Many members of the Institute of Ideas Education Forum are experts in a variety of educational fields. Here we are encouraging the writing of opinion pieces relating to recent policy reports or publications that aim to influence policy. The views of forum members may not necessarily be those of the Institute of Ideas, but are original and challenging.
If you would like to comment on a new report, please email education (replace _at_ with @). Potential contributors should note that opinion pieces should be no more than 500 words long and are peer reviewed. They do not necessarily represent the views of the IoI but should reflect what the Institute stands for (click here for details.)
The sixth EF Podcast is available to download now. Listen to Education Forum members Shirley Lawes, Dennis Hayes, Toby Marshall, Mark Taylor and David Perks discuss a range of educational issues.
For many observers, the scrapping of Key Stage 3 SATS for 14 year olds by Education Secretary Ed Balls finally ends the agony for a generation of stressed out and anxious parents, teachers, unions, academics, educational psychologists, government ministers – and of course children. A divorce even more widely predicted than the one between Madonna and Guy Ritchie has now taken place: the government and SATS have finally parted company. Moreover, government and opposition have united on the need for new and more enlightened forms of assessment pioneered by New York schools.
This simple educational parable, or a version of it, appears to be the common interpretation. But it bears a closer inspection.
Formally, according to Balls, Key Stage 2 tests remain in place for 11 year olds at the end of their primary school experience. However, many schools retest the children as they enter secondary school because Key Stage 2 tests are widely seen as unreliable and falsified. So, for many children, these tests never really existed in the first place.
Perhaps Balls is more accurate in regard to Key Stage 3? The immediate response of some teachers appears to be a genuine sigh of relief at their new autonomy. This indicates that there was some truth in the opinion that the SATS had become a caricature of real education, leading to various forms of ‘teaching to the test’. Still, a good teacher, the argument correctly went, could go beyond the tests if he or she wanted.
The starting point for other teachers concerns the way the minister conducts his business. To end these tests without notice might go down as decisive in a Westminster organic farmyard which does not currently know its capitalist egg from its socialist chicken. But it smacks of bad planning to teachers raised - admittedly unimaginatively - on a strict diet of aims and objectives. So Balls has failed in that regard as well.
However, interpretations that assume the tests were preventing genuine education or that Balls is simply an unprincipled opportunist only go so far. It is not even fair to labour the point that Balls is a bit odd, in a Midwich Cuckoos kind of way. These views all miss the wider context. Education has been massively reshaped in the last few years, and many previously intellectual aspirations for children have been subtly and not so subtly replaced by psychological and pedagogical tomfoolery.
Effectively, national subject examinations are being replaced by personal forms of self-assessment. SATS, being neither one nor the other, no longer fit in. But that is precisely the now pointless point. Education has been so transformed that psychological and social policy objectives such as personal development and community cohesion now constitute the heart of Ofsted inspection and school ‘self-evaluation’ criteria. In consequence, previously traditional subjects have been forced to adapt and make their subjects more ‘relevant’. And previously primary school type ‘subjects’ and ‘competences’ have arrived on the secondary school curriculum. This new educational landscape has come with its own ‘personalised’ assessment criteria which precludes any aspiration to a universal standard.
So have the SATS really gone? Far from it. Even an anti-education system requires some form of evidence of progress. SATS have actually mutated. Our children are currently studying for them in a process of generally continuing self-evaluation. Otherwise known as GCSEs.
At a recent conference of the Association of American Geographers in Boston I was intrigued by a session looking a common challenges faced by geography education in the US and UK. One of the first questions posed was “What is geography education for?” The panel of subject specialists each took their turn to answer the question: geography helps students to make a connection to other places and people around the world, it improves their conception of language, it helps them to relate to important contemporary issues like global warming, it improves their individual capabilities and it makes them better citizens. I was struck by how this discussion danced around from point to point without talking about the discipline of geography itself. So, I asked the panel, “Why do we need all these other reasons to account for geography’s place in the curriculum. Surely, the point of the subject is to learn geography because this has value itself?”
The response was quite remarkable. While I got some sympathetic support from some members of the audience, the panel seemed almost bemused by the suggestion. “But geography plays a role in all these other important areas of education today”, was the gist of their argument. It was as if they couldn’t see another reason for learning geography beyond instrumental aims. Never before has it been so clear to me that some educators no longer see subjects. As subjects like geography have been filled with extrinsic aims of global citizenship, environmental education, cultural tolerance, pre-vocational skills, key skills, etc, etc. over time these aims become the subject. Geographical topics might remain in the curriculum, but for some educators they have become a means to an aim which is extrinsic to the subject itself, rather than an end in and of itself.
Key to geography’s new-found instrumental purpose was the onset of globalization. Policy makers and some subject leaders looked to geography to provide young people with a sense of global connectivity, global perspectives or global citizenship (1). While it might sound like a great idea to national bias inherent to many twentieth century curricula with a truly cosmopolitan approach that cuts across cultural differences, unfortunately this is not what is being offered here. The ‘s’ at the end of global perspectives is all too significant. In general, developing global perspectives, or multiple perspectives, means respecting the contributions of other cultures, viewing one’s culture as an equal among others, and learning about global issues and viewing these from the perspective of others. In other words, its central purpose is not to educate students about the world, but rather to shape the values, attitudes and behaviours of young people. Therefore, global perspectives means respecting differences of viewpoint and culture, rather than evaluating and challenging them. This redefines education as a set of attitudes and values (such as acquiescence to difference) rather than an intellectual pursuit (the search for truth).
While young people should learn about the challenges and problems faced by different people around the globe, the problem with global issues in today’s geography curricula is that their aim is to promote a predetermined set of ethics rather than a genuine exploration of the issues facing humanity. Here, society’s problems have been relocated from the wider political realm to the internal psychology of students themselves. These so called ‘global ethics’ include respect for the environment, respect for cultural diversity, tolerance of other viewpoints, a concern for social justice and empathy towards those in need or different, many of which have become explicit curricula objectives. However, when socio-political values have been predetermined for young people this can only lead to values that are superficial and insincere. This personalised approach to learning about ‘global issues’ (what’s this got to do with me) inhibits the possibility for students to explore the real issues people face in their given locality, gain an understanding of their lives and maybe achieve genuine respect and empathy for them. Therefore, while the national liberal model of education sought to create (as well as influence) moral citizens, global citizenship undermines the moral self of young people, in that the state and professionals have taken responsibility for fundamental aspects of personality, such as values and emotional responses, away from the individual.
This transition in geography is what I examine in my recently published book. While there may well be extrinsic outcomes to learning geography, these will usually be an unintended consequence of the former, and should not be the aim of education. It is important for teachers to understand the difference between the two and where their professional responsibilities lie. The simple contention of this book that the job of geography teachers is geographical education, not political activism, saving the environment, building citizenship, training or something else. Geography is a discipline that deals with the science of space. Its foundational concepts include location, place, links between different places and regions. Through these concepts students learn to know where things are (location), understand different places (place), understand connections between different locations (links) and identify and comprehend spatial patterns (region). All of these are essential if young people are to grow up with a geographical perspective on the world.
Alex’s book, Global Perspectives in the Geography Curriculum: Reviewing the moral case for Geography by Alex Standish, £21.99, is available from Amazon (UK)
The book will also be on sale at the Battle of Ideas festival, London on 1&2 November 2008.
The fifth EF Podcast is available to download now. Listen to Education Forum members discuss Kathryn Ecclestone and Dennis Hayes' new book The Dangerous Rise of Therapeutic Education.
The censoring of Carol Ann Duffy’s poem ‘Education for Leisure’ is a disgrace, but so is the instrumental use of poetry. Poets, critics and educators should know better.
In the current controversy over Duffy’s poem Education for Leisure, censored by the same bureaucrats who had chosen it, it is hard to tell which is worse: the argument of the censors and their (few) supporters that discussing the poem could lead pupils to dangerous copycat behaviour; or that of its defenders, such as Michael Rosen,Francis Gilbert and Mark Lawson, that the poem is a wonderful opportunity to get kids to discuss such a topical issue as knife crime.
The ill-advised and panicked reaction of the examination board AQA to just three complaints - leading them to censor a poem that has been read for years by most GCSE students without controversy - is likely to backfire and show the country what kind of philistines are entrusted with the important task of shaping the English curriculum. Yet the arguments put forward by the defenders of the poem essentially mirror AQA’s reasons for banning it. Both represent a diminished, instrumental view of poetry and education.
AQA justified its decision with the need to strike a ‘difficult balance between encouraging young people to think critically about difficult but important topics and the need to do this in a way which is sensitive to social issues and public concern’. In other words, we must use poetry to discuss social issues, but we must ensure that the message is right for our easily-led and vulnerable teenagers and that the discussion is handled with extreme care by their guardians in the classroom. AQA clearly has a low opinion of the average pupil and teacher.
However, those who defend the poem only disagree with the censor about its message. Their implicit argument is that if the poem had been ‘dangerous’, AQA would have been right in banning it. Worse still, they think the poem should not be studied for its intrinsic merits, but used for an external purpose.
‘Of course we want children to be talking about knife crime, and poems like these are a terrific way of helping that happen,’ says Michael Rosen, the Children Laureate, while English teacher Francis Gilbert finds the poem ‘a marvellous springboard for a wider discussion about the causes of violent crime.’
Mark Lawson concedes that fiction is dangerous, as ‘any text can be lethally misunderstood’ if read outside the classroom, away from the watchful gaze of the teacher, but he thinks it can be a useful tool if the teacher, by challenging any ‘perverse interpretation,’ ensures that only the right message reaches her students.
Even Duffy’s literary agent, Peter Strauss was unable to say that ‘Education for Leisure’ is a great literary achievement, preferring to state that it carries the correct political message: ‘This poem is pro-education and anti-violence. It is not glorifying violence in any way,’ he told BBC Radio 4's iPM programme.
While the belief that poetry will instigate children to commit crimes is paranoid, its mirror image, that through the correct political message it will reform disaffected teenagers, is delusional. More importantly, this instrumental view of literature, which unfortunately is widespread in policymaking and educational circles, seriously demeans literature and education. In this discussion we seem to have forgotten what literature lessons should be about: literature.
Students of poetry should be free to discuss all sorts of issues and the socio-historical context, so that they can understand the meaning of the text. If they concentrate on studying poetry as something worth knowing for its own sake, children will indeed learn about the world, refine their moral sense, sharpen their analytical and linguistic skills, and expand their imagination, because this is the very stuff of poetry and education.
The fourth EF Podcast is available to download now. Listen to Education Forum members Toby Marshall, Mark Taylor and Dennis Hayes discussing the knife crime and schools. Also this month, the educational 'Hero and Zero' of the month and Tuck Shop, where the latest daft idea in education is exposed.
