Posted by J.A. Quayle on October 19, 1997 at 14:18:49:
AMPLEFORTH College, Britain's top Roman Catholic school, has scrapped
English literature GCSEs because it believes the examination is too easy
and has launched its own "traditional"alternative. Chaucer, Fielding and
Swift are prominent on the do-it-yourself syllabus
introduced by the £12,400-a-year college in North Yorkshire because
the GCSE gave too little opportunity to study the greats of English
literature.
All 95 boys in their GCSE year at the boarding school, whose old boys
include the novelist Piers Paul Read, will take the Ampleforth
Literature Certificate next summer. The GCSE has been abandoned after a
trial group of 23 boys took the school's certificate this summer and
received high praise from the external examiner, a school inspector.
The school's move comes as independent schools are showing increasing
dissatisfaction with GCSEs. The Headmasters' and Headmistresses' Conference
of leading schools called earlier this month for the abolition of the
examinations, saying they failed to prepare students for A level. GCSEs
were introduced a decade ago to combine the O level and the CSE, which
critics felt watered down the challenges to students. Andrew Carter, head
of English at Ampleforth, said he had received inquiries from several other
independent schools thinking of following his example.
"The GCSE was not delivering what we see as a broad and rich literature
course," said Mr Carter. "We had been feeling for some time that the GCSE
literature syllabus was becoming too prescriptive in terms of
choice of text."
Mr Carter said he also thought it "irrelevant" to compare works, as
required by GCSE. "Comparing a Shakespeare play with a 20th-century
novel is detracting from the literary qualities of the text itself," he
said. The Ampleforth Literature Certificate includes a two-and-a-half hour
final examination and three quarters of the marks are given to coursework,
compared to one third at GCSE. This allowed for a more flexible syllabus
and more fun, Mr Carter said.
"Dickens's Great Expectations was the only substantial text on the GCSE
syllabus and there was one Shakespeare play. The choice of poets was
disappointing," he said. The GCSE covered books such as George Orwell's
Animal Farm and Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck. These were wonderful
books, he said, but ones the school's 16-year-olds would have read two or
three years earlier.
Richard Palmer, the external examiner, checked the papers marked by
Ampleforth's own teachers, and described much of the work as of A-level
standard. "The quality and sheer quantity of work achieved is far
superior to that required by normal GCSE literature students," he said.
Although independent schools are under no requirement to follow the
national curriculum, Ampleforth will still teach the GCSE English language
course. Mr Carter said that parents were supportive and
universities appeared positive. The Qualifications and Curriculum
Authority, which approves examination board syllabuses, said it did not
recognise the Ampleforth Certificate as an official qualification. "Any
school can set any internal examination it likes. It is not a
qualification, it is an internal school exam."
Moderator's Comment: Could the strangler's grip of progressive education be
weakening at last? Here in the Midwest some mad educationist decreed that
Silas Marner be read aloud in all the high school English classes and we
were all duly tormented by it to the exclusion of all other examples of
English letters. Our schools are usually named after politicians,
astronauts or berserk black muslims, but with a few exceptions such as
Shakespeare and Chopin grade schools in Chicago and Jack Benny High School
in Waukegan Illinois, almost never after men of genius.
ref