Blog 2023 Malcolm Blair-Robinson

Exams

These have had an unusually high profile in the media recently due to the difficulty in getting to them or providing a venue for them, owing to the weather. There have been complaints of a lack of flexibility among exam boards in making special arrangements or deferring sittings.

I have chatted to senior students and discovered something much more fundamental. In mastering a new syllabus there appears to be mismatch between teaching, textbooks, revision and the final questions which appear. The explanation is that the test is to see whether the student can apply the knowledge to real life situations.

This blog is proud to announce its disagreement with this concept, which it considers not only demotivating for students, but barmy anyway. An exam cannot by definition provide real life situations, which have to be experienced. The better way, which by co-incidence is the old way in use prior to the unleashing of politicians and academic crackpots into the education system of our country, is to teach the knowledge and when it has been fully and exhaustively acquired, application is learned at University or in working life.

Those engaged in further education or employment say without equivocation ‘give us candidates with a thorough grounding in the basic knowledge and leave the application to us’.

Haiti Again

As a vast mobilisation of the world occurs to respond to this disaster two things are becoming clear. An event on this scale gives the U.S an opportunity to show its very best side when suddenly the giant logistical resources of the military are on offer to bring aid, rescue and medicine to the needy. Both Obama and Hilary Clinton have shown decisiveness and grasp of events, in very sharp contrast to Bush at the time of New Orleans.

The second thing, in which a lesson needs to be learned, is that while these huge resources gear up, travel, arrive and then stall before overcoming smashed communication and ravished infrastructure and command lines, terrible suffering occurs to injured survivors who have managed to escape the wreckage of their community. A new plan is needed to parachute into such disasters very early medical support and field hospital equipment and personnel. Air drops and helicopter flights of  a pathfinder nature must be organised to respond to future disasters like this. Imagine managing to crawl  from one’s collapsed home clutching one’s injured child, only to die in agony together two days later because first aid did not reach you to treat injuries which in normal times are not life threatening.

In the many interviews with ministers and other officials I listeded to on the media in the first vital forty eight hours, I must have heard the word ‘co-ordinate’ hundreds of times and the word ‘doctor’ just an handful.