91
prepare for either higher education or vocational training . The exact
boundary between primary and secondary education varies from country to
country and even within them, but is generally around the seventh to the tenth
year of education, with middle school covering any gaps. Secondary
education occurs mainly during the teenage years.
Primary and secondary
education together are sometimes (in particular, in Canada and the United
States ) referred to as " K-12 " education, ( K is for kindergarten , 12 is for
twelfth grade).
Grammar schools in the United Kingdom
In education in the United Kingdom , a grammar school is a secondary school
attended by pupils aged 11 to 18 to which entry is controlled by means of an
academically selective process consisting, largely or exclusively, of a written
examination .
After leaving a grammar school, as with any other secondary
school, a student may go into further education at a college or university .
The examination is called the eleven plus . Partly due to the failure to fully
implement the tri-partite system prescribed by the 1944 Education Act, the
examination came to be seen as delivering a pass/fail result with the
academically selected pupils passing and attending grammar schools and the
remaining pupils being deemed to have failed and being consigned to the
poorly funded schools euphemistically designated Secondary Modern Schools
.
This arrangement proved politically unsustainable, and, over the period 1960
to 1975, non-selective ("comprehensive") education was instituted across a
substantial majority of the country. The eleven plus examination had been
championed by the educational psychologist Cyril Burt and the uncovering of
his fraudulent research played a minor part in accelerating this process.
To understand
grammar schools in the UK, some history is needed. After
World War II , the government reorganised the secondary schools into two
basic types. Secondary moderns were intended for children who would be
going into a trade and concentrated on the basics plus practical skills;
grammar schools were intended for children who would be going on to higher
education and concentrated on the classics, science, etc. This system lasted
until the 1960s, at which point changes in the political
climate led to the
general acceptance that this was a discriminatory system which was not
getting the best out of all children. This was partly because some authorities
tended to prioritise their budgets on the grammar schools, damaging the
education prospects of children attending secondary moderns.
The decision was taken to switch to a single type of school designed to give
every child a complete education. That is why this new type of school is
called a comprehensive school. However the timetable of the changeover was
left to the local authorities, some of whom were very resistant to the whole
idea and thus dragged their feet for as long as possible. The result is that there
is now a mixture. Most authorities run a proper comprehensive system, a few
run essentially the old system of secondary
moderns and grammar schools
(except the secondary moderns are now called "comprehensives"). Some run
comprehensive schools along side one or two remaining grammar schools.
The Labour government that came to power in 1997 instituted measures that
allowed parents to force a local referendum on whether to abolish grammar
schools in their area. The form of this referendum depends on whether there is
still a full two-tier system running, in which case all parents with children at
primary schools in the area are eligible to vote, or whether there are only a
few grammar schools in the area, in which case only those parents with
children at primaries that regularly send children to the grammar school are
eligible. By 2003, only a few referenda had taken place and none of these had
delivered the requisite majority for conversion.
The debate over selective education has been widened by other measures
introduced by the Labour government, allowing schools to select a portion of
93
their intake by "aptitude" for a specific subject. There are many who think
that selection allows children to receive the form of education best suited for
their abilities, while "one-size-fits-all" comprehensives fail everybody
equally. One of the greatest attacks on the comprehensive
system is that it
leads, in essence, to selection on the grounds of wealth as the good schools
are generally located in areas with expensive housing, so children from poor
areas are denied the possibility of attending them. Conversely, there are many
who think that the selection of children at 11 divides them into "successes"
and "failures" at that age, and is therefore wrong. The current Labour
government, from the party that originally championed comprehensive
education, appears to favour the first of these groups, and their introduction of
local referenda on grammar schools has been attacked by opponents of
selective education as an unworkable system designed to give the semblance
of choice while maintaining the status quo.
Private schools generally give the same sort of education as grammar schools,
but there are exceptions; Gordonstoun for one. In areas where the local
authority provides a comprehensive education – which some parents don't like
for various reasons – independent schools are particularly common.
Достарыңызбен бөлісу: