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I agree with Mollie and Barry too. It's a sad reflection on today's society that the government deems it necessary for pupils not to be seen to fail, hence dumbing down to the lowest common denominator. The other side of the argument is that children need to learn how to deal with some adversity, and if failing an exam is one example of that I think they would learn more from that than from being mollycoddled into thinking they have passed when their standard is poor.

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Failure at something used to spur us on to work harder to succeed next time, harsh lessons have to be faced in life, we can't wrap kids up away from reality, it is doing them no favours. The paradox now, of course, is that the modern crop of teachers are products of the modern school system, and haven't the skills themselves that will be required to teach the higher standards that children now need...

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I think on the whole children are brainier than those of my generation. They have a heck of a lot more to get their heads around too, and homework for primary school children is quite onerous compared to when I was a kid.

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I absolutely agree Willow .I honestly do not know how some folk on here seem to thrive on pulling the younger generation to bits , having spent a lot of my time with kids I know how much they have to learn at school and in higher education to succeed these days ,gone are the days when they can flit from job to job as most of our generation did .Well done to those that try hard ,don`t listen to those moaners who want to dumb down your grades .

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I absolutely agree with every word.

To say that children are less intelligent that we were is a very sweeping statement. How people come to this conclusion is beyond me.

They can glean untold knowledge from computers so why not use every available source of information.

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I agree with Willow too!
Don't forget our children developed a lot of things we use today to make life easier for us oldies.
And of course their young will develop all the future technology to make their lives easier, and again it will be their young ones that will take the worlds knowledge much further than it is today, and so on.
Just take medicine how good they are getting at it, curing things we never thought would be cured, with progress being made all the time.
Give the kids more credit than you give them, they are definitely not stupid, as some of you make out.

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Unless I missed something, noone is suggesting that children today are less intelligent, or stupid, just that the education system is worse. I, for one, am not knocking the next generation in the slightest, but I do despair at the government's approach to education these days.

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I too seem to have missed the posts that intimated kids were stupid and that we should dumb down grades. I believe it is the teaching system that is failing them where there is failure, and this is what I feel needs to be addressed. Far from believing today's kids have too much to learn, I believe they are underestimated in the respect of what they are capable of learning.

There is no doubt that the overall level of knowledge of graduates, particularly academic knowledge, is at an all time low. Some may think that doesn't matter, I believe that it does, and very much so, we should all be advocating better schooling, higher standards and any return to a system that was proven to be better than what we have now.

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I seem to remember being put in my place by a teacher in the pub years ago.He was adamant that content was the important thing not spelling or grammar.

I thought then and still do that if I was employing school leavers for a job,those with CVs full of poor spelling and grammar would go to the bottom of the pile....As would those who couldn't be bothered to be smartly dressed for interview...no matter what the job might entail.

And those whose spelling and grammar was poor...if they didn't have the intelligence to get their CV checked by a relative or friend who could spell...they too would be at the bottom of the pile for lack of initiative.

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Well said poohdog, valid points indeed....