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)

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 19^th 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 19^th 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/