Educating Ruby (4 page)

Chapter 2

Why old school won't work

We start this chapter with a quick overview of the debate about education. The situation is confused, and the picture we'll present is somewhat oversimplified, but we hope it will help you get oriented for when you get into more detailed discussions about school. In the public imagination there are, very roughly, three ‘tribes' of educational opinion. They have different diagnoses of what is wrong with schools, and correspondingly three different sets of ideas about what needs doing to put it right. As we tend to meet these fairly frequently in the media, and in conversation, it's worth arming ourselves with some clarity about their strengths and weaknesses. Within each camp there are people who hold
the most extreme views, and many more who subscribe to more moderate versions. It will quickly become clear which tribe we belong to, though we will try to do some justice to the other positions.

The first tribe we will call the Roms, short for romantics. The stereotype of the Roms is that they believe in the innate goodness of children, and therefore assume that education should allow children to express themselves and discover their own talents and interests. Didactic teaching and adult authority are seen as impositions that cramp and quite possibly damage this inherent spirit. The most extreme Roms have a deep trust, not borne out by evidence, that if children are just left alone, all will turn out for the best. (They've obviously never read
Lord of the Flies
.) The patron saint, as it were, of the Roms, is the 18th century French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau who articulated this view in his didactic novel
Emile
. Famous exponents of the Rom philosophy include Rudolf Steiner (who did indeed have some fairly wacky ideas), Maria Montessori and, most notoriously, A. S. Neill of Summerhill. Real Roms tend to home-school their children or send them to small ‘alternative' schools. The main characteristic of the Roms is that they are few and far between these days. There are almost none to be found in mainstream schools or in colleges of education.

The second tribe are the traditionalists, Trads for short. They tend to think that the ideal school is the good old-fashioned grammar school, with lots of chalk-and-talk
teaching, strong discipline, conventional examinations (and plenty of them) and an emphasis in the curriculum on literacy, numeracy, timeless classics (Shakespeare, Beethoven) and difficult abstract subjects (grammar, algebra). To the Trads, teachers are respected sources of culturally important, tried and tested factual knowledge (the periodic table, the Tudors). Their job is to tell children about this knowledge and to make sure they have understood it well enough, and remembered it long enough, to pass exams in it.

These exams (especially A level) are vitally important and entirely fair and reliable, and they act as the gateways to the best universities (which, in turn, give access to well-paid professional jobs which will make you wealthy and therefore happy). After children have taken these exams, Trads seem to lose interest in the question of what this patchwork of factual knowledge actually enables children to do. It seems to them self-evident that mere acquaintance with facts is a good thing. Perhaps the implicitly valued capabilities are ‘the ability to hold your own at dinner parties' and ‘to do well on televised tests of general knowledge', such as
Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?, Mastermind, Eggheads
and especially
University Challenge
.

Trads believe that success in this educational obstacle race reflects the joint operation of a trio of entirely unproblematic factors: ability (which is fixed), hard work (which is under pupils' control) and good teaching by the school. (We'll come back to ability and effort shortly.) Trads believe that armies of Roms have for years been trying to take over the education system, and that all educational ills and disappointments of the last 50 years result from this infiltration. Any attempts to question this reassuringly straightforward picture is treated as ‘progressive claptrap'.

Core to the Trads' world view is a belief that things can be divided neatly into twos, which means that anyone who isn't a Trad must be a Rom. But there is a third very important tribe of people who are signed up to neither traditional nor progressive views, but who are trying to think more carefully about how schools can best prepare children and young people – all of them – to flourish in the real, turbulent world of the mid 21st century. We'll call them the Mods, which is short for both modest and moderate. Mods know, when things are complicated, that patience and humility are required, and like the famous tortoise, they make, over time, better progress than the more doctrinaire hare.

Education is a prime example of a ‘wicked' problem, one that is very complex and ill-defined, so Mods are painfully aware that quick fixes, appeals to nostalgia and rhetorical point-scoring don't cut it. They are much more at home with the kind of intelligence that the great psychologist Jean Piaget described as “knowing what to do when you don't know what to do”. Mods become pensive, they tinker and explore, while the Trads get more pugnacious and the Roms disappear to the margins. Almost everyone who works in education is a Mod. But because Mods prefer to tinker quietly than to bang big drums, it is easy to underestimate how many there are, and how much progress teachers, head teachers and their schools have been making.

It is one of our ambitions for this book that we can create a more confident and more unified Mod voice with which to challenge the naive polarisations of the Roms and the Trads. As you will have guessed, we are Mods, and a good deal of our working year is spent with thousands of students, teachers, parents and employers who know we cannot turn the clock back to an allegedly ‘golden age' of grammar schools, and nor can we make do with simplistic
quick fixes. We have to think carefully, debate respectfully, experiment slowly and review honestly as we go along. In this way genuine progress will be made.

Because Trads tend to be loud and confident, there is a risk of being swept away by their rhetoric, especially when you are feeling confused by all the different claims and counter-claims. So we need to look a little more carefully at the case they make for going back to more traditional styles of education.

Sometimes Trads assume that, as well as being of unquestionable value in its own right, the mere possession of ‘culturally valuable knowledge' somehow bestows on the owner an ability to think rationally. Traditionally this assumption applied to the ability to read and write Latin, and there are still those who champion Latin as the ultimate training of the mind. Currently ranked a very respectable 6,339 in the Amazon best-seller list,
Gwynne's Latin
claims, “What Latin, when taught in the traditional way, does is to train the learner's intellect and character as no other subject can even begin to do. It trains the learner to focus and concentrate; to memorise; to analyse, if necessary with minute exactness, and to problem-solve; to be diligent; to be conscientious; to be persevering; and much more. Learning Latin in the traditional manner makes us better at every human activity.”
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Now, we wholeheartedly agree with Mr Gwynne that the purpose of studying much of the syllabus
is not to master the subject matter per se. Most of it will be of no use to the majority of those who struggle with it. We manage perfectly well without remembering the French imperfect tense or the equation for photosynthesis. Its main purpose is to develop useful, transferable qualities or ‘habits of mind', such as concentration, perseverance and analytical precision. The trouble is, there is absolutely no evidence that Latin, when taught in the ‘traditional way', has any such effect. The thinking you learn by studying Latin does not transfer to other subjects in the way it was imagined it might.
2

More recently, such claims tend to be made for the study of mathematics, and now it seems to apply to any form of knowledge that a traditionally inclined secretary of state for education deems to be a ‘cultural treasure'. Merely engaging with this subject matter in a way that enables you to recall it and manipulate it (in the highly prescribed ways required for exams) is thought to provide this training of the mind. But it doesn't. All the evidence shows that learning any particular thing, be it
Grand Theft Auto
or Latin, makes you better at that thing, but unless you are taught in a very particular way (more on this later), the benefits do not automatically transfer to any other domain. In fact, this is true for every subject on the secondary school curriculum. If taught in the traditional way, they do not make you any better at general-purpose thinking. Harvard Professor David Perkins wrote a very good empirical paper on this way back in 1985, called
‘Post-primary education has little impact on informal reasoning', which about says it all.
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Curiously, despite their apparent belief in the possibility of such general mind training, Trads often argue, when it suits them, exactly the reverse. The explicit attempt to cultivate ‘transferable thinking skills' is doomed, they say, because any method of thinking is so tightly bound to a particular subject matter that no such transfer is possible. The high priest of the Trads is a retired American professor called E. D. Hirsch, who keeps insisting that any direct attempt by teachers to cultivate mental abilities, such as précising material or distinguishing between the main message and more subordinate messages, is not only doomed to failure; it is the main reason why many poor children don't read very well and don't do well in exams. As far as we can tell, Hirsch's view is that simply
knowing
this venerable content – not being required to think about it, analyse it, distil it or use it to spark your imagination – somehow makes you an educated human being. We don't quite understand why being able to write an A grade essay on the symbolism in Wordsworth's poetry should make anyone a more competent and fulfilled human being. Throughout history, and across cultures, there seem to be a lot of people who have managed perfectly well without this particular accomplishment, and many others like them.

This emphasis on just knowing, and its associated feeling of being securely
right
, is deeply characteristic of Trads. They seem to greatly prefer knowing to thinking. They like to be certain, and to defend their certainty with any rhetorical tricks they can muster. Even though they hate to appear
ignorant of anything, they are often deeply confused about, for example, the difference between being knowledgeable, being clever and being genuinely intelligent. While these three states are clearly different, Trads often seem to think that not knowing something – being ignorant – is the same thing as being stupid, and that both are causes of shame. Some of them seem to like to catch people out – for example, by taking little quotes out of context and subjecting them to ridicule. They enjoy debating and winning arguments, and will deploy selective and distorted evidence when it suits them. Trads also confuse the ability to retain and retrieve knowledge with ‘intelligence'. A definition of ‘intelligence', endorsed by 52 leading experts in the field, specifically cautions: “Intelligence is not merely book learning, a narrow academic skill, or test-taking smarts. It reflects a broader and deeper capability for … ‘catching on', ‘making sense' of things, and ‘figuring out' what to do.”
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It is perhaps not surprising that Trads are over-represented in the worlds of politics, the law and journalism, where skills in adversarial debating and point scoring are highly prized. Such sophistry is, of course, very different from real thinking, which is an often hesitant, difficult and slow attempt to get closer to the truth. Mods like to discuss and wonder, edging their way towards ideas that feel more solidly appropriate to the unprecedented challenges of the present.

Being busy defending an already espoused point of view leaves little time for real exploration. For example, Trads
have tended to select the work of a few academics who support their case and ignore everything and everyone else. Two of the most revered and respectable American academics writing about the future of education are the co-founders of Harvard's influential Project Zero, Howard Gardner, and the man we mentioned a few paragraphs ago, David Perkins. You would have thought they would be worth a look, but they are never referred to by the Trads: they don't suit their case. As Trads tend to have exaggerated respect for ‘top' universities, they can't rubbish the well-respected work of scholars like Perkins and Gardner, so they just pretend that they don't exist.