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Alison Prince
Jill Stephenson’s excellent piece on the unsavoury domination of Murdoch (SR 308) asked why our education system is producing university graduates who read the Sun rather than something more literate. Clearly, the answer must have something to do with the prevailing educational ethos – but where exactly is the basic mistake?
I think it stems from the idea that an externally designed system can be a good replacement for the less formal method of leaving education to the teachers. This infatuation with centralised system-producing reflects the larger conviction, current in the last couple of decades, that a country is an economic enterprise rather than a mass of individual people. Computer use has made this possible, but In a historic context, we may still be in the primitive stages of information technology. We are delighted with its organisational powers, but relatively few people have yet grasped its creative possibilities.
Such innovations as the hypercard are providing a tool that can open up a free individual way to shape and communicate new ideas, but this concept is not yet lodged in the thinking of governments. From their point of view, technology has provided the perfect Control Age, efficiently equipped to carry out surveillance, recording and analysis of data. It has handed them undreamed-of power.
In my view, this power is being abused. Because the establishment of systems is a desirable end, it has invaded education, with the result that it stresses the need for learning testable facts. Less finite aspects of wisdom-gathering are not easy to assess in tick-box form, so they have quietly been phased out. The impoverishment of thought that results from this is gathering momentum, since the number of people who have a broader concept and experience of education is dwindling.
Children are all too often instructed by teachers who themselves have never known any other way.
Working at Jordanhill College in the late ‘80s, I saw with dismay the narrow focus on ‘validation’ and results. Education students then were being taught to administer the approved module, record the results, and hope their school could hold its head above water, and I see little sign that things have changed except in a few maverick cases. All the classic teachings about education have been dumped. The Socratic idea that the ‘unexamined life’ is worthless has gone, along with the pursuits of perception and enlightenment that still underlie the great religions. Also discarded is all the work of such pioneers as Maria Montessori and, more particularly, Jean Piaget, whose teaching used to provide the basis for all post-graduate education courses.
We have been channelled into living within a value system that may not relate to the way we think of ourselves at all, but it is so universally accepted that education has been slanted towards teaching us how to use if properly.
Born in Switzerland in 1896, Piaget’s work was still assumed to be vitally important until Thatcher and the ‘70s swept all such insights away in a tide of glorious, guilt-free material acquisition. At that point, we started to see a shift in the way human significance is evaluated. There have always been slaves and exploitation, but it used to be accompanied by a cautious understanding (or fear) that the disadvantaged might also play music, write poetry or head a rebellion. The division was socially brutal but, perhaps with the exception of Henry Vlll’s new religion, not spiritually intrusive. That personal invasion did not move into real power until the end of the 20th century, by which time we had been brainwashed into accepting that the most important thing about any human being is his or her spending power.
Trains and aeroplanes do not carry ‘passengers’ but ‘customers’. This may seem a tiny thing to pick on, but it is the canary in the coal-mine, a chirp of irritation that reveals a far worse malaise. It shows that we have been channelled into living within a value system that may not relate to the way we think of ourselves at all, but it is so universally accepted that education has been slanted towards teaching us how to use if properly.
In schools now, the educational emphasis is on the how and not the why. Socratic dialogue is limited to a playground ding-dong of opinion, not usually couched in skilled terms. In the classroom, facts are purveyed, boxes ticked, the techniques for exams learned, statistics entered in the school records, league tables compared. Recording all this takes a lot of a teacher’s time, and there is no chance to explain how words have come to mean what they do or how people in Europe must have felt about Napoleon. The children have become the fodder of the system.
The editor of a national magazine told me last week, ‘I was in my first year at university before my dad realised I didn’t know how apostrophes worked. He taught me in 10 minutes.’ Bill Boyd (SR 310) worries that a recent report highlighted the fact that ‘not only are most teachers uncomfortable with the notion of teaching literacy skills, many of them have little confidence in their own language.’
Such lacunae are inevitable when teachers themselves have been narrowly educated. Instead of revealing the underlying structures that make language and knowledge the glorious things they are, education, which literally means the leading out from within of the child’s abilities, has given way to a training in how to fit effectively into the ever-shrinking limits of a commercially-dominated world. There is no time to develop organic understanding through questioning and discussion, and the idea that a child has to rebuild the structure of new information in his or her own mind is not considered to be an essential part of the process.
At graduation, mortarboards are tossed into the air and framed photos put on the mantelpiece, but the ex-students may still know nothing about apostrophes or how our languages are constructed.
Piaget’s most perceptive contribution was to point out the fixed schemata within which children develop. He observed that infants start off with a physical understanding of what surrounds them then begin to make what sense of it they can in their still-growing brains. Because of this, it is no use trying to urge a child into a more sophisticated mind-set until the he or she has reached that developmental stage.
Piaget’s approach was biological, regarding the child as a growing organism that continues to develop throughout its life, and he contended that, like any other animal, it needs to find its own equilibrium by taking in what it needs. It seemed obvious to him that the teacher’s job is to satisfy that need through providing experiences that enable the child to discover new truths. Perception and memory, he claimed, are not wholly logical, being right at the centre of the child’s deeply personal ‘hard drive’, but cognitive development goes on for many years, and must remain unimpaired and fully fed. The expressive arts enable children to enter into an active relationship with what is being taught. They must never be regarded as empty vessels to be filled. Least of all should they be filled with material that has no meaning to them except as a response to be trotted out when the appropriate question triggers it.
The corollaries are obvious. A child restricted to a diet of test material has no way to feel him or herself to be growing and developing, gaining the ability to express inner ideas and feelings. Deprived of any outgoing expressive function, unused material starts to silt up in the brain. Depression and frustration set in, as current statistics show only too clearly. Many such children pass the tests imposed by the system well enough to get into tertiary education, where they continue to get adequate results, but universities and colleges, too, are under the cosh to keep the statistics right.
A dwindling number of lecturers can find time to enter into a creative dialogue with their students, or else their own education never equipped them to do so. At graduation, mortarboards are tossed into the air and framed photos put on the mantelpiece, but the ex-students may still know nothing about apostrophes or how our languages are constructed. Secretly intimidated by texts that use long words and need a basic grasp of grammar, they turn to reading the Sun because, although they managed to pass their exams, their cognitive development stopped when they were about eight years old.
Good young teachers out there could change all this. But the way things are now, they’ll be lucky to get the chance.
Alison Prince is an author and editor in Arran
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