No doubt these marks were often lower than whatever more generous marks were given for classroom work. So ending the balanced blend of marks will artificially inflate kids’ final marks, and erode the value of final exams. (Eventually the PCs will eliminate these exams to save money and hassle, and raise kids’ marks even more to show ‘how well” kids are doing and “how smart” they are.
Missing in all this is the fact that kids today are dumber in terms of general and traditional knowledge and understandings than they were 15 years ago, for instance. Kids today have very poor, un-broad-based backgrounds with little sense of history and weak skills in various phases of language, both reading and writing. The exams are the last remaining vestige of objective accounting and assessment of kids’ actual knowledge. When they get reduced or go all together, there will be no guarantee as to what or how much a kid knows at graduation. The embarrassment of how poorly too many kids do on the finals can also be covered up by increasing the kids’ classroom mark weighting and eventually doing away with the ‘old school’ exams.
Learning is so damned hip these daze with a skewered focus mainly on technological delivery systems and platforms, not actual content, subject matter, or critical thinking with any depth whatsoever.
The announcement today about increasing job credits shows that schools are no longer interested in teaching traditional curriculum and are truly becoming job training centres for esthetics, welding, carpentry, accounting, and entrepreneurship. Schools have been sold out to Chamber of Commerce philistines with no interest in Truth, Beauty, humanities, and other truly important, basic civilized learning.
There are also dopes out there with agendas to have students learn about money management, accumulation of wealth, having financial portfolios, etc. crap as early as elementary school. That type of thinking combined with Ontario’s early crash courses on adult sexual matters show that governments want kids to be old and brainwashed before their time. The agendas of government and business are crippling and warping schools and kids. Intellectual curiosity, open-minded imaginative exploration are to be curbed or eliminated.
We are moving toward mass control of young people like never before, programmed to buy the latest gadgets and live limited lives in front of screens with unhealthy sedentary lifestyles. Tragically, these are the only ‘brave new worlds’ offered by governments and business today and tomorrow. Critical thinking and personal autonomy will disappear more and more.
Subjects headed for extinction: English and Social Studies. Who needs subjects that encourage students to think for themselves, to be aware of irony and values, to make informed choices, and to know any truths about humankind–those only discoverable through a study of literature and history.