Честно говоря, очень рад, что в РФ есть такой интересный преподаватель, как Пол (@english_with_paul), что он искренне пытается донести своё непредвзятое мнение до других людей. Сегодня он решил поделиться своими наблюдениями по поводу ухудшающегося положения системы и качества образования в Великобритании, Германии и частично в России. Конечно, думающему человеку сразу становится любопытно, когда он слышит, что будет рассказано о причинах происходящего. Однако описание проблемы и констатация фактов исторического развития общества не всегда заканчиваются реальным анализом и конкретными выводами. Скаем так, не думаю, что "либерализация" общественного поведения, политкорректность, толерантность, усиление роли ученика в школе/универе и снижение сложности учебных программ являются причинами наступившей "полной задницы" (it sucks), как пишет Пол. Это ведь явно - следствия. Причём, в Китае, Гонконге, на Тайване, с Восточной Европе, Бразилии я наблюдал то же самое. Это - общий процесс. Как любили до недавнего времени говорить, "отголоски" или "сопутствующие недостатки" глобализации.
В таких случаях у меня, как и у многих коллег, всегда есть один «язвительный» вопрос: «Если качество образования ухудшается, то, значит, граждане в данном обществе способны спокойно выживать именно с таким уровнем знаний, не так ли?» Ведь логично рассудить, что образование закладывает те навыки и умения, которые позволят людям зарабатывать себе потом на пропитание, как минимум. А значит, большего от них и не требуется. Можно выживать и с таким образованием. Почему – это уже совсем другой вопрос, который затрагивает структуру экономических отношений и запросы от экономики на грамотных граждан. Если запроса нет, то нет и образования. Но эта проблема в подкасте не рассматривается. Да и надо ли? Пока что Пол предлагает привлечь в профессию больше мужчин и увеличить зарплату.
Мне нравится слушать хороший английский и находить для себя любопытные фразеологизмы. Ещё чилдренам включаю кусочки из его речи как на замедленной скорости, так и на стандартной, чтобы обращали внимание на чёткость произношения каждого слова – от первого до последнего звука. Боремся так с редукций и учимся медленной, чёткой, слитной речи.
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Аудио по ссылке: https://t.me/igoryevtishenkov/131
В файле напечатал текст подкаста Пола на английском.
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Hello, my dear friends, and how are you doing, and welcome to this unannounced podcast, which is a response to the video I posted earlier, because I've been getting lots of private messages about, Paul, why is education dying in the West? I thought it was supposed to be like the golden standard, the gold bearer, but unfortunately, it's just not these days. Things really, really do suck. And excuse that very in-depth scientific term, suck, but I think it's quite fitting.
So, I've been researching the decline of at least British education, and America is similar. Over the past 15 years, I noticed trends even before that, and I'm going to go through a list of what's wrong. You can actually try to think, do any of the issues I raise somehow correlate with issues that Russia is facing? Or maybe if you're in Belarus, Ukraine, Kazakhstan, wherever, or Spain, it would be very interesting to know.
So, yeah, I thought I'd do a nice little podcast because it'll be quite educational. And again, this is something I'm quite a specialist in, because I follow the international survey tests, the published scores of our league tables, and all these other bits and pieces. And I actually work in a consortium of European teachers, so we meet once every couple of weeks.
They're basically friends who are teachers, but we meet every couple of weeks to discuss issues that are affecting education in our respective countries, you know, culture, governmental policy, and that's where I learn a lot of my stuff, and it's very interesting for them as well, because there's me, there's a couple of Germans, French, Spanish, Dutch, there's a couple of Scandinavians as well. Really, really interesting stuff. It's a nice group of friends. All right. I'm going to start off by telling you this. When did I notice that things weren't right?
That goes back a long time ago in fact, because, when I was a little boy with long blonde hair, I was so attractive, when I was younger with that just seemed to have died as I got older but still anyway because my mom told me I was a lady killer as a teenager. Well, girls didn't agree, but my mom said so anyway. I went on a German school exchange and I think that was year nine and when I went there I… we spent a day in a sort of German school like you know with our exchange partners, and I had to go to a maths lesson and some other kind of classes.
And the class… the kids… the classes I went to the kids were the same age as me. And I looked at the maths they were doing on, like bloody hell our maths is so much simpler compared to what the Germans are doing like much simpler. And even the teacher asked me to come to the board to solve some equation (I minded) no, no, no, no no. I can't embarrass myself. And even the other English kids that were sitting with me watching this maths lesson, none of us could do it.
It was the equivalent sort of level of maths that we do at A-level, for example. It was just insane. And so I got back to England. But obviously, I was too young to kind of put two and two together. But I understood that the Germans are far more capable than we are. I mean, they spoke pretty good English compared to how we spoke German. Then the second biggest shock to my system, when things really did sort of get set in stone, was when I went to Germany for my academic placement.
So my third year was spent in the East German city of Erfurt in Turingia at a teacher training university, the Pedagogische Hochschule Erfurt. And I even met lots of other Eastern European students from Czech Republic, Slovakia, Lithuania, Poland, and lots of other places. And their German was so much better than mine.
And there was another English guy as well. They just destroyed us. And it's also about their maturity to education. Me and James, we were getting drunk. We were just causing havoc. The Germans enjoyed that, by the way. But these Eastern Europeans, you know, they just seemed so much wiser and decent and just more diligent than me and James. And me and James, we were the best students in my entire department at university. Because this was a very prestigious university to go to.
So we were sent there. And I realised that, yeah, lots of other countries and Germany, they're just ahead of us leaps and bounds. And so I went back to England to finish my last year at university, thinking something is seriously wrong. Seriously wrong. Like, what the hell is going on? Because even in my final year, a lot of my classmates, who went to other cities in Germany, they didn't learn anything.
They came back to university, graduated with a first class or two, well, but could barely speak German, so that made me think, what the hell is going on? Of course, I put all of that on the back burner for some time, until I started my teacher training, which I was doing whilst working as a teacher and training at the same time in the GTP programme. I remember one particular day. I can't remember when it was, but one particular day, I actually dug up some old GCSE past papers.
Our GCSEs are the same as the Russian YEGE exam. And so I dug up some GCSE papers and also the marking criteria over the length of about ten years. And what I noticed when you read the teacher's notes, and also what you are asked for, year after year, it actually got considerably easier. So when I took the German GCSE, you actually had to get the grammar right. I mean, it wasn't very advanced, but you still had to get it right. When I did my teacher training quite a few years later, you could actually get the tenses in German wrong.
But as long as you communicated the message, you could get an A. Now, if I had made such mistakes when I took German GCSE, I wouldn't have got an A, I probably would've got a C. So that kind of showed me, okay, right, there's definitely then grade inflation. There's a high level of grade inflation, and that's actually quite alarming, because that means kids are getting As, going to A-levels, maybe getting As, but aren't maybe as proficient in German and various subjects as they were, say, 5, 10, 15 years ago.
And I even kind of raised this to my mentor, and they basically said, oh, just ignore it. It's just a way, it's just government intervention. And that's what got me really, really interested, because at least when I was teaching German, I was looking at the marking criteria. They really had to know very little. They did not need to learn very much at all.
They could get the articles completely wrong, and it didn't matter, and I was wondering, well, what's the point then? What's the point of trying to kind of aim high? And so over the years, you know, I realised myself what was happening within British education. I went to Germany to teach in a state school there as well for some time, and that was a lot better, but it's now sucking in Germany as well, big time. Of course, I've been working here in EFL in Russia, but I've had links to some state schools.
So I've got some experience of what's been going on, but I rely mostly on what you guys tell me. Now, there are a few really worrying things going on within the Western state school system. There is a major retention crisis. This is what we saw in that video, and there are many videos like this. The one that's above this post, where teachers are leaving in droves. No one wants to enter the profession.
At the end of the profession, usually within a year, they are gone. Teachers who've been around for like, say, 10, 15 years, they are not going to stay on any longer. They are leaving. There are instances where there are some grades of school that don't have a single teacher and sometimes have to be mixed into one large group in the sports hall or something. That's not normal. It's really, really, really bad. We can't hire from good pools of teachers for the reasons I'm about to explain.
So I've got a list of reasons here. Now, if you ask other people, depending on their political persuasion, they might give you a completely different answer. So these reasons are what I have researched over the years, but I'm going to give you the kind of very diluted, simple version. The first thing we've got to understand is, it's not just about what has happened within the school system is about what's happened in the home. I follow a proverb that I live by and that is, if you want to understand the state of a country, you have to look in the average household.
And that makes so much sense, because to understand the direction a country's heading in, well, what's the average family like? And that would tell you what's going on. And. English families or American families these days, it's all about putting devices on the lap of your children, like a phone or a tablet, TV, computer games, going on to all of these like mind numbingly dull, communication apps, you know, you know, trying to be on Instagram influence, all of that kind of stuff.
It's really, really that bad. So where does all this come from? Well, okay, in the 1980s, there was a massive change in Western parenting, because up until then, you know, parenting was kind of considered quite conservative. Kids were to be seen and not heard. And in the 80s it was really like a massive change which kind of affected, well these are the millennial generation by the way, they started in about 83 to the 90s.
And it was in the 80s when there was like a huge change in familial policy. So it was not like, okay, don't cane your kids anymore. Like, you know, it was normal in the 60s and 70s to smack your kids’ hands with a stick, which we call the cane. It even happened in schools. They got rid of that, Thank God. And the approach was, okay, we understand that, you know, we have to help children.
We have to include children, like have inclusive policies. No child should fail. We should try to help everyone. And so it's one of these kind of ideas that on paper, like communism, it really, really works. In reality, not so much. And so the intentions were absolutely spot on, but the trouble is it's gone from one extreme to the other, because life in everything, whether it's about education, whether it's about marriage, relationships, friendship, it's always about a golden middle.
But here it's not, it went from one extreme to the other. So it went to a very left-wing sociological, let's call it familial structure. So it was more like, okay, children are humans as well, which they are, so we need to listen to them, don't always say “no” because we have to respect them more.
So again, it's like the right idea, but we went completely the wrong way about it because, you know, we try to dismiss human psychology, that children are amoral, that they aren't biologically developed, and they need the guidance of a parent, and a good example to follow. If you're not gonna provide them, then well, you're gonna be a bit stuffed. So there was a massive change in parenting. So a lot of these millennials are now having the kids that go to school, like Generation X, Generation Z, Generation, no, I'm Generation X, so Generation Z and Generation Alpha.
And a lot of teachers find these generations unbearable, because they're extremely self-entitled. Well, what do you expect if you've been taught you can never fail? You know, that everyone matters and everyone has a voice. It's like, well, yeah, but you're still young and you still, let's be fair, are a bit clueless, you know? Why don't you kind of do what you're told and then when you're 18 you can decide? That's what I was told when I was growing up. But again, people got their views on that.
So there's definitely an issue with parenting and also I think Generation X, because they had that massive change, that's created a lot of helicopter parents as well. And if you combine that with the toxicity of social media, like the increase in narcissism, the desire for attention, the collapse of cohesion, there's kind of more competition between people.
That's just adding more poison into the cauldron, in my opinion. And it's just making matters much worse. Of course, during the 1990s in the education system, that's when political correctness really started to take off. Not so much when I was at school. You heard certain things, but like, you know, if all of this stuff today that you hear happened when I was at school, we would have sent you to a mental hospital.
But when I was doing my teacher training in the early 2000s, it was already there. You know there were things you couldn't say I was told I was never allowed to use the word “fail” or “failure”, you had to think of other ways and also the training was like you have to get down to the eye level of the student and be on their levels like “why can't I bring them up to my level?” you know and so but it but I will I get punished for that you see I'd be absolutely punished. So there was like a major soft touch approach it was very PC like total indoctrination already the curricula were being rewritten, even, for example, like, the British history was taken off the curriculum and replaced by the history of medicine because it was felt that British history would upset a lot of ethnic minorities because of our colonial past. So a lot of the PC indoctrination was going on. So what that meant is that a teacher, like, okay, because of the sentimentalities of certain students that students started to know their rights and not their responsibility, it meant that students could challenge you because again we were told that everyone has a voice and you know like even teenagers have a voice and they have rights.
Well, they do but they were kind of exploited so students started to threaten to sue you to take you to court or to report you to like the police or something. So of course teachers are gonna be scared you know you're kind of scared that you say or do something wrong you step out of line and you're gonna lose your job and many teachers have done. What else have I mentioned?
So one thing a lot of teachers do talk about. Now, this is going to depend on what side of the political spectrum you are. Now, most teachers tend to be left-wing, tend to be. Left-wing or quite liberal, because the reason for this is that teachers are very creative people. And for the most part, creative people tend to be more liberal. Of course, in Russia, you probably get a kind of more conservative types, but I still say a lot of teachers are maybe relatively liberal.
But again, I'd have to double-check on that kind of fact here in Russia. But in England and the West, if you are kind of your staunch conservative, you will be pushed out stand like secondary education, 100%. You wouldn't last long because you would not accept the kind of liberalization of the British education system because it's liberal from top to bottom.
And what's interesting about that is that there's been lots of teaching methodologies that have been introduced that simply do not work and what usually happens is that you get some kind of a PhD-student, who is researching some kind of new method. They work with the Ministry of Education. They kind of implement it. A lot of the information is often pseudoscience and is based on near to nothing. And then what happens is that, like, some do-gooder in the Ministry of Education implements this and tells teachers, right, we're gonna be teaching like this from now on. We're gonna use the student-based approach. And by the way, the student and child-based method has been proven not to work.
That has been proven. And I'm dead set against that because I've often argued that we've been learning — we talk about English and what we're teaching and learning. People have been speaking English fluently as now for years. Do we think that people are somehow ignorant and incompetent before that no one was C2 until the lexical approach was introduced? Of course not. It's ridiculous to think so. All that people are doing is just trying to reinvent the wheel, You know, to kind of have existing concepts, presented in new ways, using word salad. That's all it is. But these methodologies get pushed, and especially not just teaching methodologies, but methodologies on teenage psychology, behaviourism. A lot of this is based on very flimsy psychology. You know, very flimsy.
And psychology in the West, and this is interesting to point out, is very corrupt, extremely corrupt, because there is the replication crisis that's been going on for about like a decade, maybe a bit longer now. And so whenever I read modern-day psychological reports, I take everything with a pinch of salt, because I'm always asking, who tested this? Where was it tested? By whom? And who were the subjects? You know has it been confirmed like at least five times by different experiments? If not, then I'm not going to trust it and a lot of methodology is based on very flimsy psychology.
Now, if I were to go to most teachers who present all of these conferences in Russia, and I say what is your material based on, I promise you, 99.9% would not be able to answer. They just take it as it is and maybe because they've tried it once or twice for them it works. But doesn't mean that it does for the most So, yeah, there are a lot of dodgy methods that are based on nothing that schools are forced to use, especially in the state school sector.
Of course, you've got government intervention as well. This is another reason why Western education is dying because, you know, I think teachers flourish when you are left to your own devices. You know what's best for your students. You have a plan to follow, but you should be quite liberal in how you implement your planning. So, you know, because students are different, classes are different. If you're going to be given a “one-size-fits-all” approach dictated by the government, well, then students are going to suffer.
You know, that's why I like this language school. I was working at in Moscow for so long because they allowed me to teach how I wanted. They said as long as they pass and they stay the whole six months and they go to the next level, perfect. So I was allowed to kind of really push them and you know, I taught what I thought was best and it worked. But government intervention is just relentless, partially because, well, the government needs to look good. They need to be seen to be doing something.
Like, students are getting better under our governmental leadership, we've introduced these changes, grades are up. But as I said at the beginning, I realised that grades are better. But the pass mark, because of grade inflation, like, you know, you can get an A in mathematics with about, like, 50% now. 50% to get an A. And, also, the material is considerably easier, like much easier than it's ever used to be.
And that's a fact. So, when the government says that kids are doing better, well, actually, they're not, because there's evidence to suggest otherwise. Because universities in Britain, not all but many, have to introduce remedial courses. That means if you're an English student and you're going to study, let's just say, science, maths, business, you also have to take extra English classes, because universities are saying that we're going to university with an insufficient level of English.
Well, almost 50% of Britain's functionally illiterate. It was like 45% or something, functionally illiterate. Something about like, was it like 30 to 40% of school leavers at the age of 16, graduate with a literacy and numeracy rate, three to four years lower than the age of 16. I mean, that's just insane. So something is clearly wrong. And, many companies in Britain actually have to provide courses to help new employees because they say they come to us after GCSEs, even A-levels, not able to read or write properly, they can't spell. And it's a major, major problem.
On top of that, a lot of employers find there's lots of behavioural issues as well. Again, that comes back down to the soft-touch, liberal, left-wing approach to behaviour management, and also parenting, like a really, really shitty parenting these days.
Okay, let's also talk about this. Now, this was mentioned in the video that I posted earlier, and it's really, really sad to hear how teachers get furniture thrown at them, they get sworn at, their lives are threatened. If you take a phone away from a kid, the kid freaks out and punches you. I think it was mentioned in the video, and I've heard many stories of even pregnant teachers being punched in the stomach by a student. It's just insane. Bullying is off the charts.
Now, I know bullying happens in Russia, but I actually did read, I think two years ago, some report that was conducted where it said something like 25% or 30% of students in Russia claim to have been bullied at some stage in their lives. And bullied, I think we kind of say bullied in the way that it makes you not want to go to school. Because there's always name-calling and pulling hair, but it kind of stops and doesn't last long.
But we call it severe industrial-level bullying. And in England, in America, it's between 70% and 80% of all school students admit to having been severely bullied, to the point of actually wanting to be homeschooled. So if you imagine that that's going on, I mean, why is bullying just running rampant? It's very simple, because if you've got a dumbing down process of behaviour management, that you're taking a liberal approach to human psychology, to deny human psychology, that get down to their level and talk to them, you're your friend, teachers need to show that they're vulnerable.
By the way, that is a part of a master's teacher's programme in America. Teachers these days in America doing a master's, again, are taught to be vulnerable, because if you're vulnerable, it builds a bond with your students. No, it doesn't. It means they run riot around you. They exploit you. They exploit your weakness. That's why they get away with murder. And also, as I said about the issue with teachers as well, is that if in England, because kids know their rights and not their responsibility, if you say or do something, the child can report you, and there's nothing you can do as a teacher. Absolutely nothing in most cases. Very, very difficult. So, of course, you're not going to get the kind of strong, strong, confident, charismatic, skillful teacher.
You know, schools are hiring from a very weak pool of teachers these days. No one wants to go into state education. They know what it's like. The salary is terrible. Your life is terrible. We know that most people don't last long. If anyone's got any skill, they will not enter state school education. That's a fact. Maybe some do. Again, there are some good schools in the UK and in America, don't get me wrong. But mostly they are not, not anymore.
Even bullying and all of this teacher harassment happens in expensive private schools. So a lot of teachers basically say, well, do you know what, for the salary that I get and the stress and the responsibility and the PTSD and all that, it's not worth it. It's really, really not worth it. So yeah, you're not getting the teachers who should be there. They're all gone. Everyone leaves. So basically, this is like a kind of little introduction as to why things are really that bad I mean I could talk about this for hours and like…
But it's really it's really kind of quite… regrettable that it's got this bad. I mean, I think to repair the situation. I mean if I talk about England right now. Firstly, we need more men in education, a lot more. I mean when I have my speaking clubs, and by the way, my speaking club starts in a month. Don't forget to join. I think last time there was like two men out of like a hundred and something women, right?
Because most teachers I have are women, you know, but we need more male teachers. We need to make it prestigious enough to in to attract males to have that balance. For kids to actually have some kind of male role models as well. And there's nothing wrong with that as well as having female ones. We also need to have a fairer programme to be fair, but we need to be strong. We are teachers. We are leaders. We set the tone we set the example. If you're going to have a teacher who's a bit mental and into this weird ideological stuff that you get in America these days, what do you expect the students to be like then?
You need proper role models. You need people who really know their stuff, but to do that, you've got to up the salary. You've got to somehow reign in the bullying. How do you tell parents that they're bad parents to work with the teachers? How do you do that? You know, it's gonna take a couple of decades of repair. That's a thing. It's gonna take like a major, major shift in public perception of education and … Yeah, I don't know how it's gonna be done.
I really don't know but it would have to be it would take a leader like a prime minister or a president to basically. Completely crash the system and reboot it like from scratch literally from scratch. That's what has to be done, because it's, it really, really, really, really sucks. And yeah, I'm going back to England soon, by the way. And I'm going to go and visit my friend who works in a school.
And if I get his permission, I'll even take some videos and show you guys. He works in a primary school, so it won't be that bad, but, uh, I can maybe get access to another friend in a secondary school and, uh, like show what goes on there, be very, very interesting. So yeah, let me know what you think. Again, don't get me wrong. It doesn't happen absolutely everywhere, but it is extremely widespread, like you can't imagine extremely, if you speak to a lot of English people, they'll probably say something similar to me.
Um, yeah, as I said, I don't know how to solve this. I really do not. It's like, it's not something like that would take a couple of years. It's all about a couple of decades. I also, one last thing I'm going to mention. I talked to a lot of teachers about AI and, you know, they're all AI in the future.
And one thing where teachers make, like, a fatal mistake when we discuss this. They say but Paul you know here's the thing AI will never replace teachers because teachers have the empathy and people need that human contact with teachers. And teachers like you know are there for the students based on what I've just told you. No, they are not. Not anymore. You know so that's why I sometimes think that maybe AI is going to replace a lot of this because there aren't going to be teachers left wanting to join the profession anyway in the state sector? Uhm, I don't know.
I might be totally wrong, but let me know what you think in the comments, guys.
https://t.me/igoryevtishenkov/131