Education: Golden age of exams is a myth, say experts | Education | The Observer: "anxiety about poor spelling and grammar had been a constant theme. 'A trawl through reports on examinations from the Twenties upwards reveals that there was no 'golden age',' said David Wright, chief executive of the institute. He cited an official report on O-level papers in 1958 which found: 'The standard of English was no worse than in previous years, but is still very unsatisfactory... The most evident, if not the most serious weakness, is in the spelling. A few examples will suffice: ammount, Brittain, Britian, buisness, bussiness, deffinate, fourty, fivety, ocurred, occured, payed, polytitions, publically, usualy.'"
Plus ça change...
Interesting little piece in The Guardian... especially after the nonsense about 'variant spellings' which appeared in the Time Higher Education supplement earlier in the week. On the one hand people are fed up of correcting the same old spelling errors and accepting these is seen as further 'dumbing down' of education. On the other, it turns out that the same old spelling errors have always been the same old spelling errors.
Is it harder to swallow that education is dumbing down... or that we were all just dumb in the first place? :o)
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