Post-War Childhood

by Webb, Simon;

  Let us now see in detail what one of the chief claims that educational standards have been dumbed down since the days when the baby boomers were attending school actually amount to. As popularly understood, the story is roughly as follows. Fifty years ago, the literacy rate in Britain was practically 100 per cent. Almost all children left school able to read and write, as well as being able to calculate the change from a £10 note in their heads. Education was more structured in those days and it was recognized that not all would have prizes. Those children who were able to benefit from it and worked hard were offered a first-class academic education which could lead them on to university and success. Today, probably as a result of trendy, left-wing teaching methods, 20 per cent of children leave school functionally illiterate. They have become so dependent on calculators that many are unable to carry out the simplest arithmetical operation by themselves. As a direct consequence of the pitiful state of the country’s maintained schools, almost half the students at Oxford and Cambridge are from private schools. The remedy is to turn back the clock and recreate the style of schooling which was around fifty years ago. This, in a nutshell, is the theory to which many people subscribe and has become official government policy over the last few years. Perhaps if we look at the individual components of this tapestry of myths and half-truths, we shall be able to see what is really going on.

  We begin with one of the most frightening of the statistics bandied around about the woeful state of modern British education, that a fifth of the young people in the country are functionally illiterate. This is so often asserted that it has become accepted almost as a fact, but the truth is rather complicated. When we look back at the past and try to work out whether conditions were better or worse at such and such a time, it is of course vital that we are able to measure the things at which we are looking objectively. In the case of literacy, this is impossible to do.

  What is usually meant by literacy in Britain today is not the ability simply to read and write, but really the possession of a GCSE in the subject of English Language at Grade C or above. This indicates a reasonable level of literacy, which means that a person can read bus timetables and extract information from a newspaper article in order to answer questions about it. A recent GCSE in English required pupils to plough through an article from the Guardian on the subject of prison reform and then answer some pretty deep questions about the views expressed there. One may however be unable to gain a Grade C in an English GCSE or this sort and still be perfectly capable of reading simple texts with complete accuracy, as well as obtaining information from everyday sources. In this way, a person who has not passed a GCSE in English, but still manages to hold down a job in a shop, can be classified as illiterate, at least by modern criteria.

  All this is a little confusing and shows how tricky it can be to compare one era with another. Looking back at the baby boomer years, we have no way at all of calculating the literacy rate. Between 1945 and 1965, threequarters of secondary school pupils in this country did not take, let alone pass, a single examination. This is something which is almost always forgotten when people are extolling the virtues of the British educational system fifty or sixty years ago. Something over 75 per cent of secondary school pupils attended secondary modern schools and left at the age of 15. There were no facilities for such young people to sit O levels, the General Certificate of Education, which was taken at the age of 16. The great majority of adults in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s had no qualification at all which would allow anybody to make even a tentative guess as to their literacy level.

  Another reason that it is not possible to make any meaningful comparison between the proportion of adults who were illiterate in, say, 1959 and now is that different levels were used to judge the matter. In 1959, illiteracy meant just that: a person who could not read or write. The definition of literacy for decades after the end of the Second World War was the ability to read or write a simple note. Judged by this standard, over 99 per cent of adults in Britain fifty years ago were literate, just as they are today.

  This is where the faulty recollections of baby boomers have had a huge and abiding influence upon practically every child in the country over the last ten years or so. Once literacy began to be defined in terms of how many teenagers pass an English GCSE at Grade C or above, it becomes clear that a substantial proportion lack the ability to do so. In other words, by this quite arbitrary standard, which has only been around for a few decades, a feeling has arisen that Britain’s educational system is failing. A corollary of this is that if children are failing to learn to read and write properly, then this must surely be because they are not being taught correctly. If that is the case, then we must appoint somebody to lead an investigation into the matter and find out what has gone wrong, what is causing this supposed epidemic of illiteracy.

  Here is a recent scare story about this subject, indicating that children are starting school less able to learn than they once were and without the necessary skills which will enable them to start acquiring literacy at an early age. A survey carried out in early 2016 by The Key, an information and advice service for head teachers, estimated that almost 200,000 children would be starting school in September 2016 ill-prepared to begin learning. This was shocking news, although examining the data in detail was reassuring. Four out of five teachers were worried about poor social skills and many said that levels of reading, writing and numeracy were lower than ‘they should be’. What level of reading, writing and numeracy should children starting school have? Apparently nobody, not even those working for The Key, have any idea. Fergal Roche, who works for The Key said that, ‘An agreed definition of what “school readiness” means could be the first step to helping schools, parents and early years practitioners identify what support is needed to meet this growing issue.’

  In other words, there is currently no objective measure of how literate or numerate children should be when they start school, but 200,000 of them would fall below this minimum expectation, if it existed! This would actually be quite funny if it were not for the fact that people take nonsense like this seriously and it is the sort of thing that governments are liable to seize upon when next they seek to impose some new diktat upon schools.

  Once again, we are told that a problem is developing or getting worse, based upon no evidence at all beyond the vague recollections of middleaged men and women of how they think their own school days were. As a matter of fact, in the 1950s, children were expected to bring no knowledge at all of literacy to school with them when they began formal education. It was thought to be positively harmful in those days for parents to try and anticipate the job of the school by inculcating in their children the rudiments of reading or arithmetic.

  Whenever discussion turns to higher education in this country, the percentage of students who attended state schools and then went on to Oxford and Cambridge Universities is sure to come up. Conclusions are drawn about the quality of British state education by the fact that just over half of Oxbridge students attended ordinary, maintained schools. The rest were educated privately. In other words, the 7 per cent of young people who have been at independent schools are able to take half the places at Oxford and Cambridge. What can possibly be going on in our state schools to produce such a grotesque situation? Perhaps if the state schools were as good as the private ones, then more children from working-class or ethnic minority backgrounds would have the chance of getting to the best universities? And of course, ‘improving’ state schools always means doing our best to replicate what we suppose the conditions and educational methods to have been in the baby boomer years!

  Once again, our collective memory is playing us false. Today, it is admittedly very hard for a pupil from an underperforming state school to get into Oxford. It is possible though, as is proved each year when young people from even the most wretched and failing schools somehow overcame all the cultural and educational obstacles in their path and receive offers from Oxbridge. However, fifty-five years ago, it was quit
e literally impossible for over three-quarters of the children in Britain even to aspire to such a thing. The reason for this was the entrance examinations operating at both universities.

  Entry to Oxford University meant having to pass examinations in Latin, Greek and mathematics. This was called Responsions. Cambridge had similar entrance examinations. Obviously, only those at private schools or grammar schools would be studying these dead languages, without which there was no possibility of getting into Oxbridge. For the first fifteen years after the end of the Second World War, this remained the case, effectively barring from those universities over 75 per cent of state school pupils. Even when Latin and Greek were dropped from the entrance examinations, matters did not improve for the great majority of state school pupils, because they were still leaving school at 15, without the opportunity to take even a single examination.

  Having dealt with two of the common misconceptions about schooling and education at the time we are examining, we can now look at another strange idea, which is that young people left school at that time with a superhuman talent in mental arithmetic. We hear that all manner of feats were undertaken in this field by ordinary shopkeepers and petrol-pump attendants and that without a calculator, they could multiply two shillings and eight pence by 34 and then tell you what your change should be in farthings. These folk memories can only be based upon garbled anecdotes from old people. Since almost 80 per cent of school-leavers had no qualification of any kind in mathematics, it is very difficult to know how we might be able to say whether they were better, worse or about the same compared to modern youths when it came to arithmetical operations. We have literally no information on this subject.

  All of which leads us neatly to the examples which were given above of sums from the old 11 Plus and their apparent superiority to the problems set in modern GCSEs in mathematics. By now, readers have probably worked out how this trick, routinely played on newspaper readers, actually works. It is first necessary to know that between 75 and 80 per cent of children did not pass the 11 Plus. So the questions asked in the examination were not at all of the type that most children would be able to answer, even back in the 1950s. Those who did get them right were those who had been taught well and had a good grasp of arithmetic. There are certainly 11-year-olds today who would make short work of a question which required them to list the prime factors of a large number, but they are, as then, a minority. This is the first stage of the trick; to imply that children in the 1950s or 1960s were all capable of some complicated, arithmetical operations and the fact that many school pupils today can’t perform these is an infallible sign that educational standards have fallen over the last fifty years.

  The next step is quite neatly done. Having begun by showing a question that very few children would have been able successfully to tackle in the past, we contrast it with one that almost every GCSE pupil in a modern British school will be able to do; for example, writing eight thousand three hundred and fifty in figures. The first one or two questions in the Foundation level GCSE paper are always very simple. The old O level mathematics, which was abolished almost thirty years ago, was something of a blunt instrument. Although it was theoretically divided into grades, nobody really took any notice of them. Essentially, one either passed an O level or failed. If somebody had five O levels, nobody ever troubled to ask about what grade had been achieved; it was enough that one had passed them. The GCSE is a finer tool, which discriminates carefully between various levels of ability. This, combined with the fact that the modern British system allows any child from any background to aspire to a place at university, suggests that any changes in that particular field have been for the better.

  It might be amusing to dispose of one very popular belief about modern schoolchildren which baby boomers always seem keen to recycle. This is that children today are so reliant upon computers and calculators that they have no grasp at all of the essential arithmetical operations. In short, they simply punch numbers into a calculator or mobile phone and the answer comes up automatically. They don’t really understand what they are doing, which indicates how feeble and deficient their education must have been. In the old days, it is confidently asserted, children could carry out long multiplication on paper, because they had been properly taught and knew what they were doing. This particular piece of nonsense often appears in newspapers when the concept of ‘dumbing down’ in education is being considered.

  In the fantasy world which has been created by the baby boomers, long after the event, any 12-year-old child who wished to multiply 16.82 by 19.61 would set out a proper sum like this;

  16.82

  19.61 X

  The boy or girl would then elaborately work through the digits until the answer was obtained. This is of course absolutely absurd and not at all what would have happened fifty years ago. In fact, the pupil would have reached for a handy aid which would enable this multiplication to be carried out in a far easier way; the 1950s and 1960s version of the electronic calculator. Just like their present-day counterparts, when faced with a tricky sum, the baby boomers would rely upon shortcuts and techniques which hardly any of them understood. A classic case, over half a century ago, of ‘dumbing down’!

  It is probably a safe bet that no reader under the age of 50 has ever had occasion to use log tables. Indeed, they will probably not even know what they are! Never the less, for many years and certainly for the whole of the baby boomer era, log tables, along with similar tables for Tan, Sin and Cos, were what one turned to when faced by tricky mathematical problems. Not one pupil in a thousand who used the things had any idea how they worked, simply using them as a magic shortcut to tedious number work.

  It is beyond the scope of the present book to go into detail about how log tables were constructed. Their use, though, was simplicity itself. Taking the example above, that of multiplying 16.82 by 19.61, one would look up 16.82 in the table and find that a long string of digits was given. The process was repeated for the second number and then the two figures so obtained were added together. The total was then checked in another part of the log table and would show what the answer to the complicated long-multiplication sum would have been. Although children in primary schools were taught long multiplication, just as they are in schools today, by secondary school none would actually be setting out sums in this way. Instead, they used the log tables at the back of their maths textbook.

  The important point to bear in mind here is that very few pupils fifty years ago had the faintest idea how log tables were devised or even what they were doing when they used them. It was sheer magic, just like calculators today. They looked up the numbers, added them together and hey presto, no need for any tiresome long multiplication. The same could be said for the use of slide rules, which were also widely used before the development of electronic calculators and computers. Baby boomers used these gadgets as a quick way of doing sums, often not knowing what they were doing.

  The present obsession, driven almost exclusively by the distorted recollection of school in the days of the baby boomers, for memorizing times tables by heart, performing mental arithmetic and learning to read by phonics is not motivated by evidence-based research into what constitutes a good and sufficient education. A recent piece of research has revealed how pointless and indeed sometimes counter-productive are the efforts by politicians to compel schools to somehow ‘return to basics’ and use teaching methods which were around in the post-war years.

  For the last twenty years or so, the teaching of reading by phonics has been officially endorsed, as part of efforts to tackle the imaginary scourge of illiteracy which we have been persuaded is threatening the country’s economic prosperity and intellectual well-being. It is government policy that it is desirable and wise for children to be taught to read by sounding out the letters of a word, going, ‘Cah, Ah, Ter spells “cat”’. It has been claimed that this old-fashioned way of teaching reading has been stunningly successful and that by bringing back the classroom methods which
the baby boomers remember so well, we will be able to eradicate illiteracy. This is yet one more example of the way in which the hazy memories of the 1950s and 1960s are used as the basis for policies which will affect millions of people in this country.

  The London School of Economics conducted the largest study of the use of phonics in the teaching of reading in British schools, analysing the performance of over a quarter of a million children, whose performance was tracked throughout their primary education. When the results of this massive piece of research were released in April 2016, it was found that although children’s scores in reading were boosted immediately after phonics training, this effect disappeared by the time they were tested at the age of 11. By that age, there was no measurable difference in the literacy of those who had been taught with phonics and others who had learned by different methods. The whole drive towards phonics had been a pointless waste of time because, as the researchers noted, ‘most children learned to read eventually, regardless of teaching method’.

  What we are really seeing all too often in the field of education is a general longing for some non-existent past, a time when all 11-year-olds could calculate in their heads the cost of 36 radiograms at £29 7s 6d each and then go on to work out how much the resulting amount of £1,057 10s 0d would yield in three years if invested in a Friendly Society at 2¾% per annum compound interest. It need hardly be said that although there have always been children and adults capable of amazing feats of mental arithmetic, most of us now, as in the past, have always needed physical aids, whether in the form of a calculator, log table, slide rule or just a simple pencil and paper. The feeling persists, though, among many older people that using digital devices is somehow cheating and leads to an enfeebled intellect and declining mathematical ability. This strange idea is not a new one.