Read the following passage and mark the letter A, B, C, or D to indicate the correct answer to each of the questions
Do you think education is better now than it was in your grandparents' time? Many older people in the UK believe the opposite. “Schools were better in our day,” they complain. “There isn't enough discipline these days. Kids don't work as hard as we did, either. The syllabus isn't as challenging, so clever students aren't being stretched enough. They need to study things in greater depth. Exams are much, much easier now as well.”
Were schools better years ago? Some British teenagers travelled back in time to a 1950s boarding school. They got a big surprise! The first shock came when the teenagers met their new teachers. Dressed in traditional black gowns, they look so frosty and uncaring! They were really authoritarian, too, so anyone caught breaking the rules - talking in classes, mucking about in the playground or playing truant – was in big trouble! Punishments included writing 'lines' or staying after class to do detention. The naughtiest kids were expelled.
Things were just as bad after class. At meal times the students had to endure a diet of plain, no-nonsense, healthy food. Homework was obligatory and it took ages! Copying essays off the Internet wasn't an option, as personal computers didn't exist in the 1950s!
At the end of 'term' everyone sat 1950s-style exams. The old exams were much longer than their twenty-first century equivalents and involved learning huge amounts of facts by heart. History papers were all dates and battles. Maths papers were trickier, too; calculators weren't around in the 1950s, so the students had to memorise multiplication tables and master long division. Our candidates found this really difficult.
The exam results surprised a lot of people. Students predicted to do well in their real-life, twenty-first century exams often got low grades in the 1950s exams. Does this prove modern exams are too easy? Do twenty-first century kids rely too much on modern technology, like calculators and computers?
The TV series of That 'll teach 'em! focused on a 1960s vocational school. UK school-kids study a range of academic subjects these days. But in the 1960s, children judged to be less ‘able' went to vocational schools. These helped them learn job skills. Boys studied subjects like metalwork, woodwork or gardening. In some classes, they even learned how to milk goats! The girls' timetables included secretarial skills. They also learned to cook, clean and sew - probably not much fun for most girls.
What was surprising about the students' results after taking the 1950s-style exams?
