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Mar 20, 07, 09:48 #92
I'm a proofreader!
But I'm not going to do it for free on the internet and have to double-check my own work for mistakes as well - just to avoid cheap quips at my expense.
Education, hmm.
I received a very good education at a private school in England, went to university and ended up as a French teacher in a state school.
It was a disaster zone created by the system and everybody either had to accept it or get out - teachers and students alike. However, statistically the place is a success thanks to the counting of courses called GNVQs - but I'm not going into that (too boring). I just wanted to start off by saying that educational statistics can be meaningless.
A very straightforward example of how the French verb content of the public exams at 16 has changed:
pre-1984 post-1984
present tense of a wide variety of verbs pres. tense, selected verbs
future, wide variety future, 2 or 3 verbs
imperfect, wide variety imperfect, 2 or 3 vbs
perfect tense, wide variety perfect, selected verbs
pluperfect, wide variety (simple after perfect tense) no pluperfect
conditional, wide variety conditional, 2 or 3 vbs
present subjunctive, 3 or 4 verbs no subjunctive
The result of this lack of knowledge is that children aged 16 are totally lacking the skills required to operate in French.
Now, this is not a defence of the old system - it did have serious faults - but the new system is 10 times worse and children end up utterly disillusioned.
Fortunately for my children, the new generation growing up with them at school in Poland is being taught with useless British methods and my kids will always have jobs correcting Poles with their English!
On the whole, the recent Polish education reforms are a massive step backwards and most people on this forum are probably unaware of them unless they have children of school age.
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