Wednesday 10 December 2008

Education Forum Podcast No. 6

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.

Download mp3 (27:36) (128kb)

Monday 24 November 2008

SATS: rumours of a death greatly exaggerated?
- Mark Taylor

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.

Monday 27 October 2008

Alex Standish makes the case for Geography for its own sake

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.

Friday 17 October 2008

Education Forum Podcast No. 5

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.

Download mp3 (28:57) (128kb)

Friday 19 September 2008

Michele Ledda asks: with friends like these, who needs censors?

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.

Wednesday 16 July 2008

Education Forum Podcast No. 4

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.

Download mp3 (15:56) (128kb)

Thursday 26 June 2008

NY Salon event: 'You can't say that!'

Watch Dennis Hayes, Education Forum convenor and founder of Academics for Academic Freedom, speaking on academic freedom in New York:









Reviews of The Dangerous Rise of Therapeutic Education, by Katherine Ecclestone & Dennis Hayes

'Infantilised' students and staff rapped, Melanie Newman, Times Higher Education, 12 June 2008

Schools' therapy culture leaves children unable to cope, Laura Clout, The Daily Telegraph, 12 June 2008

Emphasis on emotions creates 'can't do' students, Alexandra Frean, The Times, 12 June 2008

Class therapy 'harming children', BBC News, 12 June 2008

Infantilised students unable to cope with life, book claims, Anthea Lipsett, Education Guardian, 12 June 2008

Childish recruits: Are we infantilising our children?, Personnel Today, 12 June 2008

The lessons in happiness that are making pupils miserable, London Lite, 12 June 2008

Are we breeding a new generation of infantilised students?, My Child, 12 June 2008

Lessons in happiness making children unhappy, Laura Clark, Daily Mail, 11 June 2008

The Dangerous Rise of Therapeutic Education, by Kathryn Ecclestone & Dennis Hayes is published on 14 July 2008. Routledge, £18.99p

Adults, not metal detectors, are what schools need, says Nicki Mason

Carrying a knife is never a good idea when not on a camping trip. Most children learn this easily at an early age outside school and often without discussing it. Circumstances lead them to discover it is good to be alive, and they begin to value their own and others’ lives. For the majority of schools therefore, knife crime is absolutely not a problem, and knives feature only on the long list of items not allowed in school, along with drugs, alcohol, fireworks, chewing gum and dangly earrings.

Not all children hear the message, however, and a small minority of schools do have to deal with incidents involving knives and the circumstances surrounding them. In my experience the young person who carries a weapon does it for their own 'protection' because they feel threatened. Few have given any consideration to the most likely outcome of a confrontation - that a person or group of people bigger and stronger than them take it and use it against them. Once this is brought to their attention by an adult it is often enough to change their behaviour on the spot.

Children are capable of reason. Introducing metal detectors is to abandon reason and to send the wrong messages:

  • A metal detector at the school gate says it is acceptable to carry a knife on the street.

  • A metal detector at the classroom door says it is acceptable to carry one in the corridor.

They do not teach that carrying a knife is never a good idea, and is likely to lead to crime or death. Metal detectors do not change behaviour. Inspirational and passionate teaching of subjects, together with consistent enforcement of clearly expressed rules and discussion of reason, does. Young people are guided by the adults around them. They are inspired by adults who take a genuine interest in their lives and opinions. Every young person needs at least one adult to take a genuine interest and give sensible advice. Many find that adult in a school.

An account of the June 2008 Education Forum discussion, School knife crime ‘overplayed’, by Hannah Richardson, is available on the BBC News website:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/7457616.stm

Wednesday 28 May 2008

Education Forum Podcast No. 3

The third EF Podcast is available to download now. Listen to Education Forum members Mark Taylor, Toby Marshall, Shirley Lawes and Dennis Hayes discussing the TLRP's 'Ten Commandments of Pedagogy' and other current education stories. Listen out for two new features - the educational 'Hero and Zero' of the month, and Tuck Shop, where the latest daft idea in education is exposed.

Download mp3 (26:29) (128kb)

Tuesday 27 May 2008

Education is not sustainable according to a new book reviewed here by Dennis Hayes

Austin Williams, director of the Future Cities Project, architect, illustrator, author, and host of the innovative and entertaining ‘Bookshop Barnies’ is something of a renaissance man. His latest book, The Enemies of Progress: The Dangers of Sustainability,* provides a defence of reason, truth and progress that the early humanists would be proud of; but it is no return to tradition. It is an almost unique attempt to reconstruct the drive for a new enlightenment in the twenty-first century. Its style is witty and ironic. Williams does irony very well. One academic described his book as a ‘polemic’. Intended as faint praise, it backfires. ‘Polemical’ books are the thing that academia fears most: books produced by intellectuals outside of universities that have something interesting to say rather than the unreadable research academics produce for the Research Assessment Exercise.

Williams, according to Philippe Legrain, has a ‘gift for lobbing well directed grenades’ and readers will enjoy his ironic explosion of the puffed-up and doom-mongering ideas of the irrational and hysterical individuals who issue quasi-religious edicts about how mankind is an excrescence on the planet, but won’t argue their case.

The enemies of progress that are intellectually coalescing around the reactionary, backward-looking notion of ‘sustainability’ are not just irrational individuals. The enemies of progress are ideas: localism, nihilism, pessimism, primitivism and misanthropy. These ideas spread self-doubt, confusion and fear. In Chapter 4 ‘The Indoctrinators’, Williams uses example after example to show how education about sustainability has become a matter of manipulating children’s minds by scaring them with stories of environmental devastation and destruction that cannot be questioned. The consequence is that ‘critical thinking has been redefined…around the ‘givens’ of sustainability and environmentalism’ (p 74). He agrees with Mick Hume in the claim that Education, Education, Education has been redefined as Indoctrination, Indoctrination, Indoctrination. Because of the sustainability agenda teachers are being transformed into indoctrinators, teaching truths that cannot be questioned.

No sooner was Williams’ book on the shelves than Ofsted issued a report on Schools and Sustainability** calling for all schools to be ‘sustainable’ by 2020. They bemoaned the fact that ‘Work on sustainability tended to be piecemeal and uncoordinated….rather than being an essential part of the curriculum.’ What was needed was a ‘whole-school approach’. There is no question here of a critical – that is educational - approach. Ofsted’s chief inspector, Christine Gilbert, has an entirely instrumental attitude to the question, praising teachers who use ‘stimulating discussion and activities to engage pupils in issues relating to sustainable development’. No more critical thinking then. Gilbert is right though, too many teachers are more concerned with giving children some subject knowledge and teaching them how to think critically and don’t see their job as brainwashing future generations. They remain, for the moment, educators.

Where Williams is wrong is in seeing the transformation of education into indoctrination as ‘underhand’. If this is ‘underhand’, it is hard see what an open-handed approach would be.

In summary, Williams is in favour of the car, roads, cities, planes, travelling as far as you want on holiday, eating food flown in from all over the world and enjoying it out of season (so **** off, Gordon Ramsey). He is for allowing the unqualified development of China, India and the Third World. He wants us to reach for the stars rather than the recycling bin.

Engaging children in stimulating and critical discussion about the human potential these things express would be a start on really defending standards in education. A copy of this book should be sent to every school in the UK. What about that, Christine?


*Austin Williams’s The Enemies of Progress: The Dangers of Sustainability, is published by Societas/imprint academic, Price £8.95, May 2008

**Ofsted’s Report Schools and Sustainability: A Climate for Change, was published on 21 May 2008

Asking ‘Where are the Great Minds?’ makes us all emotional, argues Mark Taylor

It might be expected that, given the state of educational policies today, one would jump at the chance to join in further criticism of the ‘factory system’ that is so regularly complained about. When Anthony Seldon, Master of Wellington College, asked ‘Where are the great minds that have influenced the test-ridden system that passes for education today?’ * it seemed like just such an opportunity.

Seldon thinks that there are new ‘great minds’ with ‘great ideas’ that should be given more attention than the ‘arcane discourses’ of educational philosophers and dull exam-focused bureaucrats. They are: David Hargreaves (‘personalised learning’), David Hopkins (‘system leadership’); Paul Black and Dylan Wiliam (‘assessment for learning’); Ken Robinson (‘creativity’); Tony Buzan (‘spiritual intelligence’ and ‘mind maps’); Martin Seligman (‘well-being’, ‘resilience’); Arthur Costa (‘habits of mind’); and Howard Gardner (‘multiple intelligences’ and ‘five minds’).

Despite Seldon’s assertion, one would have to be in a very isolated school today not to have heard of the ideas of personalised learning, emotional intelligence, multiple intelligences or assessment for learning. They are very much in the educational mainstream. It is such ‘great minds’ that have actually created the current confusion and anti-intellectual atmosphere in schools.

All the ideas of these ‘great minds’ can all be summarised in two sentences. First, they are against the idea of the collective transmission of accumulated human knowledge to individuals in the form of subjects. Second, they are for the redefinition of ‘intelligence’ in the form of personal feelings and experiences. The unhappy consequence is a refusal to teach children in a systematic and disciplined manner.

In supporting these ‘great minds’ in their promotion of psychological and other processes, dispositions and states of being, instead of an education through subjects, Seldon performs an educational disservice to pupils who are desperate to get the high quality knowledge of the world on offer in many of Britain’s private schools like Wellington.

Seldon complains of pygmies getting in the way of the giants he wants to see dominating schools. No comment.


*Anthony Seldon ‘Influence of the giants simply isn't big enough’, TES, 2 May 2008

Mark Taylor explains why one distinguished educational thinker is talking ‘Pollocks’ about educational change

In the first of a new series of talks run by the Learning Skills Foundation*, David Hargreaves, research director of the Specialist Schools Trust and ‘personalisation’ guru, outlined his latest thoughts on education. Beginning with a re-statement of his assessment of the problems of the 19th century ‘factory system’ we have inherited, and the need for more customised education, his focus was on how ‘personalised learning’ now required ‘system redesign’ as a necessary stage in transformation. What is system redesign? Hargreaves sees it as a ‘complex fusion’ of mass customisation and peer
production through innovation networks based on the ‘co-construction’ of learning by previously distinct sectors of teachers and pupils. This ‘system redesign’, he argues, points to five significant consequences for schools. First, a merging of primary and secondary sectors; second, the development of more permeable year groups in a shift away from age-related learning; third, the disappearance of the Key Stage system of assessment by 2020; fourth, the introduction of competence based school days; fifth, the collapse of the traditional division between schools and workplaces and the restructuring of larger schools into smaller ‘home units’.


The talk centred on the development of the internet as an example of the new type of co-constructed learning that is leaving traditional teaching behind. For Hargreaves, educationalists who want to reap the harvest of innovation must capture the tendency by young people to create their own systems. He celebrates not just ‘student voice’, but goes ‘beyond’ it in order to create ‘student leaders’ in every school. The ultimate result will be a system of ‘flatter leadership’ distinct from the traditional ‘hub and spoke’ school model.


Perceiving these changes as liberating, Hargreaves next considered who will lead them and run tomorrow’s schools. It is ‘Generation Y’, otherwise known as anyone born after 1980, or anyone familiar with blogging or Facebook rather than television. In short, the old hierarchical leadership model of teachers and students co-ordinated by government must be replaced by an unco-ordinated one based on babyboomers, Generation X and Generation Y which is left alone by government. And how will it all finally look? Hargreaves asks us to picture a ‘Jackson Pollock painting’ more than a traditional organisational flow.



Hargreaves develops a useful picture of where the ‘system’ may be going – or unravelling. However, there are many problems with his analysis. The first concerns his own refusal to admit responsibility for the changes he describes. As an architect of the specialist school system, he is remarkably unwilling to see how much current ‘innovation’ derives from his own attack on the traditional system. He lacks awareness of how far the ‘factory system’ has already become the future. The fact that that the education system is still considered to be failing reflects badly on him and not just on the 19th century. Secondly, the key feature of the current system is not, as he thinks, internet-led innovation. Rather, it is the absence of confidence in intellectual authority. The failure of educators to take responsibility for defending subjects as creative triumphs of intellectual development is seen by Hargreaves as evidence of innovation. But it is not. It is merely a readjustment to the collapse of intellectual authority he caricatures as a factory system.



The resulting ‘anti-system’ could end up fomenting a privatised form of charismatic or revelatory leadership by the young instead of defending public knowledge through the impersonal intellectual leadership of traditional subjects. This will leave many schools without a disciplined intellectual core around which to teach the truth as best we know it and to show that every child has a personal stake in universal knowledge. And the unquestionably brilliant potential of the internet may be reduced to little more than cobbled together celebrations of folk wisdom. No educator should have a problem with enabling the young to become leaders or to use new technology, but not at the expense of the disciplined subject knowledge they will require to do so properly – and properly creatively.



Many of Hargreaves’ ‘insights’ are attempts to rationalise and romanticise the breakdown of traditional subject-based education and the failure to replace it with anything of substance - except ‘the internet’. But he has failed to perform the central task of any educator, that is, to offer a system that enables children to judge and think critically through their subject knowledge about the world they are growing up in.



*David Hargreaves: Who runs schools and who should run schools? Learning Skills Foundation Lecture, April 23 2008. http://www.learningskillsfoundation.com/

Friday 11 April 2008

Michele Ledda thinks Nintendo in the classroom is a no brainer

A new scheme involving 900 children across 16 schools in Scotland aims to test the effectiveness of Dr Kawashima’s More Brain Training computer games in improving pupils’ behaviour, concentration and achievement in maths tests. The games involve a number of mathematical, linguistic and other problem-solving activities ‘designed to exercise the brain by increasing blood flow to the pre-frontal cortex.’

The scheme follows a small trial carried out by Derek Robertson, of Learning and Teaching Scotland, the authority responsible for curriculum development. Thirty pupils were made to play More Brain Training games on the hand-held Nintendo console for 15-20 minutes every day for ten weeks before the start of the lessons. They were given maths tests before and after the trial, which showed a 10% improvement.

Robertson is very enthusiastic about the scheme. "Game-based learning can provide dynamic and culturally relevant contexts that engage, motivate and challenge today’s young learner," he told the Times.

Anything that helps children learn should be welcomed, but there is a problem. Whatever the scientific merits of the trials - and Robertson has been honest about the limitations of his first experiment - we cannot motivate pupils to study mathematics through a scientific or technological fix.

In 2006, former education secretary Alan Johnson had great hopes for an experiment carried out in County Durham* which would test the effectiveness of fish oil supplements in boosting 'youngsters' brainpower and improve behaviour in the classroom.' Johnson told the Sunday Times: "The government is committed to ensuring that children are provided with healthy food and the nutrients they require during the school day, not just to aid their physical health but to ensure they can study hard and behave well." Now we have an attempt to use the therapeutic and motivational effect of computer games to achieve the same goals.

The problem of pupils' motivation and behaviour does not lie in the brains of modern children, which are not physiologically different from those of their ancestors. Nor does it lie in the impact that modern technology has on children's lifestyle and 'culture' (Robertson calls the current generation of school pupils 'digital natives').

The so-called 'problem of motivation' is an expression of an entirely adult problem that keeps being displaced onto children.

It is a problem of authority, of not knowing what to do. Teachers do not think they have the authority anymore to tell children that it is important to learn maths, English, history, or any other subject. They no find it increasingly difficult to define what is good for their charges and to decide, among other things, what an educated citizen should know by the age of eighteen.

The crisis of authority is not peculiar to teachers. It affects all adults in positions of authority, such as parents, teachers, doctors and, perhaps most of all, politicians, including those who devise education policies.

In this context, trying to borrow the authority of science or technology as a substitute for adult judgment can only exacerbate the problem, by showing pupils that we don’t really believe in knowledge and we are trying to piggyback maths onto computer games. A moral problem cannot be solved by a technological fix. We should instead devise a human-centred solution. We need teachers to regain control of teaching and believe both in the importance of their discipline and in the ability of their pupils.

Children can only be motivated if they see that adults have the confidence and authority to tell them what it is they need to know.

For details of the Durham experiment, and more, listen to BBC Radio 4's Today programme.

Defending abstract knowledge does not make you an epistemological dinosaur argues Mark Taylor

In an interesting debate at the Royal Society of Arts*, sociologist Michael Young made a rarely heard point, namely that the teaching of knowledge matters. More importantly, he pointed out that knowledge is neglected because policymakers assume that there is no connection between knowledge and the needs of the economy. In consequence, the educational system has become a vehicle for a kind of mass vocationalism, based on targets, league tables and outcomes, which have changed the character of schools into places that are no longer distinctive for attempting to give children knowledge that they cannot acquire elsewhere.

Young cautioned against assuming, in response to this change, that schools are democracies or that they should be used to resolve authority issues in the wider society. To understand the place of knowledge in schools today we need to understand that knowledge is both context-dependent and context-independent. With that distinction in mind, he counselled against conflating these two aspects of knowledge in schools, and noted that context-independent knowledge - in the form of abstract ideas - must sometimes be taught counter to the experience of the child. Indeed, the teacher must impose it on the child.

With arguments like these Young comes across as an epistemological dinosaur - if a welcome one - in the present climate of anti-intellectual governmental and academic approaches to education. These approaches were partly expressed in the response of Geoff Stanton. Stanton, in seeking a defence for the anti-knowledge shift observed by Young, claimed that vocational pedagogy is ‘more complex’ than its academic equivalent. It appears that the more the curriculum loses its previous connection (however poorly taught) with academic subjects, the more observers like Stanton claim that new methods are more sophisticated than previous ones. But Stanton’s defence really only justified the replacement of properly examined academic knowledge with the messy and ever-growing range of self-assessed ‘subjects’ currently being thrown at schools. In this sense, Young is indeed right that schools are losing their previously distinctive educational place in society and, with ‘subjects’ as diverse as ‘parenting’, ‘family learning’, ‘happiness’ or ‘health and beauty’, it is increasingly hard to know where school begins and family ends. Clearly, therefore, vocational pedagogy conflates educational process and content and mystifies the crucial fact that all schools ought to provide a rigorous education in academic subjects which - given that all topics of study have underlying academic principles - would then enable progression to their vocational applications to be made.

So has Young got it right in defending knowledge? Not quite. In focusing so much on knowledge per se, as opposed to subject knowledge of different academic disciplines, Young ends up debating the knowledge content of almost everything, rather than defending the distinctive subject content of a general academic education. Philosophically, this may be inevitable, but pedagogically it is problematic, because it allows the acceptance of the potential ‘subject’ in every newly assessed form of modern behaviour. So, instead of challenging the current approaches to education as he would wish, he ironically opens the theoretical door towards a defence of them. For example, in saying that the knowledge base of beauty therapy must be taught as seriously as that of physics and chemistry, he implicitly weakens a defence of an academic curriculum for all pupils, and ends up in the thick of the current contorted ‘debates’ about how many new undisciplined experiences can be thrown into the curriculum to make it ‘relevant’ to the 21st century. After all, through Every Child Matters, the government has transformed ‘enjoyment’, ‘engagement’, ‘health’ and ‘happiness’ into forms of knowledge which they seem to think can be measured. Indeed, the government appears to have a more radical approach to knowledge than some of the social scientists Young criticises.

Although knowledge should be defended in the form of the subjects that explain the world to us, if it is defended at too abstract a level, it parrots in the secondary sector the post-modern confusion evident at university level. The result is the increasing elevation of cross-curricular thematic learning and experiences above the teaching and applying of the core principles of individual academic subjects. Pupils who learn in this way are in danger of turning up at university intellectually confused and lacking in the real subject knowledge they need to challenge their tutors. This is the opposite of what Young intended. He forgot that even the defence of knowledge is context-dependent.

*What are schools for? A debate between Michael Young and Geoff Stanton, RSA, 30 January 2008: http://www.rsa.org.uk/events/detail.asp?eventID=2451

'Being the best' for children means being an educated, and not a just a trained, teacher says Dennis Hayes

There is a new OfSTED consultation paper on improving inspection of Initial Teacher Education (ITE) which is an odd title as the TDA – the Training and Development Agency for Schools that funds what OfSTED inspects – only talks of Initial Teacher Training (ITT). Some university departments talk without hesitation about training teachers while others cling to the word ‘education’ in the titles of their programmes. One national body representing university departments of education calls itself the Universities' Council for the Education of Teachers (UCET). Another body representing the unions and professional associations calls itself the Standing Committee for the Education and Training of Teachers (SCETT). So are today’s teachers educated or trained? Before anyone gives the easy answer that induction into a profession requires both education and training, let me make a clear distinction between the two.

Teacher Education can be easily distinguished from Teacher Training. Teacher education is built around the study of ‘educational theory’ or what the disciplines – psychology, philosophy, sociology, history – tell us about education. Educational theory in this sense is essential to pedagogical and professional understanding. Teacher Training – as devised and required by the TDA - constructs initial professional development around the achievement of competencies or standards and has often only fashionable and faddish notions such as ‘learning styles’ or ‘multiple intelligences’ as ‘theoretical’ content. Structuring any course around ‘objectives’, whether you call them ‘competencies’ or broad ‘standards’, transforms that course into training.

What teachers get today is this training and, as if to make the implications of this clear, the government has even removed ‘education’ from the titles of the government department dealing with schools for the first time since 1870.*

But what children deserve are teachers who are educated. New teachers’ obsession with practical matters and ‘getting the buggers to behave’ is the result of the philistinism of ‘teacher training’. What else is becoming a teacher about when nothing theoretical appears on the PGCE curriculum?

Many teacher trainers – let’s use the correct term - might believe that the government’s new proposals for a master’s level qualification for all teachers might signal a change of direction**. A master’s level qualification taken over a period of time might enable a generation of teachers to study theory and be educated as professionals. This was always the sanguine intention of those who wanted a longer period of initial professional development. What teachers will get is a Master’s degree in Teaching and Learning (MTL). Much of the detail, beyond the title of the award, is not worked out but it will not be a Master’s degree in education. It looks like an extended set of competencies is going to be required.

I am not collapsing, unlike some of my colleagues in university- and college- based teacher training, into the philosophical fantasy of nominalism – the idea that if we give something the name ‘education’ it will become a reality. The real task is not changing what things are called, but it is to bring back teacher education. That is why getting into an abstract debate about what practical ‘pedagogy’ teachers need to supplement theory avoids the main problem when attempting to 'be the best'. All teacher training is now entirely practical and it’s just not good enough for our children. The message to the children's secretary is to be the best, to be the ‘Education Secretary’, and put the education back in to preparation for teaching and into our schools.

*The Manifesto Club petition to the PM to put ‘education’ back in the titles of government departments takes up this issue. Read about it here, and sign it here.

**The DCSF document 'Being the best for our children: releasing talent for teaching and learning', was published in March 2008. Read it here.

Friday 29 February 2008

Education Forum Podcast - No. 2

The second in a series of post-forum podcasts is available to download now. Listen to Education Forum members Mark Taylor, Toby Marshall, David Perks, Dennis Hayes and Shirley Lawes discussing family learning and other current education stories.

Download mp3 (28:05) (128kb)

Friday 1 February 2008

Education Forum Podcasts

The first in a series of post-forum podcasts is available on the Education Forum Section of the Institute of Ideas website. Listen to Education Forum members Mark Taylor, Toby Marshall, Dennis Hayes and Dave Perks discussing the Children's Plan and several current news items.

Download mp3 (30:40 mins) (128kb)

Thursday 31 January 2008

Mark Taylor thinks that the Children’s Plan is a contemporary 'Minor Carta'

Few people appear to have realised the real significance of the name change that occurred when Ed Balls became Secretary of State on 28 June 2007, and promptly created the Department for Children, Schools and the Family to replace the Department for Education and Skills. However, the truth really is in the title: there is no desire to educate the people anymore. Instead, after 10 years in power, the Children’s Plan exposes the intellectual wasteland at the heart of Labour’s education policies.

Balls claims that the plan responds to the desire for more support, and observes that children’s needs must come before traditional institutional structures (although he wants schools at the centre of the newly unstructured structure). The plan wants Britain to be the best place in the world to grow up by 2020, but does not explain how the necessary comparison will be developed with other countries to work out whether this has been achieved.

The plan’s chapters attempt to rationalise – but not really order – the multifarious existing policies which already affect children, from registered childcare to 20 mph traffic zones, to obesity checks, parenting advisers, softer skills, Surestart, testing and zero carbon schools. A unifying theme of the plan is ‘partnership with parents’ and a ‘new relationship’ between schools and parents based on a personal tutor for every child. One conceptual innovation serves to cohere this rationalisation: ‘social pedagogy’, a term I expect we will be hearing more of in the next few years. Unfortunately, it appears, like personalisation, to express the collapse of the intellectual relationship between government and people and its replacement with a behavioural one.

Perhaps this is too harsh a judgement on the government? Surely, there is still education in the plan? Certainly, the case is made for a Master’s qualification for all teachers. But will it make them masters of teaching subjects or masters of diagnosing stages of intervention? And what will they teach if, as the plan states, the curriculum is being built around ‘assessment to identify support and intervention’? Similarly, a system based on ‘stage not age’ testing (another idea in the plan) will ultimately lead to more testing, not less, and people may eventually forget what they are supposed to be testing for (also see my BOI 2007 essay on exams on the website). And will it really be possible for children to think for themselves when involved in so many needs assessments to gauge the required support? And won’t the multiplication of adults in supporting roles simply confuse everyone about the source of intellectual authority in the classroom? In any case, social pedagogy suggests a shift in teacher training away from the theory of knowledge about the world and towards a knowledge of theories about the child. The curriculum, negatively in my view, will therefore tend to focus more on internally referenced psychological limits than externally referenced epistemology. The result may be to further isolate teachers who really want to teach their subjects, and possibly to indoctrinate others in lowering their intellectual expectations. If the plan succeeds, teachers may eventually be seen as just another of the ‘key workers’ who support children. And the voluntary parent-teacher association may become the compulsory parent-state association.

The plan was created from a ‘consultancy’ with adults and children, as well as the convening of three ‘expert’ groups for age groups 0-7, 8-13 and 14-19. With such coverage, the impression can be given that the plan is coherent, and that the public have spontaneously ‘demanded’ support. However, this is far from the case, and the question really has to be asked about whether this is a plan at all, as opposed to an attempt by Ed Balls to understand his remit. The expert groups based their findings around a superficially enlightened desire to offer ‘opportunity’ rather than ‘deficit’ models of childhood. This adds up to less than the sum of its parts, however, because the groups all replace the intellectual liberation potentially offered by academic subjects by stages of childhood. Thus, they are experts on everything but education, and the only debate within their findings is intra-psychological (about when to intervene), rather than educational (about what to teach and when to let go). These reports therefore legitimise the shift expressed in the main plan from the idea of education in academic subjects to intervention in the lives of diminished subjects. References in the main plan to how it conforms to UN articles on the ‘right to an education’ cannot hide the fact that this only means - a more evasive idea - personal development.

In short, a new ‘care elite’ is institutionalising itself in government, more through imaginative default elsewhere than the power of their own ideas. Their increasingly confident educational and political use of the language of support and parenting obscures the truth that people who have become successful principally for social reasons are trying to convince others that success is only rooted in the personal sphere – as long as the latter are supported by the former. This represents a morally dubious conflation of care and authority over both children and adults. Seen this way, the Children’s Plan, in a Runnymede moment, is a contemporary 'Minor Carta'. The question remains whether any children, and that appears to be all of us these days, will really want to be partners in such a diminished view of education, government – and ourselves.

The full text and the Executive Summary can be found at the DfES website (pdf).

Mark Taylor’s 'Battle in Print' essay, 'The debate over examinations is little more than a War of the Poses', can be found at the Battle of Ideas.

Friday 4 January 2008

Lynn Erler argues that educators need to know about neuroscience to avoid ‘neuro-myths’

The Teaching and Learning Research Programme (TLRP) is a research initiative funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC), running from 2000-2011 and supporting to date over 65 education research projects. The TLRP commissioned a review, which appeared in 2007, of neuroscientific findings considered to be of relevance to education and educators. The review was carried out by UK-based researchers Uta Frith and Sarah-Jayne Blakemore and was followed up by a TLRP seminar series called “Collaborative Frameworks in Neuroscience and Education”. These moves mirror concerns that are world-wide, according to the OECD, over the infiltration into formal education of scientific developments that can alter learners’ thinking and activities in the classroom. In the US, for instance, schools use medications for hard-to-control and difficult-to-teach children.

The short pamphlet, Neuroscience and Education: Issues and Opportunities is based on the Frith/Blakemore review and the TLRP seminar series. It is an attempt by specialists to present an idea of the impact, breadth and influence on education of neuroscience-related issues to non-specialists (educationalists, the public in general) in an accessible way. The contributions are from researchers in neuroscience and psychology, and include 98 references to science publications that are already impacting on developments in education-related industries. Some publications present some clear conceptual models that are useful and can be thought-provoking to people involved in teaching and learning, particularly school-based education.

The 28 pages of the pamphlet contain succinctly presented information about the brain, brain development and brain “care” including neuro-myths, developmental disorders of dyslexia, dyscalculia and ADHD which have supplied the principal thrusts of neuroscience research and consequent alleviation projects and products, explanations of why “brain-based” education programmes may help learners be more alert in the classroom but can be classified as neuro-myths that have little or no scientific basis. “Issues on the Horizon” that cross between neuroscience and education are then addressed in the final section. Scientists have been appalled at what has been done with snippets from ‘scientific’ reports and are looking at the future and have issued here a report that informs but also warns and admonishes for collaboration between science and education to ensure “careful educational and scientific scrutiny at all stages” (p. 24), of what is already possible in the classroom in terms of tracking and controlling brain functioning.

Neuroscientific research findings have been and will continue to inform aspects of education, particularly in areas of disability and learning impairment. However, there have been other “spin-offs” identified by Frith and Blakemore (2000) as neuro-myths, which have filtered into UK schools as commercial “brain-based” programmes. The reader is put straight about several such programmes that “too often do not survive scientific scrutiny” (p. 15). For example while a conceptualisation of “learning preferences [styles]” may be of value in encouraging teachers to use “a full range of forms and different media” for learning materials, the “existing research does not support labelling children” (ibid.)

The document concludes with two strands:

  1. What is already, and will shortly be available from neuroscience in the realm of cognitive enhancers (e.g. Ritalin and drugs for Alzheimers are used by enterprising student who hope for higher exam results), and the use of neurofeedback to increase and improve productivity such as carried out on students at the Royal College of Music.
  2. The limits of neuroscience, which has until now only been able to focus on the individual and which has a long way to go in conjunction with many other disciplines - psychology, social sciences, education - to be able to provide holistic improvements in learning.

The authors of the document wish for collaboration between neuroscience and education to conceptualise frameworks for working together to scrutinise the transfer of concepts between neuroscience and education, to avoid future repetitions of “popular ideas about the brain [that] have flourished without check and are impacting upon teaching and learning already” (p. 24) without scientific and educational evaluation. While brain gym might be considered innocuous and in fact a support for being alert in the classroom, more insidious enhancement mechanisms are already available and are being used, not to mention future developments, which are sure to be said to emerge from “ science”. The pamphlet is an attempt by scientists to inform educationalists and to urge them to action: to become informed and together with scientists to inform, and not to leave developments to the government to regulate.

Just how the collaboration across neuroscience and education is going to take place is not ventured in this document, which is a huge detriment. Clearly an exchange across disciplines must be undertaken and a response from the educational community is in order. To be able to enter into a dialogue and to influence future policies at all levels, however, educationalists need themselves to propose a clear conceptualisation of what it means to be human, what it means to learn with dignity and to be respected for human difference.

Neuroscience and Education: Issues and Opportunities was launched at Portcullis House, Westminster on 15 May 2007.

The pamphlet is available as a pdf: http://www.tlrp.org/pub/documents/Neuroscience%20Commentary%20FINAL.pdf