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You can find the current article at its original source at https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/may/18/new-gcse-pile-pressure-kill-passion
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| The new GCSE exams pile on pressure and kill off passion for learning | The new GCSE exams pile on pressure and kill off passion for learning |
| (6 months later) | |
| Reading teachers’ and students’ accounts of the immense stress and mental health issues caused by the introduction of the new GCSE exams this year is heartbreaking. “The new GCSEs have broken my best students, left some with serious stress-induced illnesses, and isolated the majority, leaving them completely apathetic towards their own learning,” said one teacher. A student reports: “I have seen the mentally toughest people crack and it’s painful to watch. People crying over being unable to do a maths question. Is this what we want as a nation, to be put under this mental stress?” | Reading teachers’ and students’ accounts of the immense stress and mental health issues caused by the introduction of the new GCSE exams this year is heartbreaking. “The new GCSEs have broken my best students, left some with serious stress-induced illnesses, and isolated the majority, leaving them completely apathetic towards their own learning,” said one teacher. A student reports: “I have seen the mentally toughest people crack and it’s painful to watch. People crying over being unable to do a maths question. Is this what we want as a nation, to be put under this mental stress?” |
| Exams are not exactly known for making teenagers happy, but the misery should at least lead to something useful at the end of it. GCSEs as they previously stood were so forgiving that their usefulness was often called into question – but instead of reforming them, former secretary of state for education Michael Gove decided to take them back to the days of the O-level. The new GCSEs emphasise tough, stressful end-of-year examinations over coursework and regular testing: teacher friends tell me that even in subjects where the content of the syllabus hasn’t changed enormously, the way that students are tested on it has become much more stressful. | Exams are not exactly known for making teenagers happy, but the misery should at least lead to something useful at the end of it. GCSEs as they previously stood were so forgiving that their usefulness was often called into question – but instead of reforming them, former secretary of state for education Michael Gove decided to take them back to the days of the O-level. The new GCSEs emphasise tough, stressful end-of-year examinations over coursework and regular testing: teacher friends tell me that even in subjects where the content of the syllabus hasn’t changed enormously, the way that students are tested on it has become much more stressful. |
| If the aim is to gift England’s young people with “the broad, deep and balanced education which will equip them to win in the global race”, as Gove claimed, then why are we returning to the educational principles of 30 years ago rather than teaching them the flexibility and resilience that they need to thrive in the modern world? Why are we asking them to sit three separate 75-minute geography exams and forcing them to revise until the early morning, instead of giving adolescents space and opportunities to develop the skills and talents that interest them? | If the aim is to gift England’s young people with “the broad, deep and balanced education which will equip them to win in the global race”, as Gove claimed, then why are we returning to the educational principles of 30 years ago rather than teaching them the flexibility and resilience that they need to thrive in the modern world? Why are we asking them to sit three separate 75-minute geography exams and forcing them to revise until the early morning, instead of giving adolescents space and opportunities to develop the skills and talents that interest them? |
| The problem here is not that the new exams are harder. It is that they are all-consuming. Nobody of any age should be pulling 70-hour work weeks just to keep up. Where previously students were able to bring copies of set texts into the English examination, now they must memorise quotes from a couple of novels, a Shakespeare play and a selection of poems. What does this kind of memorisation actually teach people? In the age of Google, how is it useful outside of an exam room? Why test students on their ability to retain information rather than understand it? | The problem here is not that the new exams are harder. It is that they are all-consuming. Nobody of any age should be pulling 70-hour work weeks just to keep up. Where previously students were able to bring copies of set texts into the English examination, now they must memorise quotes from a couple of novels, a Shakespeare play and a selection of poems. What does this kind of memorisation actually teach people? In the age of Google, how is it useful outside of an exam room? Why test students on their ability to retain information rather than understand it? |
| There is another significant difference between O-levels and the new GCSEs: not everybody had to take O-levels. In the 1970s, many people left school for jobs at 16, and only 8.4% of the population attended university. Now we are destroying teenagers with stress at 16 and then again two years later with A-levels, with the aim of eventually getting them university degrees that are increasingly expensive and decreasingly useful. | There is another significant difference between O-levels and the new GCSEs: not everybody had to take O-levels. In the 1970s, many people left school for jobs at 16, and only 8.4% of the population attended university. Now we are destroying teenagers with stress at 16 and then again two years later with A-levels, with the aim of eventually getting them university degrees that are increasingly expensive and decreasingly useful. |
| Students don’t always discover their passions in the classroom. I was a textbook product of a nice middle-class high-achieving school: I worried sick over my exams, passed them all, but then ended up leaving school just before I turned 17 to work on a video games magazine because I had spent all my spare time playing games and making websites. My parents despaired – but ask any of my millennial peers whether the exams and qualifications that we were told to stress over were useful when the economy collapsed in 2008. To survive, we had to hustle – and the school system, as it was, emphatically did not teach us that. | Students don’t always discover their passions in the classroom. I was a textbook product of a nice middle-class high-achieving school: I worried sick over my exams, passed them all, but then ended up leaving school just before I turned 17 to work on a video games magazine because I had spent all my spare time playing games and making websites. My parents despaired – but ask any of my millennial peers whether the exams and qualifications that we were told to stress over were useful when the economy collapsed in 2008. To survive, we had to hustle – and the school system, as it was, emphatically did not teach us that. |
| On my beat covering the video games industry, most of the young people I meet developed the skills and talents that they need for their job – art, music, coding and game design – as a hobby, because school didn’t support them. Why, then, are they just making GCSEs harder instead of adapting them to teach things people need in the modern world? Why aren’t we broadening the range of subjects and adding more vocational options for students instead of getting them to memorise poems? | On my beat covering the video games industry, most of the young people I meet developed the skills and talents that they need for their job – art, music, coding and game design – as a hobby, because school didn’t support them. Why, then, are they just making GCSEs harder instead of adapting them to teach things people need in the modern world? Why aren’t we broadening the range of subjects and adding more vocational options for students instead of getting them to memorise poems? |
| I’m not saying that adolescents should be spending their time in school doing whatever they want. But there should be time left outside of school to pursue other things, whether it’s music or video games or making YouTube videos or just being teens. Exams might be a necessary evil, but there should be time and space left over for young people to live their lives and discover their passions, instead of piling so much schoolwork on them that they are having panic attacks and migraines en masse. | I’m not saying that adolescents should be spending their time in school doing whatever they want. But there should be time left outside of school to pursue other things, whether it’s music or video games or making YouTube videos or just being teens. Exams might be a necessary evil, but there should be time and space left over for young people to live their lives and discover their passions, instead of piling so much schoolwork on them that they are having panic attacks and migraines en masse. |
| • Keza MacDonald is video games editor at the Guardian | • Keza MacDonald is video games editor at the Guardian |
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