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Schooling and testing - a potted history

By Phil Cullen - posted Friday, 13 November 2009


During the period, educational thought was also being energised by people who held alterative views of the nature of learning. Pestalozzi, a Swiss gent (1746-1827) and practising schoolie, agreed with Frenchman Rousseau (1712-78) that a child is a person who has an idiosyncratic nature and uniquely-individual needs and, therefore, should not be taught according to any pre-conceived theory of learning, such as fear of failure. The desire to learn and the ways of learning reside with each individual in a unique way. The German gent, Froebel (1782-1852) put such thoughts into action. Appreciating that children like play and like learning, both working together become one powerful learning device. They can be combined in a schooling situation without any fear of testing or indicators of failure. He developed a notion of a kindergarten, a happy place where the children are the plants which grow better when encouraged by a teacher-gardener. Italian Maria Montessori (1870-1952) applied this notion using special apparatus and encouraging freedom to learn without didactics.

These educational gurus valued the learning capacity of each child and would have been seriously at odds with present-day Robert Lowe-type educrats. Despite their influence, schools maintained themselves as sit-stilleries, generally speaking, for the 19th and at least the first half of the 20th century. The left-over testing rituals of Inspectors of Schools to see if schools were up to scratch maintained the dullness of learning.

Until the late 1950s, schools in all western countries were cloned. The use of paper and pencil dominated each day’s activities, classroom silence was treasured and the only noise heard around the average school was the voices of teachers sermonising from the front of the classroom where all pupils faced a large chalkboard used only by the teachers. Group and maieutic teaching strategies were seldom if ever undertaken. Heavy testing programs by school principals encouraged the maintenance of chalk-talk routines. Schools were dull and heavily routinised places. Few were anxious to continue with such feckless activities and left school as soon as they were old enough.

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There was a break in the history of school learning-dullness, but it didn’t last long.

The blitz of World War II made a huge difference to schooling in England. Schools couldn’t be organised as tidily or as strictly as they had been. Teachers found that children learned better than they had ever done when they talked with each other, undertook learning projects together, handled material that took the place of scarce paper and pencils; and were not restricted by age-grade classifications.

Over the next two decades, primary classes in various LEAs (Local Education Authorities), especially Hertfordshire, Bristol, Oxfordshire and the West Riding of Yorkshire, sparkled with sheer learning and joy of achievement that had never been experienced before. Overseas countries sent observers to check out the phenomenon of honest-to-goodness learning theories being applied through relevant teaching strategies.

It didn’t last ... down-under, things went well for a while until moral-campaigners, management theorists and change-for-change-sake artists left the schooling doors open. They altered the structures of education departments and schooling went “back to drastics”. As a consequence, State and Federal Education Departments are now controlled by non-teachers and measurers. Politicians, especially Julia Gillard, maintain the Joh Bjelke-Petersen maxims of making sure that schools do as they are told.

It’s back to 1862 with Matthew Arnold’s plea for a return of “intelligent life” to the classroom to replace the “deadness, dullness and discouragement” that testing brings. Primary schooling will have to endure another set of quixotic reforms for a while before there is a return to learning for learning’s sake.

Here we go again. The one thing we learn from history is that we don’t learn from history.

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About the Author

Phil Cullen is a teacher. His website is here: Primary Schooling.

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