SON, COULD YOU HOP ON YOUR BIKE AND GO BUY US A HOUSE

Drive to keep pupils interested in school (Kevin Schofield, The Scotsman, October 8th, 2005)

Primary school pupils are to be given psychological tests to find out why they become disenchanted with education.

North Ayrshire Council is the first local authority in Scotland to use the pupil attitudes to self and school (PASS) questionnaire. It is hoped that the tests will be able to identify the causes of problems such as low achievement, poor attendance and fragile self-esteem.

The system involves pupils between primary four and second year being asked 50 questions, with the answers being evaluated to assess their long-term attitudes towards education.

Bob Neilly, North Ayrshire Council's quality improvement manager, said it was hoped that the information would enable it to put in place measures to ensure that every pupil remained interested in education. He said: "Pupils tend to have a positive attitude in early primary school, but we want to know where that goes wrong and plug the gap.

Despite the deft fudging in the phrase “psychological tests”, what is almost certainly proposed here is to ask elementary school kids how they would like to see their schools and education run. Unless sanity intervenes, the results will presumably be translated into policies and directives, so the kids will get their way in some measure. This is appalling for two reasons. The first is that it constitutes another triumph for mad scientism. Bookshelves groan under the insights and experiences of lifelong educators, but these are now presumably all to be swept away as “unsystematic” and therefore unreliable authority. Good and committed teachers will have to navigate around the nonsense that will predicably result and animate and educate the kids by stealth, as they have been forced to do more and more for years.

The second is perhaps more insidious. It reflects the growing widespread confusion of adults as to what constitutes an educated child and, indeed, what is is in the best interests of children at all. In custody cases, the wishes of teenagers used to be given great weight for the understandable reason that kids of that age vote with their feet and the courts weren’t going to police them. More and more, one sees courts giving increasing weight to the wishes of younger and younger children, not for practical reasons, but because we are so confused about what childhood is and needs that we are honestly coming to believe they know what is best for them more than we do. The truly frightening thing is we are so at sea ourselves that maybe they do.