There is a continuity within the Thatcher-Major-Blair 'reforms', namely the view that education has a utilitarian purpose: to fit pupils to work in a competitive society, and one in which there is systemic insecurity.

We should not be surprised by this, it's what neoliberalism is all about.

However, the view that education is not synonymous with "training", or simply about the imparting of "skills", is a legacy from The Enlightenment; a legacy which the current elite finds threatening.

Bill Rammell, then Higher Education Minister, told The Independent that:

' ... the fall in those studying classics, philosophy and history (is) "no bad thing" ... ' IND

The trend towards "mechanised" education has also recently been raised both by North London student Tom Greene writing in The Independent, by a leader in The Guardian, and by Peter Hyman in the Observer.

It's all a matter of the difference between: 'What's counted and what counts?'

England runs one of the most comprehensive testing regimes in Western Europe, and the consequent damage caused to real education is the subject of much comment:

What counts,   Our children tested to destruction,   SATs: Exam meltdown;

There is a wider problem raised, for example, in the Unicef Report.

In general, there's a strong sense that Primary schools 'have lost their sense of fun and play'.

The effects of SATs on subjects like Poetry, and Science have also been highlighted.

Finally, and supporting A.C.Grayling's argument, there is lack of attention to "high order skills" probably because they are less easy to test, and/or, because they are no longer required in the global 'utopia'.   'Parrots';

Our education system is collapsing into a form of mass indoctrination

The problem is that we live in a world where if it's not measurable, it cannot be commodified, therefore it's useless.

Pupils are being prepared for a world where no one's wants to know what they think, or what they know - in the sense of knowing how and why, rather than what - and the last thing the 'movers and shakers' - who meet up in Davos every January - want is subordinates who ask awkward questions.

A liberal education has too often been replaced by an indoctrination of the young in the answers they need to memorise and regurgitate for exams.

It is so all pervasive that we simply do not see any longer what has happened, and the education establishment – teachers, academics, administrators and those in the quango penumbra – does not acknowledge the impoverishment rather than the flowering of the lives of our young people.

This sad story extends far beyond the shores of Britain: in the emerging superpowers in the East, students sit inert in large school and university classrooms, passively absorbing material dictated to them by grey men and women, which they repeat in their essays and dissertations, straining every sinew to produce the "right" answer.

The creative, the imaginative or individual response is marginalised, and the whole process of education with schools and universities becomes mechanised and industrialised: mass-production factories of the mind ...

Independent  17 July 2010    

The importance of knowing how

Schools Minister: children are deprived of knowledge

A generation of schoolchildren has grown up without knowing who Miss Havisham was and thinking Nelson won the Battle of Waterloo, Schools Minister Nick Gibb said yesterday.

In his first keynote speech since taking office, Mr Gibb – who is responsible for the delivery of the national curriculum – made it clear he believed schools no longer put enough emphasis on imparting knowledge to pupils.

He called for an emphasis on "facts, data and narrative" in history and "the rich language of Shakespeare" which, he said, "should be the common property of us all". He added, speaking to an education conference organised by the think-tank, Reform: "Yet, to more and more people, Miss Havisham is a stranger and even the most basic history and geography a mystery."

A survey of first-year history undergraduates revealed that twice as many students thought Nelson was in charge at the Battle of Waterloo rather than Wellington.

Ninety per cent could not name a single British Prime Minister of the 19th century.

"Knowledge is the basic building block for a successful of life," Mr Gibb said ...

Independent  02 July 2010    

The Importance of Knowing How

Social mobility in England 'lags behind other countries'

The study – commissioned by the Sutton Trust – suggested that pupils born into families with a history of underachievement were still much more likely to be resigned to low-paid jobs when they grew up.

Sir Peter Lampl, the charity’s chairman, said failure to improve social mobility risked pushing the UK to the “bottom of the class in education’s world order”.

"Education mobility points the way to the level of future social mobility in this country,” he said.

“While there are some signs of progress, we are still not serving the needs of the current crop of school pupils as well as we should and parental background remains a much more significant determiner of children's life chances in the UK than elsewhere.” ...

“A major obstacle to education, and consequently social mobility, is therefore the high levels of social segregation in English secondary schools.”

Researchers at Essex University analysed the test scores of thousands of children born in 1989/90 ... and compared them with results of equivalent exams by children born at a similar time in other nations.

The findings show that in England, 56 per cent of children of degree educated parents were in the top quarter of test results at the age of 14, compared with just nine per cent of youngsters whose parents left school without any O-levels – a gap of 47 percentage points.

This was twice the equivalent gap seen in Australia – 23 percentage points – and bigger than the 37 point gap in Germany and 43 point gap in the US ...

Telegraph  26 Apr 2010    Inequality:Does it Matter?    

Parents' class is the key in England's exams system

Top comprehensives 'more exclusive than grammar schools'

'Communitarian Citizenship'

Neoliberalism and education

Debt should not overshadow education in the election campaign

Labour has had three terms to sort out schools, years in which it has tipped money into the system on a scale that may never be repeated.

Yet, as with the health system, unprecedented levels of investment have yielded disappointingly little ...

The government's response has been to throw money at problems in the hope they will go away, while concentrating on achieving instant superficial improvements by erecting new buildings.

Alongside this, it has been enslaved by the notion that big is always better and that vocational and technical subjects should always be prioritised over academic ones.

It often assumes that schooling is the same as skilling. It is also obsessed with controlling teachers through targets.

Targets can deliver. But in the end, a target culture reduces education to bureaucracy and crushes initiative ...

Whichever party wins control after the election, it will need to start thinking more holistically about what education is for. The debt crisis looms large, but we must not allow this issue to blot out everything else in the campaign.

If there is one thing more important than sorting out debt, it is sorting out education.

Independent  06 April 2010        

Testing can undermine children's rights

OECD: UK has worse social mobility record than other developed countries

The chances of a child from a poor family enjoying higher wages and better education than their parents is lower in Britain than in other western countries ...

Highlighting the UK's lack of social mobility, the Paris-based thinktank said the chances of a young person from a less well-off family enjoying higher wages or getting a higher level of education than their parents was "relatively low" ...

It added that there was a hefty wage premium associated with growing up in a better-educated household and a corresponding penalty for being raised in a less-educated family ...

In the UK, the OECD found that 50% of the economic advantage that high-earning fathers have over low-earning fathers is passed on to their sons.

By contrast, in Australia, Canada and the Nordic countries, less than 20% of the wage advantage was passed on ...

mugclass
10 Mar 2010, 1:58PM

In my town, if you live in one of the less well off area, your children will go to one of three schools, all of which have just received damning reports from Ofsted. For a bright child from a low income family there is no hope. You will be educated in a school with high truancy, high level of behavioural problems, high levels of disruptive behaviour, a high teacher turnover and frequent teaching by supply staff.

My husband and I were fortunate to benefit from the grammar school system, and although our families were both low income we went on to excellent universities and good careers.

Labour have managed to achieve great equality - the equality of ensuring that if you are from a poorer background, no-one will do well. They have achieved equality of failure.

Guardian  10 Mar 2010    Economic Democracy    Inequality

OECD

A Family Affair

Frustrated pupils 'bored by their factory schools'

UK low in social mobility league, says charity

... surprisingly, children spend very little of their time in school thinking. There is almost an unspoken deal: we'll spoonfeed you the required nuggets of information to pass your exams if you behave and do your homework on time. Our education system is not designed to get children to think. Why?

Because even now, after some streamlining of subjects, teachers have huge amounts of content to plough through. Because teachers often do not have the techniques or confidence to engage in open-ended, probing questioning. Because in some schools there are crowd-control issues that get in the way.

There is perhaps one further reason. We don't prize thinking in this country. We are suspicious of the intellectual; it's almost as if we believe too much thinking is not a good thing ...

englishhermit
16 Aug 09, 12:50am

Careful now. Who is going to man the call centres and work in the banks if they have been taught to think?

There are too many jobs about where thinking is not only not required but would preclude selection for the job in the first place.

What is required is the ability to follow instructions on the screen without deviation from the script.

Beep. Beep. Ching. Beep. Beep. Ching. It's the machine people from Planet Screen.

Observer  16 August 2009

The Rose Report appears to reprise most of the educational controversies of the last fifty years, many of which were thriving when I was at teacher training college in the early sixties.

In those days it was received 'wisdom' that primary schools were about creativity, and the ownership and control of schools was non-controversial: the LEA provided the money - such as it was - and a very weak inspectorate left teachers to get on with it.

Now, as The Independent's leader rightly indicates, the Tory-Gove agenda is about taking schools away from what Margaret Thatcher called 'socialist' LEAs, and preparing them for the day when the IMF tells the UK to privatise them.

A bureaucratic-centrist curriculum will almost certainly not be privatised - another indicator of the corporate state - and what is learned will continue to be a political football along the lines of a sterile debate between 'modernist' versus 'traditional' modes of learning.

AC Grayling raised a crucial point about the curriculum in his New Scientist article "The importance of knowing how" which distinguished between knowing facts, and evaluating them.

Critical thinking is, arguably, the last thing politicians like Balls and Gove would wish to see developed since their nostrums might then be subject to the closer inspection which they deserve.

However, it is impossible to divorce education from the society in which it is embedded, and neoliberal society (oxymoron!) expects - without spelling it out - that children be equipped to enter a global economy in which employment carries endemic risk and uncertainty, and previous social support systems are ebbing away.

The dilemma is the extent to which this is made explicit, and also the extent to which the process of education enables pupils to challenge the theoretical basis of such an economy.

Such a curriculum would also - justifiably - raise the profile of both the ethical and ecological considerations which the current global economy ignores.

This is not the radical reform primary education needs

Government's failure over the past decade has been in overloading the curriculum, imposing too many tests and attempting to manage schools directly from Whitehall.

And there is scant evidence that ministers have learned from past mistakes. Only this week they announced that education on "emotions" should be compulsory in primary schools from age five.

Sir Jim himself acknowledges that the existing curriculum has grown too "fat". But it is not clear that his recommendations would trim it.

What our primary schools need is a clear and concise list of knowledge and skills that children should possess by the time they move into the next level of education.

Once that has been established, the job of policymakers is to step back and give teachers the freedom to impart knowledge in the manner they deem appropriate.

The proposal last week from the Conservative education spokesman, Michael Gove, to extend the secondary academy system to primary schools points the way forward.

Giving schools the freedom to run their own budgets and decide how best to teach the curriculum looks rather more like the "fundamental" reform the primary education sector needs than anything the Government has produced. The Independent 01 May 2009

Computers key in primary review

Jim Rose: education becomes a sideshow

Jim'll fix it

Neoliberalism and education: the autonomous chooser

The importance of knowing how

MPs call for simpler curriculum

Teachers 'de-skilled'

The national curriculum for five to 16-year-olds in England is too heavily controlled by government, the Commons schools select committee has said.

The curriculum should be slimmed-down, according to the cross-party committee of MPs.

And schools should only have to follow the curriculum in the core subjects of English, maths, science and ICT.

The government has accepted some reform is necessary, but says the curriculum is crucial to raising standards.

The committee's report said there should be a cap on the proportion of the curriculum prescribed by central government.

"Our view is that it should be less than half of teaching time," the report said.

It said teachers had been "de-skilled" by high levels of central government guidance and prescription.

"At times schooling has appeared more of a franchise operation, dependent on a recipe handed-down by government rather than the exercise of professional expertise by teachers." ...

BBC NEWS 02 April 2009

Soulless schools cursed by league tables and dominated by "formulaic" exams are squeezing the lifeblood out of education, leading headteacher and political commentator Anthony Seldon will warn tomorrow.

The 21st-century obsession with teaching "facts" harks back to Thomas Gradgrind's utilitarian values in Dickens's Hard Times, he will say in a hard-hitting lecture to the College of Teachers. The result is a system that stifles imagination, individuality and flair.

In an extraordinary indictment of the national examination system, Dr Seldon, master of Wellington College and biographer of former prime minister Tony Blair, will claim that we are forgetting the very purpose of education. "Many parents, many teachers, will recognise it. Schools need to be liberating places, but it is very hard to do it with the utter throttling, choking straitjacket of the national examination system curriculum," he told the Observer

In Britain, he advocates a severe cut-back of external testing and examinations, which he claims have increased because of a lack of trust of schools, heads and teachers.

One option would be banishing national external exams until the age of 18, as they do in the United States. He also argues that GCSEs and A-levels, should be "swept away" in favour of exams, such as the International Baccalaureate, with its primary years, middle years, and diploma-level programmes ...

Observer 08 March 2009

Laureate attacks poetry teaching

Sats put primary pupils off science

The importance of knowing how

This education system fails children by teaching them to parrot, not think

What is education for?

What's counted and what counts

North London student Tom Greene argues that the needs of examination markers is now driving education:

This process (marking) would be fine if it was reflecting the work that was done by students, rather than shaping what and how is taught to them. Exam preparation, and increasingly education, is now about adapting to this system; forcing an examiner, wearily red-penning through piles of paper, to give you that top grade. Students are drilled to jump through hoops that the examiner is holding.

Exam preparation is part of education - but they shouldn't be one and the same thing. The mechanical exam process is moulding a mechanical education. In traditionally opinion-orientated subjects such as History and English Literature, subjectivity is being replaced by a clear-cut method of approaching exams. For GCSE English you have to write essays that conform to three-word criteria (eg "Inform, Explain and Describe" or "Analyse, Review and Comment"). In AS English the coursework and three-hour exam are all marked under five "Assessment Objectives" - I know all five off by heart.

Tom Greene | The Independent | 17 August 2006

The real risk is not dumbing down, but an unduly narrow focus which rewards spoon-feeding over critical teaching and leaves stressed students with little time to read round.

Pupils may reject subjects that interest them in favour of those they think it easier to do well in.

Figures yesterday showed a revised, "more accessible" maths A-level not only produced many more top grades, but also attracted more students.

Anything that encourages 16-year-olds to study maths is welcome, but it is sad if it can only be done by emphasising the certainty of success rather than the challenge. ...

Leader | The Guardian | 18 August 2006

A real education service would not require the minister to dabble in curriculum, er, 'development' via an almost weekly torrent of initiatives.

Former Education Secretary, Alan Johnson, was emblematic of this particular fever.

He 'ordered' schools to teach the classics - such as Jane Austen and Charles Dickens - to 11 and 12 year olds:

Policy director of the National Association for the Teaching of English, Ian McNeilly, who is also an English teacher, said:

"For students who are not yet ready, teaching texts of such linguistic complexity is completely counter-productive."

He accused Mr Johnson of trying to secure a few more votes from Middle England "by not allowing standards to slip".

"But you don't have to do that by shoe-horning a classic author into the classroom," he added.

"The guy's a bird brain. If he wants to make an informed decision he can give me a ring. His decision is completely uninformed."

BBC NEWS 16 February 2007

The content of the curriculum is of crucial importance, not simply in deciding what pupils shall study, but - more important - in deciding what shall be left out.

The price of any curriculum is the other curriculum that might have been; the other person the pupil might have become.

But for now, it's the plaything of the latest 'here-today-and-gone-tomorrow' politician, making her/his way up - or down - the political greasy pole.

Examples of headline-grabbing 'initiatives' - which were probably chip wrappers within days - include:

5.28pm

Helen Jones (Lab) returns, suggesting that there is much in this bill that is beneficial.

"But I deeply regret that I cannot support the government's measures.

"There are two things we need to do in education: transfer skills, and transfer values. And you cannot 'sell off' that second process.

"But that is exactly what we are proposing to do ... "

I want now to return to the original question - What Should We Teach? - and pose it in a different way:

• Basic Skills, including IT;
• Those aspects of geography and history which will allow us to "place" ourselves in the wider context of where we are and from whence we have come;
• An inquiring, scientific attitude of mind imparted by experiment and discussion;
• An understanding of the fallibility of beliefs and opinions;
• Empathy with and concern for others, imparted by history, geography, drama and role play, and role models from people, from all times and cultures, who have demonstrated in their lives a care and concern for others;
• What is Society? Compare and contrast, for example, the aftermath of the Asian Tsunami with the aftermath of Hurricane Katerina
• An exploration of the causes of conflict and war, and of conflict resolution;
• An understanding of Gaia, and of the planet's ecological limits.

These aims are very largely absent, since the society from which they came has given way to that of the autonomous individual, and the commodified citizen, both chattels of the corporate dystopia.

Back to top      Home Page