What happened to education?

Its funny how so much can change in so little time. I didn't leave school that long ago but it was a time when only a handful of students got grade A. We didn't even have an A* grade. G.C.S.E's were bought in with the first year taking their exams in 1988. It was a time when the teachers were always on strike. They refused to mark your homework and you often had a day off school as the National Union of Teachers were on strike. Add to this a handful of bomb scares made even more realistic by the constant threat of the time of attacks from the IRA and it seemed that education in the late 1980s meant you had to work hard to get decent grades. We always insisted that GCSE actually stood for General Collapse in Secondary Education. How little we knew at the time.

Today something like 95% of students are achieving A's and A*'s. Now I’m not saying that the kids of today don't study but surely if 95% of students are getting the top grades then surely you are not making the exams hard enough? I often hear at work about the problems they have finding young people that can actually read, write or have a basic competence of Maths. The invention of Text Messages seems to have removed any ability to spell and dropping or substituting any letter. E.g. Alrigt m8 wot u upto?

We have an admission test at work of English, Maths & general competency. It does make you wonder what will happen when all of these young people come up to the age of being ready for employment? Will the world be able to understand their slang?

Meanwhile, University which used to be something that people that wanted to go into professions like Law, Teaching, Medicine. Today it seems they have opened up the Universities so that there is a place for nearly every student. It no longer seems to be a privilege but more a right of all these young people to go. Which is fair enough if they are going to go and learn and leave with a degree of worthwhile, but makes you wonder, do so many go to University now as they all got the required A Grades because they dummed down the exams so much that anyone could get in.

It has gotten so bad that Private Schools have opted out of the GCSE system and switched to the International GCSE (IGCSE) as they are harder.

Does make you wonder was all this done to simply get more people into study and off the unemployed list and therefore off the current statistics? Time will tell but from my own experience with GCSEs many years ago I'm all for bringing back O levels.