Dumbing down the education system

One of my favourite textbooks offers the following opinion about intellectual progress: “today’s undergraduates study the material covered in yesterday’s graduate courses. Tomorrow’s high school students will learn about things once considered too difficult for university professors”. Similarly, it is often asserted that the modern child’s homework is too difficult for their parents to understand, not because those parents are dim but because the syllabus has moved on so much from when today’s generation of adults were in school.

Such thinking is hard to square with another popular topic of middle-class conversation: the dumbing down of the national curriculum. In the UK, for example, we often hear employers and university admission tutors bemoaning falling school standards. The proportion of UK teenagers going on to college has risen from 10 per cent to 50 per cent over the past 40 years, so a cynical observer might ask, ‘what would you expect’?’ The principle that pretty much anyone who wants to go to college gets to go, must, we might be tempted to think, have lowered entry standards.

Similar chatter is heard about the Leaving Certificate and our own national curriculum. My own, very unscientific, observation is that for maths and science subjects, the ones with which I am most familiar, students in the leaving cycle are studying material a year or two behind similar courses taken by yours truly in a very ordinary Welsh comprehensive school in the 1970s. I see little evidence of the intellectual progress claimed by the US author mentioned above and some evidence of regress.

In the UK, recent evidence suggests one thing at least has not changed, despite bigger and more universities, Oxford and Cambridge still dominate the professions, government and boardrooms. If this is about meritocracy then there is nothing to worry about: if the most able are selected by the best universities it is understandable that they get the best jobs. Critics worry that access to elite universities is still purchased via expensive private education and that competition for entry into Oxbridge is nothing like a level playing field. The truth is nuanced: you have to be very smart to get in, but there are more smart kids than places at Oxbridge so other selection criteria are used.

The brutal truth is you don’t need to be super smart to be a CEO, lawyer, accountant or government minister. So other, less academic, more tribal, criteria come into play. That’s where the role played by educational signalling comes in. You know what you are getting, up to a point, when you hire someone from the same university you went to.

Funnily enough, one of the most meritocratic employers, globally, is the investment bank. Of course, nepotism exists: at one management meeting I witnessed the senior partner putting lines through some of the names on a list of proposed redundancies. Asked why he was exercising his veto his reply was, ‘this firm never fires an old Etonian’.

But the ferocious demands of the market place mean that people have to be hired who can actually do the job. Deregulation of the City of London - the introduction of proper competition - meant that people with funny accents and graduates of polytechnics had to be let in. I reckon only professional sport is more meritocratic than the more competitive corners of high finance.

Whether dumbing down matters is debatable. If the result has been more kids getting more education, what's the harm? We might quibble about better use of resources: Robert Reich, ex US secretary of labour, currently a professor at Berkeley, recently argued that too many US young people are doing the traditional 4 year liberal arts degree to not much purpose. Many of them would be better off in technical colleges learning how to maintain the robots that are taking their jobs.

Not many commentators are prepared to put their heads above the parapet in this way: health and education reforms are fiercely resisted in every country that we care to look at, no matter what the existing state of affairs, no matter how obvious the need for change. The only thing everybody agrees on is that they need more money. The tough questions represent political suicide for anybody that even asks them, let alone anyone who suggests answers. How much responsibility should the State - the taxpayer- assume for children whose life chances are so diminished because they come from dysfunctional families? The list of emotive - and politically toxic - questions is endless.

Devaluation of college entry standards has merely moved the education system closer to the US, where the serious academic work doesn’t really get going until graduate school. The smartest kids are still easy to identify, Goldman Sachs is still able to spot the brightest and the best; it just takes a little longer than before.