“If your experiment needs statistics, you ought to have done a better experiment.”

  • Ernest Rutherford

Imagine history were the subject the Powers That Be had decided was super-important, the one that everybody needed to have a solid grasp on in order to be a functional human being in the modern world, the one on which student and school performance would be judged.

And the way competence in history would be judged, at least in Year 5, would be by being able to quickly give the precise dates of the reigns of the English monarchs. There’d be an entire industry built up around monarchy memorisation, detailed emails home highlighting where a child was a little bit wobbly on the Georges, maybe iPad games they could play to practise.

That would be silly, right? There’s a lot more to history than the dates of the kings and queens, there’s a lot more to it than dates full stop, it’s a subject full of stories and mysteries, and I mean, sure, it could be handy to know when Henry VIII was around, but there are more interesting things than his dates.

Of course, schools wouldn’t just teach the dates – teachers are professionals, they’d want to encourage the kids to take an interest in the past, they’re not monsters. All the same, given that the Timed Timeline Test is a key performance indicator for their career and the school, they’re going to dedicate a fair bit of time to quizzing on it.

There would be two obvious repercussions to this: despite the teachers’ efforts, the students and parents would tend to believe that history was mainly about dates; and many students who have a flair for picking apart old documents, imputing the motivations of historical actors, or whatever it is historians do – many of those students would infer that because they didn’t get good scores in the TTT, they were No Good At History.

Of course, this elaborate straw-man argument doesn’t quite accurately parallel the state of maths education – I’m at pains to point out that my kids’ school does all it can to nurture love and competence in maths, and that clearly implies that all schools do – but at the end of the day, the Important Bits Of Maths To Know are the ones that are in the times table check and in the SAT. Or the GCSE. Or the A-level.

There’s a syllabus to follow. There might be some room for enrichment, room for creativity, room to go off on a tangent and find some joy and delight – but there’s precious little of it. And it’s painful: as the Numberblocks famously sang, there’s so much more to explore.

In a previous life, I wrote and spoke a lot about exam technique. All the tricks for squeezing every last mark out of the test, all the hacks to make it easy for the examiner to reward you, all of the inside track on wheedling out a bump in your grade.

I sincerely regret it.

What an absolute waste. What a waste of everybody’s time, concentration and energy. We could have been doing something fascinating with all of that. We could have explored off of the beaten track, we could have solved a cute puzzle, we could have discussed the statistical implications of students getting extra points on the test for knowing how to sit a test.

I’m not advocating for an end to exams, but mainly because I don’t have a workable alternative. But I am going to echo Rutherford: if our system can be gamed so that students who know how to sit an exam outperform students who’ve learned the material, we ought to design a better system.

Many thanks to Paul O’Malley for suggesting the theme. This post is dedicated to those who love learning.