Suresh Menon: Red-letter day for education

When I was at school and got told off for doing something wrong, the teacher would tell me to bring in my parents. And I couldn’t just pick someone off the street to play the role of father or mother in return for a week’s lunch money – it had to be the genuine article.

Then the teacher would go into embarrassing detail about my lack of whatever it was (concentration, modesty, focus, interest in maths, good manners – the list was long) and would extract a promise that I’d improve.

At home, I would get more of the same. Privileges would be cut. And I  would have to listen to my grandfather’s stories of his heroics in the war.

Today if a child does something wrong, I am told, the teacher rushes to apologise to the parent. And perhaps privileges are increased at home.

But even in this “live and let live” world of modern education, a recent move by teachers at a British school stands out; they are no longer allowed to use their dreaded red pens to mark students’ work.

Under a new grading policy at Mounts Bay Academy in Cornwall, teachers must mark and write feedback in green, while students must reply in purple.

“Milton! Thou shouldst be living at this hour. Thou wouldst probably have died of shock.” In the old days, if a student got the name of the poet who wrote that wrong, his answer paper would have a red mark. And it didn’t come with a voucher for a meal at the burger shop to ease the pain.

We were made aware of it when we made a mistake. “Back to the drawing board,” we said and spent another hour with Pythagoras’ Theorem. It didn’t matter if the mistake was pointed out in red ink or blue or green or yellow with pink stripes.

“Students make more progress if it is a dialogue, and the new system is designed to help that,” the head teacher at the Cornwall school said.

And students’ reply? What’s that? We had no such option. If you got it wrong, you got it wrong. What are you expected to say? “About that theorem – are you sure? And how do you know Pythagoras didn’t get it from Wikipedia?”

Mollycoddling is the new watchword in education. Whatever you do, don’t hurt the students’ feelings. Say it with green (until green becomes the colour of fear decades from now and the cycle starts all over again). Maybe today’s students will never forget that Wordsworth poem or Pythagoras’ Theorem. But at what cost?