Learning How Things Are

A whole six days ago, the Daily Mail ran a front-page headline ‘Pick your own exam results’, denouncing the Government’s decision to introduce measures to prevent the same kind of exam-grading fiasco happening in England as had afflicted the Scottish education system. Six days are a lifetime in this epoch of almost daily policy reversal and upheaval. Anyone would think that this was a Government without a single free-thinking, cognitively-different weirdo or superforecaster in it, given its apparent inability to predict any consequence at all.

But it was that headline that interested me, combined with the Government’s stated anxiety about ‘grade inflation’, the progressive ‘devaluing’ of exam grades over time. I can see the theoretical point behind this, but it confuses me. Surely if we aim at improving educational standards, and we have an exam grading system based around absolute rather than relative measurement – that is, that everyone who achieves a particular mark gets a specified grade, rather than say the top five percent of marks achieving an A, or whatever – grades are bound to rise over time?

The narrative behind ‘pick your own results’ is the mean one of suspicion and hostility towards the young. It’s the belief that the young have it easy, that they are coddled and indulged – and, by extension, that the professions including teaching conspire to indulge them. Most years exam results improve: the explanation must be, not that the system is getting better at educating children (at least in terms of enabling them to pass examinations), but that the exams are easier. As a columnist in the Express put it a couple of days ago, ‘children must learn to fail’, the implication being that their increasing success as measured by exam results is fake. Of course these newspapers suddenly realised that the students who were being expected to learn that lesson, this way, were not unidentified abstract snowflakes somewhere else, but their readers’ grandchildren and therefore beyond reproach, hence their volte-face.

In economic terms, a bit of inflation is a good thing; a bit of inflation, in fact, is the life-blood of an economy. You just see what happens when prices stop gently rising over time: it’s not fun at all. But I wonder whether there is a link between being concerned about ‘grade inflation’ and concentrating on inflation of other kinds – and that behind both is a basic approach to the ideas of resources, limitation, and justice, and even truth. Gradgrind would-be-Victorians respond to the child’s cry ‘That’s not fair!’ with the answer that life isn’t fair, but what they mean underneath that brutal retort is that it is very fair indeed, that its existing structures of power and authority reflect an absolutely just recognition of ability, talent and effort, and that the powerless should damn well learn their place. Your failure is your fault and your responsibility. How dare anyone suggest otherwise.