Ditch the dialogue of the daft

Alison Utley ("Too loving spoonfuls", THES, October 16) has touched on a major problem that almost all the dominant forces in our education system have a vested interest in ignoring. Students do expect to be spoonfed, but this is because our school education system is geared to teaching them that they should be.

Schools are required to show results - and the only ones that matter are those that can be measured, which means that getting students through examinations is paramount. The result is that students are discouraged from exploring subjects and confined to narrow exam syllabuses. It is hardly surprising they are not taught that initiative and personal responsibility for learning matter.

Teachers must not be blamed. Their career prospects, the status and income of their schools, depend on good exam results. A whole bureaucracy of supervision has been built up that believes learning can be measured simply by exam results - the inspectorate and the various quality councils.

This structure has been created by a long-running and almost entirely wrong-headed debate about "educational standards" that has centred on the so-called "gold-standard" of A level. This has served to stimulate teachers - who are actually very good at their jobs - to make every effort to get students through the exams, only to find that when they do so the goalposts are moved as politicians bray about "falling standards".

At the same time, employers are concerned about the quality of the employees they are receiving, but trapped by this dialectic of the daft into wittering about "standards" when it is the lack of initiative and a sense of personal responsibility for learning that matter. People who are self-driven are what they need and a real will to take the initiative is the key quality in any employee.

This is not the fault of the students: British education has always tended to favour passive learning, and the primacy of exams, the linking of school incomes to exam success and the creation of a dull bureaucracy of inspection have only served to increase this passivity. Virtually all attempts to tackle this have failed. Projects and coursework were genuine efforts to get students to work for themselves, but in their anxiety for results schools effectively teach these, while there is a sub-culture of copying extending far into the internet. Teaching "skills" has been seen as an antidote, but in practice skills can be learned (but alas not applied) passively and treated like any other facts. In any case, separating skills from knowledge is artificial - in almost all fields of endeavour there is a value in having a good body of simple factual knowledge.

It is not unreasonable that schools' performance should be known and exam performance be subjected to public scrutiny. But this is now having an entirely unintended and perverse effect on our education system. The exponents of quantitative assessment are in so dominant a position that they are stifling experiment and efforts to widen the education experience.

The impact on universities is immense. We have always assumed our students want to learn and are equipped to do so. That is increasingly not the case and spoonfeeding is becoming de rigueur. New quality arrangements for universities are being discussed and we can only hope that the disastrous schools model will be avoided. We need a national debate on education, but not the dialogue of the daft we have suffered for the past 20 years. The abuse of teachers, now a national blood-sport, has been a peculiarly perverse element in this: the truth is that they are all too good at their jobs and, when the job is defined as getting students through exams, have succeeded brilliantly, as the rising pass rate at A level indicates.

There is a desperate need for reform in schools, but not the dull, mechanistic methods the quality bureaucrats have imposed. Its aim must be to get students to take the initiative. It will not be easy because such things are difficult to measure, but they are easy to discern and vital to the development of our children.

John France

University of Wales Swansea