Scenes From The Battleground

A version of this post has already appeared at http://www.labourteachers.org.uk/2012/01/09/the-education-spectrum/

What is often most noticeable about education debate is the extent to which people, who are apparently addressing the same issue, talk past each other without even comprehending the opposing view. I think that this is because there are two different debates going on simultaneously. It suits people to focus only on a debate where they feel they have a strong argument and ignore the debate where they have a weaker argument. I hope that what follows might help clarify what is actually disputed in a lot of discussion about education.

The first of the two debates is about the content of the curriculum. Opinions differ on the extent to which there is a recognised body of knowledge to be passed on to the next generation. Traditionalists believe that there is a body of knowledge (which we can call a tradition) composed of the best that has been thought and known. Accordingly, traditionalists will tend to describe the aims of education in terms of the academic above everything else. They will advocate: the employment of teachers with expertise in academic disciplines; the use of clearly identified subject areas, and methods of teaching, organisation and discipline that allow for teachers to directly pass on their expertise. Radicals will reject the existence of any particular tradition to be passed on, and will instead suggest that skills and dispositions are more important than knowledge and that learning is to be based on the interests or needs of the individual child, or the requirements of a future which is unlike the present where people will value different knowledge and skills to those which are valued now. They will doubt that present forms of organisation in schools are appropriate, particularly the role of knowledge and the position of discrete subjects in the curriculum, and the position of teachers and adults as authorities over children. They will favour teaching methods which avoid the need for teacher authority or subject expertise, seeking to maximise the amount of activity and autonomy on the part of children, and to allow for the acquisition of qualities other than the academic. This debate between traditionalists and radicals is reflected most clearly in the discussion of “standards” and behaviour, which breaks out on a fairly regular basis in the media.

The second debate is about entitlement to the curriculum. Opinions differ about who should be able to get particular types of education. Elitists believe that the full benefits of education can only be gained or appreciated by a minority. Educational institutions will be expected to differ in their aspirations, and those schools with the strongest academic aspirations will be expected to find students who are suited to academic achievement and the system will be judged to a very large extent on its provision for those most able students. Egalitarians will want all schools to provide the curriculum to all types of children. The benefits of education are for all and attempts to discriminate between children will be viewed with suspicion, as will attempts to create a hierarchy of schools. The traditional faultline in this debate is, in England, over selection at 11: the division of academic children into grammar schools and other children into secondary moderns which was the norm for two decades from the mid-1940s and still exists in some parts of the country. Similar arguments are also had about the place of private schools.

Now, obviously, in sketching out these two debates I have tended to simplify or exaggerate positions. Few people are complete traditionalists; almost everyone accepts that the curriculum can change to accept new disciplines and contemporary concerns. Few people are complete radicals; everyone identifies some knowledge that is useful to all, even if it’s just the ability to read and write. Most elitism is moderate enough to accept some form of academic provision for the masses, and often to accept routes into the elite by those who missed them the first time. Most egalitarianism stops at some age, usually 16, and I have never met anyone who advocated that everybody should study for PhDs. We are talking about two spectrums of opinion as opposed to two divisions into binary categories.

The important thing here is that we understand that these are two separate debates even though both are often considered to be debates between political left and right. Traditionalists and elitists hold what are often recognised as “right-wing” positions. Radicals and egalitarians are typically described as “left-wing” positions. However, traditionalism and elitism are not the same position at all, nor are radicalism and egalitarianism. A lot of reason for the poor quality of much education debate is due to attempts to conflate this into a single spectrum, where the two alternatives are the “right-right” position of combined elitism and traditionalism and the “left-left” position of egalitarianism and radicalism.

This can be seen more clearly if we put our two spectrums of debate on a pair of axes.

Most of the volume in the education debate comes from the “progressive” top-left quadrant of the diagram (where we’d find the likes of Melissa Benn , Fiona Miller and Lord Hattersley) and the “conservative”  bottom right quadrant (where we’d find the likes of Melanie Phillips, Chris Woodhead and Lord Tebbit). It suits people who hold these two positions to act as if they are the only positions available and so most media debate seems to take place on the red-arrow above. Both camps know that there are limits to which they can gain public support for their positions. Grammar schools, if reintroduced, would not be popular with the vast majority of parents whose kids would not go to them. Trendy teaching methods are held with contempt by parents who actually want their kids to achieve academically. It is far easier, therefore, for educational conservatives to focus on standards and the educational progressives to focus on structures when having the debate anywhere the public can hear. It is in both their interests to maintain the debate along the red line, and to pretend that everyone is arguing from a position on that line. It suits both camps to pretend that everyone is either a left-wing supporter of child-centred education or a right-wing supporter of selection and no other position is possible.

Astute politicians have discovered the benefits of arguing for rigorous academic standards and comprehensive schooling (or at least no increase in selection), which places them somewhere low in the top right quadrant. This is the territory that Tony Blair and David Blunkett staked out in the mid-to-late-nineties. It is probably where the current government is, although one cannot be certain as it is unclear where the push for academies and free schools is meant to lead and the Tory backbenches seem keener on grammar schools than the coalition front benches. It is key political territory, because it is what most parents want for their children. They want their children to be entitled to a good academic education, without having to fight for a place among a privileged minority. It is also the territory with the strongest arguments in its favour, as it combines both a call for justice and a resistance to educational fads. It is opposition to both dumbing-down and to writing off a large section of the population.

In case you’ve missed it, the extent to which the exam system has been “gamed” by schools has recently been exposed by an investigation in the Telegraph. In particular, the extent to which exam boards and examiners offer training which tips off schools about the likely content of exams, and boast about the easiness of their exams has been exposed through filming with a hidden camera.

For most teachers this is less than shocking. We all know that schools play the system, and this is no different to all the other practices schools use to inflate results, such as putting kids in for worthless vocational qualifications, focussing resources on “borderline” students or the cycle of retakes used to pass modular exams. Combined with removal of material from the curriculum, and low pass marks, almost all exams have become a much devalued currency, although it hasn’t stopped denialists claiming that actually it’s just that kids are much smarter and better taught these days  .

Most of the comment I’ve seen from all parts of the political spectrum has concluded a couple of very obvious things:

1) The examination system is not very good.

2) Exam boards should not be competing for business.

I haven’t yet seen any dissent from this. It’s too obvious for words and so I’m not going to add to it.

However, I have seen a few other rather annoying opinions that I think are worth highlighting.

Firstly, it would be too much to hope that a lack of academic rigour in the exam system would be seen by everyone as grounds for increasing the rigour of exams. It didn’t take long for people to suggest that the problem was not that the exams weren’t testing academic knowledge properly, but the very idea that academic knowledge is the point of schooling.  One Guardian journalist who presumably hasn’t been inside a classroom in a comprehensive school for 40 years declared that the real problem was that schools don’t teach “the value of motivation, persistence and self-belief“. A blog by (you guessed it) a consultant seemed to suggest that the focus on exams was a distraction from students being “fully engaged in their subject study as part of a much wider and more engaging whole curriculum, and through being resilient, adaptable, motivated and happy independent learners”. Both appear to think that the answer to a exam system which lacks academic rigour is a school system that does too. Worse, there is simply no acknowledgment that all of the above has been rammed down teachers’ throats continually for decades. The answer to manifest collapses in education standards is always more of the same type of thinking that lowered standards in the first place.

Another issue raised by the scandal is one mentioned several times in this Guardian article: pressure on schools from league tables. Now whereas the above arguments for making education less academic were nonsense from start to finish, this one is more of a matter of degree. Examinations, accountability and competition between schools can be excessive. Anyone who doubts this should look at some of the horror stories Diane Ravitch has reported from America in her recent book.  However, by comparison the fear of accountability in the English school system reflects little more than the dread of being found out. We know this because where schools are known to be good, which unfortunately is too often only in the private schools, they do not care about league tables. It was common for top independent schools to come bottom of the league tables by not doing GCSEs. (Have a look at the two bottom schools in Warwickshire in 2009, who’d want to go to them?) Even OFSTED was not aenough of a threat to ensure compliance from prestigious parts of the private sector. Any number of top schools were damned by OFSTED under its mad tickbox assessments.  I don’t want to suggest that just because top private schools are confident enough in their reputation to ignore crazy forms of accountability then everyone can, but it does suggest that you can have a reputation for academic standards without league table confirmation and OFSTED approval by … wait for it… having academic standards. We probably do need to review the way schools are held to account, and I am glad to see that changes in the direction of academic rigour are underway, but we should not forget that if school managers are more scared of a middling league table position than of failing their pupils then that suggests a problem with their attitude and their values as much as it does a problem with the system.

I then argued that there were a number of recurring bad ideas about aims for education, that are basically non-academic. These were:

• Developing character
• Improving emotional well-being
• Fitting children to their future role in society

My view is that while education might do all of these, they are by-products rather than aims, and each is potentially destructive if made into an explicit aim.

Then I looked at what the aim of education should be  and concluded that education should be about making kids smarter. I admitted that this had to be defined relative to culture and argued that this would have to include significant knowledge. I also pointed out that some of the fashionable properties of a developed intellect, such as a) understanding b) thinking skills c) creativity d) autonomy and e) inspiration, either could not be easily distinguished from the skills that come from knowledge, or where they could be they were actually not helpful.

Before I leave this topic, I think it is worth noting that the debate is often phrased in different ways. In particular, distinctions are made between types of knowledge and between knowledge and skills that are used to restate traditional anti-knowledge arguments in new ways.

The first way is to ask “Should we teach knowledge or skills?” I think it is clear from what I have argued above I think I have made a case in favour of knowledge. I have also critiqued quite a number of alleged skills which are taught in the place of knowledge. However, I can’t leave it at that as it is quite common for people, having set the question, to accept that knowledge is still important, but to claim that it is a false dichotomy and that we should actually be teaching both. On the face of it there is a certain amount of truth to this. We cannot avoid accepting that students should be developing skills of some description. When I endorsed the teaching of knowledge I was not endorsing rote, I was endorsing the teaching of knowledge which was to be used and understood. This can be termed as “skills”. I also accepted that there was a place for learning the arts, which again can be termed as “skills”. However, we should hesitate to accept at face value the arguments of people who say “teach both” as if they were two separate things, because they can then advocate occupying children with pointless activities or games and call it “skills-based” teaching.

Knowledge versus skills is not a false dichotomy; it is a badly expressed one. The debate is better expressed as “should we teach knowledge or generic skills?” It is skills which don’t correspond to an individual discipline, but are contentless fudge, that are the enemy of knowledge. If we have to let the word “skills” into our educational vocabulary we should not let anyone be ambiguous about what they mean by it, and we should be aware that any movement based around skills, even skills with a place for knowledge, is likely to be about dumbing-down unless specifically referring to subject-relevant skills.

An additional piece of jargon which can be used to obscure the debate and bring in generic skills by the back door is “deep knowledge”. It is fairly obvious that information is not much good if it is not understood, or if it is known so weakly that it cannot be applied. Fluency and understanding is absolutely vital to knowledge. If this is what is meant by “deep knowledge” then I am very happy with it. If “shallow knowledge” is used to mean rote learning then I have already endorsed deep knowledge over shallow. However, sometimes the claim is made that all methods which emphasise knowledge are “shallow” and in order to make knowledge “deep” we need to explicitly teach understanding, thinking skills, creativity, autonomy or inspiration. Again, we have the situation where it is claimed that knowledge is important, but in practice it is being sidelined.

In my experience, the most important test of whether people are opposed to knowledge and content is the one of subject boundaries. Subjects are useful ways of organising knowledge, and continue to be useful until the most advanced levels of academia where inter-disciplinary work may open up new ideas. Where there is respect for knowledge there will be respect for the framework given by subjects. Those disciplines may at times run together, particularly when moving from specific examples to more general concepts, but this is something that develops from mastering those discrete disciplines, it is not a convenient starting point for study.

As Hirst (1974) put it:

A liberal education approached directly in terms of the disciplines will … be composed of the study of at least paradigm examples of all the various forms of knowledge. This study will be sufficiently detailed and sustained to give genuine insight so that pupils come to think in those terms, using the concepts, logic and criteria accurately in the different domains. It will then include generalisation of the particular examples used so as to show the range of understanding in the various forms. It will also include some indication of the relations between the forms where they overlap and their signficiance in the major fields of knowledge, particularly the practical fields which have been developed.

However, anybody seeking to teach generic skills and sideline knowledge, will not appreciate the importance of subjects. They will seem like arbitrary divisions. Those who want to dumb down will emphasise “cross curricular links” and “thematic projects”. They will often provide frameworks for “skills”, frequently called a “taxonomy”, in which very different skills are grouped together with no respect for subject boundaries because of superficial resemblances and a hierarchy is created in which the contentless generic skills are placed higher than subject knowledge. They will also use variations on the slogan “I teach children not a subject”. What this really means is “I teach children, but what I teach them is anybody’s guess”. If anyone asks you “Do you teach your subject, or do you teach children?” I would recommend answering by saying: “I teach my subject to children”.

References

Hirst, Paul, H. (1974) Knowledge and the Curriculum, Routledge and Kegan Paul

Now that decades have passed since the abolition of corporal punishment it has become very difficult for educational progressives to assert their moral superiority simply by saying they oppose it. Sure, they can lay it on thick about how much they oppose it, they can call it “child abuse” and demand that every teacher who doesn’t oppose it be immediately sacked, but they can’t actually mark themselves out from the crowd with their disapproval. Not only that, but a policy of forcing out people who had happily used corporal punishment in their teaching career would mean a mass exodus of recent immigrants from countries in the developing world where corporal punishment is normal, at the hands of white, middle class English people, something which would be hard to paint as a victory for social justice or political correctness.

So for this reason, there has to be a new way to declare one’s boundless compassion and, if a teacher, condemn the moral degeneracy of one’s peers. There has to be a new moral dividing line between the goody teachers and the baddy teachers. There has to be a new basis for the self-righteous superiority of middle class liberals. In recent years it seems to have become shouting. For as long as I remember anyone arguing for teacher authority, the importance of obedience, or the need to end the chaos in the classrooms, could expect a straw man attack along the lines of “well, you think teachers should always be shouting at children”. It was always a ridiculous attack as order in the classroom and well established teacher authority takes away the need to shout. The truly terrifying teachers often shouted the least (although they sometimes shouted the loudest). The schools with the best discipline often had an explicit or implicit “no shouting” policy as classrooms were quiet enough for teachers to be heard and there were plenty of sanctions that were easily available and could be calmly applied. Not only that, but when direct instruction was the government approved method of teaching (in the late nineties and the early part of this century) then every teacher was required to get attention in class, and it was hard to condemn shouting when you knew that you might have an observation where getting the class to hear you would be expected. Indeed, I have lost count of how many “shouted” plenaries I have observed over the years resulting from belief in a three part lesson and the normal tendency of classes to get louder over time if they are allowed to speak.

However, the move away from teaching, and towards activities, in the last few years has led to a new breed of “punishment puritans” who disapprove of the raised voice. Often it is simple self-aggrandisement. I have heard aspiring members of SMT insist to NQTs and student teachers that they never, ever, shout even though their bellowing is often heard through the corridors. Similarly, I have heard teachers condemned for shouting because they confront bad behaviour in their lessons (regardless of the volume at which they do so); because they have become upset or angry, or because they will shout back when students shout at them rather than letting the students take verbal control of the classroom.

Recently, I have seen the disapproval of shouting take the same tone as the opponents of corporal punishment took, that of complete and unquestioning disapproval from a position of moral superiority, unsupported by a rational argument. It’s put me in a bit of a dilemma. I have worked in both “shouting schools” and “no shouting schools” and have preferred the latter. I trained in a school with an explicit no shouting policy and actually rather enjoyed it. When I worked at the Metropolitan School the students were savvy enough to know that forcing a teacher to shout at the class would be a sure sign that they had got to them, and, therefore, raising your voice in class would just make kids laugh at you. The discipline system there had clear sanctions which did not include taking a kid out and shouting at them. Therefore, there was very little point to shouting at all. Even when I have worked in a “shouting school”, I would try hard to avoid shouting at classes; it was a high risk strategy and I was experienced enough at managing classes to know how to deal with noise in a more structured and careful way. Therefore, I have no particular support for shouting, and little reason to advocate it as a form of behaviour management.

However, the moral indignation and hypocrisy have got to me. I simply cannot abide some of the attempts to demonise teachers for shouting that I have heard recently. And in particular, I cannot tolerate the trend I have noticed in managers suggesting that teachers who shout at students are to blame for the students’ poor behaviour, as if children had no free will, and their behaviour simply reflected the moral deficiencies of their teachers.

So let’s be clear about a few simple points. Teachers shout for three reasons.

1) To get attention.

It is a fact of cognitive psychology that if we are not listening to someone then our attention cannot be grabbed by the content of what they say, but will be grabbed by its volume.

…unattended speech is not analyzed to a semantic level, that is it is not analyzed for meaning. Instead it is analyzed for physical characteristics such as pitch and loudness … all stimuli are analyzed for their physical characteristics, but only a limited number (those to which you attend ) are analyzed for their semantic content. .. unattended stimuli must be processed in case something important requires your attention. If you are in a crowd and someone shouts “Fire!”, the loudness of the unattended message will make you shift your attention to the source of the sound…But presumably if someone merely said “Fire,” you wouldn’t hear it because the word doesn’t stand out from any other stimuli

(Willingham, 2007)

In a relatively quiet room you might be able to get attention by becoming quieter. In a room where all the noise is of one pitch you might be able to get attention through the pitch of your voice. If you have a whistle you could certainly go without shouting. However, in a noisy classroom, teachers often have little hope of gaining initial attention from a class if they don’t raise their voices. There are ways around this, slower methods that involve getting attention one student at a time, or making students scared to let their attention drift, and in a tough school you will have to pursue these methods or you will wear your voice out. But there are always going to be situations where it would be irresponsible not to shout in order to gain attention. If a kid you don’t know is behaving in a dangerous manner then it would be better to yell “Oi!” and be considered rude than to let someone come to harm while you agonise over a more polite way to intervene. There is no way of making the act of shouting beyond the moral pale here, even if, like myself, you prefer to avoid it.

2) Out of Anger.

It has to be said there exist schools and classes where losing your temper and shouting has a clear positive impact on the behaviour of the class by giving them a bit of a scare. However, the effect diminishes with the age of the students and with the frequency with which they experience it, and with tough classes it can have a negative impact (imagine being furiously angry and then once you show it having thirty kids laughing at you, it is not going to end well), so I would not recommend this as a behaviour management technique. However, there are two reasons why I will not condemn anyone who does use it. Firstly, if it is normal to use it as a technique in your school, then a refusal to raise your voice will undermine you by making you appear weak or unconcerned about poor behaviour. In those situations it can barely be avoided. Secondly, in those situations where shouting is having no positive effect then it is entirely possible that the shouting teacher has become upset and lost control. This is not a good thing and teachers should try to avoid letting it happen. However, as I argued before it makes absolutely no sense to condemn teachers for being upset. That is simply to blame the victim, and to make teaching the exclusive preserve of those who don’t care about their classes or their own dignity. Again, neither of these cases seem to suggest a moral transgression on the part of the teacher. In one case they have done what is necessary, in the other they have acted like somebody who cares.

 3) As a punishment.

This is the one that I personally am most guilty of. If you are in a school where the sanctions are inadequate to deal with the behaviour then you have little choice but to look for sanctions that can be delivered on the spot and require no follow up. I wouldn’t ever recommend shouting within a classroom, or in front of other students, (it can backfire badly if a student has eye contact with another student when they are being shouted at) but one of the few instant punishments we have left is to ask a student to stand outside and then go and shout at them. Now, I am the first to argue that other sanctions would be preferable. I prefer sanctions that are recorded and public. I prefer sanctions that will mean something to every kid not just the weaker characters. I prefer sanctions that are less stressful for the teacher. I prefer sanctions that defuse a situation rather than risk escalation. However, there are plenty of schools where the behaviour policy is not adequate and the use of a good old-fashioned bollocking is a matter of necessity rather than principle.  A puritan could self-righteously disapprove of it for being unpleasant, but that is because either they disapprove of all punishment, or because they haven’t grasped the basic idea that punishment is meant to be unpleasant. What they cannot do is argue against shouting as a punishment without accepting that teachers in those schools should, because of the circumstances of the school, tolerate bad behaviour in their classrooms because they’d rather kids lost their education and lived in fear of their peers, than teachers got their hands dirty in the pursuit of restoring order.

Now, I suspect that a lot of the punishment puritans will reject these arguments on the basis of the usual lies about behaviour. While hiding in their offices they will pretend that there is no need to grab attention, pressure classes into behaving, or punish the guilty. If you have good enough lessons then no child will ever misbehave and if they do it was obviously your fault – after all you shouted and that shows you are a bad person – and there is simply no need to raise expectations or challenge disruption. If you are upset by children then it simply shows you are incompetent and if they were still teaching a full timetable then they’d show you how to remain calm under pressure.

However, back on the frontline, teachers are put in positions every day where they have little choice but to raise their voices. I do not like that situation, and much prefer an environment where it is not necessary, but I can’t stomach the attempt to blame the victims by the very class of people who have created the situation in the first place. When blaming teachers is used to pretend that there is no Behaviour Crisis, and that the level of disobedience and abuse teachers endure is simply down to weak teachers letting the side down, then the self-righteousness has merged into sheer callousness. I can only hope and pray that one day those who consider their condemnation of their colleagues to be evidence of their own unbounded compassion come to see themselves as those around them see them, not as a beacon of decency but as opponents of teacher authority who fail children, again, and again, and again.

 References

Willingham, Daniel T., Cognition, 2007

I have been working my way through all the various aims of education that are apparently academic, but, nevertheless, manage to devalue subject content.

The last of these is the idea that education should inspire. This seems to be another case of confusing virtues and purposes. The best teaching is inspirational, but teaching that doesn’t inspire has not necessarily failed. It can be that the students were not capable of being inspired. It could be that knowledge that is useful and valuable is not always inspirational. It could be that in order to learn something inspiring in the future, it is necessary to learn something drier and technical now. It is far from obvious that inspiration should be a regular occurrence in lessons. There may be only a certain amount of inspiring lessons a person can take before even the inspiring becomes normal, and the normal becomes tedious.

Of course, that still leaves open the idea that education as a whole should be inspirational. I really don’t want to reject this idea outright, as I do feel that something may have been missed in an education that, while apparently successful, leaves one bored by the prospect of future learning. However, I think there are better and worse ways to address this. I would hope that the best way to become inspired by learning is by feeling the satisfaction of learning a lot. If learning becomes a habit, then it should be something that continues. Inspiration should be a by-product of good education, achieved without actually explicitly aiming to inspire.

The destructive version of inspiration, however, is the one that seeks to create motivation to learn in the absence of actual learning. At heart it is another variant of education aimed at improving the emotional well-being of children rather than educating them, the only difference is that in this case the concept of emotional health includes the disposition to learn.  Inevitably we have all the same issues outlined before when talking about emotional well-being. It distorts the relationship between teacher and student. In effect the teacher ceases to be a teacher and becomes a motivational speaker concerned more with feelings than learning. It is intrusive and patronising, making children’s feelings  a matter of public property and is likely to be based on superficial pop psychology. It makes the manipulation of emotions acceptable and even desirable and enforces an “emotional orthodoxy” on children. It will undermine actual academic learning by suggesting that a requirement for hard work, pressure to achieve, or an awareness of one’s own ignorance might create negative attitudes to learning. It will encourage an emphasis on engagement and pleasure in learning that will inevitably result in a focus on the superficially interesting, or worse, the supposedly “relevant” rather than the best of what has been thought or known and an emphasis on “fun” teaching methods rather than effective ones. Finally, it will buy into the destructive contemporary idea that feeling positive is, in itself, a means to achieving ends, which undermines the need to work to bring about change.

To really see the harm that focusing on inspiration does though, you need to look at what is considered to be an “inspiring lesson” to managers. It is always the gimmick lesson, the lesson based on stunts and games and a memorable performance by teachers. It is being made to laugh or gasp or get over-excited; it is not being made to learn or to think. Ask to see “an inspiring teacher” and you be presented with an amateur comedian or conjurer. You will get to see the science teacher who sets things on fire, or the maths teacher who plays games. You will get to see the illusionist who has established “great relationships” with a difficult class by indulging them and never pushing them to work hard. You will get to see new toys and, no doubt, new software for the interactive whiteboard. You will not get to see the passionate academic who loves their subject and gets children from deprived backgrounds to go to university to study it. You will not get to see the bottom set teacher who turns around classes who have never learnt much in the subject before. You will not get to see the teachers whose students always make progress.

It should be a great compliment to be told you have inspired a student, but it is never good to be called an inspirational teacher. Because when it comes down to it, there are no short cuts and success is more about perspiration than inspiration. If you get your classes to work hard, inspiration will strike when it needs to. Those who seek to inspire all the time, have usually lost sight of what it is that needs to be inspired.

The next category of academic aims for education are those which can be roughly gathered together under the term “autonomy”, but appear under a huge number of different titles. These are all qualities that are to be instilled in the child which make them independent of, or different to,  others, particularly teachers and adults. There are several types of autonomy that are valued and I shall deal with each in turn.

Autonomy of Thought

This is the idea that the thoughts and opinions of children should in some way be free from the influence of adults. This is the concept underlying such phrases as “thinking for yourself” and also attacks on “indoctrination” or “being told what to think”. At first this seems fairly straightforward; we can all find something sinister in the idea of a child being raised with beliefs that we don’t happen to share. The problem occurs when we realise that we don’t see it as anywhere near as sinister if children are raised with values we consider important. So for instance, somebody who rants and raves about children being “indoctrinated” into religious fundamentalism will, nevertheless, often assume that boys should not be left to think it’s okay to be sexist. Very few people will want children to decide for themselves whether to run in front of traffic or whether to racially abuse their peers. The problem is not that no form of indoctrination is harmful, but that most of the time it is the beliefs themselves, not the processes involved in handing them on that are harmful. There is no coherent distinction to be made between indoctrinating and teaching. When children are raised to believe things which we believe in we tend to see it as teaching. When they are raised to believe things we don’t believe in we tend to see it as indoctrination. There is no “neutral” position that parents and teachers can all adopt, leaving children to form their own worldviews. Simply being with people of a particular opinion influences us to adopt the opinion. Even apathy, say towards religion or politics, is a position that will be passed on.

The problem is that there is no clear dividing line between “thinking for yourself” and any other form of thinking. Often what is meant by teaching a child to think for themselves is actually just teaching them to think, and is subject to all the usual problems inherent in trying to teach thinking skills. We can’t actually identify beliefs that are not acquired from our upbringing or experience, we just tend to think that those who agree with us have thought for themselves and those who disagree with us have been indoctrinated.  All thinking, no matter how influenced by others, is “thinking for yourself” in the sense that it is very difficult to control what anyone thinks even in the most repressive environments. Attempts to describe an unindoctrinated individual – usually they are assumed to be very rationalist and tolerant – often sound more like a description of a western, liberal, individualist . To somebody from a different culture the supposedly unindoctrinated individual might seem heavily indoctrinated.

There is a sinister side to this as well. If, in the spirit of condemning indoctrination, teachers cannot pass on any beliefs explicitly, then, for education to actually take place, they will be expected to indirectly influence children to reach the required conclusions. Letting someone think that something is their own idea is usually a technique of manipulation, not a non-coercive means to help another reach the truth. As a result a teacher becomes a manipulator of minds, controlling not only what is to be believed but what is to be thought. As with efforts to “educate” the feelings of children, we have the situation where teachers are to police a child’s thoughts rather than just direct their learning. Additionally, if the education system seeks to distinguish between “indoctrination” and “education” by identifying acceptable and unacceptable beliefs to pass on then we have the state setting itself up as the ultimate arbiter of truth. The alternative to parents raising their children with their values and beliefs and choosing an education that reflects those values isn’t some neutral situation where children “make up their own minds” based on an objective study of the world, it is a situation where the state determines which beliefs are true enough to be taught as if undeniably true and which beliefs are to be either restricted or rejected. Inevitably, attempts to restrict indoctrination of the child would simply remove those influences on the child that aren’t under the control of the state. This would be totalitarian; the state seeks to determine not what it is valuable to know, but what it is acceptable to think.

Autonomy in Learning

This is the idea that children’s learning can be freed from the influence of teachers. The usual jargon here is “independent learning”, “learning to learn”, “metacognition” and talk of teachers being only the “guide from the side”. In the most extreme version, this is the radical individualist idea that there is something unhealthy or corrupting about expecting to gain knowledge from others, or being directed towards knowledge by others, and that children need to be freed from this dependence so as to acquire knowledge on their own and according to their personal whim. However, being “free” of the knowledge held by others is ignorance not independence. Knowledge is not subject to copyright. We can share it as a community. The knowledge of experts is valuable, even to the most ingenious. People who go through life distrusting experts on principle become cranks, not innovators; even Isaac Newton said he’d stood “on the shoulders of giants”.

The more moderate version of this idea, simply claims that children can be taught to learn for themselves, and that this will enable them to learn more than if they were to learn from their teachers. There are several problems with the claim. As usual, we have reason to doubt the existence of a generic, teachable skill. Whether we learn quickly or slowly will depend on the area in question; a child who seems to learn maths with just a glance might well struggle with learning a language. Moreover, a good indicator of our ability to learn in a subject is how much we already know and how well we know it, therefore the activity of learning might be the best method of gaining skill at learning and is certainly a good method of developing the disposition to learn. There are some teachable study skills, like revision techniques and note-taking, which are effective but hardly replace the need to be knowledgeable about a subject and there is no identifiable “learning” skill. For this reason “learning to learn” courses tend to resemble a very slow course in study skills stretched out by using pseudo-science (learning styles, brain gym, left and right brain thinking, triune theory of the brain. etc.) as filler. There is considerable reason to think that people, and children in particular, are natural learners and that teaching somebody to learn is as absurd as teaching them to breathe or excrete.

While we can teach ourselves, for instance by reading books, people can usually expect to learn better from being taught. This is because a teacher, if competent, can assess the learner and consider how learning should progress. A book cannot assess its reader and we are very poor judges of our own ability. Even if it was the case that teaching was an inefficient method of bringing about learning, this would not be an argument for teaching children how to learn, it would be an argument for not teaching them at all. If we value learning at all then we find it hard to rule out the benefits of teaching. For if we doubt that there is much knowledge to be taught, we should also have grounds to doubt there is much knowledge to be learnt.

Autonomy of Expression

Our final form of autonomy is usually called “self-expression”. It is the idea that we should give a particular value to children being able to communicate their own thoughts, ideas and feelings. This is obviously not a bad thing in itself, but it is hardly clear why it should be more important than being able to communicate in general or communicate in an academic context. I suspect that it is simply a form of “therapeutic education” and that developing these skills is meant to improve the child’s emotional well-being rather than their intellect. We live in communities and the ideas, thoughts and feelings of others are often of great importance to us and there is no obvious reason to think that the communication skills involved in communicating about the minds of others are that different to those involved in expressing our own thoughts.

There are, however, good grounds for not requiring to children express themselves when they don’t want to. Children are entitled to privacy. The lack of privacy is already one of the most unpleasant aspects of childhood. Most of our education is in public; subject to the scrutiny of our peers, why intensify this by trying to make our interior world public, too? As Arendt (1961) put it:

Because the child must be protected against the world, his traditional place is in the family, whose adult members daily return back from the outside world and withdraw into the security of private life within four worlds. These four walls within which people’s private family life is shared constitute a shield against the world. They enclose a secure place without which no living thing can thrive. This holds good not only for human life but for human life in general. Wherever the latter is consistently exposed to the world without the protection of privacy and security its vital quality is destroyed…

Everything that lives, not vegetative life alone emerges from darkness and however strong its natural tendency to thrust itself into the light, it nevertheless needs the security of darkness to grow at all. This may indeed be the reason that the children of famous parents so often turn out badly. Fame penetrates the four walls, invades their private space, bringing with it, especially in present day conditions, the merciless glare of the public realm, which floods everything in the private lives of those concerned so that the children no longer have a place of security where they can grow.

When we expect children to express themselves as part of the education endeavour we are breaking down these protective walls of a private life and it is far from clear that there is any benefit to it.

Finally, there is the point that all these forms of autonomy involve prioritising the individual which is why so much of the jargon here has the prefix “self”. Advocates of autonomy treat the thoughts, feelings and opinions of children as the most important part of the educational enterprise. It stops education being about how the child relates to the world, and starts being about how the world should relate to the child. It is far from obvious that a child should be raised as if the world is there simply to suit them. Exclusive concern with one’s own feelings and opinions is traditionally known as “selfishness”. It was normally seen as morally wrong, not something to be indulged. The strongest case against autonomy is the moral case. There are values, of solidarity and community; of culture and family; of altruism and sacrifice, that matter more than self-gratification. The truly autonomous, unindoctrinated, self-expressing child would be an attention-seeking egotist, trained to disregard others, not a functioning member of society.

Reference:

Arendt, Hannah, Between Past and Future, 1961

I wrote previously about the academic aims of education. I argued against the concepts of understanding and thinking skills . Next on the list is creativity. This is an intermittently fashionable one, here’s a summary of the “creativity” argument for dumbing down, from 1950:

We frequently hear the charge that under present day mass-education methods, the development of creative personality is seriously discouraged. The child is under pressure to conform for the sake of economy and for the sake of satisfying prescribed standards. We are told by the philosophers who have given thought to the problem that the unfolding of a creative personality is a highly individual matter which stresses uniqueness and shuns conformity. Actually, the unfolding of the individual along the lines of his own inclinations is generally frowned upon. We are told, also, that the emphasis upon the memorizing of facts sets the wrong kind of goal for the student.

Guilford (1950)

Naturally an idea that was widely heard in 1950 is going to be presented to teachers as the latest innovation.  Lately, I hear it is most in videos featuring a man born in 1950: Sir Ken Bloody Robinson whose 1970s deschooling rhetoric, has helped to convince me that, in education, “paradigm” is another word for “straw man”.

Sir Ken is the man who once headed a committee of worthies (including such educational exports as Lenny Henry and Dawn French) who produced a report which appeared in David Blunkett’s dustbin in the late 1990s and made fascinating recommendations like:

Where possible, school governing bodies should designate a member to have responsibility for encouraging links between the school and cultural organisations and to have an overview of the school’ s policies and programmes for creative and cultural education.

As a starting point, we should notice that creativity is something, like many of the other aims of progressive education, for example thinking skills and sociability, where there is little reason to think it can actually be taught as a generic skill in classrooms. At the risk of coming over all Dan Willingham,  there is debate in the academic literature, for instance in Baer (1998), as to whether creativity may  be domain specific (i.e. whether being creative in one area will mean you will be creative any other) or even task specific (i.e. whether being able to creatively solve one problem will mean you can creatively solve other problems). If creativity isn’t transferable from one context to another, or even if it plausible that it isn’t, then we have no reason to accept creativity as a general curriculum aim, only reasons to accept it in particular subjects where it might be appropriate. No subject should be added to the curriculum, and no teaching approach followed, just because it encourages creativity. We actually need to ask questions about when creativity is actually required in an academic context.

To answer those questions we need to clarify what is meant by “creativity”. I can identify four senses in which the word is used, however these are not really alternative definitions, the word is frequently used to mean a combination of these.

1) Artistic ability. If creativity is simply what we show in “the Arts” then there is little to object to about teaching it in the sense of teaching art subjects or getting students to engage in artistic enterprises. I have in the past been concerned that schools get overly concerned with such endeavours, and any teacher who has lost pupils out of important lessons for the sake of “the school concert” can gripe about it, however, art, drama and music are real and potentially valuable subjects and as long as I don’t have to do cover lessons for them and the GCSEs in them aren’t included in the EBacc with the proper subjects, then they have their place. That said it’s probably worth pointing out to the most fervent advocates of greater creativity in education that (in the words of Tom Bennett here):

…the last time I looked, the curriculum was also stuffed with drama, music, dance, writing essays, poetry, design, textiles, expressive arts, and on and on and on. If creativity is being given a raw deal I think it could be a hell of a lot worse.

2) Thinking skills. Sometimes “creativity” simply means the same sort of contentless, unstructured reasoning that was discussed here.

3) Self-expression. Like thinking skills this is a topic which requires consideration apart from creativity, and can be found among my considerations of autonomy here.

4) Imagination. This is probably the key concept that is being addressed when people talk about creativity and the one to be addressed here. It is the ability to bring to mind something different. Psychological tests of creativity often ask open questions and gauge somebody as more creative if they have more answers or if their answers are unlike other people’s answers. We call writing “creative” when it has purposes that involve more than expressing information and where it is considered a virtue to be dissimilar to other similar pieces of writing – i.e. novels and poems rather than bus timetables or weather reports. Now valuing imagination makes sense in many ways. It is an intellectual virtue to have ideas, and great thinkers are usually recognised for something original in their ideas or the expression of their ideas. There are, however, going to be two problems when we try to use apply this form of creativity to the educational setting.

Firstly, in much of our intellectual life the quantity of our ideas is unimportant compared with the quality. Having a large number of good ideas in a lifetime is important; watching someone sift through a large number of ideas when you want them to decide something simple is a nuisance. This is why shopping with some people is a nightmare. We might like to say “well, there’s more than one answer to this question”, however, when making decisions we are happy to have only one answer if it is either the right answer, or the best possible answer. There may be other intellectual skills that can be developed by comparing answers; there may be times when it is only by considering a wrong answer that we move to the right answer; there may be times when it is easier to find the best answer by considering lots of different answers. However, there is little to be gained from the generation of additional wrong answers. One good idea is worth a million bad ideas. And it is here where we have a problem with the concept of creativity in the classroom. The better we get at an intellectual discipline, the better we get at avoiding wrong answers. Part of being smart is being able to reject bad ideas. It is not a sign of an excess of rote learning, or misplaced educational priorities if education produces “convergent” who identify very few answers to a question rather than “divergent” thinkers who develop a wide variety of different answers. There is little point in trying to teach the supposed skill of coming up with many ideas, we do that naturally when we are ignorant.

Secondly, novelty might seem to be a feature of great ideas, but actually this is because it is hard to recognise the greatness of an idea if everybody has it.  The contexts where we reject good ideas because of a lack of originality are rare outside of the entertainment industry or academia. An omelette tastes no worse because you are not the first person to have made one. Even with great intellectual innovations, we don’t tend to reject them if more than one person may have come up with them independently. No engineer ever said “well I used to solve that problem with calculus, but now I’ve heard that Leibniz and Newton both invented calculus, I won’t bother”. Most of the time, our most original ideas are the dumbest ones we’ve had, the ones where everyone else knew better. You might be the first person to try and use tarmac as a sandwich filling, but I wouldn’t want to eat it. I’d rather have an omelette.

Productivity and originality of ideas are signs of truly great thinkers, but they are not reliable indicators of great thoughts. We might expect a genius to have great imagination, but so does the madman. The phrase “he has too much imagination” is not oxymoronic and the advice “don’t go getting ideas” is not perverse. Unlike knowledge, or judgement, imagination is something that is most useful in moderation. It is good in particular contexts (like when trying to entertain) and bad in others (like when trying to give directions). Like many of the other aims of progressive education, like self-esteem or sociability, the creative imagination is not something that we want to see more of from everybody, in all circumstances.

References:

Baer J., (1998) ‘The Case for Domain Specificity of Creativity’ in Creativity Research Journal 11(2)

Guilford, J.P. (1950) ‘Creativity’, American Psychologist, 5 (9)