The notorious liberal Plowden Report of 1967 burbled of attempts made by teachers to 'make arithmetic more practical and more interesting' – which meant more useless. Having already begun to wreck the teaching of reading and history, they turned their attention in the 1960s to destroying maths teaching as well. Thanks to this foundation, I managed to get a respectable O-level in elementary mathematics, probably not far off a maths degree from the University of Skegness nowadays. Every day required us to perform miracles of mental arithmetic, just to buy a quarter of toffees. And we had that wonderful advantage, a proper grown-up coinage and measures instead of the crude toe-counting metric and decimal systems we are reduced to now. Properly taught, we could all learn it, and we did. It was dull, but the more you did it, the better you were at it, so I don't think any of us minded. In the same way, we did endless sums, until we could get them right in our sleep.
Privileged private schools and village primaries alike used the same unfailing technique. My early teachers made me chant my times tables, and my weights and measures.
But it works on everyone.Īnd of course the same goes for the proper teaching of maths. This is hated by progressive teachers because it is 'authoritarian'. From that vivid memory, I can deduce that she used the simple, effective method now known pretentiously as 'synthetic phonics'. I can still remember the moment I cracked it, and the first words I read, which were 'They meant well'. My mother taught me to read before I went near any school. I was incredibly lucky in my early schooling. It just shows that, like so many in politics, he has very little idea of what is going on in the country he governs. So Prime Minister Rishi Sunak's idea of forcing everyone in England to carry on studying maths till they are old enough to vote is daft. In many cases, the most unhappy are those who never properly learned to read or count, and now flounder in classes where many teachers are not that good at such things either. The growing numbers of exclusions and special schools tell us that many children actively hate being made to stay in classrooms where they learn little and live in fear of bullies and chaos.
Yet since it rose to 16 in 1972 (it's now 18 in England, and who knows if it will ever stop rising?) there has been no sign that the country is any cleverer. For more than a century now, well-meaning people have clung to the idea that the longer we all stay at school, the better educated we will be.
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