Educating Ruby (7 page)

This modern fable was actually composed by a bona fide, though mischievous, academic professor by the name of Harold Benjamin. What do you think? Are there eternal verities which you would want your children to learn? Or are there things which your children are learning which
seem to you to fall into the category of ‘fish-grabbing'? If so, what are they?

It seems to us that the Trads are often unable to say why we should not be teaching net-making, archery and bear-pit-digging (or, in our case, computer-coding, internet-mental-health-protecting and public-figure-lie-detecting). We suspect that Mods, on the other hand, would find much enjoyment, as well as food for thought, in this parable. It will chime with their doubts about whether all children today really need to learn how to add fractions, solve quadratic equations and tell a sine from a tangent or a gerund from a gerundive. There will always be a minority of children who might go on to use these skills and knowledge in their professional lives, and a slightly larger minority who will simply enjoy mastering the rules of micro-worlds such as algebra and trigonometry. But there are millions of youngsters for whom these subjects are just a pointless grind, and there are a thousand other topics one could argue for with equal justification: Sudoku, crossword puzzles and
Minecraft
, to name just a few.

The belief that calculus, for example, is an essential part of the preparation for life for all young people is just that, a belief, not an established fact. There is no evidence that youngsters who are made to study trigonometry lead lives that are any more fulfilled or intelligent than those who are not. And there are lots of good free courses online (e.g. from the Khan Academy) that will get you quickly up to speed if and when you need it. (If you are not a teacher, when was the last time you needed, in your real life, to solve a quadratic equation? Or recall, without recourse to your iPad, the capital city of Mongolia? Or explain the difference between a terminal and a medial moraine, or a breve and a minim?)
The question of what is really worth knowing, in the Google age, is wide open, and one we will return to in
Chapter 4
.

If school is meant to offer young people a powerful preparation for a successful life (and not just for university), why isn't it more
like
real life? The way learning is organised in schools seems, in many respects, very different from, or even at odds with, the experience of learning that people have in their homes, workplaces, playgroups, sports and athletic clubs, online chatrooms and meditation retreats or when watching gardening or cookery programmes on television.

Nearly 30 years ago, Professor Lauren Resnick, then president of the American Educational Research Association, gave a presidential address which was entitled, ‘Learning in school and out'.
17
She pinpointed, on the basis of a wide variety of research, some key ways in which learning in school frequently differed from learning in these out-of-school situations. First, real-world learning is often collaborative whereas learning in school has traditionally been predominantly solo. Even where schools do lots of group-work, come exam time everyone has to revert to individual pieces of work for which they alone can be held responsible. Educationalists are beginning to devise ways of assessing collaborative endeavours, but they are in their infancy as yet.

Second, assessment in school is usually based on the ability to explain, describe, analyse or compute something. It is based on products that mostly involve manipulating symbols on paper or screen. In real-world learning the hallmark of success is usually practical: did the baby get to sleep? Did the bridge stay steady when people walked across it? Did the painting get accepted for the show? Do people come back to the restaurant? In a music exam or a driving test, you may have to do a bit of theory, but the acid test is visible in the way you actually do something. Real-world learning is about getting things done; in school it is about generating ‘performances of understanding' for the sake of showing that you
can. People who are good at doing, but not very good at explaining, are massively handicapped in school by this difference.

Third, in the real world we learn because we want or need to – in order to achieve a goal that we ourselves consider worthwhile. Learning connects directly with the work or life situations in which we find ourselves. In school, by contrast, you are required to take on trust the idea that, someday, all this will make sense and turn out to be really useful – but not yet. And the timetable of what you are learning is dictated by someone else. The reason you are learning this now is because it is the next lesson in the teacher's scheme of work, not because you and your friends have stumbled on an interesting question that you feel motivated to pursue, or because your iPad suddenly won't connect to iTunes. So the motivation is quite different in school and out. And not all youngsters are willing or able to mobilise their full intelligence if they do not value what they are being asked to do. Many of them are mistakenly judged to be ‘less intelligent' because of this.

Fourth, learning in the real world is very often accomplished with a whole array of tools and resources that are marshalled and drawn upon as necessary. In the real world we are mostly ‘me plus': me plus my computer, me plus my iPhone, me plus all my notes and books, me plus all my contacts, me plus my mug of coffee. A plumber is completely hamstrung without her socket set and her mobile phone. When she meets an unfamiliar boiler and needs to call her contact in the parts department of the manufacturer, nobody would dream of calling that cheating. School traditionally tries to strip down learning so that it becomes the manipulation of words, numbers, chemical symbols or algebraic equations by a solitary mind.

Sugata Mitra, one of the most interesting and renowned educational thinkers in the world right now, has said that he could transform education with a single change: simply allow everyone to take their smartphone or their Wi-Fi-enabled tablet into the examination hall. Why create this artificial barrier? It's like taking Ronnie O'Sullivan's snooker cue away and saying, “Now show me how good you are.” (There's more about Mitra in
Chapters 4
and
7
.)

Fifth, real-world learning is often physical. It involves the body in a variety of ways. Cooking, hairdressing, caring for young children or old people, wiring an electric circuit and playing netball all involve bodily activities such as bending, kneading, touching, listening and smelling, as well as taking care of your implements and materials. In school, subjects assume importance in inverse proportion to the amount of bodily activity they involve. If you can stay clean and still while you are learning, that is good, so maths and English come out at the top of the pecking order. Traditionalists can't wait to introduce students to the pristine abstract worlds of subjunctive clauses and Pythagoras' theorem. History and geography are a bit messier. Art and music are pulled down the hierarchy by their essentially sensory natures. Media and business studies are tainted by association with the real worlds of television and commerce.

And down the bottom of the pecking order come dance, drama, design technology and PE. Cookery, dressmaking, woodwork and metalwork are so shamefully reminiscent of old-fashioned trades and crafts that they cannot be spoken of directly; they now inhabit a shadow world of food technology and resistant materials. Instead of learning how to bake Mary Berry's amazing tiramisu cake, you study ‘nutritional properties' and ‘packaging and labelling', the curriculum being designed to drag students back from the
ghastly brink of real physicality into the safe, clean – and, it has to said, often cheap – world of categories and issues. Youngsters who are best at thinking while they are doing tend to drift down this hierarchy of esteem, not because they are less able but because they find it difficult to master the peculiar trick of detaching cognition from action. It may be a worthwhile trick to master, but, because of the simplistic ‘folk psychology' that underpins much of education, students are not
helped
to do so.

Why are schools designed in this dysfunctional way? Because when they were being developed in the 18th and 19th centuries, they were built on a false view of the human mind. They aimed to develop a general-purpose, all-round educated person by making school a place separate from life where there were no
specific
goals to which learning could become attached. This meant knowledge and skills would be represented in children's heads in a generic, free-floating way, waiting to be ‘hooked' by any relevant need or circumstance that subsequently came along. School learning was made to be ‘off the job', so to speak, so that what was learned would be retrievable under all appropriate circumstances.

But sadly the mind doesn't work like that. Every experience we have is indexed in the neural memory store in terms of the context in which, and the purpose for which, it was learned. What was going on? Where was I? How was I feeling? What was I up to? Did it work well? Everything we learn is automatically tagged in terms of these markers. We need these tags to tell us when to retrieve something we know and activate it. So there is no off the job; wherever we
are, we are noticing our surroundings and our own priorities, and what we learn is registered and recorded in that context. School is definitely not off the job. It is not an absence of those cues and concerns; it is a very particular, and in many ways peculiar, constellation of cues and concerns. The miracle is that some of what we learn in school
does
stay with us and comes to mind when it is needed in the outside world. Sadly a huge amount of school learning does not.

This doesn't mean that we can't help learning to become gradually more generic or disembedded. We can. The point is that the broader relevance and utility of what you are learning has to be discovered. Transfer is also a learning job, and it is one often neglected by traditional teachers, carrying a naive theory of mind, who vaguely assume that if you have learned something ‘properly', if you were ‘paying attention', then transfer ought, magically, to happen. It doesn't. If you want your students to develop those more general-purpose learning skills and attitudes you have to work at it by, for example, varying the contexts and the tasks, and explicitly getting them to discover for themselves which of the habits and procedures they are developing apply when.

If your child is struggling at school it may well be because of the peculiar nature of school itself, not because they are ‘low ability' or ‘unmotivated'. These labels simply conceal all the deeper questions that need to be addressed. We hope that this discussion might help you to shift the conversations you are having with teachers on to a more productive plane.