Education: it's child's play

There have been several articles published in On Line Opinion recently on various aspects of education and the aim by the new Rudd Government to stage an “Education Revolution”; probably better described by an earlier contributor as an Education Renaissance. Where to start and what to teach are the critical issues for the future of the Australian population as it will be say, 30 years from now.

Three of us, all retired tertiary educated senior citizens, have been meeting intermittently for many months talking over what we see as problems for our grandchildren. We three believe that education really is a major key to the future. It is a route out of poverty for the underprivileged and is the key to a fulfilling life.

Our view is that the ability to think clearly is critical to the well being of individuals and the future of our society. Other essential outcomes of all education are an ability to use language and mathematics effectively and to understand basic science and the importance of science, ethics, economics, and politics, and the effects these have on our daily lives.

An article in On Line Opinion on August 21, 2007 by Stephen Law, alerted us to successes in achieving the clear thinking aspect of the above statement. Further reading by all three of us of books, other articles and web sites has shown that these successes have been noted by other education systems and momentum is developing elsewhere to have a new educational method adopted.

We also think that probably the best approach to having this new method of education introduced would be to educate teachers, and particularly parents, about the advantages of the proposed changes in the hope that their support would smooth the way for education department ministers and bureaucrats to introduce what is required.

Under what is proposed, children will continue to learn to read and write and so on, but they also learn to think about and discuss many things. They will find the things they think and talk about interesting, so that boredom becomes less of a classroom problem, and they will learn to think in a way which will help them throughout their whole life.

The proposal is a relatively new and very effective method to improve the intellectual capacity of the students in the school system. As a secondary effect what is proposed also results in a substantial improvement in the behaviour of all students, particularly those likely to become disruptive and antisocial.

Our present education system attempts to supply information and facts for absorption by students but the rate of change is now such that by the time students are due to emerge from the school system the information provided earlier is often of little relevance.

We are also aware of the problems magnified in state schools by the presence of students whose abilities and behaviour are such that they are or would be excluded from private schools. This is further compounded for comprehensive high schools in the New South Wales system by the diversion of many of the more intellectually competent students to selective high schools.

These problems have tended to encourage many parents to enroll their children in private schools, particularly those who just miss out on the selective school. This cannot help but mean that children miss out on interacting, in the educational environment, with other children from different religious, ethical and social backgrounds. This is to the disadvantage of them all and, ultimately, to our society itself.

What is proposed should reduce this drift and may make selective public high schools less necessary or desired. It will also help achieve the desirable outcomes as stated earlier.

In the aspects of the present problems mentioned above, our concerns are parallel to the concerns raised more eloquently in The War for Children’s Minds by Stephen Law, a philosophy lecturer and writer at the University of London, and published by Routledge. The article in On Line Opinion referred to earlier was written by Law who in chapter three of his book proposes a different approach to education best described as encouraging children to be more questioning.

He advocates the introduction at an early age of a basic philosophy course where children are led to discuss various topical ethical and societal questions of their own choosing and to reason for the positions they take.

Law describes the success that this approach has had at Buranda State School in Queensland since 1997. Staff members at Buranda are satisfied that there has been a substantial improvement in the intellectual abilities of the students in their program and that bullying and other bad or thoughtless behaviour has ceased to cause very significant problems.

Statewide comparative tests have confirmed that Buranda students are now performing at or near the top of the state. From being a school with falling enrolments, mediocre test results, and only 40 or so pupils there is now a full complement of students (+190) and families have moved to the area so that their children can enroll.

In 2001 many schools in Clackmannanshire in the UK, in conjunction with Professor Keith Topping, a senior psychologist, and the University of Dundee, conducted a controlled experiment utilising a similar program. That trial resulted in an increase of 6.5 units in measured IQ scores for the philosophy classes compared to control classes and significant behavioural benefits. Two years after the end of the trial the differences between the philosophy class students and the control class students had further diverged.

Nottinghamshire in the UK is another location where the system is being introduced. Dr Gilbert Burgh at the University of Queensland  has commented, “... rather than learning about philosophers or the history of philosophers, philosophy in schools is more about getting children to think for themselves, both critically and creatively”.

The program only requires about one hour of school time each week but, from what we have found in our research, the time and any cost gives a better return in educational outcomes than any other current curricula item. To adopt such a program the participating teachers at each school, and preferably all teachers, will need to read a few articles, maybe one or two books, do some Internet research and attend a one or two-day in-service training course. The required reading materials and teacher aids are already available at reasonable cost, with some free on Internet sites, and courses are available in Queensland and possibly through the University of NSW and many overseas sites.

While in the previous paragraph we mention one hour of school time spent on this proposed new subject that one hour can be utilised to cover some of the subject matter that would normally be covered in another strand such as social studies, personal development, or science.

The discussions envisaged would also significantly improve the students’ language skills, as has been reported in the trials, and the general reduction in behavioural problems, as achieved in the early trials, will make each teaching hour more effective.

At Kirkaldy, in Scotland, the proposed subject is introduced midway through the P1 year (students aged six) for one hour a week replacing half an hour of language and half an hour of personal development. It then continues throughout the primary school years. We believe it axiomatic that an ability to argue rationally in support of a position will improve a student’s language ability and be of major assistance in his or her personal development.

Federal Government funds which could be applied to allow prompt adoption of what is proposed are already available. For a public school with, for example, 200 children in Years 1 to 7, about eight hours of teacher class time is required. Train one competent and experienced teacher in each school in the new method and provide a casual relief teacher for two days a week so that the trained teacher can “double up” in class for the one hour of P4C. This cost would continue to be incurred only until the students become experienced with the new method and the normal class teachers had both experience and training. The funds could be those now available for the Chaplaincy Program and the funds would then be supporting a program with much greater potential benefit to the young students.

We also see the possibility of reduced drug addiction and criminality as children learn to help and co-operate with one another, to develop their own ethical concepts and philosophy of life and to apply and react to a different style of peer pressure. This difference in peer pressure will be due to the increased influence in the classroom and the school of the more competent and clearer thinking students, probably from more enlightened households.

There are long term economic and societal cohesion advantages to Australia from improved educational outcomes for public school students and probably political credit advantages to any government that introduced the program.