The Mail on Sunday: PRIVATE schools have always been expert at drilling children to pass exams. Now all schools are expected to compete on this basis. Instead of exams being a means to an end they are now an end in themselves.
I say this as one of those annoying people who could always easily pass exams, even though I had paid little attention to my lessons and remembered almost nothing as soon as I left the exam room.
For this reason I know both how much and hw little they really mean.
Certainly the idea of learning for learning’s sake - which many kids used to experience in the first year of their A-levels - is now to be swept away. What we will produce are not the best-educated children in the world, but simply those who have done the most revision.
Scrap GCSEs, let teenagers be teenagers and examine them when they are old enough to know better.
Much better.
Suzanne Moore, June 10
