Education is everything. If you're racist, or homophobic, it's because you are uneducated in what it means to be different. If you shout at someone in the street because they got in your way, it's likely that you were never sufficiently educated on appropriate anger management and resolution. If you are able to work, but choose to stay at home and live on benefits, then education has failed you - regardless of what grades you got in school.
Education is so much more than grammar and times tables.
Education Secretary Nicky Morgan has just announced a "war on illiteracy and innumeracy" and plans to move England up the league tables by punishing any school that does not have a 100% pass rate on English and maths tests in 10 and 11 year olds. Any school that does not have a 100% pass rate two years in a row will be considered a school in need of serious help, and professionals will be brought in from other schools to show them how it's done.
Firstly, her use of the word "war" is accurate. In a war, there are casualties. In a war, there are no real winners. In this war, the casualties will be children across the country.
The academically bright children, who mastered spelling, grammar and arithmetic early on, will find that they are not able to be furthered, because once they have reached the appropriate level they are no longer priority, and teachers' limited resources have to be used elsewhere.
The academically challenged, who struggle with English and maths, are carrying the school on their shoulders: if just one of them doesn't pass their literacy or their numeracy test, the whole school and every teacher in it is considered to have failed. That child has failed the whole school by being bad at spelling.
This pressure - on the teachers and the pupils - is insane. And how important is it, really? Some of the most successful people I know, company directors earning hundreds of thousands of pounds a year, don't know the difference between 'affect' and 'effect'. They have illegible handwriting, they write 'could of' instead of 'could have'. It turns out, you can be hugely successful and still not know 12x7 without using a calculator or spreadsheet. Why are we letting these children think they have failed?
In our capitalist society, the richest and freest people are the entrepreneurs. The lateral thinkers. The people with creativity and ambition. If we are teaching our children that the most important things for their self-worth are their literacy and numeracy levels, we are lying to them and depriving them. We are not educating our children in the important things in life. How to play. How to recognise and believe in your own abilities. How to recognise the values of others.
Defining the success of English schools by their ranking in league tables is absurd. We should be defining the success of English schools by the calibre of human being that comes out of them. If we want our country to prosper, we need our children to learn creative thinking, ambition, and the joy of learning, so that they find their passion and continue learning on their own after school is done. We need our children to learn acceptance of others, to understand that being different does not mean being less valuable.
Don't get me wrong: literacy and numeracy are vital, and children should absolutely be taught spelling, grammar and punctuation, as well as arithmetic. The children who are naturally talented in these subjects should be pushed further, and those who struggle should have all possible help and support to get them to an acceptable level for life. But we should not be focussing solely on English and maths at the expense of a holistic education. A child who has a C in English and maths but no other skills is going to be a less successful adult than the child who never uses commas and misspells 'definitely' but is excellent at analytical thinking. Learning by rote is not education.
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