Could you have passed these exams at the age of 17?

Parent Cafe
1

I’ll say in advance that I certainly couldn’t have! Nor could anyone else I knew when I was 17; nor could my son at that age, or any of his friends.

I was recently looking through the letters (which I had someone translate from German to English many years ago) that my mother wrote to her parents during the period of nearly five years when she was separated from them, living in England via the Kindertransport from December 1938 (when she was 15) to September 1943, while her parents were still in Berlin (until June 1941) and then living in the Bronx. Which was where she was finally able to rejoin them. (After the War began in September 1939, until her parents were able to emigrate from Germany, they exchanged letters by using a first cousin of my grandmother’s, who lived in Basel, Switzerland as an intermediary.)

I was also looking at her official British Kindertransport file, which I obtained a few months ago from the World Jewish Relief organization. That file mentioned that in July 1940, when she was 17, during a time when she had been evacuated from London (where she had been staying with a host family) to Woking, she took her “Higher School Certificate” examinations at the Putney County Secondary School for Girls. She had taken her “School Certificate” exam(s) a year earlier, at the City of London School for Girls – which I already knew she had attended, since she saved all her report cards from there!

According to Wikipedia, the “Higher School Certificate” exams were the predecessor to the present-day “A-levels” (which I’ve read about in innumerable British novels, but still only vaguely comprehend!) and the School Certificate exam(s) preceded the “O-levels.”

In any event, I came across a letter she wrote to her parents in late May 1940, while she was studying for her Higher School Certificate exams and taking practice exams. She described her exam schedule as follows:

That adds up to 30 hours of exams, on five separate days, on five (or more, depending on how you count) different subjects. Which makes my (or my son’s) AP exams seem pretty trivial! Rather impressive under any circumstances, I think – never mind that she was somehow able to focus on exam preparation, in the middle of a rather significant war, when she was not only an evacuee but a 17-year old refugee in a foreign country, who hadn’t seen her parents for a year and a half and didn’t really know if they would ever be reunited. And was writing exams mostly in a language (English) which was foreign to her and which she had been studying only for about four or five years. Plus, one must remember that even though she was Jewish, because she was German she had nonetheless been classified as an “enemy alien” since the outbreak of war in September 1939. In fact, a few months earlier in 1940, all male German nationals from 16 to 60 – including Jews, and including Kindertransport refugees – had been interned in camps on the Isle of Man, and/or sent to internment camps in Canada or Australia (many were killed when one ship to Australia was torpedoed). So that’s where my mother would have been had she been a boy; I’m sure she considered herself lucky to be studying for exams at the time instead.

All that aside, can anyone who’s familiar with the English educational system comment on whether this is still a standard schedule for “A-level” exams? I assume there was nothing unusual about it back then.

Her next surviving letter mentioning the exams (there are major gaps) was in late August 1940, by which time she had returned to London and, after staying at a youth hostel in Highgate, had taken a job as a trainee pediatric nurse, “after finishing my exams (results won’t be available till next month, but it was really easy).”

Then, in a letter dated October 12, 1940:

As she should have been, I think. I remember her telling me that because of her exam results, she was qualified to go to university in England, even to Oxford – and she said in her letters to her parents that she dreamed of becoming a history professor someday – but under the circumstances, including the financial circumstances and the restrictions on her mobility as an enemy alien, going to university was impossible for her. She did go to college after she came to the USA in late 1943, though: she got a scholarship to Sarah Lawrence and graduated from there in a little more than two years, and went through Columbia Law School, Class of September 1948 (where she was one of only three women in her class, and also met my father) in another two years after that.

TL; DR: They don’t educate kids today – and didn’t even in my day – like they did 75 years ago. Except maybe in England.

2

To be fair, the educational system prevalent in Europe and Britain was and to a large extent…still structured differently than in the US.

What we’d regard as “gen eds” for first two years of undergrad would have been considered in those societies something which should have been covered and completed by early high school or sometimes even middle school with greater specialization expected in HS…especially late HS and moreso…undergrad.

This was one of the factors in why US military intelligence reports and some educational scholars who studied the German gymnasiums(academic high schools geared for those aspiring to universities) regarded someone who has completed a Gymnasium with an Abitur was the equivalent to an American who completed high school and the first two years of undergrad at an academically reputable/elite institution.

While there is a case to be made we don’t educate students…especially the above-average/top students as well as in the past, a part of what you describe is also due to the great differences in how Britain and other societies structured their K-12 systems versus the US.

3

Cobrat, I do understand what you’re saying, but I was, of course, being somewhat facetious. Admittedly, I was comparing top humanities students in the U.K. then to top humanities students in the U.S.A… now; I don’t really know if an “elite” 17-year old student in the U.S.A. in 1940 could have been expected to pass exams of equivalent difficulty to those my mother was taking in England. And I’m sure my mother had already received a good education in Germany up to the age of 15, when she left; she was in public schools until 1936, when she was 13, and in a Jewish school thereafter. For example, here’s part of a letter she wrote to her parents when she was 15, in January 1939, a month after her arrival in England, asking for certain of her favorite books she to be sent to her:

(Of all these books, only three have survived the last 78 years and still sit on a bookshelf in my apartment: the book of poems by Stefan Zweig with her aunt’s dedication, and two volumes of Goethe with my mother’s – and grandmother’s – names written in the flyleaf.)

So my mother was certainly reasonably well-read at 15, before she ever left Germany. Then again, I’d like to think that I was pretty well-read at 15, and that my son was too!

4

If anyone’s interested, back in 2009 I posted excerpts from a few more of my mother’s letters to her parents from England (as well as the letter about the books she wanted, quoted in part immediately above), in this thread: http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/parent-cafe/827831-kindertransport-article-about-my-mothers-experiences-beginning-in-dec-1938-p1.html

5

This is fascinating. Thank you for posting.

6

UK A-levels are in a bit of a state of flux at the moment. The exams used to be spread over two years call AS and A2. There was also some “coursework” which is work done in class that counts towards the final grade. However, the government has decided that this is too easy and so the system is reverting to the single set of exams at the end of two years format. I suspect the pass rate will go down, but no-one really knows.

Do bear in mind that A-level exams contain two years of class material, so they are not like a US class test at all. Also, now about 70% of high school students do A-levels (there are other vocational routes as an alternative), but in the 1940s most people left school at 15 and only about 10%, maybe less, did A-levels (this statistic is a guesstimate so if anyone knows better please post). I suspect very few of them were women. So at the time the OPs mother would have been a very unusual student.

It sounds like the grading system has changed a lot. A-levels are now graded A-E. Grade U is effectively a fail (ungraded). But A is 80-90%. C is about 50%. Most students only study 3-5 subjects. I definitely think some subjects are harder than others. Top universities do not accept some subjects for admission. In the 1940s I think very few UK universities accepted women, and also fewer than half the universities that exist now were around then.

No grades guarantee university admission. The student has to apply to a specific course (effectively a major) and the grade and A-level subject requirements vary based on university and course. University was entirely free and grants given for living costs at the time the OPs mother was studying. She might have been better off on the Isle of Man where I believe interned professors set up their own university for their fellow prisoners.

There are exams called A-levels in other countries such as Hong Kong and Pakistan. These are supposed to be more difficult than UK ones.

7

A-level is advanced level, while O-level is ordinary level.

Many US colleges allow students with high enough grades in A-level exams to take advanced placement in those subjects, much like they do for students with high enough scores in AP or IB HL exams.

It appears that, in the UK, completion of some A-levels is expected before entering a university, where the course of study is 3 years to a bachelor’s degree, but focused on one’s major, in contrast to the norm in the US where AP level course work in high school is not generally required or expected (at typical universities, not the super-selective ones that people on these forums focus on), and the course of study is 4 years to a bachelor’s degree including general education as well as one’s major.

8

It’s the same at Hogwarts (NEWTs and OWLs).

9

No, I don’t think so. The opportunity to take classes notwithstanding, I’ve read a great deal about the horrible conditions at those camps (especially initially), and the extreme hostility expressed towards interned Jews by guards who didn’t seem to “get” why they weren’t really “enemies,” and assumed they must have done something to deserve internment. Never mind the hellish conditions on the transport ships to Australia – even the ones that didn’t get sunk by torpedoes. (See the Wikipedia articles on the HMT Dunera and the SS Arandora Star: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HMT_Dunera and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SS_Arandora_Star.) Eventually, a lot of young refugee men escaped internment by volunteering for the British military.

Actually, thinking about the university issue more, I now specifically remember my mother telling me that she was, in fact, admitted to one of the several women’s colleges that existed at Oxford at the time – something I doubt she would have lied to me about. So you’re probably right that finances weren’t the issue. I suspect that it must have been the rules limiting her mobility – between jobs and otherwise – by reason of her enemy alien status. I don’t know if any Kindertransport refugees – male or female – actually attended Oxford during the War. I’ve never read of one.

As an example of the difficulties presented by the mobility restrictions, from about April 1941 to March 1942, according to my mother’s Kindertransport file, she worked as a trainee nurse at the notorious Severalls Mental Hospital in Colchester (see http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2415036/Severalls-Hospital-Edwardian-mental-asylum-Colchester-patients-held-50-years-demolished.html, and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Severalls_Hospital). She told me that she hated her time there (mostly spent scrubbing floors and doing other menial tasks), that the supervisors treated her and other young women very badly and were very unkind, and that it was like something out of Dickens.

She also told me that she ran away from the place by climbing over a wall to leave in the middle of the night (even though she had been told that she was required to stay there for the duration because she was an enemy alien), and making her way back to London. She took with her the 1914 (but still applicable in 1941/42) “Manual of Duties for the Asylums of the County of Essex and the Borough of Colchester” and I still have it; she wrote in the flyleaf “as a memento of Severalls M. Hospital 1941/42.”

Well, it seems that what she told me about her abrupt departure was basically true: on p. 2 of her Kindertransport file, there’s a note dated April 8, 1942 stating:

Fortunately, however, she was not made to go back. (Perhaps especially fortunately because on the night of Aug. 11, 1942 – just a few months after my mother ran away – the Luftwaffe dropped a bomb on the Female Working Ward of the hospital, apparently thinking it was a factory; 38 women were killed and 23 injured.)

I did enjoy reading a comment someone placed in the file after a meeting with my mother on March 4, 1942, when she was almost 19, stating that she is a “very charming and intelligent girl; speaks perfect English.” Of course, that doesn’t surprise me!

After my mother ran away from the mental hospital, according to her file, she was placed at the Heinz Factory, Waxlow Road, Harlesden, N.W. 10, labelling bottles and boxes as a “part-time dehydration plant worker,” for 11 pence per hour, 4 hours a day, every day except Saturday. A job she described to me as mostly involving “putting cold cream in jars.” That factory was bombed twice during the War, but – again fortunately – not while she was there. Next, and until she was able to leave to join her parents in the U.S.A., she worked at Johnson & Co., 32 Foley St., W.1, as a “fixer - Govt work - tailoring,” for 2 pounds per week. (Her rent at a boarding house was 35 shillings – I don’t know if that was per week or per month.) She described that job to me as sewing pockets on soldiers’ uniforms, and expressed sympathy for any soldier who tried to put anything in the pockets of a uniform she had worked on, given how substandard a seamstress she considered herself!

All in all, she would have been much happier at a university. But the work she was assigned was still a lot better than being in an internment camp!

10

I think the more important question is, How many of us would have been able to cope with the emotional losses she must have experienced?

11

That part is very difficult for me to think about, VeryHappy – including trying to imagine myself, or my son, at that age, having to deal with what she coped with. Especially later on, when she found out that even though her parents survived, so much of her family (two grandparents, seven uncles and aunts, two first cousins, and innumerable more distant relatives) had all been murdered, and that she would never see them again. The trauma remained with her for the rest of her life, and even though I didn’t experience it directly, there’s no question that it greatly affected me as well, and in many ways was the central experience of my childhood and my life. There’s been a lot of research on the effects of that kind of trauma on the children of Holocaust survivors – and even, in turn, the grandchildren, like my son – and it all rings true to me. Which is why I was trying to focus in this thread on something less emotionally fraught for me. But you’re absolutely correct that ultimately, that’s the more important question.

12

Bombing during that war was not precision by any means. Hitting specific buildings in a blacked out city at night happened by luck.

13

I realize that, ucbalumnus, but in this specific case it was, in fact, apparently a case of mistaken identity: they hit the building they intended to hit, but they wrongly believed it was a factory. In any event, that was really only a side comment on my part; the point was really not how the bombing happened, but my mother’s good fortune in having run away from the place a couple of months earlier.

14

Donna, I think it’s fair to say that your mother was a remarkable woman in any period of history! Thanks for sharing this.

15

@DonnaL

Your posts remind me of the surprise my older relatives and parents had about the fact most public schools…including the very good suburban districts didn’t really cover literature…including poetry or literary analysis to the same degree in middle or even most of high school that they experienced in middle school.

They were more shocked when my older cousins and I told them that only a tiny minority of students in US middle schools participated in poetry or essay writing contests.

While some college classmates and American parents were somewhat surprised and impressed my 7th grade English class covered two Shakespearean plays(Romeo and Juliet and Midsummer Night’s Dream), that was considered very light coverage for that age/grade by my older relatives or some immigrant parents or classmates who spent K-8 or K-12 in Europe(Eastern and Central Europe).

I’ve been wondering if a part of this is the larger US culture which doesn’t encourage literary reading…especially of older classical literature until one’s in late high school/early college.

Also, going by my experiences growing up in what was a crime-ridden working-class NYC neighborhood during the '80s/early '90s and what I’ve heard from college classmates who attended K-12 all over the US whether a part of it was how showing any passion/interest in reading classical literature was considered by a critical mass of K-12 students as “too nerdy” or in the case of boys in some machismo-laden male subcultures “too effeminite”.

Perceptions which gave the bullies among them another pretext to target those who have a passion/interest in classical literature to violent bullying.