Blog 6-Exams, Inputs or Outputs

My children are currently enduring a week of exams. Nothing particularly new in children taking exams, even though it is a new experience for me, and more particularly my children. It has caused me to think about their purpose and our general approach to them.

Does our preoccupation with exams prepare our children for life?

Exams by their very nature measure outputs, there is no measurement or assessment of inputs, effort, attitude and commitment. There is nothing particularly wrong with this. Exams are not designed to measure this, anymore than a ruler is designed to tell the temperature. Exams do of course have a vital role to play in the education and development of our children, I do not dispute that. What does concern me however is the received wisdom that the passing of exams is in fact the purpose of the schooling of our children. And even more concerning is that we as parents and society in general communicate this explicitly or implicitly to our children.

In doing so we place a huge premium on outputs with very little attention placed on inputs. In doing so what are we telling our children?
Where in our priorities is the space for learning for its own sake? Seeing that as a valuable educative pursuit.

Are we exploring in enough detail between knowledge and understanding?

How many of us have interviewed potential recruits with a string of qualifications that make our own look as if we were asleep during our school years, only to faced with someone who appears to never have had an original thought in their entire life!

We tell out children to assimilate knowledge, but do we encourage and challenge them to understand? True, understanding without a bedrock of knowledge is impossible, but it seems to me that we value and test knowledge only, with understanding being an optional extra.

I think the educational consequences of this are all quite obvious. What is perhaps less so is the wider consequences of teaching our children to be so fixated on measurable outputs. “what we do, without discussion of how we do it”

There was a time not many years ago, that if a cricketer knew he had edged the ball he would walk, declaring himself out without waiting for confirmation from the umpire. That is unheard of now. In fact when in a recent match a player did that he was roundly criticised by team management. This is accepted because the stakes are higher these days; there is more money in the game more pressure and so on. The stakes are higher? Winning becomes more important than personal integrity? This is advanced as an acceptable argument, with “gentlemanly” behaviour banished to the history books as a quaint custom irrelevant in our modern world.

This preoccupation with outputs only leads us in only one direction, integrity, honesty, development of personal values are subordinated to measurable achievements. If achievement is in conflict with integrity, how often do we hear of integrity prevailing and be championed as the right thing to do?

I am sure we do not explicitly encourage our children to cheat or bend the system, as our bankers appear to have done. But our children are smart they work out instinctively what we as parent want for them and what their friends and society define as success.

The relentless focus on outputs, achievements and measurable attainment without the balancing discussion and praise for trying hard, doing one’s best and seeing that as a real success in itself will I fear lead our children in the wrong direction.

As parents what is the first question we ask when our children get their exam results?

1. How did you do? What marks did you get? Were you in the top quartile?

Yes? Well done.

No? Oh well at least you did your best and that’s what counts.

OR

2. Did you do your best? Did you prepare well? Yes? Well that’s great I am really proud of your effort and your achievement

Our children are not stupid and we are not capable of disguising our body language. It is quite clear to our children what the “No?” response in paragraph 1 above, really means.

We are telling our children that we care more about the output than the input?

The output is that the consequence of three things:
The quality of the teaching
The innate ability of the child
The effort put in by the child

Only the last of these is within the control of the child!

In our calmer moments way from the competition of the school gates most parents will say: “All I want is for little Jonny to reach his potential” But in the heat of battle at exam time we lose this perspective. Our children sense this; they have watched their parents lie to each other for years! They know what we really value!

As Larkin said… They fuck you up, your mum and dad, they may not mean to, but they do……