“We don’t need no education” sings the group, Pink Floyd, Another Brick in the Wall

Okay, and that is pretty well what you are getting under today’s education system.

A few years ago, I discovered that my eight year old, bright, intelligent and willing young granddaughter couldn’t count or do arithmetic.  She had had around three years of “primary education” and couldn’t add, subtract, or divide. And as for the Times Table, forget it. 

Now, I have had no formal training in teaching, so I went back to the basics of my own education.  In the olden days, we  were taught reading, handwriting, and arithmetic, a touch of geography thrown in if you were lucky, and a bit of history, which was totally incomprehensible to me. I attended a very small State school in Queensland, and as my education came to an abrupt end at around fourteen, that was it. However, I can still recite the Times Table, I can outwit my grandchildren at “mental arithmetic” and I have read widely all my life. As for the handwriting, well, I am sure a chicken could do better!!!  

At this tiny school, beginners were issued with a “slate” and a “slate pencil”. The slate was just that, a square piece of thin stone, around the same size as your iPad, and the pencil could have passed for a stylus today. Talk about pre-Babylonian!!!! This was what you learned to write with and do “sums” on for the first couple of years. And of course, your eraser was a wet “slate cloth”. Later on, we were promoted to pencil and paper.  However. I might add, that the Queensland education system was widely recognised as the best in Australia.

So, back to basics. Where did I start with my granddaughter’s problem.  I bought myself a series of teaching books readily available at the bookstore, and went right back into the first stages of the learning of mathematics. And I do mean the beginning. After that, we spent one hour a day for a year on this project. She learned the Times Tables by rote, and today can certainly hold her own in the other math fields, and gets top marks in Maths and Science.

Message for today. Don’t trust the education system to “educate” your children. If you aren’t satisfied with their results, get yourself a few books on the subject, and have a crack at helping your children yourself.  And keep it simple, remember …..reading writing, and arithmetic.