The Problem with education when its made too easy.

Education is made to teach children skills which would be vital to and greatly benefit them later in life. If unchallenged, these key skills needed would be forgotten or not considered important. If everyone could pass exams with A grades easily, rather than being a great achievment, it would be considered the ordinary and with the same qualifications as everyone else it would be hard to distinguish people from one anohter. Over the years GCSEs have been getting easier and eaier in order to try and get the biggest amount of good grades from schools however no one seemed too bothered about how this would effect the children, The headmaster of a private school in manchester said, 'The view within is that the new GCSEs will present even less of a challenge to the more able candidates than at present'. This implies that these GCSEs are encouraging some children not to work hard as they can get the best grades with a minimum effort. 'Manchester grammar school is to drop the government's GCSEs in all subjects apart from art and replace them with the International GCSE (IGCSE), an alternative more similar to the traditional O-levels.', This shows us that the people at This school have acknowleged there is a problem and are trying to re introduce harder, more challenging exams. Also the fact that failed exams and essays can easily be retaken again and again which questions the structure of the school system as how can these qualifications be taken seriously if they are easily obtainable by everyone. It is a backwards society we live in that tackles the problem of low grades, not by increasing the levels of education or by introducing new learning methods, but by making exams easier to pass.

Quotes taken from Guardian Article
http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2009/mar/04/private-schools-gcses-manchester-grammarschool