Education revolution anyone?

The fixes are many - smaller class sizes and more money being the most notoriously useless. Better school buildings, and better equipped libraries (maybe with gyms and piped music …) are also niceties that promise an edge to something already going well. But if it’s not going well?

So what might be more helpful? Highly trained teachers look like a good idea. And teachers who care most about content mastery are likely to be considerably better than teachers who have been required to prioritise generalist classroom management skills. Teaching “methods” should be the cream on the cake, but one gets sick on an exclusive diet of cream without cake.

Kevin Rudd seems to think that a computer on every child’s lap will fix a lot. Certainly the children, and probably their parents, will be happy about getting a free computer. So, no doubt, it will get support. Will it help all children become high achievers? Probably not. (Mark Latham’s unfortunate fixation on buying three books for every baby was possibly more promising, if given a tweak here and there.)

On the “early learning” front, Kevin Rudd has done his homework better than Latham ever did. His 15 hours of pre-school per week for every four-year-old is a significant structural change. It could improve school prospects for the following generations of children. Its greatest weakness, however, is that it depends on the current system to generate space, staff and curriculum. It will take years to be institutionalised, and the process of institutionalisation will automatically take the teeth out of it anyway. (We have already had Allen Luke from Queensland in January this year going in to bat for “whole language”, thus proving there is some truth in what everyone says about “ed schools” (i.e. university faculties of education) being bastions of eduthink and the source of most educational problems around the country.)

So - how about stopping the search for a fix, and doing a little meditation on the topic of a good society and what it takes to create one.

Those who have identified John Dewey’s legacy of “progressivism” (“child-centred” or “constructivist” approaches to education) as the root source of educational malaise are on the way to facing up to the real problem.

What we are looking for is Blake’s worm in the heart of the rose. There is no doubt but that progressivist eduspeak sounds beautiful, smells beautiful, and looks good on the table. The children are “enjoying” school, and “having fun” and sometimes actually learning a few things. They are “owning” the topics they are “working on”, they are “taking responsibility” for understanding the various bits of the universe of created and uncreated things they are contemplating. They are not in crowded classrooms chanting the times table in front of a teacher who wields a ruler and barks at them.

Sometimes of course, and some people think all too often, the children are lost, don’t know what they are supposed to be doing, get non-committal answers to questions they ask the teacher, and do their “assignments” in a state of profound alienation. What should be an excited and exciting exploration of a new topic area all too often becomes a chore, a task set to be completed by a given date. Those who are more capable of grasping what needs to be done (the “upper” end of the ability curve) might not look lost, but frequently are just as alienated - feeling like monkeys trained to perform tricks. They hand in work, get good marks, and forget the subject matter of an assignment, reckoning it was good if they learned through it how to better use the web as a research tool, or found a better way to build a bibliography.

My father once tossed off the thought that if the pupil hasn’t learnt, then the teacher hasn’t taught. But under progressivist pedagogies teachers aren’t supposed to teach - they are specifically told that they should abandon completely the role of “sage on a stage”, and instead be a “guide on the side” - the much over-hyped “facilitator”.

Ten years ago, on a European holiday, I made a point of visiting Vienna, so that I could go and see the house of Sigmund Freud. One of his journals was left open on a table for the visitors (pilgrims) to read. So I read. And lo! The topic of the paragraph in the middle of the page was what he remembered from his schooling. Well! It turned out that all he remembered with any clarity were his teachers. And he didn’t remember what they taught him only their personalities!

If Freud’s account is a clue to the socio-psychological dynamics of classrooms, then what on earth are we trying to do by telling teachers to be facilitators, utterly nondescript nothings with whom the children have no personal connection - while they concentrate their attention on the “task in hand”, that is to say, whatever the current topic they have selected or been assigned for study.

In India, the aspiring student (in any religious arena at least) is told, first choose your guru. Without a guru you can go nowhere and learn nothing of value.

So here is a suggestion. Everyone recruited into teaching as a career, first, should have curriculum content mastery at an advanced level, and second, and equally important, should have at the least the potential to develop, or already be in possession of a degree of flamboyance to their personality, which is likely to catch and keep children’s attention. This, by the way, does not involve wielding a ruler or barking at them. It may well centre around the kinds of interactive teaching that Grover Whitehurst describes as the best way to read to (with) children - which he names as “dialogic reading”. But it is in no way child-centred. It assumes that the child wants to grow up, wants to learn everything that helpful, significant, admired and respected olders can teach them, show them, explain to them, or inspire them to research further for themselves.

Mr Chips and Miss Dove, along with Diane Ravitch and ED Hirsch, have been screened out of the reading lists of student teachers. They should be placed centre stage as “core readings” for student teachers. So, that’s a practical, and easily implemented idea!

As an idea, it raises the whole issue of authority, a much vexed question in modern western society. Let me say clearly, it is my view that any teacher must have authority to be in any way capable of teaching anybody anything. Students rarely develop an enthusiasm for independent study (the sine qua non of the portfolio/project/assignment system) unless an obviously well-informed teacher has a cultivated mind that both provokes emulation and generates teasing questions that get under a student’s intellectual skin.

There are two sides to authority - positive and negative. The negative exercise of authority is usually perceived as (an abuse of) “power”. Sociologists (and historians and philosophers) are accustomed to distinguishing between power and authority, preferencing authority as superior in every respect to raw (brute) power. Sometimes they go together. Alexander the Great and Napoleon possibly possessed power AND authority. But authority is best sourced in respected knowledge and experience, as well as the power to achieve identified and substantive goals other than beating up on lesser mortals. (However, it is necessary to admit that one small degree of raw power is essential for any teacher in any classroom, and that is the power to remove disruptive students. This should not be punitive. But the student who doesn’t want to be there shouldn’t be there. This means abandoning compulsory schooling …)

Let’s therefore remove compulsion from schooling, but make sure the returns on getting an education are commensurate with the effort involved. (The returns, by the way, need not necessarily be monetary. the returns could be in the arena of intellectual satisfaction and the sheer pleasure of skills acquisition.)

The current panic over falling enrolments in the higher reaches of tertiary education where compulsion no longer holds students in thrall, could well be an indication that our current education system no longer offers adequate returns for effort involved.

In South Australia Premier Rann has been staving off similar data emerging on secondary schooling by supporting ever longer years of compulsory attendance. Is he in hock to the teacher unions? Is he avoiding the need to deal with school leavers joining a highly under-performing labour market? Whatever - the results for education cannot help but be negative to start with, and increasingly negative as time passes.

So, in response to the question about how to organise a revolution in education, here is a good part of the answer - get highly trained well-resourced teachers in half-way decent classrooms in front of students who want to be there, and stop the nonsense that education should be child-centred with a forthright assertion of the high value of teacher-centredness.

As well, it is time, for reasons too numerous to discuss here, to re-introduce exams as a regular feature of completing a given segment of study.

So far, these are all ideas that have a long history, with proponents and so-called “reformers” clearly at logger-heads for decades, at least.

So I’d like to nominate a revolutionary strategy that is fairly universal in its appeal, once its virtues have been explained. The chief virtue of this strategy is to maximise the effectiveness of the lines of attack outlined above for the school years.

It does derive heavily from my personal endeavors over the last decade and a half. So it is disclosure time. I have a strong personal interest in teaching small children to read. It is in the light of this that you should assess my judgment that the best way to ensure you have eager students racing their way through the school years with bounding enthusiasm and manifest intellectual growth, is to teach them to read before they get to enter the precincts of any school. More precisely, you should teach them to read using the very old-fashioned (and now new again) techniques of synthetic phonics. (NB - this does not need wielding a ruler and barking either. The Aunt Sallies that the current establishment use to protect themselves from criticism are near legendary and almost entirely false.)

Because little children are able to learn “stuff” a lot earlier than they are comfortable leaving the protective wing of a parent or known and loved significant other, all early schooling should be in the presence of a parent who functions as a co-teacher.

If one were to combine providing children with early reading (and math) skills with schooling that was teacher-centred and content rich, one would have a recipe for explosive intellectual growth that would raise the levels of functional intelligence and cultural sophistication across the entire ability spectrum of the population.

It sounds so easy. Why don’t we do it? What is the greatest stumbling block to this educational revolution?

Here we have to go back for another look at the assumptions of progressivism, and the post-Enlightenment certainties that human beings reach their fullest potential as self-actualised “independent individuals” living out their days in an egalitarian universe of similar others.

This might be most usefully regarded as a HORIZONTALIST social theory. It works most obviously to ensure the equal incompetence of everyone, a dystopic utopia fast being implemented on a global scale. God help us all! Theodore Dalrymple’s reports from the wastelands of post imperial, post industrial England’s prison-bound drug-addicted young men may be regarded as data on this apocalyptic doom awaiting the world when full Anglicisation has taken place. (Please note that in modernising China’s Beijing capital, where speaking English may be assumed to have the greatest number of practitioners, that there is a boom in old folks nursing homes - aka dumping grounds - directly linked to the increasing numbers of “nuclear” - that is, stripped down - families in increasingly small apartments within which the old folks are supernumerary.)

So why don’t we reconsider the virtues of VERTICALIST social theory. In a verticalist society olders would care for youngers, youngers would respect olders, authority would be institutionalised in symbolic terms, and social and work roles would be linked. Parents would slip easily into high-investment parenting. Children would be nurtured. Excellence would be admired. Achievements would be acknowledged. Innovations would be plentiful.

Yes, there are quite a few more details needed to fill out this prescription. But if the central spine stays vertical, the details should not be too hard to specify.

And for a postscript thought - the Japanese are now apparently getting enthusiastic about enrolling their children in Indian schools, that they see as embodying intellectual virtues they think are slipping out of the Japanese system. Indian culture has long been typified by scholars as “hierarchical” and contrasted with western “egalitarianism”. These terms must be linked to “verticalist” and “horizontalist”, but this is a new day, and needs new terminology to avoid the baggage of the old.