The GCSE system is supposed to educate people. And sometimes it does: facts and skills and methods and systems can all be picked up in the course of preparation for the exams. There are still plenty of good teachers and bright students. But if a desire for education gets in the way of the procedure - the “assessment objectives” that Francis Gilbert identified last week in his article about A-levels – then education loses. Like the all-important procedures that define call-centre operations, the means becomes the end. The purpose of a GCSE is the GCSE itself, and anything truly learned is a happy accident.
Which is good news for call centre managers, as a generation of youngsters learns that sticking blindly, rigidly to a syllabus or a procedure is the way to success and contentment. WB Yeats said that education is not the filling of a bucket, but the lighting of a fire. From many students today, proudly clutching their A* grades in English literature, the only response will be: “Yeats? Nah, we haven’t done him.”
(Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/aug/22/schools.gcses)
“Education is not the filling of a bucket, but the lighting of a fire”. yeats
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