.
Thinking about last week's publication of the Nuffield Review (Layer 169), and about the state of our schools, I came across a piece I wrote just over a year ago, and I'm putting it in here as an addendum to the thoughts on Nuffield.
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"He had it in charge from high authority to bring about the great public office Millennium, when Commissioners should reign upon earth".
Charles Dickens, Hard Times, Chapter 2.
In the final analysis, education is incredibly important and has a lot to answer for. Because it’s not only the fact of having a decent education system that makes our country or our planet, or anyone else’s country, what it is, or can be, or whatever it aspires to be - it’s also the type of education we provide that matters, and how it impacts on children and therefore on future generations of adults, and therefore on our society. It’s not only a matter of investing adequately in education, it’s a matter of investing effectively and ensuring that there is a proper consensus about what you’re expecting to gain from the investment.
It’s not just about the quantity and quality of education. Because how do we define quality? Is your definition the same as mine? Quality is about what’s taught in schools, and how it’s taught. We can have lots of good schools teaching mainly the wrong things to a very high standard. We could have those same schools trying to teach the right things but doing it very badly indeed. In the past 50 years we’ve had both of these in Britain. In my view many schools continue to teach the wrong things, and few of the right things, and also do it very badly. A great many of these schools pride themselves on very good inspection reports and an elevated position in so-called league tables.
It seems obvious that what we need are lots of very good schools teaching the right things in the right way to a very high standard. The problem is we can’t seem to agree on what the right things are, or how to teach them. Or rather, putting it the other way round and seeing it from the pupils’ perspective, agree on how children should get access to the best and most relevant curriculum, and how they should learn.
Now surely we’re intelligent people and we can agree on these things, at least 90% of the time? Sadly, it seems not, and things are getting worse - may have to get worse - before they get better.
History
In the time of Dickens the world of state education seemed very simple. “Teach these boys and girls facts. Facts alone are wanted in life. Nothing else will ever be of service to them”.[1] So said the headmaster, Thomas Gradgrind. On this there seemed to be consensus. The teacher, the government inspector, and the nation seemed to agree.
In due course this utilitarian view of education was challenged, not least by Charles Dickens, and exposed as vile and against the interests of all of those who aspire to the development of higher aspects of children and adults - the intellect, the spirit and the soul.
But in the late 20th Century and early 21st century England and Wales, almost uniquely in Europe, and unlike the rest of the much smarter nations who were making tracks elsewhere, our nation returned in its wisdom to the utilitarian view. “Give these children A stars, 5 GCSEs, Level 4 by the age of 11 - or they won’t be ready to enter the job market.” Over several frustrating years I have heard literally dozens of teachers and headteachers, and scores of ignorant politicians and bureaucrats, express this view, and show themselves unable to imagine what else might comprise a decent education, what other aims we might have, and what other skills and attitudes might be required in the 21st Century, in order for people to be able to cope with life’s challenges and live lives to the full. I heard those poor, timid, brainwashed voices parroting useless ideas about equipping children (even Primary children) for the jobs market.
To anyone who cares about children and how they experience their schools and their lives, this is an appalling state of affairs. Unicef has condemned our country for producing a generation of unhappy, deprived and exploited children, and books like Toxic Childhood[2] provide details of what’s going wrong in the way we nurture and educate our children. And still the utilitarians cling to their mantras that ‘standards’ (meaning test and exam scores) have to be ‘driven up’ (meaning more and more children have to be cajoled, threatened, or somehow motivated to subscribe to the notion that cramming and memorising for tests, usually to the exclusion of more worthwhile activities, is necessary and desirable and crucial for their success in life). It goes without saying that teachers, heads of schools and school governors must also be cajoled, threatened and motivated to accept this pathetic, harsh and impoverished view of what education is for and how it should be carried out.
These people cling to their certainties that a harsh regime of testing, inspecting and naming and shaming in league tables is making us a better country and better at giving our children what they need. The politicians are even shameless enough to claim that they say the toxic things they say in the name of deprived children living in our most challenging inner-city areas. Well how else are these poor little buggers going to get jobs? Surely they need a fistful of exam passes, even if they’ve been given nothing else? What else could they possibly need? What else could education be for? What else would enable them to ‘escape’ from the council estates and their childhood communities and their families and move into starter homes in the suburbs?
A Learning Revolution
A very important event took place in the middle of the 1960s that caused a great many teachers and parents to begin to question the utilitarian view of children and learning. A committee of enquiry under the chairmanship of Lady Plowden was set up to report to government on what was happening in the world of Primary education, and make recommendations to government on what the system needed to do to improve our Primary schools. Their recommendations had, in some places, far-reaching and radical effects on how the business of education was carried on in Primary schools, since individual children were put at the heart of our approach to learning, and learning was made to serve their individual needs, rather than the needs of a national or international system that demanded that workers had specific skills and knowledge in order for our nation (which was deemed to be homogenous) to be ‘competitive’ and prosperous.
Whilst it might sound like a proper and decent way of conducting education, putting children’s broad developmental needs at the heart of what we do in schools has come to be discarded in a politically-motivated rush to ‘drive up standards’ by forcing teachers and children to do more and more of the things that can be easily measured and less and less of the things that enable them to be confident, motivated and creative life-long learners with high levels of intelligence - intellectual, spiritual, social, emotional and physical/instinctual.
We now have a desperate need for a new learning revolution. In my view, and that of many of our serious thinkers about education, we need to follow the lead of high-achieving countries such as Finland and Canada, where they have never seen any need for a draconian system of inspections, annual summative tests and league tables. We need to follow the lead of China, which had retrained its teachers in line with the methodology which is very well summed up in a book called The New Learning Revolution[3]. For the sake of all our children we need to make education fit their real needs and prepare them properly, effectively, for all their futures[4].
[1] Charles Dickens. Hard Times. 1854 Page 1, Chapter 1.
[2] Toxic Childhood - How the Modern World is Damaging our Children and What We Can Do About It.
Sue Palmer 2006
[3] The New Learning Revolution. Gordon Dryden and Dr Jeannette Vos. 2005.
[4] See also All Our Futures. DfES 1999. National Advisory Committee on Creative and Cultural Education Web address: http://www.dfes.gov.uk/naccce/index1.shtml
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Showing posts with label Hard Times. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Hard Times. Show all posts
Sunday, June 14, 2009
Sunday, May 4, 2008
Layer 28 The Happiness Debate
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The Guardian is a brilliant newspaper, and recently won another award as the world’s best daily paper. Its so-called News Room is currently staging an exhibition of the work of Chris Riddell, one of the world’s best political cartoonists and commentators on contemporary life, who has been with the Observer for more than 12 years. His artwork is superb, especially up close in the exhibition, and his wit is laugh-out-loud funny. As Andrew Rawnsley says in his introduction, he can say in an instant, in a single cartoon, the brutal and excoriating truths that even excellent writers can’t express as well in a whole page of prose.
Which is more than you could say of the participants and the organisers of the debate at the News Room. “Can We Teach Happiness?”
Duh! NO! Let’s go home.
Much as I admire Dr Anthony Seldon who believes that his school Wellington College is successfully teaching happiness to its pupils (and staff) I find it hard to believe that he agreed to propose this crackpot notion in a debate. Though he was eventually honest enough to agree with my challenge that he’s doing the cause (of better education) a disservice by insisting that we can teach happiness, when it’s obvious that it’s not even possible to learn to be happy. Who has ever done that? Or would ever want to! By not avoiding unhappiness and its causes, through needing to understand and come to terms with confusion, misery and suffering, we progress along the path of spiritual enrichment and enlightenment, which is a far worthier goal than seeking after individual ‘happiness’.
Let’s promote other people’s happiness by all means, but teach people how to be happy - never! Dr Seldon also agreed with my point that we need to talk about learning rather than teaching, and we should stress that what we’re setting out to do is enable young people to learn how to develop all of their intelligences - IQ, EQ and SQ - in order to be better prepared for life in a complex world, and better able to cope well with life’s challenges, and therefore more likely to avoid life’s more obvious pitfalls and various causes of unhappiness.
What’s so hard about all this? I hated the smart-arse little twit of a girlie, the self-styled Director of the ‘Think Tank’ that was promoting the debate, who chaired it in an obtrusive and irritating manner, but I hated even more the Chair of her wank tank who stood up and railed on about teaching the basics of reading and writing instead of bothering with liberal nonsense like teaching happiness and creativity. Arrghhh! I had an urgent need to punch his dim little fascist philistine lights out.
How did the Guardian, liberal newspaper par excellence, get involved with this crew? Who let them in? It’s not just what they say, it’s how the bastards say it. I hate that special clever-class way of speaking that they cultivate to set them apart from non-clever people. Only in England eh? - a special ‘intellectual think tank’ accent and attitude.
I once visited the offices of Demos, in Tooley Street, and had a look around, bought some of their booklets. We need to know more about think tanks and what they think - that’s what I think. We need to consider how these special thinking classes have influence over our national affairs. We need to know who funds them, who uses them, and what sort of bangs the funders expect to get for their bucks. Maybe all that time and intellectual effort and money is doing some good. Who knows?
The opponent of the motion, Professor Frank Furedi, thinks he knows everything, when it’s clear that he knows very little about education in schools. But like most people who have been to school, especially if they have kids at school themselves, they think they know everything. Let’s put it this way, pal. You’re a professor of sociology. I don’t tell you what’s what about sociology. If I have a view on it I’m entitled to express it with a degree of humility and in the expectation of being put right on its deficiencies. So don’t barge into a debate about education and start telling the pros what’s what! In your ex-(?)Stalinist intolerant supercilious manner.
This professor actually believes that there’s no such thing as emotional intelligence and spiritual intelligence. Duh! Pretty much what you’d expect from a rationalist and a Stalinist. Clearly he has none, he can’t see what these things might be, and he doesn’t value them. He seems to think that kids should come to regard learning as something important in its own right (fine so far) but then promotes the notion that only academic success and intellectual advancement are of any importance. How far away is this from Gradgrindism? “Give these children facts. Facts alone are wanted in life.”
Give this man a good slap. That’s what Zen would recommend.
These poor little hobby horses of mine. Ride them to death, don’t I?
The conclusion of the “debate” was interesting. Actually it wasn’t a debate, in any sense that I understand the term. The ‘audience’ was only allowed to ask questions of the speakers, not bring their own thoughts and insights to the chamber. The chair asked us to raise our hands to indicate support for the motion. Not to raise one’s hand showed support for Prof. Furedi. But to raise a hand showed support for the notion that we can teach happiness. Abstain? Allow Furedi to have the benefit of an abstention and thereby affirm his obnoxious views? No - Dr Seldon had recanted on the possibility of teaching happiness, and therefore he deserved support. What he’s actually doing at his school - in practice - deserves support. Forget the semantics - lets all get behind the notion that through our teaching and pedagogy we can help young people to avoid a lot of unnecessary misery in life. We can and should be helping them travel a path towards greater enlightenment. This is the most worthy aim of education.
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Happiness - Lessons From A New Science, is a book written by Richard Layard. Buy it. Read it. Think about it.
http://www.agora-education.org/events/debate.php
http://education.guardian.co.uk/higher/comment/story/0,,2257832,00.html
http://www.guardian.co.uk/newsroom/story/0,,2238638,00.html
http://observer.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,,2247375,00.html
http://www.chrisriddell.com/
http://books.guardian.co.uk/top10s/top10/0,,1444290,00.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthony_Seldon
http://www.frankfuredi.com/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Furedi
http://www.siteset.co.uk/anthonyseldon/
You can read Hard Times on Google Books. It's well worth re-reading the first 2 or 3 chapters from time to time to remind ourselves of Dickens' wonderful insight into how a utilitarian view of how schools should work just crushes the spirit out of children (Mchoakumchild) as its deadens their minds and imaginations -
http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=DbHGywDs--UC&dq=%22hard+times%22+dickens&p...
The Guardian is a brilliant newspaper, and recently won another award as the world’s best daily paper. Its so-called News Room is currently staging an exhibition of the work of Chris Riddell, one of the world’s best political cartoonists and commentators on contemporary life, who has been with the Observer for more than 12 years. His artwork is superb, especially up close in the exhibition, and his wit is laugh-out-loud funny. As Andrew Rawnsley says in his introduction, he can say in an instant, in a single cartoon, the brutal and excoriating truths that even excellent writers can’t express as well in a whole page of prose.
Which is more than you could say of the participants and the organisers of the debate at the News Room. “Can We Teach Happiness?”
Duh! NO! Let’s go home.
Much as I admire Dr Anthony Seldon who believes that his school Wellington College is successfully teaching happiness to its pupils (and staff) I find it hard to believe that he agreed to propose this crackpot notion in a debate. Though he was eventually honest enough to agree with my challenge that he’s doing the cause (of better education) a disservice by insisting that we can teach happiness, when it’s obvious that it’s not even possible to learn to be happy. Who has ever done that? Or would ever want to! By not avoiding unhappiness and its causes, through needing to understand and come to terms with confusion, misery and suffering, we progress along the path of spiritual enrichment and enlightenment, which is a far worthier goal than seeking after individual ‘happiness’.
Let’s promote other people’s happiness by all means, but teach people how to be happy - never! Dr Seldon also agreed with my point that we need to talk about learning rather than teaching, and we should stress that what we’re setting out to do is enable young people to learn how to develop all of their intelligences - IQ, EQ and SQ - in order to be better prepared for life in a complex world, and better able to cope well with life’s challenges, and therefore more likely to avoid life’s more obvious pitfalls and various causes of unhappiness.
What’s so hard about all this? I hated the smart-arse little twit of a girlie, the self-styled Director of the ‘Think Tank’ that was promoting the debate, who chaired it in an obtrusive and irritating manner, but I hated even more the Chair of her wank tank who stood up and railed on about teaching the basics of reading and writing instead of bothering with liberal nonsense like teaching happiness and creativity. Arrghhh! I had an urgent need to punch his dim little fascist philistine lights out.
How did the Guardian, liberal newspaper par excellence, get involved with this crew? Who let them in? It’s not just what they say, it’s how the bastards say it. I hate that special clever-class way of speaking that they cultivate to set them apart from non-clever people. Only in England eh? - a special ‘intellectual think tank’ accent and attitude.
I once visited the offices of Demos, in Tooley Street, and had a look around, bought some of their booklets. We need to know more about think tanks and what they think - that’s what I think. We need to consider how these special thinking classes have influence over our national affairs. We need to know who funds them, who uses them, and what sort of bangs the funders expect to get for their bucks. Maybe all that time and intellectual effort and money is doing some good. Who knows?
The opponent of the motion, Professor Frank Furedi, thinks he knows everything, when it’s clear that he knows very little about education in schools. But like most people who have been to school, especially if they have kids at school themselves, they think they know everything. Let’s put it this way, pal. You’re a professor of sociology. I don’t tell you what’s what about sociology. If I have a view on it I’m entitled to express it with a degree of humility and in the expectation of being put right on its deficiencies. So don’t barge into a debate about education and start telling the pros what’s what! In your ex-(?)Stalinist intolerant supercilious manner.
This professor actually believes that there’s no such thing as emotional intelligence and spiritual intelligence. Duh! Pretty much what you’d expect from a rationalist and a Stalinist. Clearly he has none, he can’t see what these things might be, and he doesn’t value them. He seems to think that kids should come to regard learning as something important in its own right (fine so far) but then promotes the notion that only academic success and intellectual advancement are of any importance. How far away is this from Gradgrindism? “Give these children facts. Facts alone are wanted in life.”
Give this man a good slap. That’s what Zen would recommend.
These poor little hobby horses of mine. Ride them to death, don’t I?
The conclusion of the “debate” was interesting. Actually it wasn’t a debate, in any sense that I understand the term. The ‘audience’ was only allowed to ask questions of the speakers, not bring their own thoughts and insights to the chamber. The chair asked us to raise our hands to indicate support for the motion. Not to raise one’s hand showed support for Prof. Furedi. But to raise a hand showed support for the notion that we can teach happiness. Abstain? Allow Furedi to have the benefit of an abstention and thereby affirm his obnoxious views? No - Dr Seldon had recanted on the possibility of teaching happiness, and therefore he deserved support. What he’s actually doing at his school - in practice - deserves support. Forget the semantics - lets all get behind the notion that through our teaching and pedagogy we can help young people to avoid a lot of unnecessary misery in life. We can and should be helping them travel a path towards greater enlightenment. This is the most worthy aim of education.
.
Happiness - Lessons From A New Science, is a book written by Richard Layard. Buy it. Read it. Think about it.
http://www.agora-education.org/events/debate.php
http://education.guardian.co.uk/higher/comment/story/0,,2257832,00.html
http://www.guardian.co.uk/newsroom/story/0,,2238638,00.html
http://observer.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,,2247375,00.html
http://www.chrisriddell.com/
http://books.guardian.co.uk/top10s/top10/0,,1444290,00.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthony_Seldon
http://www.frankfuredi.com/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Furedi
http://www.siteset.co.uk/anthonyseldon/
You can read Hard Times on Google Books. It's well worth re-reading the first 2 or 3 chapters from time to time to remind ourselves of Dickens' wonderful insight into how a utilitarian view of how schools should work just crushes the spirit out of children (Mchoakumchild) as its deadens their minds and imaginations -
http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=DbHGywDs--UC&dq=%22hard+times%22+dickens&p...
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