ragon
THE
P RTAL
October 2012
Page 8
Dumbing down
Introducing his
plans for an overhaul of school exams recently Education
Secretary Michael Gove spoke in the House of Commons of “years of drift, decline and
dumbing down”, and his intention to do away with the “bite-size spoon-feeding” of recent
decades and “restore rigour” to our education system.
under heavy fire
Very predictably Gove came under
heavy fire for his proposals to ditch
the GCSE and replace it with the
EBacc (English Baccalaureate), being
accused by some critics of turning
back the clock and returning to a
two-tier system. I suspect we haven’t
heard the last of this one.
everyone leaves
the party
with a lollipop
Though I wouldn’t
favour a system that
sets up huge numbers of
children for failure and
rejection, I can see that
we need to move away
from a system that
is so concerned with
making sure that everyone leaves the party with a
lollipop.
on-the-job remedial training
It is time that we recognised that dumbing down does
not serve students well; rather it produces university
graduates with holes in their knowledge of the basics,
like grammar and spelling (and from experience that
includes graduates in English literature), and school-
and college-leavers with a clutch of ‘good’ exam
results, whose basic writing and numeracy skills are so
poorly developed that their employers have to provide
them with on-the-job remedial training. An education
system that dumbs down does not serve students; it
actually lets them down.
ignorance of Christ himself
Similarly, a Church that dumbs down lets down. The
product of “years of drift, decline and dumbing down”
in the Church’s teaching of the Faith is Catholics of
many years with substantial holes in their knowledge
of the basics, and younger Catholics with almost no
knowledge of the basics at all. For instance, how many
Catholics could give a definition of ‘sacrament’? How
many know that Christ is one person in two natures,
divine and human? How many Catholics know what
the Immaculate Conception is anymore? Or the
Real Presence? Ignorance of these things is not just
ignorance of a few facts, but surely ignorance of Christ
himself.
passing on of the content of the Faith
Pope Benedict is clearly urging the Church to
return to a more rigorous schooling in the Faith,
which I interpret as a call to leave behind catechesis
based on experience, with
all its fuzziness, in favour
of a catechesis that is an
unashamed passing on of
the content of the Faith as
summarized in the Creeds and
the Catechism of the Church.
to live confidently
as Christians in the
modern world
Not that the Holy Father is
calling on the Church to turn back the clock to a time
when the Faith was taught and learnt simply through a
series of questions and one-sentence answers.
He knows that a mere memorisation of facts will not
serve the laity well either. Rather a sound knowledge
of the Church’s doctrine and an understanding of the
significance of the facts – why they really matter - is
what is required to draw people into deeper union with
Christ and equip them to live confidently as Christians
in the modern world.
the Year of Faith
What Pope Benedict is calling for in the Year of Faith
is what Blessed John Henry Newman desired long
before him:
“I want a laity, not arrogant, not rash in
speech, not disputatious, but men who know
their religion, and enter into it, who know
just where they stand, who know what they
hold and what they do not, who know their
creed so well that they can give an account
of it, who know so much of history that they
can defend it. I want an intelligent, well-
instructed laity…”
(The present position of Catholics in England, 1851)