The Olympics are only ever about winning?

[alexandral]

Gmm, this put a spanner in my wheels of Olympic joy : The Olympics have never expressed an ethical imperative, only ever a selfish one. War without the guns. Some of the points are really hitting home: the death of Nodar Kumaritashvili, infamous Own the Podium programme, bad weather conditions. But ?

Tangentially, I dislike (or more correctly: find difficult) one of the things about educational system in the UK: it seems that a big amount of effort is spent on obscuring your child's results. How well is he/she doing? Where are they in comparison with everyone in the class? If you take your child's yearly report , most likely you will not find an answer to any of those questions, all you will find is 6 sheets full of common phrases. Personally I had to go and almost drag the answers out of the teachers (I bet they labeled me "that pushy Russian mother" in my daughter's school) and still ,the answers given are never precise, but always fuzzy and almost incomprehensible unless you spend hours and hours researching. Why am I ranting about that? I think that the attempts to cover the results are part of attempting to make education "ethical, not selfish".

Comments

[lesbiassparrow.livejournal.com]

The irony of not telling you where a child's position is in the class is that it comes from an educational system that is obsessed with ranking schools, results, teachers - everything and thinks everything can be quantified.

[alexandral.livejournal.com]

This is precisely my point. This year is the year of SATs for my daughter , so I felt I had to find (Internet is a wonderful place) some examples of SATs, for the purpose of practice. I knew they were doing similar tests during the previous years, but I haven't realised how comprehensive the tests are. Every child has a mark after every year - why are the parents never told what it is?

[himmapaan.livejournal.com]

It's very sad. Something I'm sure many of us suspect or know with varying degrees of consciousness. We would wish that the Olympics uphold those higher ideals, but ultimately, it is a competition. Nobody wants to lose.

Conversely, withholding pupils' school results out of deference to the idea of ethical equal opportunities seems to me faintly ridiculous. Why have the benefits of education and the genuine desire to furnish and improve one's intellect become such a subject of almost a kind of embarrassment?

I remember a lecture I went to in which the lecturer quipped along the lines of: 'In Britain, we have to heap praise on a twelve-year-old just for turning up for classes; in Japan, a twelve-tear-old has to win the Nobel prize first to get a pat on the back'.

I would never advocate a damaging pressure to do well in education either, but this shielding of results in order to accommodate an airy notion of ethics is just silly.

[alexandral.livejournal.com]

I remember a lecture I went to in which the lecturer quipped along the lines of: 'In Britain, we have to heap praise on a twelve-year-old just for turning up for classes; in Japan, a twelve-tear-old has to win the Nobel prize first to get a pat on the back'.

Japanese systems sounds like the one we had in Russia. :D Although I think that there are some definite advantages in the "curriculum level" system that is adopted in the UK, I just want to know my child's results , that is all.

[himmapaan.livejournal.com]

Oh, I agree the curriculum level system is extremely laudable. I just think it's silly having such a system and then being evasive about results.

[alexandral.livejournal.com]

Yes, it took me few years to get used to it but now I quite like curriculum levels , I like that they keep returning to the same topics through each level.

[teh-haley.livejournal.com]

Considering how important it is (and it's going to be in the future) for a kid to know exactly their weak and strong points, and how much the educational system is about the ranking and the results, it's kind of ridiculous.

[alexandral.livejournal.com]

Yes, it is. I hope things will change in the High School - it seems that this year (which was a pre-high-school year for my daughter) there have been more explanations given to the pupils about the curriculum levels.

[teh-haley.livejournal.com]

I hope so! I remember I had some troubles at choosing which kind of high school to attend because our teachers pointed us towards none in particular, but at least now things are pretty different here.

[alexandral.livejournal.com]

Yes, the choice of high school is a bit confusing here too , but it helps that you can find school league tables on BBC news.

[arathesane.livejournal.com]

Hmm, interesting. We seem to have the opposite problem with education here in the States. Everyone is obsessed with high test scores and grades. The testing obsession can be a problem as in many states there these standardized tests that every student must score a certain percentage on in order to move up a year or graduate. The problem is that these tests often lead teachers to teach to the test rather than teach their subjects or enlighten their students.

These are not the same things as O/A/AS levels in the UK. They don't really measure what students are capable of doing and definitely do not measure critical thinking skills. My family is filled with educators and none of them like these tests!

[alexandral.livejournal.com]

You see, the strangest thing is that here it also is all abput grades. Teachers know exactly where your child is in the grades, they are just reluctant to disclose this information for some reason.

Tests are always very limited, I think. It is hard to devise a perfect test.

[arathesane.livejournal.com]

That is so strange. I don't understand that at all.

Yeah, I agree. Some standardized testing is necessary, of course, but to put all value on them and getting high scores is a detriment to a child's education I think.

[alexandral.livejournal.com]

I think from the teachers' point of view they try to encourage everyone and "celebrate their own successes". BUT! My other bee in the bonnet about the educational system is that already now 10 year olds are divided into two streams, one "higher achievers" and another "need encouragement". The devision frustrates me too - how someone from the bottom group can be expected to move upwards? And to add to this the foggy situation with the grades = I am very confused.