Gawain Little

EDUCATION PLAYS a number of different contradictory roles in capitalist society. On the one hand, it is essential to the reproduction of labour power – without education, there will be no skilled workforce to keep the system going – but at the same time, under the neoliberal politics that has been dominant for the past 40 years, it is increasingly becoming a direct source of value, and of profit, as everything from cleaning contracts to education advisory services, from teaching resources to supply contracts, and even schools themselves, are tapped for a quick buck.

Education also plays a key ideological role in the reproduction of capitalism. It acts both as a mechanism for the reproduction and crystallisation of class differences (through academic and social selection, the rationing of qualifications, etc.) and for the transmission of the social norms of capitalist society. These, of course, go hand in hand. The ideology which educates children to “know their place”¹ sits perfectly with the very mechanisms that sort them into those places.

However, education itself is a site of struggle². Whilst the dominant ideology of any society is the ideology of the dominant class³, hegemony is maintained through painting these ideas as the ideas of society as a whole⁴. Because capitalism relies on a careful balance of coercion and consent⁵, the ruling class has always had to compromise its vision of education with that of the working class. Decades of working class struggle for universal comprehensive education have shifted the balance of that compromise but always within the confines of the capitalist system.

And yet education also has a broader liberatory potential. Critical education can give working people the power to name their oppression and to challenge it, and beyond that is fundamental to the creation of an alternative society of the future. Whilst these aspects are rarely revealed under capitalism, they are always present, as untapped potential of the education process.

The question of pedagogy is key to the battle between these different visions and purposes of education. Brazilian educator Paulo Freire argues that there are two distinct concepts of education – the banking concept and education for critical consciousness – each of which implies, and is based upon, a fundamentally different vision of society⁶.

The banking concept of education considers students as empty vessels to be filled by the teacher. It rests on a number of assumptions which are entirely compatible with acceptance of, and compliance with, capitalist society ⁷.

This approach of ‘depositing’ knowledge into passive students is not just a missed opportunity to develop critical consciousness. By depriving students of control over the learning process, we deny them control over their own lives.

“The more students work at storing the deposits entrusted to them, the less they develop the critical consciousness which would result from their intervention in the world as transformers of that world. The more completely they accept the passive role imposed on them, the more they tend simply to adapt to the world as it is and to the fragmented view of reality deposited in them.
⁸ ”

The education profession is also debased in the process. In the banking concept of education, the role of the educator is divided into two distinct steps: a cognitive phase in which the teacher works alone to understand the material, and a narrative phase in which the teacher attempts to transmit this understanding to the students. Essentially, the educator functions as a delivery mechanism, usually for content decided elsewhere.

As an alternative to this banking model of education, Freire counterposes the idea of a problem-posing education, where educator and students work alongside each other to pose and solve the problems of people in their real environment. In this process, the educator’s role becomes much more fluid. They are at all times cognitive and in dialogue with the students, who are also cognitive and in dialogue with the educator and each other throughout.⁹

Dialogue is central to Freire’s pedagogical approach. He argues that knowledge only exists and can only be understood in relation to others, that thinking cannot be confined to the relationship “thinking subject – knowable object” but must instead be understood as a relationship which involves other thinking subjects.¹⁰

Freire describes dialogue as “the encounter between men, mediated by the world, in order to name the world”¹¹. He gives language a key role, arguing that words contain within them an essential unity of action and reflection: praxis. He goes on to argue that, “liberation is a praxis: the action and reflection of men and women upon their world in order to transform it.¹²”

It is this praxis, this reflective action to transform the world, that is at the heart of the Freirean conception of education¹³, described by Unwin & Yandell¹⁴ as the “polar opposite” of the neoliberal policies popularly known as the Global Education ‘Reform’ Movement or GERM.¹⁵

“Those truly committed to liberation must reject the banking concept in its entirety, adopting instead a concept of women and men as conscious beings, and consciousness as consciousness intent upon the world. They must abandon the educational goal of deposit-making and replace it with the posing of the problems of human beings in relations with the world. ‘Problem-posing’ education, responding to the essence of consciousness – intentionality – rejects communiqués and embodies communication.”¹⁶

‘In Vygotsky’s approach, consciousness is the product of social interaction in the process of acting on the world. Language works as a tool which, acquired socially through interaction with others, becomes internalised and facilitates the development of verbal thought as a more powerful act of cognition’

This concept of consciousness, defined by its intentionality, is the essence of Freire’s vision of education, captured in the phrase: “liberating education consists in acts of cognition not transferrals of information”.
¹⁷

It also, as Vittoria¹⁸ notes, mirrors perfectly Marx’s distinction between humans as social beings, who work consciously to transform reality, and other animal species who act out of instinct¹⁹. It is this conscious work which transforms both nature and man.

The development of consciousness is the main focus of the work of Soviet psychologist Lev Vygotsky. Vygotsky challenged both vulgar behaviourism and subjective idealism in his “struggle for consciousness” in Soviet psychology²⁰ . Against those who tried to explain consciousness either as a simple product of stimulus-response mechanisms, or as essentially metaphysical and unknowable, Vygotsky presented a complex dialectical process in which language plays a key role in changing thought not only quantitatively but qualitatively.

In Vygotsky’s approach, consciousness is the product of social interaction in the process of acting on the world. Language works as a tool, acquired socially through interaction with others, which becomes internalised and facilitates the development of verbal thought as a more powerful act of cognition.²¹

This dialectical interaction of thought and language provides the answer to the vexed question of the development of thought in the child, replacing both the vessel-filling banking concept of education and the Piagetian thesis of internal maturation or stages of development. The educator’s role is no longer trapped in the dichotomy of trying to fill an empty vessel with dead facts or sitting back and facilitating a natural process of ‘growth’ on which they have little impact. Education is recognised as a social process and the role of the educator as a more experienced other becomes crucial in guiding and participating in that process.²²

One of the key implications of this understanding is Vygotsky’s theory of the Zone of Proximal Development.  According to this idea, the area in which each individual child is best prepared to learn in any subject is the space between what they can currently do independently and what they can do with some level of adult or peer support. This suggests that, in assessing children’s learning and developing next steps in the process, we need to look not just at what they can do unaided but also what they can do collaboratively or with a level of adult support.²³

Significantly, this also suggests that the role of the educator is not only to identify the zone of proximal development but to work alongside the child in this area, in much the same way as that described by Freire.

The social nature of learning which was fundamental to both Vygotsky and Freire was further explored by Cuban revolutionary Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara. Guevara declared that, “society must be a huge school”²⁴ in which both individual influences (teachers, parents, family, comrades) and collective influences (social group, society, environment, media) are consciously directed towards the goal of education.²⁵

This approach has since been developed in Cuba as “social education”, described as “society’s educating action on every person”²⁶ . This social education is differentiated from socialisation because, where the latter is mostly spontaneous, social education is intentional and directed.

In addition to recognising the role of the whole of society in the process of education, Guevara also commented on the way in which this process should be carried out. He emphasised the reciprocity of the educational relationship, that “you educate or instruct by learning from those who learn from or are educated by you”²⁷ , stating clearly in an address to medical doctors in 1960, “the first thing will be not to offer our wisdom but to show that we have come to learn with the people”²⁸

Whilst this approach, in which every aspect of society – schools, health centres, workplaces, media – works as a single system, with education as a conscious and intentional goal, carried out by conscious actors learning alongside each other, may be specific to a society in the process of revolutionary transformation, the approaches involved and the recognition of the role of society cannot be ignored. As Freire argued, “while only a revolutionary society can carry out this education in systematic terms, the revolutionary leaders need not take full power before they can employ the method”. They can’t use the banking concept temporarily “with the intention of later behaving in a genuinely revolutionary fashion. They must be revolutionary – that is dialogical – from the outset”.²⁹

Guevara described the role of education as being a “conscious act” of building socialism³⁰ and described how he saw this process unfolding: “I don’t think education shapes up a country…But neither is it true that the economic process alone can bring about an economic transformation at that level. Education and economic development are constantly interacting and fully shaping themselves.”³¹

The end goal is clear – the creation of a new human consciousness: “We will build the 21st century man; we ourselves. We will be tempered in daily actions, creating a new human being with a new technology.”³² “Our task would not be done if we were only producers of goods, of raw materials and not, at the same time, producers of men.”³³

Key to this process is the development of collectivism as a guiding principle of Cuban education. This rested on Guevara’s understanding of the relationship between the collective and the individual. Cuban educationalist Lidia Turner Martí.³⁴ has argued that the collectivism Che spoke about “is manifested when man’s thoughts and actions are geared, above all, to the interests of the collective and when he feels the internal need for direct social action”; when “moral and political commitment are raised to a higher stage so that social behaviour and individual self-determination can be joined in one and the same action”. The aim, she argues, is “self-regulated personalities that consciously coincide with the collective interests”.

This dialectical relationship between collectivism and the fullest development of the “forces, capacities and moral quantities of the individual”³⁵ has implications for education. Whilst social compulsion is necessary to establish collective norms, Guevara was concerned that too much social compulsion, without adequate understanding, would lead to a “guided behavioural model” and eventually to hypocrisy and opportunism, because the goals are based on social recognition and the removal of conflict with society, not on the intrinsic motivation of being an effective part of the collective and on the alignment of the goals of the individual and the collective.³⁶

Whilst we may not be engaged in the process of revolutionary transformation that the Cuban people have been for the past 60 years, is our goal, as radical educators, not fundamentally the same? Is it not to encourage our students to participate in the collective advancement of human society? Is it not to equip our students with the tools to fully understand and take control of the society in which they live – to understand it in order to change it, as Marx³⁷ would have said? In that context, we have much to learn from the work of Vygotsky, Freire and Guevara. Together, they may provide a starting point for the development of our own radical pedagogy

The post Vygotsky, Freire,Guevara: In search of a radical pedagogy appeared first on education for tomorrow.

Lucy Coleman

AS AN Early Years Practitioner of fourteen years, having worked as a trained nursery nurse and qualified Early Years teacher I find myself increasingly asking the same question; what is happening to Early Years Education?

Like most Early Years professionals, I have a deep understanding of child development, Early Years pedagogy and many years of experience working with children under the age of 5. I know the importance of a play based curriculum and the far reaching benefits of this approach to early education. Young children learn best through play; this is something every trained early years worker knows and understands.

Why then are we constantly having to defend our position?

The UK government appears to be intent on eroding play from the early years and replacing it with more formality. Bold Beginnings, a renewed push for baseline testing, and a draft early years review have all been on the agenda in the last 18 months.

Why as a reception teacher should I have to make choices between what I know is best for the children in my class and what I know I need to do to get the ‘required’ percentage of children to reach a Good Level of Development?

‘Good Level of Development’ might lead you to believe that this statement is based on a child’s age or stage of development, but according to the UK government this is not the case.

Every child in my class will be judged using the same criteria come June. Their age will not be taken into consideration, they will all be assessed using the same ‘Early Learning Goals’.

I will have to have the same expectations for a child who is not even 5 against one who is almost 6.

I will be assessing children who began the year with very little or no English, children who come from disadvantaged backgrounds, children who have never been in any form of education setting previously.

Regardless of these differences, with less than one year in school, according to the government all of these children should be reaching the same ‘expected’ level.

Many children will have made huge leaps in terms of development from their starting points and their progress is better than those who arrive at school already at their age related expectations, but this level of progress counts for very little in terms of accountability and in terms of what Ofsted seem to expect to see when they inspect schools, simply because these children haven’t been able to jump through the government ordained hoops.

Every year the Early Learning Goal (ELG) for writing has the lowest percentage attainment, and many of the children who don’t reach the ‘expected’ level are boys, summer born or have English as an additional language or, indeed, all three.

Each year at moderation we discuss how to raise the attainment for writing, but has anyone asked why the ELG for writing is so low?

Perhaps it is because we are expecting 4 year olds to run before they can walk, expecting children who don’t have the manual dexterity to hold a pencil to be able to write a sentence which can read by themselves and others.

Some will be capable of this, but does that mean that all of them must be able to?

The ELGs are currently under review with a draft Early Years Foundation Stage (EYFS) framework being piloted in September 2019.

This review, however, was conducted by a panel which consisted of very few Early Years experts and is not based on any significant research.

There are members of the panel with a vested interest in the outcomes as providers of commercial educational programmes such as Jolly Phonics and Ruth Miskin Training.

Many Early Years professionals would in fact welcome changes to the current Early Learning Goals, however what we would welcome even more is a proper consultation on this and the use of valid research evidence to underpin any changes.

There has been a worrying trend in recent years for reception classrooms to become more formal, with many now simply an extension of the Year 1 classroom.

This has been compounded by the Ofsted report ‘Bold Beginnings’ which praised more formal styles of teaching and had an over-emphasis on formal Literacy and Mathematics. The report also suggested the Reception year should meet the “now increased expectations of the national curriculum” ¹.

When the National Curriculum was reviewed in 2014, this would have been the perfect opportunity to ensure that the expectations in Year 1 mapped to and built on the Early Learning Goals. This did not happen, and instead the Year 1 curriculum continues to be misaligned with the Early Learning Goals whilst the Bold Beginnings report seems to suggest that it is the task of Reception teachers to extend their curriculum beyond the statutory EYFS curriculum and start teaching Year 1 objectives.

‘Do we really want children to leave school without having developed the ability to think critically and challenge the social constructs of the world in which they live?’

Bold beginnings seems to completely ignore the Characteristics of Effective Learning which are based on ‘established evidence on the role of self-regulation in forming strong dispositions for later learning and successful lives, and how to encourage those.’ These characteristics underpin the whole of the EYFS curriculum and are an essential part of a child’s learning.

If children are given opportunities to develop these characteristics they will literally be developing the ‘foundations’ of learning for the rest of their school careers and beyond.

Many ‘Outstanding’ reception classes do follow a completely play based approach and achieve high levels of development. These schools manage to provide meaningful experiences for children and real life contexts in which to support children to reach a ‘Good Level of Development’ and beyond.

Yet none of these less formal approaches were mentioned in the Ofsted report. There was a clear sense that Ofsted was favouring a preferred style of teaching in the Bold Beginnings report; one which sees children as commodities on a production line where the end product is of far more importance than the process.

The end product being human capital.

Do we really want children to leave school without having developed the ability to think critically and challenge the social constructs of the world in which they live?

The concern is that teachers and Senior Leadership teams who are inexperienced within the EYFS will read the Bold Beginnings report and will instinctively move to a more formal approach in order to please Ofsted.

Ofsted themselves say that they have no preferred style or method for teaching, and yet they failed to provide a balanced report and offer alternative approaches other than formalised teaching methods.

As Bold Beginnings rightly states; the reception year is unique, for many children this will be their first experience of education and so needs to be handled with care.

As reception teachers we have the ability to set children on the right path of learning, we can equip them with the skills to become life-long, inquisitive learners. Or we can switch them off to learning, asking them to complete tasks which are too difficult and are not developmentally appropriate, making them feel like a failure before they have even turned 5.

As a result of the Global Education Reform Movement (GERM) education has become preoccupied with the following ‘standardization, literacy and numeracy, predetermined results and test-based accountability policies.’²

Who then is benefitting from the current overpreoccupation with these elements within education, since it is certainly not the children?

Why would the government not want our education system to produce critical thinkers who challenge the status quo?

What do they stand to lose?

It seems that those who own the large education based commercial organisations and who profit from the current education system are the ones who have the most to lose from an education system which creates critical thinkers. It would pose a real threat to those very companies who profit from the current system of testing and standardisation and indeed would create individuals who are willing to challenge those in power.

Where then does this leave Early Years Education?

I know the journey that I will continue to take the children in my class on through their first year of school, I know which path I will be leading them towards. I will continue to teach the ‘whole child’ since I refuse to create a classroom which has an over-emphasis on intellectual development and ignores the other aspects of a child’s moral and social development.

My concern is that I am increasingly becoming part of a minority and as more and more experienced teachers are leaving the profession due to unrealistic demands from our government, what hope is there for the future generation? What will become of Early Years education? What will happen to play?

The post What is happening to Early Years education? appeared first on education for tomorrow.

Julian Williams

HAVE YOU heard of “Mastery maths”? You might think it’s the latest fad, the latest government imposition, or the latest resource for learning mathematics. Maybe it’s all these things? You can go online and check out what is being sold: you might like some of the ideas yet also object to others. But this is where the money is; the government has decided the CPD budget for maths is to be spent this way, so this is ‘it’.

The NCETM hubs seem heavily involved in shaping it in practice on the ground, but they are constrained by the programme’s national commitments which have been shaped by Shanghai and Singaporean influences. I’ve heard that the programme gets its support because the ministers who supported it thought it involved children sitting in rows being taught together through ‘Direct Instruction’, being properly disciplined, and learning by rote. From what I see, however, there seem to be some good things in this system: in particular some texts and approaches are inspired by Skemp and Bruner and their aficionados in the Association of Teachers of Mathematics, adapting many of these ideas from the 1970s¹. There are also Western influences such as the concept of ‘variation’ developed by Ference Marton and others that now boomerang back to us from Shanghai: well and good! The Singapore programmes emphasise what Skemp refers to as ‘relational understanding’ (real understanding of mathematical concepts and how they relate) to underpin the instrumental numeracy – even the recall of times tables – that Conservative education ministers value so highly² .

Not so long ago a teacher asked me if I thought ‘apparatus’ was still ‘in’ for good maths teaching: their school was very much ‘into’ their whiteboards and so on. I was shocked. Well, manipulating manipulatives are certainly ‘in’ again in Singaporean maths.

The notion of the whole class moving together through the essential curriculum also feels right by equitable criteria: a true ‘no child left behind’ policy approach. Then, who would complain about there being text books to support the teaching? Surely materials that are well designed and crafted by informed praxis should be welcomed as resources even for the most independently minded and resourceful teachers.

Even more positive – the fact that the Pacific rim teachers tend to have a culture of research and lesson study in their professional practice is not to be sneered at… if only this kind of professional development was significantly resourced here (clearly this is not going to happen under the present government).

So, in this case, I think there is good reason to support work on ‘fluency’ that is understood to be emergent from experiences that are relational. Skemp never meant, I think, to suggest that instrumental mathematics does not have a role, but I think he saw that it was limited if it did not engage with relational understanding, like ‘having procedures’ without ‘knowing why’ the procedures work and sometimes might go wrong. Consider the 17 times table, not one perhaps that we have learnt by heart/rote – but perhaps it would be good to experience trying to do so? So 8 x 17 = … er? On the other hand, I know that 17×10 = 170… and 17×2 = 34, so 17×8 has to be 34 less than 170, or 136. This is ‘obvious’ knowledge that flows from relational understanding to support instrumental working; surely pedagogy should encourage it. This is a ‘knowing by heart’ that is genuinely mathematical, in contrast to learning by rote that is quite otherwise because it has no basis in mathematical reasoning and so undermines mathematical ‘sense’; perhaps we should call it mastery but not mystery.

‘The notion of the whole class moving together through the essential curriculum also feels right by equitable criteria: a true ‘no child left behind’ policy approach.’

So what should we really worry about in “Mastery mathematics”, given that many of the ideas it promotes seem to be arguably well founded, and persuasive? For myself, what I worry most about is that ‘mastery’ is not only mastery of mathematics per se but mastery of the teaching-learning partnership, or relationship. “Mastery” sold as good practice seems to be yet another means of telling teachers and learners how they should do things, because this is believed or has been shown to be ‘effective’ (in somebody’s hands). In other words, what is wrong with “Mastery” for me is what is wrong with the whole policy discourse about “what works” and “best practice”, which is often propagated in a regime that actually has very slim evidence or authority to make these claims. The policy becomes the master of us all, and we are obliged to suspend our critical faculties and comply.

I think what is wrong with “Mastery maths” is close to the concept of the dialectic of Master and Slave: both are alienated from their labour as well as each other. In Mastery Mathematics who is Master and who is being “mastered”, who is the ‘slave’? It worries me that the people who are absolutely central to learning-teaching are not given agency, not given the control, are not invited to be critical of this whole new narrative of ‘best practice’ which marginalises their judgment. The teachers and learners are not the masters here; are they then the slaves to their masters, working for their institutions, as Ian Stronach once put it “Doing their sums for their country” in PISA, TIMSS, and National tests?

The direction of policy, at least in recent decades (and this has been true of the Blair governments as much as of its expansion in the years since), has been to treat the profession, the teachers and classroom practice, as the object of change, rather than its agent. Barrow³ wrote “Giving teaching back to the teachers”, in which he appealed to researchers not to steal teaching and judgment from the teachers. Everything said there applies even more emphatically now, with the ‘researchers’ being replaced by the what-works-technicians, managers, and policy.

We also need to give learning back to the students, because the control of teaching from outside robs learners of agency or mastery quite as much as it has done teachers.  Becoming the ever-more compliant ‘deliverers’ of a given best practice pedagogy and national curriculum, driven by tests, the freedom of the teacher disappears. So does the freedom of the student to learn; motivation becomes a technical job for the teacher, an instrument to harass the learner into learning what we claim they need to know. We are no longer allowed as teachers to conceive of the diverse ways we might teach, and the many ways our students might learn, because best practice tells us how it is normatively effective, and anyone who does not comply– well that’s fine but they have to have a convincing reason to press back against the weight of the world and its ‘evidence’.

And yet – the evidence is remarkably slim. Arguably, the most important factor in effective learning-and-teaching is a powerful (and relatively ‘unalienated’ – if that’s possible) relationship between the teacher and learner: some call this love. If the intrusion of Mastery into an effective teacher-learner relationship serves to undermine this, then I am sure it will prove ineffective – though I wonder if this will be detected by the kinds of evaluation and measurement widely employed to evaluate effects.

In conclusion: what I am arguing is not really ‘against’ the current trends for Mastery Maths particularly, but FOR a renewal of a different kind of professional development, where the agency of learners and teachers is more obviously respected as the vital agents of real learning. I urge the critical examination of the imposition of Mastery Maths and other such slogans and programmes insofar as they purport to have the ultimate answers to developing practice, leaving the teachers with a purely technical task of ‘delivery’, and presumably reducing learning activity to ‘package opening’ functions worthy of a future menial workforce and compliant citizenry.

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Aretha Green

IN OCTOBER 2018, I was privileged to take part in a six-day National Education Union delegation to Cuba. This short article is a reflection on some of what I experienced there and the lessons for our own education system.

Throughout our time in Cuba, my overwhelming impression was of the agency and meaningful involvement of students in their own education. This was consistently evident, and obviously at the heart of Cuban pedagogy. Since the revolution in 1959, Cubans have fought for not only bread, but also roses. Students in Cuba are a direct product of these roses; their ability to be an effective part of the conversations surrounding their learning is a demonstration of the empowerment the revolution has continued to bring the Cuban people. Nowhere was this more evident than when visiting the final school of the trip, a secondary school in Pinar del Río, so much so that I could not help but feel a little heartbroken for my own students in the UK. A member of the delegation asked the students how many of them wanted to go to university. Every student put up their hand, in a hall of around 200. In spite of the blockade, children in Cuba have grown up with purpose and aspiration: bread and roses. The bread has nourished them physically; the economic rewards of the revolution have ensured that unemployment remains relatively low. Housing, careers and healthcare are all accessible. However, it is the roses that have made the educational opportunities available to Cuban children so special. They have empowered them in a way that bread alone cannot, and are plentiful in Cuba: the quality of education, the communal attitude, the collective consciousness. Cuban students have active agency in education; they are empowered to contribute meaningfully to their learning, to be part of the conversation. The student voice in Cuba is a credit to its roses and to the society that nurtured them.

As a result of the blockade, Cuba has, at times, struggled for bread. It has crippled their economy and limited access to basic provisions. In spite of this, roses are not seen as a lavish addition, an added extra; they are as fundamental as the bread. Collective consciousness is encouraged and enriched through a national structure of student representation across all Cuban schools. From the beginning of primary school, class elects its own student officers, including a president and vice-president. These officers make up the student Council and elect a student president for the school. This elected student president is involved, alongside teachers, parents and representatives of the other school staff, in the direction and governance of the school. A diverse group of students are included within this student voice. They are empowered by other students and teachers. They see themselves as equals, amongst other students and in conversation with the teachers. They contribute effectively to curriculum design and content as part of a two-way dialogue about their learning.

‘In Cuba, the student voice is at the heart of the hidden curriculum. It is a cornerstone in the education of values and skills to enrich children.’

Children’s agency in education is largely dependent on the ethos surrounding the role of education. The function of education varies between capitalism and alternative systems. Under capitalism, a key function of education is for social control, influencing the working classes to ‘know their place’, as part of the ideological apparatus at the disposal of the bourgeoisie. In education, working class children are prepared for low-skilled occupations through the socialisation of capitalist society’s norms and values: obeying authority; coping with boredom and alienation; meritocracy; and conformity. In addition, educational opportunities are rationed, in order to crystallise class stratification across society. A classic example of this is the role of selective education, once more popular under Theresa May’s government. In the words of one anonymous DfE official, speaking in the mid-1980s, “We are beginning to create aspirations society cannot match…When young people drop off the education production line and cannot find work at all, or work which matches their abilities and aspirations, then we are creating frustration with perhaps disturbing consequences… we have to select, to ration educational opportunities… people must be educated once more to know their place”¹.

Despite the best intentions of many teachers, student voice in the UK tends to be a reflection of this perception of the role of education. Students are not empowered through external school factors such as art, music and literature to have true agency in society, particularly in education. Even if encouraged to be involved in their learning, British students are largely not equipped or empowered to do this. They have been socialised to not question throughout their lives. They have no roses.

Usually, student voice in the UK is in the form of an annual survey. Students are required to answer the questions anonymously. It is not a dialogue, but a customer satisfaction survey. The students are often explicitly referred to as customers and they are treated as such, as passive consumers of education rather than active participants. The questions are corporate in nature, and the student responses are not regarded as meaningful.

Sometimes, in the UK, small groups of students are used as a voice, such as student councils. Although this arguably may act as better practice than the survey responses, students who are not equipped by society to feel valued will not be able to effectively contribute. Middle-class students inevitably volunteer for these student council positions as they have the cultural capital to firstly apply and secondly to be effective in the role. Along with the typical middle-class volunteers, the teachers sometimes select some working-class children, with behaviour issues, in the hope that becoming a rôle model for others will help their own behaviour. Regardless, it is a token position for the students involved, an Ofsted tick box to be checked.

In Cuba, the student voice is at the heart of the hidden curriculum. It is a cornerstone in the education of values and skills to enrich children. In the UK, emphasis tends to be placed on the formal curriculum; the pure delivery of ‘quality’ teaching and learning, measured through standardised testing. From my time spent in Cuba, it was obvious to me that enriching the child and empowering them as a ‘whole person’ through the hidden curriculum was a central and consistent focus. Qualified teachers, in every classroom, carry out this process, rather than increasing numbers of unqualified teachers and staff who are not educators, as we have seen in England as a result of academisation. Cuban students are empowered, they have a voice, and they are architects of their own education. Their voice is also one voice across Cuba. Children have the same uniform, a visual representation of unity amongst students rather than competition, and they belong to the same school students’ union. It is clear to the students what their rôle is in their own education, as it is the same for all Cuban children.

As a result of bourgeois hegemony, capitalism encourages educators to perceive working-class children as having inferior norms and values – less cultural capital – which then leads them to educational failure. Under capitalism, high culture is seen as more valuable. Students with high-cultural interests (theatre, classical music, elite sports and elaborate language codes, for example) are seen as more ‘intelligent’, hardworking or academic. When capitalism is removed, children are perceived as equals and nurtured equally. Cuban children understand that their voices are valued equally, in the absence of hierarchy.

Because of their low cultural capital, British working class children are alienated from their educational setting. We have allowed a system to continue in which working-class parents are alienated from their children’s education; they do not engage with the corporate aims of the school. The children speak in a language different to that of their teachers and their textbooks and are trained to seek immediate, rather than deferred, gratification, as middle-class children are. Workingclass children do not have access to the cultural capital of the middle classes, and are therefore alienated from student voice participation. This is something we as educators must fight to change because, until we do, the education of our young people is diminished.

“Fidel showed us that another world is possible” were the words of the union representative at the University of Pinar del Río to the delegation. Another world is possible for us too, but we must first cultivate our roses for the sake of our young people, and of their education.

The post We need roses too: Student voices in revolutionary Cuba appeared first on education for tomorrow.

Kiri Tunks

Sexism still exists. It exists and persists in spite of the battles that have been fought, and we thought won, for women’s equality.

THE FACT is women and girls are still managing sexism at endemic levels at work, in school, in public, on social media. The evidence is depressing and overwhelming. The NEU’s own report ‘It’s just everywhere’ makes clear how routine sexual harassment and sexism is in schools but also that serious sexual assault is an issue too.

These findings are backed up by other research including the Girl Guiding Attitudes Survey which found 64% of girls experience sexual harassment in schools or End Violence Against Women’s ‘All day, every day’ report and briefing on schools’ legal obligations to prevent and respond to such incidents. But such experience is not a problem specific to schools: Plan UK found that 86% of women aged 18-24 suffered routine sexual harassment and abuse on the streets, and the TUC’s ‘Not just a bit of banter’ exposed the prevalence of it at work.

We live in a society where sexual assault is a fact of life for many women but only 6% of rape cases end in conviction. More than two women a week are murdered in the UK by their partner or another male family member and yet both the media and the justice system treat such deaths as a series of tragic individual incidents; a good man who cracked, with the implication that it was the murdered woman who somehow provoked her own death.

Then there is the pay gap; the maternity and pregnancy discrimination (54k women lose their jobs in the UK every year because of it); the cuts to public services which affect women more than men; the attacks on trade unions which have made great gains for equality over decades; and the impact of austerity – research by the Women’s Budget Group show that it is women who are most affected by this government’s policies with Black women being the hardest hit. No-one’s brain is pink The UN’s Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, Phillip Alston, on a recent visit to the UK said

“If you got a group of misogynists together in a room and said ‘how can we make a system that works for men but not women?’ they wouldn’t have come up with too many other ideas than what’s in place.”

This state of affairs coincides with the the return of the ‘Pink Brain – Blue Brain’ premise across a range of academic research, media and even cultural institutions such as the Science Museum. In 2016 their ‘Who Am I? exhibition asked children to explore whether their brain was pink or blue. We have NGOs delivering training in education which asks participants to identify where they are on a Barbie to GI Joe ‘jelly baby continuum’.

Research purporting to prove sex difference has received a lot of coverage such as that by Simon Baron-Cohen which claims to prove that males are systemisers and females are empathisers from birth. This research involved showing newborn babies a mobile and a photo of a face. It’s research fraught with problems – not least the age of the subjects – and has been robustly challenged and yet it’s an idea that still gains traction. Perhaps it’s because it reinforces the way our society is organised and seems to make sense of it. At one level, it is easier to believe that the brains of women and men are fundamentally different than to challenge structural and social inequality. More than that, perhaps this scientific drive betrays a need to prove gender difference in order to justify a sexist ideology which can be used to sustain the oppression and exploitation of women.

It is astonishing how flimsy the research which claims to prove sex difference is and how easily it falls apart on rigorous inspection. We think of science as being neutral and objective but we forget that scientists are people and subject to cultural influence like any other. Darwin, when challenged about the sexist application of his theories pronounced: “I certainly think that women though generally superior to men in moral qualities are inferior intellectually”. A Victorian example of science being used to prove what people want to believe. Many scientists have analysed these findings on sex and gender, and debunked much of it, but their work has not received anywhere near the same exposure as the original claims. Cordelia Fine (Delusions of Gender, Testosterone Rex) and Angela Saini (Inferior) provide particularly powerful overviews of this debate.

Simply put, many of the claims made for sex difference are based on research which is either flawed in its sample base, or its execution or its interpretation. Sometimes, claims are based on a completely unrelated experiment, designed to look for something else. Given just how much research has been done in this field, the claims that are being made for it just don’t hold up. The evidence instead suggests that there is far more difference between the brains of individuals than between those of different sexes.

‘It is astonishing how flimsy the research which claims to prove sex difference is and how easily it falls apart on rigorous inspection.’

Yet modern science still excludes and misrepresents women. Look at how poorly women are represented in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematical (STEM) fields. All the evidence shows that girls are as adept in these subjects as boys until GCSE but take-up drops off at A Level and beyond resulting in women making up only 24% of STEM graduates. The fact that so few women work in computing is particularly odd given the history of women in its development: Ada Lovelace, Grace Hopper and Katherine Johnson to name a few. But this is a field in which sexual harassment is rife. Addressing that might go some way in changing the career choices of women.

But what other deeper, subtle processes are at work here? The constant presentation of the male maths? The genius trope? The logical ‘male’ brain? The male environment and culture? All messages which signal to girls ‘Pick something else’.

Given the scale of the problem, how can schools begin to challenge this? Well, schools can and do make a difference. My own schooling in the 80s was consciously anti-sexist. That’s not to say I was schooled in some kind of feminist Utopia but everyone did metalwork, woodwork, textiles and cooking. We had Local Education Authority (LEA) advisors and input that provided resources and raised expectations of schools.

The educational landscape is very different now. Firstly, there has been a huge atomisation of the education system with the growth of academies and free schools and the demise of LEAs. Schools no longer have access to reliably ‘kitemarked’ policies or advice and are likely to approach this kind of work haphazardly, intermittently and according to what is cheap or available. Relationships and Sex education is a particular weak spot. Schools rely on their results to survive in this cut-throat world where poor exam grades can result in academisation.

This means subjects like PSHE, Citizenship or the Arts are disappearing from the curriculum. These are the very places where complex issues of sexism, sex and relationships could be safely and productively explored. Now we have outsourced this learning to the internet where pornography is prolific and few filters exist to help young people navigate what they see.

Changes to Initial Teacher Training mean that new teachers are likely to be much more school based so there is less awareness of pedagogical or social theories. Anti-sexism and anti-racism pedagogy was part of my PGCE. This is not something that routinely happens now.

I would argue further that there has been a ‘machofication’ of our schools which is harmful for all of us. We have a school system which imposes strict dress codes and hair styles; has a zero-tolerance behaviour system; a military approach to management where staff are told to ‘man-up’ to handle the workload and stress created by a data-heavy top-down assessment and inspection system; where staff and students are routinely expected to ‘go the extra hundred miles’; where pastoral support is seen as ‘fluffy’ instead of a vital part of supporting our young people. And yet, there are educators all over the UK finding ways to challenge sexism in our schools, ensuring that the curriculum makes women and their achievements visible; making space for young people to ask challenging questions about relationships and behaviour (and to cope with being challenged themselves); staff setting up feminist groups and conferences for young people. But this work shouldn’t be left to chance. It’s schooling that all our children need and should be universally implemented and funded so that it is part of a high-quality entitlement.

We need a complete revolution in how we organise our schools so that they work for young people in their lives now and in their futures. We need a rich, broad, global curriculum which actively involves young people in their education and exposes them to the diverse nature of the world and different people’s contributions to it – in the past and the present day.

We need an education which teaches our young people to know their rights and to know how to ask questions and make real sense of the answers. We need to change our culture so that sexism is challenged at every turn and not allow the huge potential of our young women to be stifled or silenced through harassment, violence or prejudice – or for any of our young people to be hemmed in by stereotypes and prejudice. We all, men and women, suffer when expected to conform to sexist stereotypes.

Here’s some science: no-one’s brain is pink; our brains are grey and endowed with inestimable capability. We must not get distracted by unsubstantiated, poorly constructed ideology, masquerading as science. As educators, we must not limit what is possible for young people. Our job is to expand horizons and knock down barriers. If we do that, maybe we can build an education system, and a society, that works equally for everyone.

Further Reading

• Cordelia Fine (2010), Delusions of Gender (Icon Books)
• Cordelia Fine (2017) Testosterone Rex (Icon Books)
• Angela Saini (2017), Inferior, (Fourth Estate)
• Sacha Baron Cohen (2003) They just can’t help it (Guardian) https://www.theguardian.com/education/2003/apr/17/research.
• highereducation
• Sacha Baron Cohen (2003) Essential Difference: Men, Women and the Extreme Male Brain, (Penguin)
• A new book by Gina Rippon (professor of cognitive neuroimaging at Aston University) is expected to create more waves this year Gina Rippon (2019) The Gendered Brain (Penguin)

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Patrick Yarker

David Hawkins ‘The … talents and abilities of any newborn human being are wrongly expressed by the image of a fixed innate potential in this or that dimension, and by the mathematical counterpart of that image, a measure.’

Alfred Binet ‘Intelligence? It’s what my tests measure.’

ALITTLE OVER a hundred years ago, the French government made schooling for all children compulsory. It soon became clear the schooling mandated wasn’t suited to all. Other provision could be offered those who did not succeed in mainstream education because, in the language of the day, they were ‘sub-normal’s But how could such children be distinguished? Alfred Binet, pioneer psychologist and director of the prestigious Sorbonne Laboratory, had an answer. Together with his collaborator, Theodore Simon, he worked with a group of fifty children designated ‘normal’, and with a similarsized group of children diagnosed by doctors or teachers as ‘deficient’, to construct and standardise a series of tests which would supposedly reveal the stratification-lines between levels of deficiency. The age at which the great majority of ‘normal’ children passed each test provided the basis for a scale along which to locate individuals. Those who did not interact socially or linguistically were deemed least intelligent. Next least were those who could not pass all the tests which a ‘normal’ child of five succeeded at, such as pointing out various named parts of the body, correctly identifying one drawn line as being longer than another, defining simply words such as ‘house’ or ‘horse’, and repeating back an uncomplicated sentence. And so on.

Intelligence testing in the modern sense is born here: out of seemingly-good intentions, dubious experimental methods, and a set of highly contestable assumptions. Chief among these is that an entity called ‘intelligence’ exists which may be tested and hence quantified in individuals, and that this quantification reveals worthwhile information about the person tested.

Even as Binet and Simon revised their original tests, comparable versions appeared in the USA and the UK. Each iteration of the ‘intelligence test’ became the benchmark for the next. If the distribution of scores on the new test matched the pattern of previous scores, the new test was regarded as a valid measure, even though the nature of ‘intelligence’ had not been determined, and its measurability merely asserted on the basis that ‘mental characteristics’ must be akin to physical ones.

Skulls and numbers

The search for an index to the mind had long focused on the body. At the turn of the 19th Century phrenologists claimed that precise measurement of the relative proportions of the skull’s configured surface offered an exact indication of mental powers. Before the phrenologists there came the physiognomists, for whom it was indeed possible to tell the mind’s construction in the face. These C18th theorists developed tabulated systems which classified pictures of faces and profiles supposedly to reveal correspondences between physical appearance and individual character. As the 19^th Century wore on, experimental psychologists believed that reaction-time to a physical stimulus, or the extent of hand-eye co-ordination, or the degree of responsiveness to being pinpricked on the skin at two points simultaneously, gave proof of mental prowess. Binet and Simon’s tests replaced this physiological perspective with a concern for activating what were regarded as higher mental functions. They set the trend followed ever since.

Binet held that ‘intelligence’ was a complex variable, not a single indivisible function. Attention, memory and judgement formed part of its working. He believed that people could improve these capacities, albeit until they reached a pre-set limit. Furthermore, for Binet, ‘intelligence’ was context-specific. It revealed itself only in an engagement with particular circumstances. He was wary of presenting levels of ‘intelligence’ in numerical terms. But Binet’s was not the only view.

Francis Galton, polymath, explorer, and enthusiast for all things quantitative, was born in Birmingham in 1822 and died in 1911, the same year as the much younger Binet. In mid-life he became interested in genetic inheritance. Statistical information which he collected about family relationships among eminent people, and case-studies he examined of adopted children and twins, convinced him that ‘genius’, or ‘intelligence’, was largely or wholly inherited. Such an outlook fuelled the rise of eugenics, a term Galton invented and a cause he fervently supported.

Galton asserted that ‘intelligence’, like height, is distributed in a population according to the artifice known as the normal curve or bell curve. He wrote:

This law of deviation from an average… if [it] be the case for stature, will also be true as regards every other physical feature–as circumference of head, size of brain, weight of grey matter…. and thence, by a step on which no physiologist will hesitate, as regards mental capacity.¹

For a man who had once consulted a phrenologist, and who continued to think there was some correspondence between mental capacity and physical traits such as the length of the index finger, taking this step presented no difficulties and begged no questions.

Galton, ever inventive, came up with the idea of correlation, and with a set of associated statistical techniques upon which the proper interpretation of intelligence test data in relation to populations is said to depend. The Binet-Simon tests, the notion of an ‘intelligence level’ or ‘quotient’ (derived from the ratio of test-score to chronological age), and the Galtonian box of statistical processes, equipped psychometrics with the tools to measure mind. And hence to reify a human being.

Improving the stock

Binet’s original intelligence tests date from 1905. The Eugenics Education Society, of which Galton was Honorary President, was established in 1907. One of its members, Charles Spearman, pioneered the application of factor analysis to intelligence test-scores in order to ground a notion of ‘general intelligence’ or ‘mental power’ which he called ‘g’s Spearman believed ‘g’ to be an underlying quality that made people intelligent. In any individual it was a fixed quantum. He suggested that people might be given the right to vote, or to have children, on the basis of their level of ‘g’, an idea taken up by Michael Young for his cautionary satire, The Rise of the Meritocracy, first published in 1958.

Young’s book glances at the prospect of a genetically-engineered elite. Michael Young’s son, Toby, co-founder of a Free School in London, looks forward to the day when embryos can be screened in vitro for ‘intelligence’s Such screening would enable ‘parents on low incomes with below average IQs’ to select only the ‘smartest’ of their embryos to be taken to term. For Young, who endorses it, this is ‘progressive eugenics… g-galitarianism’.²

‘These days the notion of ‘ability’ fulfils the same discursive function in the education system as ‘intelligence’ once did.’

As eugenic visions for ‘improving’ the human stock began to be outlined in the early C20th, a young psychologist, Cyril Burt, much inspired by Galton and Spearman, published a paper in the British Journal of Psychology purporting to show that ‘the superior proficiency at intelligence tests on the part of boys of superior parentage was inborn.’³ Burt would work for London County Council, the largest education authority in the country, as Britain’s first professional educational psychologist. His view that ‘intelligence’ was largely if not wholly inherited, fixed by the age of eleven, and readily measurable by testing, significantly influenced the Haddow Report on primary schooling (1931) and the Spens Report on secondary schooling (1938), both of which shaped the segregationist tripartite structure of maintained education in England after World War 2. Different types of school for different types of mind.

As Clyde Chitty observes, the notion of ‘intelligence’, especially when it is constructed as genetically determined, needs to be understood against the backdrop of opposition to mass education.⁴ An elite education is necessary for a ruling class, but training will suffice the proletariat, on whom anything better would be wasted because of their supposed innate inability or ‘lower intelligence’s Burtian views about the inborn superior capacities of a class elite are further inflected in the psychometric tradition by perspectives which lend themselves to racism. It is argued that intelligence tests scientifically reveal the stratification by ‘race’ of human intelligence, with some racial groups innately more intelligent and others less. Furthermore, educational intervention to boost capacity is a waste of resources given the immutable nature of individual intelligence. In Burt’s words, ‘[n]either knowledge nor practice, neither interest nor industry, will avail to increase it’.⁵ Such views were argued in the USA at the turn of the 1970s by Jensen, and again in the 1990s by Herrnstein and Murray in their book The Bell Curve. In the UK, Eysenck (a student of Burt’s) and Brand took a similar line, and others maintain it today. They influence policy debate. For the notion of a quantifiable ‘general intelligence’, in great part genetically determined and hence inheritable, readily serves reactionary political agendas. It helps justify the maintenance of an unequal status quo, or bolsters calls to restore to its supposedly natural order a society perceived to have become degenerate and unstable.

New name, old story

The dominance in education of psychometric perspectives began to wane in the 1950s. Evidence increasingly appeared which rendered untenable the claim that ‘intelligence’ was a fixed entity. School students improved their scores on intelligence-tests. Children who had failed the 11+ nevertheless passed O Level exams at 16. Other criticisms undermined the credibility of the tests and the construct of ‘intelligence’ they claimed to measure. Some tests were framed in ways which assumed cultural knowledge of the kind only middle-class children were likely to possess, thereby giving them an advantage. Gender also seemed to skew results. The belated exposure of Burt as a scientist who faked foundational evidence in his work, and who published under false names articles aggrandising his role in psychometrics and attacking his opponents, put paid to ‘IQ’ as a respectable idea. But a dominant discourse is not so easily overturned. These days the notion of ‘ability’ fulfils the same discursive function in the education system as ‘intelligence’ once did. It enables processes to be justified which categorise and sort young people into a hierarchical structure within which different groups are treated unequally, and in some ways discriminated against. This structure tends to reproduce existing social inequalities and injustices, which the discourse of ‘ability’ is deployed to rationalise and defend.

The common sense of the system now, its regime of truth, is based on determinist assumptions about ‘ability’s These may take their cue from the hereditarian belief that, in Burt’s words, ‘each child’s genetic constitution sets a limit to his mental development.’⁶ Or they may stem from an apparently more compassionate awareness of the role played by social background. As with ‘general intelligence’, any pupil’s ‘ability’ is reckoned a fixed scalable quantum, high or middling or low, which can be spot-lit by testing. ‘Ability’ labels are assigned to learners as soon as possible, and periodically re-confirmed. Children are grouped by label, and offered different educational experiences accordingly. The aim across a school career is for the pupil to reach or fulfil the potential inherent in their given level of ‘ability’s This is fixed ‘ability’ thinking. It exerts a sustained material effect on the lives of pupils and teachers through the policies and practices which it underpins, the structures of schooling it legitimises, and the very language it speaks. For example, a post is advertised requiring someone to teach ‘across the ability-range’s Or a school declares itself to be ‘all-ability’s Or a government policy targets the ‘less able’, or the ‘gifted’s Even mixed ‘ability’ grouping, the would-be alternative to ‘ability’ setting or streaming, is a manifestation of fixed ‘ability’ thinking. How else ensure a group contains the right mix of high, middle and low, save by determining the ‘ability’-that fixed quantum-of each prospective member and picking accordingly?

Rise

Binet’s canny definition of ‘intelligence’ as being what his tests measure throws us back on ourselves.⁷ How we hear Binet depends on whether we regard ‘intelligence’ as a real entity amenable to measurement via testing, or as chimerical, and constructed by the apparatus which purports only to measure it.

But behind the question of ‘intelligence’ is the much more profound question of how the learner is to be conceived of and regarded. Is she an object of knowledge, classified according to test-scores within a regime pessimistic about human educability because, for every learner, ‘ability’ and hence learning has a pre-determined limit? Or is she intrinsically unknowable, beyond typology, a portal for the unexpected and the new, for whom conditions must be furnished so that yet other ways of showing herself as a learner may come into play?

The great educational historian Brian Simon helped undermine the case for intelligence testing as a basis for school selection. He suggested that ‘the teacher who sets out to educate the children under his care meets them as human beings’.⁸ The discourse of ‘ability’ prevents this meeting and evades its implications, both ethical and political.

Meanwhile, as research time and again reveals, fixed ‘ability’ thinking, the heir to Galtonian ‘intelligence’, works its malign effects in the lives of learners, and in the lives of teachers who oppose what such thinking represents. Let us have done with it. Let us step out of its shadow, and rise above our inheritance.

Further reading

• Fancher, R. (1985) The Intelligence Men: Makers of the IQ Controversy. New York: W.W. Norton
• Gresson, A.; Kincheloe, J. and Steinberg, S. (Eds) (1997) Measured Lies: The Bell Curve Examined. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
• Hart, S., Dixon, A., Drummond, M. J., and McIntyre, D. (2004) Learning without Limits. Maidenhead: Open University Press
• Hawkins, D. (1977) The Science and Ethics of Equality. New York: Basic Books, pp. 115-6
• Kline, P. (1991) Intelligence: The Psychometric View. London: Routledge
• Murray, C. and Herrnstein, R. (1996) The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life. New York:Simon & Schuster Ltd.
• Young, M. (1961) The Rise of the Meritocracy 1870-2033: An Essay on Education and Equality. Harmondsworth: Penguin.

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David B Morgan

As we approach the April 2019 launch of the new curriculum in Wales, clouds are gathering in the uplands. The naysayers are out and the bright lights and fanfare that heralded the publication of the Donaldson report back in 2015 seem obscured even from memory, as we peer into the winter grey. A comparison of BBC News headlines will convey the changing tone. From;

‘Radical national curriculum overhaul proposed in Wales’

BBC News 25 February 2015

…we have been reduced to the hysterical;

‘Warning “Education will be left to chance”’

BBC News 10 January 2019

…and the rather more informative;

 ‘Draft Welsh curriculum ‘poorly defined’ education bosses say’

BBC News 10 January 2019

LANGUAGE CAN be alluring and from ‘radical’ beginnings to criticism from the ‘bosses’ makes an appealing narrative that, although oversimplified, is instructive in charting the reform plan’s changing fortunes. Old maxims such as ‘Who? Whom?’ can also act as a useful starting point. However, to oversimplify this complex issue is to do disservice to some genuine concerns about implementation coming from teachers themselves. It also underestimates the scale of ambition and the power of established and entrenched thinking the reforms seek to overcome.

Like the rest of the UK, Wales’ journey from the professional self-confidence and experientialism of the latter half of the 20th century to the exam factory battery school’s vision of the early 21st began with the introduction of the national curriculum in 1988.

Throughout the Major Years and at an increasing rate in the Blair Years the emphasis was placed on league tables, teaching to the exam and an evermore restrictive attitude to content and delivery. As Donaldson has noted:

“Expectations about what schools should be doing have grown inexorably while evidence about how to bring about improvement has remained elusive… The high degree of prescription and detail in the national curriculum, allied to increasingly powerful accountability mechanisms, has tended to create a culture within which the creative role of the school has become diminished and the professional contribution of the workforce underdeveloped. The extent of legislative control and associated accountability mechanisms, seen as necessary at the time, have inhibited professionalism, agility and responsiveness in dealing with emerging issues, and have forced too-frequent political intervention in non-strategic matters. For many teachers and schools the key task has become to implement external expectations faithfully, with a consequent diminution of local creativity and responsiveness to the needs of children and young people.”¹

In Wales some attempts were made to counter the deluge of national testing and bureaucracy that accompanied it. This has had some limited success in Primary Schools but it is fair to say that the framework within which schools in Wales have had to operate has been broadly in line with English experience.

By the time the Blairites had been consigned to the history books even the establishment had begun to rebel against the constrictive standardization. Unsurprisingly, the response of Conservative Ministers did nothing to restore power to teachers. Indeed, the Free Schools and Academy programmes demonstrate their utter contempt. In the worst of England’s ‘Free Schools’ today it is far from clear whether qualified teachers will play a part in your child’s education at all, let alone whether they would be in a position to meaningfully direct the curriculum, assessment and pedagogy. In contrast Donaldson declares;

‘To be clear, the recommendations of this Review do not imply an emphasis on any particular teaching approaches: decisions about teaching and learning are very context and purpose specific, and are best taken by teachers themselves.’²

It is this recognition of the importance of both teachers and learners that made the Donaldson Review appear so radical and why it remains vitally important that teachers are able to direct the implementation process.

The idea of letting teachers off the leash represents a challenge to both the hierarchy of schools management and to the established working practices that have prevailed throughout most of our careers. The leading criticism of the reform programme in Wales has come from ADEW, the body

representing directors of education across Welsh Local Authorities. Or to put that another way the managerial professionals who have based their careers on the establishment and maintenance of the systems built during the period of Conservative and New Labour dominance. The reform programme has deliberately and self-consciously adopted a framework of broad ‘what matters’ statements aimed at allowing the space in which teachers can operate in a pupil-centred manner. Building on Vygotsky’s concept of Zone of Proximal Development and the ‘scaffolding’ techniques developed by generations of educators since; Donaldson’s pedagogical principles encourage teachers to

‘Build on previous knowledge and experience to engage interest’ to ‘promote problem solving and critical thinking’ and to ‘encourage collaboration’. ³

ADEW demonstrate that they have no-confidence in teachers’ ability to develop and utilise pedagogy flexibly because this has no place in their visions of a rigid standardised and prescribed approach. They argue;

‘In the main, too many statements are generic, poorly defined and weak on knowledge and skills development. As a result, it is likely that pupils’ knowledge, understanding and skills development will be left-to chance, i.e. relying heavily on the knowledge and experience of individual teachers as opposed to an entitlement defined by the curriculum.’
⁴

Let’s think about that for a movement. Relying on teachers to make professional decisions about teaching and learning is equated to leaving things ‘to chance’. This response and the cynical projection of it in the sensationalist media is designed to undermine confidence in teachers and scare families and communities.

The development of the new curriculum is being taken forward in a number of aptly names ‘Pioneer Schools’ with the intention of these early trials informing the guidance that will be rolled out throughout the sector. This collegiate approach has is a monumental task and has presented a number of challenges. Time away from the current day to day tasks, to work on the new approaches has been a significant challenge. Even coming out of the shadow of the past career environment presents its difficulties.

‘It has been a shock for teachers in the Pioneer schools, who for the past twenty years were trained to follow strict guidelines, to be asked to design curricula around broader areas and to think in a very different way about how people teach and learn and what skills and facts young people in the twenty-first century need now and will need over their working lives.”⁵

The prevailing managerial culture in education has certainly harmed the profession as well as the lives of generations of children, but what Price does not consider are the countervailing factors. In most cases teacher training continues to provide the critical skills and theories and models that equip teachers to challenge the exam-factory mentality and promote their own creative solutions. I accept that even here there is a dichotomy. Any one comparing the CPD offered by the exam board with the sessions from any other education professional can see this. The point is that, despite the challenges we have faced, teachers have continued to challenge governments, the regional consortia, exam boards and school leaders. This self-confidence has been most evident and most effective when it has been collective, organised through the trade unions and bringing together teachers, families and the wider community.

The task we face, in creating the new curriculum, and make no mistake this work will continue for many years whatever is announced in April, is enormous and challenging. It is for these reasons that the original timescales for implementation were unrealistic and why they have been revised. The most concerning element of the Assembly’s recent review of progress is not the prospect of an increase in teacher autonomy. It is rather the signs that have emerged which indicate attempts by national and regional officers and some school leaders to restrict teacher involvement. The NASUWT have argued that:

“It is the experience of the NASUWT that in many Pioneer Schools the so called ‘co-construction’ is being undertaken by a small select group of staff, usually at a senior level, and education ‘experts’. In many cases, the majority of other staff in the school are not involved, are not engaged and have little information as to any of the work being undertaken.”⁶

This is potentially disastrous and combined with attempts to frustrate channels of communication, amount to attempted sabotage of the reform project. The NEU has called for

“full engagement with, and from, the education profession when the new curriculum and assessment arrangements become available for feedback in April 2019” and argued that “crucial engagement should remain a priority as we work towards the final model and the implementation of the National Approach to Professional Learning in 2020.”⁷

However, this engagement alone is not enough. If the process begun by the Donaldson report in 2015 is to survive both internal sabotage and external opposition, and deliver real reform of the education process in Wales that puts teachers, students and communities in the driving seat, it needs active champions; it needs to be fought for by those who understand that giving teachers the power to make professional decisions about teaching and learning, and encouraging them to promote problem solving, critical thinking and collaboration, is at heart of developing an effective pedagogy.

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James Douglas

“This, then, is the great humanistic and historical task of the oppressed: to liberate themselves and their oppressors as well. The oppressors, who oppress, exploit, and rape by virtue of their power; cannot find in this power the strength to liberate either the oppressed or themselves. Only power that springs from the weakness of the oppressed will be sufficiently strong to free both. Any attempt to “soften” the power of the oppressor in deference to the weakness of the oppressed almost always manifests itself in the form of false generosity; indeed, the attempt never goes beyond this. In order to have the continued opportunity to express their “generosity,” the oppressors must perpetuate injustice as well. An unjust social order is the permanent fount of this “generosity” which is nourished by death, despair, and poverty. That is why the dispensers of false generosity become desperate at the slightest threat to its source” Paulo Freire¹

“Curriculum for Excellence is intended to help children and young people gain the knowledge, skills and attributes needed for life in the 21st century, including skills for learning, life and work Its purpose is often summed up as helping children and young people to become:

• Successful learners
• Confident individuals
• Responsible citizens
• Effective contributors.

These are referred to as the four capacities”²

 “know and understand the history of these islands as a coherent, chronological narrative, from the earliest times to the present day: how people’s lives have shaped this nation and how Britain has influenced and been influenced by the wider world know and understand significant aspects of the history of the wider world: the nature of ancient civilisations; the expansion and dissolution of empires; characteristic features of past non-European societies; achievements and follies of mankind gain and deploy a historically grounded understanding of abstract terms such as ‘empire’, ‘civilisation’, ‘parliament’ and ‘peasantry’ understand historical concepts such as continuity and change, cause and consequence, similarity, difference and significance, and use them to make connections, draw contrasts, analyse trends, frame historically-valid questions and create their own structured accounts, including written narratives and analyses understand the methods of historical enquiry, including how evidence is used rigorously to make historical claims, and discern how and why contrasting arguments and interpretations of the past have been constructed” Department for Education: History Programmes of Study;Key Stages 1 and 2

AS WE TAKE the first tentative steps in to 2019 and pupils return to schools across England and Scotland ready to carry on their learning, much is in flux and much remains. As “the old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born” to liberally paraphrase Gramsci⁴ (and leaving previous education secretaries misguided views of his work out of it), whilst England and Scotland find themselves in the middle of major teacher union disputes and whilst media and politicians on all sides scream about concepts of identity, where does that leave our pupils? What do we mean when we talk of oppression and liberation and where is education? For all the pretty words of politicians and “staked claims” of ministers, the liberation of the oppressed, the true generosity that Freire speaks of seems far from the core of the curriculum across both nations.

The curriculum in Scottish schools varies vastly from that in English schools and whilst not introduced in a raft of sweeping changes that saw the national curriculum be initially introduced as part of the education reforms of 1988, it was introduced around the time of the McCrone agreement⁵, also known as “A Teaching Profession For The 21st Century”, an agreement which made a raft of changes in the working conditions of teachers in Scotland, including a 35 hour working week with set class contact, preparation and collaborative work hours.

In considering how curriculum for excellence can be a curriculum of the oppressed, we need to take a look at history and modern studies, subjects for which the national identity of Scotland, already contested in many ways, paints with a large brush. In examining this, we do not intend to consider the historic place of Scotland within the United Kingdom or the constitutional question, whether you are in West Lothian or otherwise.

Rather a look at what is set out in the history and modern studies curriculum is a basis for examining the class consciousness set out within or otherwise, for this is fundamentally the focus of Freire. This is also the fundamental question facing a nation where one in four children are in poverty. This is the question facing learners in Clydeside, Kelvinside and Morningside.

The Scottish history curriculum, in considering wars in which Scots have fought, takes it`s focus on just that. Deeper questions of what those wars were fought for and who was sent to die are glossed over for a focus on the nationality of those who fought.

The lived history of what happened at home whilst working class boys and men were fighting is covered but with nowhere near as much detail. For a nation that saw so much unrest around the first world war and social unrest which came to define not only “Red Clydeside” but the labour movement as a whole, this seems somewhat astounding.

The history of Scotland between 1914 and 1918 is as much the history of the rent strikes and Mary Barbour as it is General Haig.

‘The paternalistic attack on the history curriculum mirrors the Conservative Party`s paternalistic view of education.’

A curriculum which focused on that history would be a curriculum which showed that working class people can organise. It would be a curriculum which would show that working class people can stand up to and fight back against their oppressors. It would be a curriculum where George Square would be remembered more for being at the centre of a people’s movement rather than the statues of Victoria and Albert or Field Marshalls which can be found therein. It would be a curriculum for the oppressed.

It is another Scotsman who has been most vocal in recent years of the curriculum in English schools not being a curriculum of the oppressed. Edinburgh-born Michael Gove, in his time as education secretary led vociferous attacks on the teaching unions, not considering for a second their important role in shaping education in Britain and launched attacks on the history curriculum with articles for The Daily Mail with such screaming headlines as “Why does the Left insist on belittling true British heroes?”⁶

In a grossly simplified view of the history curriculum and a view of teaching which bore no resemblance to reality (which could be said to exemplify not only his term as education secretary but also the Daily Mail) Gove took aim at a “Blackadder” view of history. The article sets out his antipathy for any who dare question the view of the first world war as a “noble cause” led by Haig, the “patriotic leader grappling honestly with the new complexities of industrial warfare” before looking to defend Britain`s role in the world as “marked by nobility and courage”

In Pedagogy of the Oppressed⁷ , Freire states “Looking at the past must only be a means of understanding more clearly what and who they are so that they can more wisely build the future.” The Conservative view of education exists merely to look at the past and be thankful for the actions of those who went before you The paternalistic attack on the history curriculum mirrors the Conservative Party`s paternalistic view of education. A history curriculum that tells you to be thankful of the generals that heroically led the charge. A citizenship curriculum that tells you that being a good citizen rests simply in voting and understanding how government works without thinking how things can be changed. An education system that tells you to be thankful for the carpet salesman or used car salesman who has stepped in to save your school.

That Ruth Davidson and the Scottish Conservatives⁸, now finding themselves the party of opposition in Scotland have been echoing the words and sentiments of Gove on education reform less than five years later should cause concern for all involved in education in the nation.

This paternalistic view stands in opposition to the vision set out in Pedagogy of The Oppressed, where Freire sets out a vision of the working classes taking the tools to change the future for themselves in an act of love, a paternalistic view of education is top down, telling those working classes to be thankful for their act of “generosity” which is nourished by death, despair, and poverty. In the history, modern studies and citizenship curriculums of both nations, in the reforms pushed through in England and threatened in Scotland it is this paternalistic view that lingers.

The post An inescapable concern The Scottish and English curriculum through the prism of Paulo Freire appeared first on education for tomorrow.

Ken Jones

THE BREAK-UP of the welfare state, deindustrialisation and the end of full employment have been essential elements of neoliberalism. They have created social and educational problems which have deepened since the crash of 2008, reducing Britain to a critical condition.

Yet crisis has not produced a radical political outcome. One of the most striking features of the years since 2008 has been the political success of the Conservative attempt to present the solution to the problems of neoliberalism as a stronger dose of the same: permanent austerity becomes the answer to recession. Likewise, in education, the mix of tradition and market which animated Conservatism in the 1980s – and led to the 1988 Education Reform Act – was taken to a new level of intensity in the programme launched by Michael Gove when he became Secretary of State in 2010.  Nearly a decade later, the problems of that programme are evident – in teacher supply, in the stagnation of the academy project, in school cultures strongly shaped by the demands of tests and examinations. Faced with this situation, the thinking of those committed to the legacy of 1988 has mutated. This is especially clear around issues of curriculum and assessment. The stifling effects of hyper-accountability are admitted, and schools are chided for their near-exclusive focus on good exam results. But the remedy for these miseries is found on another page of the conservative educational primer, where the advantages of a ‘knowledge-rich’ curriculum are set out. As Ofsted emerges as an authority on curriculum, schools are faced with a new agenda for change – but once again the impetus will come from the right.

Why should this be the case? Why, in the context of appalling levels of austerity-induced child poverty and chronic problems of teacher burnout, should educational debate still be dominated by proposals of this sort? And on what resources and traditions could alternative approaches draw?

To sketch the beginnings of some answers, it is useful to return to the moment of Michael Gove, to the situation in which he intervened and the rhetoric he crafted.

‘The process of ‘seeking out’, which amounted to a willingness to recognize, positively evaluate and make sense of working-class youth cultures, was to influence greatly the generation of teachers entering urban secondary schools in the later 1960s.’

Empowered by the Conservative-Lib-Dem Coalition’s presentation of itself as an emergency regime, which needed to use forceful measures to exit from a once-in-a-century crisis, Gove seized the opportunity to pursue a strategy of restructuring that compressed the patterns of the 18 years of Conservative policy under Thatcher and Major into one fouryear ministerial span. He concluded that, more than twenty-five years after the Education Reform Act, which was supposed to have settled such matters, there was still much to be done to break the influence of progressive educational ideas and the organizations that harboured them. To do this, he aimed to extend the ‘achievements’ of the Thatcher period, so that schooling was reinvigorated by competitive mechanisms, private sector influence, tight control from the centre and what he saw as academic rigour.

The claim to rigour was central to the way in which Gove justified his agenda. He described himself as an ‘unashamed elitist’ who wanted to ‘proclaim the importance of education as a good in itself’ and to ‘argue that introducing the young minds of the future to the great minds of the past is our duty’¹. Policies based on these principles would ‘provide children with the opportunity to transcend the circumstances of their birth’, ‘spreading knowledge to every open mind’. He claimed to be for the poor, against the privileged; for a good education for everyone, against the growth of intellectually un-rewarding and functionally valueless vocational qualifications. In short, he attempted to make ‘social justice’ the property of Conservatism, and to win the argument that established knowledge traditions were a means by which social justice in education could be realised.

It is this perspective which continues to dominate policymaking, while other kinds of thinking about knowledge traditions and students’ learning are eclipsed. The problems which such alternative traditions have sought to address are well summarised by Lew Zipin²:

‘Winning school learners to the sense that their intelligence is recognised and challenged, such that they engage with teaching-and-learning invitations, is a most difficult project when learners’ culturally inherited ways of knowing do not match those privileged in school curriculum. A justice-orientated strategy, [entails designing] a curriculum that makes meaningful connection with ways of knowing in learners’ lives beyond school. To do so, it is vital, observes Lewin, to ‘become ethnographers in the true sense’ that is, to become open to learning about and from the lives of others, with conviction that these lives embody both intelligence and knowledge assets (rather than biological and cultural ‘deficits’).’

Zipin is writing in a US context, but similar perspectives have been a feature of educational thinking in Britain too. In Education in Britain³ I discussed the work of teachers and educational thinkers in the 1950s and 1960s, when schoolbased curriculum experiment was licensed, and the question of the relationship between students’ cultures and the school curriculum was there to be explored. They felt lucky, one teacher recalled:

‘to be at that point in England’s history because no one was saying you have to teach this or you have to teach that, although there were A level and GCE examinations. I think we were free to invent a new curriculum and there were people saying the comprehensive school needs a new curriculum. It needs a new curriculum that fits it, it’s no good it taking another curriculum. So the invitation was there to create.’⁴

‘We would expect English work to be rooted in the concerns, hopes and fears and daily lives of the pupils’ wrote Harold Rosen,⁵ one of those who brought a distinctive ‘London English’ into being. One of Rosen’s colleagues, John Dixon, suggested to an NUT conference that, ‘there exists not merely this sort of elite culture … but some different kind of culture which it is necessary to seek out by going into other people’s experience’⁶. The process of ‘seeking out’, which amounted to a willingness to recognize, positively evaluate and make sense of working-class youth cultures, was to influence greatly the generation of teachers entering urban secondary schools in the later 1960s. The idea that part of the teacher’s role was to understand and mediate through curriculum innovation the social and cultural changes that students were living through gave a new purpose to the work of teaching, a purpose which underlay approaches towards race, and class in later decades.

This sense of classrooms as places of cultural encounter, in which established knowledge traditions were not taken for granted as embodiments of excellence, was later marginalised. When Harold Rosen, died in 2008, his son Michael Rosen reflected on the meaning of his work and the fate it had encountered. His father had spent a lifetime arguing that culture, language and education were inseparable: ‘whatever language the pupils possess, it is this which must be built on rather than driven underground.’ Yet these years of ‘thought, theory and practice’ had been forgotten – or, more precisely, ‘wiped out’ – by the governments of the 80s and 90s.⁷

At this point, where we consider the ‘wiping out’ of a body of work, it is useful to recall a point made by the American writer, Corey Robin⁸: conservatism since Edmund Burke has insisted on the impossibility of the idea that the politics and cultural life of a society should be shaped by the majority of the people who live in it. Everything that is good in a society -its sense of beauty, civility, order, truth – can only be contaminated by mass influence. Excellence is elitist. From this perspective, traditions of thought and practice of the sort developed by Rosen and Dixon, can only be damaging.

This is the tendency of Ofsted’s thinking, as embodied in its new curriculum framework. Its emphasis falls on that which should be known, something which is external to the culture of learners. The resources which learners bring to school are of no interest. This is not an approach likely to encourage new thinking about pedagogy, nor about how to support the learning of students whose ‘culturally inherited ways of knowing’, to quote Zipin⁹, ‘do not match those privileged in the school curriculum’. It may thus contribute to prolonging a crisis of education, by introducing new and unproductive norms to pedagogy and curricula. In this situation, the experiences of an earlier period provide a rich alternative to policies which repeat, rather than escape from, the terms of an educational impasse. Attending to the relationship between formal curricula and student experiences and requires a complex pedagogy, and a readiness to commit to a cultural dialogue which passes Ofsted’s understanding.

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Jess Edwards

The terms “knowledge rich”, “powerful knowledge” or a “knowledge based pedagogy” are fast becoming a fashionable way of describing the values at the centre of a great education

AT ITS HEART, those pushing this “knowledge agenda” draw on the ideas of E D Hirsch¹ who expounds passionately on how a return to a more traditional curriculum built around ideas of shared knowledge can help children to become more powerful. Children, they argue, need access to “powerful knowledge” and this will help achieve a more socially just education system.

So Rachel De Souza, founder of Parents and Teachers for Excellence, says in her forward to A Question of Knowledge:

“Knowing those things – and not just recalling the bald facts but deeply understanding them – gives you an upper hand. It gives you the confidence to discuss a wide range of live topics with those around you and it gives you social status. It makes you part of the club that runs the world, and the inside track to change it.”²

If, like me, you follow the endless Twitter “debates” between the “traditionalists” and the “progressives”, you will no doubt have seen that the idea that a core body of knowledge exists that children need to know in order to be educated. This comes alongside an associated pedagogy – namely that of direct instruction or the transition model of education akin to what Freire termed the “banking model”³.

The teacher acts as the holder of knowledge, imparting that knowledge to pupils in the form of facts to memorise.  There are some really deep problems with this model of pedagogy. The first for me is the very question of “knowledge”. Presented to us as value free, knowledge is anything but. In the writings of Hirsch, we will find all sorts of important things for children to learn about American history. None of them will be about Geronimo or Crazy Horse though. None of them will be about Malcolm X or the Black Panthers either – why not?

It’s not so much what is deemed as important to the knowledge brigade, but what is omitted that is worrying.  Also missing from this model of curriculum is the question of immediate relevance to the subjects of education – children.

It’s worth just noting a central tenet of Hirsch’s work – something that he called “intellectual capital”. This is the idea that middle class and ruling class children come to school already with a bank of vocabulary and experience and knowledge that gives them what Hirsh says is the “Velcro to gain still more knowledge”⁴

I can see why this might sound appealing and correct to so many teachers. On the surface, it is true of course, that middle class children come to school with many advantages. But scratch below that surface for a moment and what are we saying? That working class children are culturally impoverished? That they come to school with a cultural deficit that we must overcome?

This is something that Dianne Reay gives some time to exploring in her book Miseducation: Inequality, Education and the Working Class. She writes of the Head Teacher of a big academy in North London where the parents started to complain about what they called the draconian rules within the school. In her defence, the Head Teacher said:

“What underpins this philosophy is that if they come from unstructured backgrounds where anything goes and rules and boundaries are not clear in the home, we need to ensure that they’re clear here. So we run very tight systems here, you could call it a traditional approach or a formal approach”⁵.

I give that quote because I think it encapsulates the contempt with which the current architects of the education system really hold working class children and their families in. To Nick Gibb, government minister of state at the Department for Education, and his friends, they’re all from chaotic, unstructured, “anything goes” homes and at school they need to learn to do what they’re told and learn what’s good for them. What is dressed up as social justice is what I would call old fashioned social control.

I believe that children learn best when they feel there is a relevance and purpose to the things that go on in class. Where they have some say and ownership over the process of learning and where they are helped to un-cover and explore the curriculum. The associated pedagogies of a curriculum that treats children as the subjects, rather than the objects of the education process is at direct odds with the current trend of so called “powerful knowledge” and direct instruction.

I am lucky enough to have been working alongside Luke Abbot and Tim Taylor on the National Education Union funded, Mantle of the Expert (MOE) course over the last year. MOE is a truly transformative pedagogy that places children at the very centre of the learning process. This year, my Year 4 class have worked in role within story worlds of their own creation. We have learnt about world travel, about a range of cultures and beliefs, about Vikings and Anglo-Saxons and about migration and our local area. I have worked hard to avoid turning these subjects into a list of learning objectives to be ticked off one by one. Through using the MoE approach, the children have been part of co-constructing the stories and we have planned the next steps in our inquiries together.

Some might ask if the children have learnt anything. The answer can be seen in pages upon pages of the best writing I have ever achieved from children in my fifteen years of teaching practice. The children’s writing has benefitted from the sense of purpose they feel. I am not asking them to write for me or for a set of assessment criteria (although of course, I am assessing their writing all of the time). Instead, they are writing because they feel there is an immediate need for them to do so. For example, we read Kensuke’s Kingdom by Michael Morpurgo and worked as a make believe mystery solving team for an entire term. They needed to write reports to file on missing people; they have needed to write scripts for TV advertisements for the mystery solving team. They have felt compelled to write letters, newspaper reports and heartfelt diary entries. Of course, spelling, grammar and punctuation have all been included in a way that is meaningful. This is crucial because without the writing feeling purposeful to the children, the teaching of SPaG will largely fall on deaf ears.

Centrally important to this creative approach to pedagogy is dialogue. Dialogue between children and between adults and children. Talking, thinking and talking again. Imagining solutions to problems, testing those solutions out and in the process, learning essential skills and knowledge. There is now a group of Twitteratti teachers who spend lots of their time attacking dialogue. They rail against group work. They say that discussion is a waste of time.

But dialogue is crucial. Dialogue is how we construct meaning in education. It’s how we make sense of the world. It must be placed centre stage in any pedagogy that seeks to be truly liberating.

I believe deeply that it is simply not true that those in government are honest about wanting education to provide social justice. Many of the teachers currently arguing in favour of the knowledge agenda are passionate teachers, wanting to empower the students in their classes.

They are being misled. The language of social justice is being co-opted by those with no interest in achieving it. Arguing that the banking model is the way that children learn best has failed the test of history. Even the CBI president, Paul Drechsler, has criticised heavily the current emphasis on test results and rote learning, and called for them to prioritise teaching that encourages thoughts, questions, creativity and teamworking⁶. Even for the needs of British industry, the current system is not delivering.

Creativity, now painted as something only an oldfashioned, woolly, liberal kind of teacher believes in, must be fought for in our schools. Without a creative approach to the teaching of all subjects, children will never gain the deep understanding and love of learning that they deserve to feel. The creative process, from thought, through discussion, rethinking and making, lies at the very centre of what it is to be human. To turn a human being’s learning into an exercise in fact based test passing, is to embed the deepest alienation in our school system. Teachers everywhere must begin to fight for a vision of education where children can truly develop their personalities, where they are encouraged to think and question and most importantly, to challenge and make the world a better place.

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