When I began writing this, we were in Cape Town. The weather was perfect – hot, but not too hot. The sea was glinting below the mountain we were staying on, next to its companion curve of soft, white sand. Youngest Daughter coped well with the long, uncomfortable flight, despite our trepidation. My Man was working any chance he got, but was prepared to be enticed away by his girls without much complaining. I was delighting in the peace and freedom to read and write at my leisure. And Oldest Daughter? She was trying very hard to avoid soul-crushingly boring studying.
I knew what I wanted to write about, but it has taken me a long time since then to work out quite what it is that I wanted to say. Being away from the relatively brutal reality we had been ensconced in, while wonderful, wasn't helping me to understand myself. At all. This afternoon, I think I finally have. It is all about choice. I acknowledged the reason my brain was hiding from this understanding, and it popped into focus without another murmur. So these are my thoughts on choice, GCSE exams and child abuse.
Oldest has just entered her sixteenth year. Her South African cousin, who was born a year and a week before her, just turned seventeen. Due to population pressure in South Africa when she was six, Cousin still has two years left at school before she joins the confusing and choice-ridden world of 'adulthood'. She is spending her time discovering who she is and who she wants to be. Her experience of school is very different to my daughter's.
When she was fourteen, Oldest and her English contemporaries were made to choose subjects to study that would potentially impact on the direction their lives would take for ever after. Subject choice at this age is not unique, but the method of examining them in this country is a singular decision.
National political agendas determined the core of the 'choice' – science, English and maths, as well as physical education and some woolly ideas about citizenship and personal health that were to be hidden around the curriculum.
Local political agendas determined that at my daughter's school, a language was compulsory, and in her particular circumstances, her choice was between German and French. Religious education was another locally-determined non-option, I can only speculate as to why.
Logistical agendas determined the narrow range of acceptable combinations of other subject areas that were available. These ranged from vocational courses to academic selections, courses for those unlikely to achieve any qualifications at all, and courses for those likely to achieve more than most. The 'choice' appeared immense, but the reality was a lot less impressive. Once you had decided on the most common, i.e. academic route, there were three subjects available to choose from; two if you decided to take the misnomered 'separate sciences' course.
The three choices had to be popular enough to ensure that a class would be made available, but not so popular that places were limited by clever timetabling.
Lots of advice was handed out. Printed information, parents' evenings, ten minute interviews with a member of the management team, many of whom were interacting with our children for the very first time, so that was effective. Apologies for the sarcasm.
Subject teachers enthused about how wonderful their subjects would be – although, I suspect they were only really this enthusiastic towards the pupils they expected good grades from, my daughter included. There was subtle competition between the heads of academic departments, and fantastic (and expensive) school trips were touted unashamedly to bewildered students. Our awkward, spotty teenagers were courted like investment bankers, if their teachers thought they might deliver the grades they needed to prove their own worth.
I'm a teacher, and paid by the government. If I worked in a state secondary school teaching GCSE subjects, I would be touting for the good students come options time, believe me.
There are probably as many management positions in your average UK state secondary school as there are in the whole of the Microsoft corporation. Well, perhaps not, but this is the sole mechanism for retaining good teachers in a role in which they are judged to within an inch of their sanity by their paymasters; the State; deranged parents; brutalised children; issue-hungry journalists; power-mad politicians; society at large.
But the responsibility and pay rise each mini-management position brings is equalled and overshadowed by the necessity to justify it, hence raising the judgement stakes.
No wonder heads of department try to 'sell' their subject area to unsuspecting kids.
Once they have their prey safely ensconced for the next two years, these poor teachers are made to devour any creativity and passion for particular ideas and notions the pupils initiate, forcing them instead down the narrow alleys allowed by league tables and exam results.
Does that sound harsh? I don't blame the teachers. I don't believe any of them came into their jobs thinking, 'gosh, I can't wait to bully children into doing only and exactly what is needed to get grade C or above in my subject area, so that I'm not judged to be failing them'.
Adolescence is hard. Those of us who've been through it remember that. And teaching adolescents is exhausting, in a soul-sapping kind of way. They have so many difficulties to contend with in life – hormones, sex, no sex, acceptance, being different, being the same, pushing those they love away while desperately needing to be loved; rapid brain growth and body changes at the root of it all.
And so many of their parents have no clue as to how to deal with them. The social change akin to extreme sports we've experienced over the last century has made it impossible for each generation of parents to keep up with what is required by their children. They experienced bad parenting themselves as teens, so the parenting many of this generation of teenagers have to bear is beyond endurance.
Teachers know this. The best and the worst of them struggle to contain the rage and the pain and the fear they can feel emanating from a fluctuating proportion of their classes of thirty or more students at a time. But what can they do? Only use the tools at their disposal to channel the young minds in their care down a well-trodden route, with the prize of a future beckoning them from the other end.
The tools, between the ages of 14 and 16, are methods of teaching which both take away all choice from their learners, and simultaneously fool them into believing that the very heavy burden of responsibility of all future happiness falls into their own hands.
I'll try to explain this another way.
GCSE courses make students unbearably passive. Teachers herd them like sheep through the coursework and exam study that, highly specified as it is, will achieve the grades they need. These, by the way, are the grades the teachers need, not the students so much.
Students believe they need the grades. It is drummed into them regularly that without the correct qualifications at this level, they will have no future.
Given that they learn little of practical use within this curriculum, and given their extreme youth, this notion is absurd.
Isn't it? Can you really tell me that if you don't achieve an A grade on an English exam at the age of 16, you will never be able to access the skills required to live a long and successful life in our society? Bullshit.
On the other hand, if a significant proportion of the class don't achieve grades A* to C, the teacher will be sidelined; the long line of managers above her will be in danger; and the school will be reported as failing its pupils. Reputations will fall; middle-class families will fight to leave; grades will potentially be lost further; morale will drop. It doesn't bear thinking about. For the school, anyway.
So students are given no choice. Their responses to learning are tightly controlled. Like iron. And to reinforce their compliance, they are continuously told: “The choice is yours – your future is in your hands; learn these responses well, or you won't be able to access further education, and then you won't be able to access higher education, and without that, you will have no job – you will end up stacking shelves in Asda.” A fate worse than death, indeed.
Does this amount to child abuse? I think it does. Have you seen a fourteen-year-old lately? They are so painfully young, it hurts. A fifteen-year-old? What do you believe a fifteen year old should be doing with his or her time? Making friends, making music, making out? Or buckling under the responsibility of making their teachers and their schools and their government look as though they are doing a good job?
Let's give our children back their childhood. I want my daughter to come to me in tears because her best friend called her a bitch for flirting with her boyfriend, not because she is completely overwhelmed by the pressure of coursework that she has to do. Not that the first scenario is ever going to happen, because my daughter and her friends are just lovely, they really are, but you understand the sentiment. I want her to be her age. I want her to be dreaming of an exciting future, not terrified of not having one at all because she chose the wrong subjects when she was fourteen.
My beautiful, talented, amazing daughter – who knows what the future will bring. Let her live, explore, want and dream now. Don't expect her to look back at her young self from the other side of forty, and think 'if only I had learned my Geography better, I wouldn't be in the mess I'm in now, filling up the shelves in ASDA with goods from all over the world.'
It's absurd. It's institutional abuse of a whole generation. It's a violation of youth. And it's making my Oldest -still so very young – miserable.
I invented Rice Pie to cheer her up:
Cook some good rice in a steamer – I used Jasmine. In a casserole dish, sauté an onion and brown some mildly spiced sausages. Add some carrot pennies and sauté for a few minutes before adding some frozen petit-pois. Turn the heat down and add good stock, not enough to cover, about a cup full. A couple of tablespoons – okay, a good slug – of Grand Marnier or other orange flavoured liqueur finishes it off. Now spoon the rice over the top, sealing the food and liquid underneath, and allow the stock to gently steam into the rice for about ten minutes or so. Use a giant spoon to serve. It tastes delish.
