I'm not totally unsympathetic to Shadz on this one.
At Uni I was a serial non-attender of lectures (couldn't see the point in them and still don't). Every term the registrar would send a letter back to my LEA suggesting they consider withdrawing my grant, and every term the LEA requested my results, but since I was hitting first class grades, it caused a bit of difficulty for them. What it did mask is that I chose to work and learn in an environment outside of that prescribed by convention. In actual fact it meant a lot of hard work which wasn't always visible, but it was certainly conducted to a greater level of interogation than anything that involved sitting in room blindly copying down word for word verbatim what was being spouted from the front, without so much as a pause for thought and consideration.
Essentially you were dealing with an unchallenging, convoluted and thoroughly inefficient way of transferring information from one person to many. Unfortunately the people repsonsible for perpetuating this out-dated method, are products of the same system that's served them so well, so never seek to challenge it. The result is nothing more helpful then reproduction in one's own image.
They even suggested awarding a 1% mark in each module for every lecture you attended
Suffice to say, being more resourceful than most, I sent a space hopper along as my proxy (one of the orange ones with a permanently inane grin on its face) it caused amusement amongst most of the lecturing staff who could see the subtle protest element in it, in so much as my space hopper could be close to getting a third class degree at the end of a year. The University management weren't quite so accommodating.
Quite tellingly for me, I went to Uni as a so called mature student (though only in my mid 20's). I wasn't aware of it until half way through the term, but I'd inadvertantly joined the first GCSE intake, and in this respect I have to agree with Dom, they really weren't very clever as a group. After successfully threatening the Uni with legal action, I was able to skip a year, and join the last 'O'- level generation. I estimate they were about 20% better. The GCSE kids by contrast worked harder. I was under the impression that having been educated beyond their natural intelligence, they were seeking to compensate for their comparative lack of intelligence and understanding, through work ethic, which is laudible. Unfortunately, they frequently turned this into a memory recall exercise though, and confused the two things.
A lecturer of mine lamented that there was nothing more depressing for him to give a lecture in September, and find his words being reproduced months later word for word verbatim without a modicom of thought or analysis.
"You can't fail them" he said "They're right"... "But you can only give them a 2:2 it's depressing, they haven't demonstrated thought or understanding"
My own Mother (a teacher) gave her Maths class an 'O' Level paper recently. This should translate of course, as unlike other areas of the education system, Maths doesn't really change. It was an experiement the Department wanted to try. The result was that the whole year were consistantly 25% lower on the 'O' Level paper than they were on the GCSE equivilant.
I recently bemoaned a student placement who we had working with us (22 year old Girl at De Montfort University) we gave her blank maps of Europe and Africa and asked her identify countries. It doesn't prove intelligence I conceed, but there's an issue about general knowledge and all roundedness. She identified Spain, France, Germany, Italy, Belgium and Holland eventually once she swithced them. Norway she identified as Sweden and then gave up. In Africa she managed just South Africa, and then gave up; after having identified Saudi Arabia as Egypt.
As regards parents, I think there's an altogether different dynamic here in increasingly a lot of cases. There's a cohort coming through, with a sizeable minority amongst them, who basically can't pass on educational stimulation to their children, and can't supply the knowledge and explanations that an enquiring mind wants. The tragedy of this, is that the parent often wants to, but just doesn't have the knowledge to pass on. My God I even got a phone call recently late at night asking me "what causes thunder to go bang?". I was more than happy to oblige, and felt it was quite sad. The will was there but the deficit in knowledge was yawning