education

I work in education, but on the outskirts. I don't work in a school nor for the government and policy making machines, I work for a charity teaching music. As such I keep half an eye on what the government is doing with education and where it thinks it's priorities should be. The latest thing I've heard about is about adult learning. 

In England, 56% of adults have literacy skills below the level of a good GCSE while for maths the figure is 75%. 

Now, I knew it was bad, but thinking back to those horrible days of GCSEs I don't remember the level being so high that half of the population couldn't learn the skills needed to pass the exam and retain the skills for later in life. It worries me that as a population we do not put a great deal of emphasis on what the government calls 'life long learning'. Since leaving school a few years ago, I've not yet stopped studying something. I did go to university, but only for  a limited amount of time, after that I have been working full time and studying part time. 

Have so many people forgotten the joy achieved when you finally understand something you didn't understand  before?