Gove's Baccalaureate Battle

The reason Michael Gove’s English Baccalaureate is proving to be so toxic is the sheer plurality of views on the subject, a diversity that neatly reflects the vast range of learning methods, areas of interest and talents that any single representative cross-section of school pupils will reveal.

The notion that a whole country’s school-age population can be satisfied, fulfilled and lifted to a level of achievement from a solitary system of academic hoop-jumping is naïve at best and is arguably both grossly negligent and condescending.
It fails to address the vast talent pool that is the youth of this country and instead seeks to push our children through a tight gap of attainment: it is the equivalent of attempting to push a square shaped object through a circular hole, it is a fruitless activity that ignores the raw material (if I may be excused from using such an industrial term) and the reams of evidence available on how to get the best out of said material.

The problem is our children are not square shaped or circular, they are star-shaped, they are triangular, they are oval. They are every shape imaginable. No one hole is ever going to accommodate all of our shapes.

Gove’s ambition is usually admirable and his rhetoric has noble elements to it. I agree whole heartedly that we have a duty to our children to impart upon them core life skills such as literacy and numeracy but disagree that they must be taught through the same academic vehicles that this country has used for centuries.

We have a plethora of vocations in this country which contribute vast amounts to our economy and our society and most of which require and teach the literacy, numeracy and other core skills that we are currently seeking to disseminate through our dog-eared textbooks. It goes without saying that a child naturally disposed to more practical activities will be more motivated and open to learning in activities that harness these practical, even non-academic, tendencies.

Where our real duty in this debate lies is in ensuring that the children of this country have an education that motivates, inspires and advances. A degree certificate alone is no longer the golden ticket into employment that it once was and this country is a better place for it. Let’s build our education system around those who it will educate, not around out-dated conceptions of academic box-ticking.