Leaders: The 3Rs remain a solid foundation of education | Moss rolls back into stone age

NOBODY now disputes that the keys to success, both for individuals and for nations, are to be found in education.

Nobody disputes either, that achieving a good education depends on a basic foundation of people being able to read, count, and write.

So it is shocking to discover that some Scottish companies, despairing of recruiting school-leavers with these basic abilities, have set up back-to-school basic courses for some new recruits.

It is shocking because these fundamentals have been known for years, familiarly embedded in the language as the “three Rs”. Lest we sound like a reactionary preacher, can we just note that we are pointing out what is common sense – unless a child knows how to read, write and count, that pupil has little chance of absorbing the higher skills of languages, history, geography, physics, maths, chemistry and so on.

This has been the message, not just of dominies of the old school, but recent commissions on literacy, including the Standing Literacy Commission set up by the present Scottish Government. So, why does Scotland seem to be going backwards rather than forwards on this issue?

According to the Scottish Chambers of Commerce, four out of five Scottish firms want to see an improvement in basic literacy and numeracy skills. Almost half of all companies taking on staff in the past year have found it hard to identify candidates with the requisite skills. Just over half reported that recruits had poor attitudes and motivation. Problems included poor reliability and timekeeping.

Fixing much of this is not rocket science. Even issues such as reliability can be related to 3Rs’ problems. If a job, for example, involves filling in dockets with numbers, or relating products to labels, a recruit lacking these skills is loath to admit it and will go to great lengths to cover it up.

Granted, it may take time for the kind of solutions identified in a 2009 Literacy Commission report for Labour to become embedded in the schooling system and more time yet before school-leavers who have benefited from those solutions to arrive in the labour market.

But Scotland has been in the business of comprehensive education for half a century, of education for all for a century – and all of that based on being a pioneer in the western world of a schooling system intended to give the able a good education regardless of parental income.

Yet Scotland, on this hard evidence, still does not have schooling that does a 21st century job. Of course, the government is busy trying to construct the new, but controversial, curriculum for excellence in secondary schools. But even if it does set in place the means of improving the skills of school-leavers that is claimed for it, the improvement may not have a chance of appearing if pupils do not have the basic 3R tools to tackle it. Having a basics-for-excellence foundation in place first looks to be a greater priority.

Moss rolls back into stone age

Dinosaurs didn’t die out with the last mass extinction event millions of years ago, they just evolved into something else. These dino-descendants are detectable by their strange utterances, the most common form of which is expressed by the equation: “Women can’t do X because of Y.”

The most recent specimen to step into dino-detector range is Sir Stirling Moss, once a racing driver of some repute. According to him, women cannot be racing drivers because they don’t have the “mental strength” to do it.

This is the same illogic, some might call it stupidity, that used to decree that women cannot be politicians, judges, pilots, astronauts, etc, etc. In all of these areas, modern social science has shown that it is not the capability of women that is at fault, it is the barriers put in the way by men to entry which are the problem.

In sport, biology creates some differences which mean that it is difficult for men and women to compete as equals in some disciplines. But it is hard to see how physique can create this sort of gender barrier in motor sport which, after all, is conducted sitting down. And even Sir Stirling (awfully good of him this) has conceded that physique is not necessarily the issue.

We stand to be corrected, but we are not aware of any reputable scientific study that has found there to be any systemic difference between the mental capacities of men and women. Indeed, there are many – including many men – who would argue women are the more robust of the sexes in terms of mental strength.

Great racing driver though he was, Sir Stirling would be well advised not to comment further as he has let his old-fashioned prejudices cloud his judgment.