Exam boards have tests without science or maths, surely dumbing down has gone to far?

Education in this country has been totally dumbed down over the past 30 years or so by successive Governments. In part, this has been due to the politically correct tenet of teachers been told to teach to the lowest common denominator. For a period between approximately 1920 (when there was fully comprehensive [not school type, incidentally] education for all) and about 1975, each generation could be expected the learn a little more than its parents.. For example, my grandfather for a skilled artisan, my father had a clerk's job, then became a commercial traveler, I became a lawyer and my brother a management consultant. I was taught the rudiments of history and geography, a little physics and chemistry, quite a bit of biology. This breath of education doesn't exist anymore - and teachers are often as illiterate as their students. In his recent novel, 'A Day in December', Sebastian Faulks paints a picture of a private schools taking on someone to check the spelling and grammar of a private school's pupil reports due to complaints from parents. This may be a novelist's exaggeration, but I'm sure there is a kernel of truth