Are Standards Slipping?
Published on the Online Opinion , February 20th, 2006 Professor Shayer’s recent findings which claim to show that 11- and 12-year-old children in the UK are "now on average between two and three years behind where they were 15 years ago", in terms of cognitive and conceptual development raises the vexed issue of standards in education. When someone claims that “standards are slipping” they can mean a great many different things and it is often not easy to scrape away the surface rhetoric and gain an understanding of exactly what they are getting at. “Standards are slipping” may mean any or all of the following: That the cognitive ability (information processing ability including perception, conceptualization and problem solving) is dropping amongst children of a given age. The curriculum is dumbing down. That is to say, children of a given age in a given subject are being presented with facts, process and problems of a lower standard than they were at some (usually unspecifie...