The Annual Exam Jamboree Falls Flat in 2012.

News that GSCE results have been downgraded in 2012, apparently on the instruction of Education Secretary Michael Gove,  has led to widespread condemnation from all those upset that exams have seemingly got "harder" for no legitimate reason other than posing as being "tough" and upgrading the status of the exams.

Critics have accused Gove of playing politics and ruining students employment prospects ( though with mass youth unemployment at present that might be one way of "managing expectations" ). Then again this follows years of using educational grades as a form not of educational attainment but social engineering.

There have been years of grade inflation in a way that effectively politicised what were once a routine examination into a principle under the Blair regime of being ever more "dizzy with success" and the notion of "education, education, education" and to get more students into "higher education".

That happened in the 1990s as old polytechnics were converted under John Major's government in the 1990s into universities and the freeing up of "higher education" establishments into offering more consumer choice in degrees from golf course management to other ones less practical and derided as "Mickey Mouse" degrees.

The stupidity of downgrading the grades before the exam results were released by Michael Gove, rather than setting out to make them harder from the beginning of the academic year is just one decision among many which as stupid as inflating them in the first place.

The next form of stupidity that ought to have stopped some years ago is the annual kitschfest of televising students leaping for joy when they "get those grades". That's good for them, perhaps, but it just does not deserve the amount of hype heaped up on it every year as though it were the X Factor or any other banal talent show.

Exams have been watered down. It is only necessary to compare an O Level paper from the 1970s with a GCSE one from the past two decades to see that. Exams have actually become far more a test of just passing an exam than they were before. No doubt in the name of being "inclusive".

A Levels are a case of that too. Take history. When perusing an A Level history paper from the 1970s one would confront austere 25 mark essay titles with challenging statements such as "The Restoration failed . Discuss " or "In the end Cromwell was sitting on bayonets and nothing else"

By the 1990s any A Level question on the Stuart period would be broken down into easier 3 part stages starting off with a picture and asking the student to comment on what he saw in it and to evaluate a few sources in which the point of using knowledge recall to answer a provoking question was entirely excluded

Far from being "parroting" information ( as the new A Levels require ) the old A Levels required the student to do what he would be expected to do at university which is to stake out his own case and answer the question as concisely and directly as possible with recourse to facts and analysis.

This was a test of mental stamina and time management as well as testing to see whether the student could stick to answering the question set directly and not waffling about anything that did not argue a case. That principle was no doubt regarded as too unpleasant and so ditched.

Trendy educationalists espousing supposedly "left wing" concepts of education have actually contributed far more to downgrading the status of both the old O and A Levels to to mere knowledge reproduction and the actual teaching of history to merely spotting what questions are going to come up.

More emphasis in the past was given to the teaching of history as a subject for two years after which there was an exam that would test the students breadth of knowledge and how he had, in conjunction with the teacher's lessons, read on the subject and was encouraged to do so.

I remember my A Level years with fondness. I had to learn how to read entire books on the Stuarts, such as those of Christopher Hill, Conrad Russell and the discussions different historians had on the English Civil Wars or the Wars of the Three Kingdoms so I could genuinely form my own opinion on them.

The idea now of parroting information reduced subjects to a meaningless task and the fact the subject on the exam happens to be about history seems irrelevant as it might just as well be an exam on flat pack furniture assembly or the corporate policy of McDonald's restaurants.

Even if that last idea was intended to be satirical, I have heard that McDonald's are indeed seeking to offer  equivalents to the old exam qualifications and that Pearson education is going to enter "the market" by providing degrees. Maybe the crude utilitarian view of education is the future.

It doesn't bode well for the idea of independent critical thinking but more towards the idea that education is their to discipline minds in a very narrow sense. Exams are about that, of course, but it seems to me that they used to be part of a broader attempt at providing a true education.

On Higher Education

Priyamvada Gopal ( My Fears for the Arts and Humanities )has claimed with regards the coalition governments programme of cuts that,

The Conservatives, along with their consistency-free Lib Dem allies, are to preside over the greatest assault on the arts and humanities in the history of modern Britain. Lord Browne's review paves the way to the privatisation of higher education. With cuts in funding of up to 80%, university courses have been thrown open to market forces. Government can "withdraw public investment … from many courses" in favour of "priority courses and the wider benefits they create". The arts and humanities are to be debilitated as investment is directed to engineering and applied sciences. This is a partisan review that favours corporate industries, not universities and their students.

Naturally, if investment is to be withdrawn that is not necessarily a bad thing if many utterly useless courses are axed such as Media Studies or Golf Course studies. The government should try to re-introduce and encourage apprenticeships in practical subjects that need to be done. not studied

It is hard not to think that Gopal is indulging in special pleading. There should be open ended finance for degrees that are meaningless and no dintinction made between those that are of use to society and make for a better one with more informed citizens and those who just want a cushy time at university.

For Gopal then claims,

With students gouged for huge fees to give them "choice" and thousands priced out of university altogether, subjects without a self-evident "market value" face extinction. All but the most affluent will be induced to turn away from courses in literature, history, modern languages and most social sciences and towards professional qualifications in "high-utility" subjects like law and business administration in the understandable hope of a certain return for investment.

Whilst Gopal is correct to emphasise the inherent philistinism of the utilitarian cult that has seen radical neoliberal forces reduce knowledge and learning to market use value, many institutions and academics have made this possible by sabotaging higher education for so long.

When post-modernist frauds have denied there can be any standards or meaning outside the text or made moronic claims about Shakespeare having no more meaning than the text on a cornflake packet, academe is ripe for a large cull.

Whole swathes of academia should have finance removed from it: gender studies and all those parasitical useless drains on public finance should just not be state funded. If people want to study them and choose to, they can fund them privately.

Moreover, there is simply no point sending so many young people to get stoned and hammered for three years at "uni" whilst doing arts degrees to then pick up the token 2:1. Academics themselves often find students a bore who get in the way of them doing their research.

Quantity in education has for too long been prized over quality with far too many students studying courses of little intellectual or even negligible use value on crude free market lines. Perhaps reducing the amount of mickey mouse degrees and students and to invest in quality would prevent this.

Simply wanting more students to go to university to reduce youth unemployment is another short termist measure in an economy and society founded more and more on illusions and wish thinking in a fools paradise of debt fuelled consumerism.

Another fact needs to be faced. The neoliberal system does not require intelligent, thoughtful or truly reflective individuals: such people are sceptical about unwarranted authority and are not geared up towards the compulsive obsessive ends of a utilitarian and decadent consumerist society.

This is particulary obvious with those who study the humanities in order to go into PR, advertising, identity politics and "community" based political activism.There are many branches of the parasite economy in Britain that need cutting off.

Such parts of the "knowledge economy" require mediocrities who research useless themes in order to avoid the rigours of dealing with reality and who take refuge in a world of abstruse jargon like some of the dunces of medieval theology. The post-modernists are but one example.

When graduates do become "successful" in the arts and humanities, they oftenwork as part of think tanks espousing group think philosophies. The age of the Oxford Don who spends his days meditating on ethical problems or writing long treatises that are not for publication have gone.

To maintain one's integrity in the suffocating domain of a society run on neoliberal utilitarian lines is increasingly difficult. The casualisation of university careers is atrocious but it reflect the general decline in academic standards and the running of universities as knowledge factories.

More talented academics able to write brilliant books are simply giving up. Such people include the historian Michael Burleigh who thinks that universities are dominated by idiot ideologues and post modernists who have downgraded higher education.

They have, of course, but this is a symptom of the decline which has been caused precisely by universities expanding and offering half baked arts degrees that require the mere recycling of jargon in accordance with the prescription of creeds.

That in turn is the result, paradoxically, of universities being run on consumerist lines of quantity not quality.Of giving people what they want, freedom from the claims of real lived life, instead of having to grapple with it without throwing up walls made from an inpenetrable thicket of jargon

If universities are to become centres of disinterested inquiry and free thought again, then man utterly useless degrees need to go, funding given to the better and more talented students in the arts and government funding given to those who go into maths, science and engineering.

The problem is that the obsession with getting so many people into university when they might be better off taking up plumbing or doing something useful but valuable to society means that it will be taken over by business corporations and this is not a good thing.

Psuedo-egalitarians and tenured campus radicals will accuse those who want more rigorous selection and to bring back polytechnics will be accused of "elitism". Most obviously by those with vested interests in packing more students through.

Higher education needs to be reformed so that state support is given to talented individuals of all backgrounds, but especially in degrees that have more obvious social benefits. Britain stands in need of more graduates in the sciences and maths and better graduates in the arts and humanities.

More vocational studies closely attuned to jobs need to be introduced. Polytechnics reinstated. Pointless humanity subjects removed. "Media Studies" is not a fit subject for university. University entrance should be based only after grades are known. No idiotic clearance scramble.

Before university, A Levels need to be made as they were back in the 1970s: i.e challenging and with unpredictable 25 mark questions and not broken down three parts answers that people can rote learn from past papers and study guides.

Gopal does not distinguish between quality degrees in the arts and humanities and pointless ones. That must be done. Courses in the humanities, especially history, should not be skewed merely to fit in with the research interests of the academics. This will mean they have to start teaching again.

Courses at university should aim at giving the student a broad knowledge of the subject and connect them with real life problems vividly and not introduce them to modular specialisms within the first year just because that's convenient for the academics.

Targeted funding needs to be introduced not privatisation. The state's resources cannot stretch to all these students and the needs of the country need to be considered. It's a waste of time, effort and money to have so many people studying futile subjects at bad universities.

Loans for science and maths students would be paid by the state on completion of the course and incrementally for each year the graduate remains in the UK over a period of 15 years. Emigration would mean the loss of that pay off and sequestration of assets on return to the UK if not paid off before leaving.

Higher education has to take into account the needs of the country: it cannot be merely a individual lifestyle chioce. If so then like any leisure activity it must be personally funded. If Gopal does not like the sense of "entitlement" in the First World then this is the answer.

Academics in subjects dedicated to demolishing the pretensions of Western Civilisation as a mere discourse in postcolonial studies can sink or swim depending on whether they really do serve any purpose other than in rationalising hatred and resentment towards British society.

There is a difference between reducing all knowledge to market use value but Gopal is using that to advance special pleading for humanities that simply really serve little academic or intellectual use for improving society and churning out more professional activists and lobby groups.

Many specialised professions in which Britain excels – theatre, film, curating, journalism, publishing, advertising – require research and teaching in the humanities....reading closely and knowledgably is an invaluable skill in all walks of life and yes, it has to be taught and kept alive through research.

This in nonsense. Advertising is about manipulating people into buying trash they don't often need. That's market research. Not academic research. That hardly needs a degree in the humanities. It means selling a line.

Hence Gopal's claim is pure New Labour. Journalism depends not on media studies but on being able to write well and communicate.That can be learn from apprenticeships with newspapers or a degree in history or learning how to write.

Given how many academics, not just postmodernists, do churn out jargon drenched texts the evidence does not bear this out. In the Guardian we get think tanks spewing out meaningless propaganda and tedious identity politics, much of which is to get access to resources for some "community".

University Degrees-The Myth of the Necessary Benefits of University Education.

It's that tedious time of the year again when A-Level results come out and the annual ritual of damning them for being easier or praising students for being more hard working will appear in the media again.

Pictures of banal students jumping for joy with pseudo-ecstatic expressions on their vacuous faces will be splashed on the front pages as they grab those grades which will, it is thought, put them in good stead for the future, as if by emphasising it, it will necessarily become true.

Unfortunately, this con trick is waring thin. But willing self delusion is the order of the day in most aspects of contemporary life in 2010. From ramping up grades or massive levels of debt and spending money on the consumer goods that alone define people's identity and well being.

The fact is that A Levels have become easier in the last two decades, that pupils do work harder and, above all, that ultimately neither trends really matter that much because the nature of British society no longer needs intelligent and sceptical individuals anyway.

It needs those with the ability to channel intelligence towards pre-set agendas, to be a "mental proletarian" in a bland suit who fits his knowledge to the advertising creeds, mission statements and the imperative to manipulate others to buy new goods and new experiences.

For Britain's forte in PR, advertising, selling "heritage", travel and tourism means that arts degrees are themselves hardly worth much in themselves any more. Our civilisation no longer values those willing to ask questions about the way we live.

This is the essence of Bullshit Britain.

J G Ballard had it right when he wrote, "Professional qualifications are worth nothing—an arts degree is like a diploma in origami." In the bland jargon of neoliberal drones, a degree is a "signal" in the labour market that a person has "transferable skills" in analysing data.

Yet without showing the correct consciousness in using higher order skills to rigid and one dimensional lower order ends ( marketing trash nobody really needs and "selling yourself" like a whore in the marketplace ) a person cannot get very far.

Degrees are merely a sop to the middle class opinion that our civilisation is based on liberal values when it is highly dubious that this is the reality or that many liberals who are not blinded by concupiscence can actually believe this without willing self delusion.

Not least when the myth of the advantages of higher education are set against a totalising consumer society where everything and everybody is dehumanised into a pure commodity and set of generic attributes.

The cult of the CV started off that, another import from the USA which reduces a person to a smooth and blandly functional mechanism where sceptical intelligence is feared, and where job applicants are required to answer doltish questions such as "If you could be a fruit what would you choose to be ?".

The "Knowledge Economy" is largely a myth. It consists of people transferring bits of information, exchanging it, and being able to manipulate money supplies, promote think tank thinking for a future of resource wars to prop up consumerism, and getting consumers to consume.

Most students lack any sense of being able to ask searching questions about their own society and the meaninglessness of their lives, as they brag about how pissed and stoned they were last night or else in fetishising the latest lame pop group to grind out banal music and paltry lyrics.

A-Levels have been relentlessly dumbed down and the public life cretinised: to exercise a free and sceptical intelligence that university education once gave is to make yourself a social pariah.

The art of conversation must too be dumbed down to the level of "exchanging" platitudes and attitudes.That is, where conversation still exists as people "connect" through Facebook and as the quality of experience of lived life dwindles and diminishes

Those sickened at British society only need to have the strength of mind to sit out the last declining years of our civilisation by trying to make sense of it, record it and analyse the reasons why.

This needs no degree but just a real degree of personal integrity to sit it out and see it for what it is. Those jumping for joy and tizzy schoolgirls can celebrate whilst they can in light of the fact that even with degrees, they face a more hostile, meaningless and difficult life ahead.

The cruelty and idiocy lies in creating false expectations and turning A Level and university placement in to such a hullaballoo, as if any of it really mattered to anyone but them and their parents obsessed with status

There was none of this fuss in the 1970s and 1980s when A Levels were still a real qualification. In 2010 the only thing that can be said is that the penalty of not having this qualification or a degree sometimes outweighs the effort of getting them.

In itself, however, the attainment of qualifications is meaningless and the need to find meaning in the meaningless accounts for the hysteria as it is intended in a society driven by hype to drown out deeper considerations of why such attainment is considered actually useful.

The more empty the achievement, the more the mind numbing upbeat boosterism, as with so many other aspects of a fake economy driven by nothing but the hallucinogenic qualities of a society dominated by credit fuelled booms and transient candy floss consumer fads.