In particular, we’ve had the great Gove brouhaha of course,
with teachers unions standing on one side passing votes of no confidence and
throwing rotten tomatoes, and Gove striking a decidedly lonely figure on the
other side bemoaning the rabid Marxist ideology of teachers and generally chucking
brickbats. The crux, so far as I understand it, is thus: Gove thinks that the
only way to improve standards is to introduce rigour, insist on rote learning, and
get the basics right, ensuring children know their adjectives from the adverbs
and can recite their times tables backwards with confidence; teachers say that
all sounds lovely, but in reality it would
take us back thirty years and fly in the face of all accepted modern teaching
practice, with its emphasis on Inquiry- and Problem-based learning. Children
don’t learn, say the teachers, if what they’re learning appears to them to have
no practical application. You have to make it interesting. You have to teach in
context. Fine, says Gove, but first you have to give children the basic
building blocks; you can’t be creative without knowing how first to express
that creativity.
I’ve always been cursed with a lawyer’s mindset: there are
always two sides to every story, there is merit in all arguments. Life is the navigation
of an ocean of different shades of grey, and other such noises. And up until
not that long ago that’s precisely how I would have viewed this particular
issue. Yes, you teach in context, yes, you should make it interesting but at
the same time children do need to know the basics. If you can’t read, you’ll
find your ability to learn severely curtailed. If you don’t know your times
tables, you’ll find that trip down to the greengrocer’s so much more difficult (and
yes, that apostrophe is in precisely the right place, thank you). Both sides
are right. Go away, kiss and make up, children.
Now, however, I’m not so sure. I’m becoming increasingly
influenced by two quite remarkable men – Sir Ken Robinson and Sugata Mitra (if
either name is new to you, look up their TED talks here and here)
– and I now find myself falling off the fence towards the teachers.
The most successful people always seem to be those who can
be creative. Those who can see things from a fresh perspective, those who are
unafraid to ignore what came before and who can see what might lie ahead. The
ability, in essence, to say ‘yes, I know that’s how we normally do things, but what
if we were to do this instead?’ It’s a skill we’re all born with – it’s how
babies learn about the world around them – and yet it’s a skill that the
current education system chips away at. As soon as you enter the system you’re
told ‘this is how it works’. Opportunities to discover for yourself are few and
far between as you slowly but inexorably work towards first SATS tests, then
GCSEs and A-Levels. This is how you write, this is how you add, this is how it
is. I remember when I was at school, questioning why something was done the way
it was done and being told ‘because that’s how you pass the exam.’ By the time
children leave the system their ability to view life creatively has taken a
beating, and yet at that point we then take them by the hand and say ‘now you
are adults, now we expect you to go forth and shape our future world. Toodle
pip.’
There’s a disconnect between what we want children to learn, and how we think they should learn. A mismatch. A conflict. It just isn’t
working. It may have worked once upon a time when we needed to churn out
perfect little clones to go out into the Empire capable of neat handwriting and
instant recollection of mathematical shortcuts, but it’s not working now that
we have so much information available for almost instant recall. I’m not
suggesting, of course, that there’s no need for handwriting or a knowledge of
basic arithmetic, say, but the emphasis placed on these things, their
importance, is overstated.
Let me give you an example from my professional background.
When I started in law, there was a huge emphasis on library skills. We all had
to be able to walk into a law library and find information. Physical research skills
were vital. Now fast forward a bare 15 years, and find me a single trainee
solicitor in any firm that still routinely (or ever) goes anywhere near a law
library. Caselaw, legislation, textbooks, all available online. What once took
half a day of concerted research can now be found in minutes from the comfort
of your desk. Does that impact on the ability of new solicitors to do their
job? No, of course not. It frees them to concentrate on doing it, rather than
wasting their time looking stuff up. Experience, the ringing of vague bells in
the back of the head, counts for more than rote knowledge. But in schools, at
least if Gove has his way, it will all be about rote knowledge – and to a certain
extent already is, because we already have SATS, and testing, and Ofsted, and
observation and oversight.
This isn’t just a holdover from the Empire. This is our maddening
need to score performance, isn’t it? Our modern desire to place things into a
list. We must score schools, we must be able to tell how well they’re doing.
Like some grotesque real life version of the X Factor we have to pit one school
against the other and be able to find them wanting. And how do you measure a
school’s performance? You test its product. You test the children. And if you
test the children, then the children need to know how to pass the test. So they’re
taught to pass it, and inquiry and curiosity take a back seat.
It’s fashionable to say the system is broken, but it’s not
broken – it simply, as Sugata Mitra says, does a job that’s no longer fit for
purpose. And while in some circles (particularly, I confess, one we find
ourselves in with La Child who is, as I may have mentioned before, quite
clever) it’s also fashionable to blame teachers for the lack of support for
children who don’t quite fit the system, it’s not the teachers’ fault. It’s the
system’s fault. It’s Gove’s fault, and it’s our fault for accepting a system
that is not fit for purpose, and forcing teachers to work with it.
Sorry, a bit long and ranty for a Monday afternoon this. I’ll
find a video of a cat being a Ninja for the next one.
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