We Have Certificates--Others are Educated

Return to Times Tables? 

Not when we can ask Poles to do our sums

Peter Hitchens
MailonSunday

No, they are not going to bring back times tables. Teachers think this sort of thing is beneath them, and that making any child learn things is cruel.  I must have heard Education Ministers promise to restore times tables 20 times. Nothing ever happens, except that the unfortunate politician is asked on air to say what nine eights are, and can’t.

I do wish that some of them would retaliate by testing the TV and radio presenters who torment them on their knowledge of the tables.  I doubt whether most of them could cope.  Even I, properly drilled in tables at a strict-regime school in the 1950s, trip up sometimes. On Friday, I was shocked and mortified to find I couldn’t do 11 times 11.

But most politicians and TV presenters, being far younger than I am, never endured what I did – the rhythmic, endless chanting as we sat in rows, while the sun shone temptingly outside. 

Instead, they were sometimes ‘tested’ at school, while their poor parents were expected to make themselves unpopular with their children, and do the actual teaching, perhaps in the car. But that rarely works.  This is a pity, because my times tables are the one part of my schooling that I still consciously use, many times a day. I still need them. And so does everyone else.

So why is this latest pledge, like all the others, a fantasy and a false promise?


It’s partly because all proper education rests on authority, on the idea that adults have something to teach, and children have much to learn.  And teachers no longer have any real authority. What they have is conditional authority, while luck lasts.  Teachers are seldom more than 30 seconds and three feet away from an accusation of abuse that, even if totally untrue, will ruin their lives and their careers irrevocably.

They can charm. Or they can bluff. In some cases the bluff is backed up by almost totalitarian regimes in schools with charismatic, overpowering heads.  Such heads usually find subtle ways of excluding troublesome children, either before they arrive, or afterwards. But the excluded ones have to go somewhere.

And that means that most of the difficult stuff, from times tables on up to irregular verbs in foreign languages, either is not done at all, or is skirted around, except in highly selective schools, state or private, almost all of which pick their children and parents on the basis of wealth and privilege.

Even then, look and see how the numbers taking languages, especially, decline over the years.  But of course the grades go on getting better, and the number of people with supposed ‘qualifications’ and alleged ‘degrees’ gets bigger and bigger, even if no one knows what six nines are.

But employers, if they can, somehow seem to prefer to hire Poles or Romanians.  We may have the certificates. But it is the people from the old-fashioned countries that tend to have the education.