Readers responses to Michael Shaw’s review of “Over-schooled but Undereducated”, TES, 22nd January 2010

Janet M. Lawley, former headmistress and an advocate for children.

What a pity that Michael Shaw was unfamiliar with the concept of cognitive apprenticeship as a model of learning and assumed that it was the same as traditional apprenticeship. It is almost two decades since Collins, Brown and Hollum published their thesis, “Cognitive Apprenticeship – Making Thinking Visible”, proposing an apprenticeship model of learning as the closest to the grain of the brain. It is teaching through “guided experience”, an approach which can be applied in all subjects and is already an approach of choice for many students and their teachers. Countless teachers have discovered that it is the natural (not the only) way to learn and help the student to demonstrate conceptual understanding.

It is the application of the principles of modelling (showing), coaching (explaining), scaffolding (supporting) and fading (giving independence), to the classroom and schools. It includes articulation (learning to explain for yourself), reflection (there is no learning without thinking), and exploration of the boundaries (as the students push forward to explore for themselves, to set goals, revise their skills and grow). No one approach is right for every topic or every subject, everyday but teachers would tell you that this approach works. It captures the energy of the adolescent, encouraging each person to think beyond their self-imposed boundaries and to become more than clones of the adults around them. It is not leaving students to discover for themselves or preparing them to become potters or telesales people. It takes full account of recent research and understanding of expert practice. Tasks are placed in authentic contexts and their relevance is clear. Teachers themselves understand the process and goals and make thinking visible. There is easy transfer to other tasks and subjects within the classroom and outside. Students take responsibility for their own learning and learn for life.

Understand this and the scope and importance of John Abbott’s book “Over-schooled but Undereducated” is revealed. Gone are “obvious, vague and contradictory conclusions” and possibilities for the future are immense and compelling. The relevance of the nomads becomes clear in a learning community. The “tough challenge of improving education for teenagers” is a challenge for all of us which will require us to look at our values and ask “Education for What?” Nothing less is good enough for our adolescents or the future of our world. This remarkable book helps us to see how we could better prepare children to be good citizens, more than successful students. It should be compulsory reading for anyone who cares about adolescents. There is a full review on www.personalisededucationnow.org.uk

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by Martin Pritchard, Former Manchester Assistant Headteacher

Obvious, vague and contradictory are Michael Shaw’s chief criticisms against John Abbott’s latest publication. Are they valid?

Michael Shaw allows that the scope of John Abbott’s work is valuable for its outline of England’s educational history – something much needed by current politicians – and for its focus on our failure of adolescents, in particular in the latter half of the 20th Century (and now the first decade of the 21st). But John Abbott offers much more than just an appeal for coherent 5-15 schooling. His analysis of the crisis facing education is rooted in a synthesis of the wealth of scientific evidence that we have all ignored, misunderstood or been unaware of for too long.

Understanding that the ways in which we learn best are more clearly seen in the oldest societies is simply valuing the store of human knowledge: especially when findings from neurobiology suggest that it was the practice of ‘natural apprenticeships’ going back over thousands of generations that shaped the structure of today’s brains. Apprenticeships are and have always been ‘preferred’ ways of learning. Teasing out and applying these lessons to now and to the future, “going with the grain of the brain”, is simply common sense. If this is obvious, why isn’t it done – why does schooling in the 21st Century continue to alienate adolescents? Why is so much of our teaching didactic, relying on telling our students what they need to do to reach a level or grade? Why do we insist on more of the same for all, when the evidence is plain that it just doesn’t work?

John Abbott focuses on the continuing arrogance of our age: that as human knowledge has increased and with it our technological abilities (e.g. cloning and GM foods) we have come to feel we can package everything in self-contained sterile units; and it is this that has led to us believing we can micromanage the learning of our children to achieve pre-determined outcomes. We can’t. We need to refer back to our store of human knowledge including the intrinsic emotional driving forces for our social (and anti-social) behaviours, understand what works and why, learn from our mistakes and plan accordingly.

John Abbott recognises that adolescents are contradictory by definition: they expect our unconditional emotional, practical and economic support but demand the freedom and resources to do exactly as they like; they expect to be kept safe but yet take incredible risks. One of the greatest challenges for us in the education of all our children is resolving these contradictions in ways that are supportive to them in becoming the responsible adults we want and need them to be. John Abbott’s book explores the scientific basis for these contradictions; the challenge is for us to develop the specific support that works in each context.

Michael Shaw seems to applaud the emphasis in ‘Overschooled but Undereducated’ on learning by doing. However, that there isn’t a list of apprenticeships is hardly vague – it is the model of cognitive apprenticeship that needs to be universally applied. As a former articled clerk in an inner-city law practice, the best learning I ever did was with the firm’s legal secretary, researching, differentiating and deciding courses of action according to the circumstances. Both as a probationary teacher and as an experienced practitioner, all my best learning has been achieved through a continuing cycle of practice, reflection, discussion and evaluation. Any professional worth consulting would need to do the same. We must correct any misunderstanding of apprenticeships, harking back to a time when vocational education was seen as second best, for inferior ‘trades’, for those who couldn’t get to a grammar school. ‘Cognitive Apprenticeship’ as a model of learning is for all – and can be seen working in the ‘freer’ curriculum of new academies and in the thinking behind the new Diplomas supported by employers, universities and teachers.

Importantly there is a proper consideration and deep respect in John Abbott’s thinking for the spiritual and philosophical aspects of other civilisations as well as our own. This has a clear contemporary relevance in addressing the contradictions and tensions of our world. Michael Shaw will surely concede that looking backwards for John Abbott means doing so to learn the lessons of the past – both negative and positive – and to assimilate proven scientific research into future practice. There is no contradiction in that.

‘Treating’ the ills of adolescence isn’t just about improving education for teenagers; it’s about recognising the opportunity to come together as parents, as educators, as workers or employers, and as members of the wider community, to take responsibility and play our collective part in working with and supporting those adolescents. It’s vitally important that we don’t just agree with the analysis of our ills, bemoaning the alienation so many of them display, but together take the practical steps John Abbott points us towards.

Twisted

A superficial Review

In one of the most quoted poems in the English language – If, by Rudyard Kipling – there is a couplet that reads “If you can bear to hear the truth you have spoken, twisted to make a trap for fools”… then, says Kipling, “you will be a man!”

Well, having read the Review of Overschooled but Undereducated in the Times Educational Supplement by Michael Shaw I am not sure who is doing the twisting – Shaw or myself.  In writing a book on education which could be read by as large a proportion of the English public as possible, I was faced with a tough challenge, for traditionally the English prefer to leave the discussion of educational theory to professionals.  In that lie the seeds of many of the country’s current dilemmas.  At a time when conventional educational theory, largely based on a mixture of psychology and historical precedent, is being challenged by the emergence of research in genetics, neurobiology, anthropology and complexity theory, traditional educationalists are not well equipped to deal with such ideas.  If the electorate can’t evaluate such matters they can’t challenge politicians to respond to their concerns, so leaving the door open for politicians alone to define the agenda.

While Professor Gus Nossal, one of the world’s most respected microbiologists, an FRS and President of the Australian Academy of Sciences, could say of the book, “It is profoundly scholarly, and eminently accessible,” Mr. Shaw seems to know so little about the findings in these disciplines that he seeks to turn a lengthy discussion  about cognitive apprenticeship into dismissive comments about herding goats into Birmingham City Centre.  Posing as an historian he even surmises that all that is said about the skills associated with craftsmanship in pre-industrial Britain is mere “mourning” for a world long gone.  That is simply not the case; what the book is actually urging is for society to recognise how such cultural changes clash with our inherited predispositions to think and act in particular ways.

The book quotes an eminent biologist explaining that what most influences individual behaviour day-to-day, more even than our biologically evolved predispositions, is the value system of our society.  So confused is Mr Shaw about the relationship of nurture to our biological natures that he suggests that I am recommending pushing the values of western society “backwards”, with a touch of the ethos of the Ten Commandments which he seems to confuse with church attendance.  Far from drawing upon youngsters’ minute-by-minute awareness of the relationship of scores of subjective impressions and conclusions based on multiple intelligences, Mr Shaw asks whether the ability to differentiate between kinds of vegetation helps a child to survive in a the playground.  He makes such thinking seem simply silly and assumes that his readers will smile benignly with him.  But it is not the different vegetation, Mr  Shaw, that is important – it is the way our brains have evolved to develop processes that enable individuals to see, and process critical differences of any kind.  It is like being able to differentiate between a smile of comfort, and another you had best avoid, or noting the distinctions between political aspirations and reality.

As for not offering a clear way forward for schools… well, without being able to appreciate the link between neurobiology, cognitive apprenticeship and pedagogy Michael Shaw could never understand why “formal schooling therefore has to start a dynamic process through which students are progressively weaned from their dependence on teachers and institutions, and given the confidence to manage their own learning, collaborating with colleagues as appropriate, and using a range of resources and learning situations.”

Shaw states that these are noble aspirations… most likely outside the scope of today’s politicians.  Another recent Review cited Henry Morris of Cambridgeshire who said in 1920 “We should organise education so that good education is not the outcome of good government, but good government is the product of good education.”  So, Mr Shaw, please don’t twist that argument: education is essentially a moral concern, not to be confused either with church attendance or the Ten Commandments.

See TES Book Review

Epistle from Pamphylia

Educare

The south coast of Turkey, from the southeast corner of the Aegean through to the point where the Syrian and Lebanese Coast bears off to the south, has only recently been discovered by curious tourists.  For some 300 days a year almost clear blue skies attract tourists from Northern Europe, the Baltic and Russia but in late January there is heavy rain, and the large modern hotels are virtually empty.  To one of these, the 800-room Sheraton in modern Antalya, came some 850 delegates to the Turkish Private Schools Association Symposium to discuss Rebuilding the Education System.  I was invited to open the three-day conference (see speech on website) and even found myself signing 160 copies of my book.

It was a very well organised conference – and I say that having experienced dozens of such conferences – and it provided an experience that has made a deep impression on me.  I first came to Turkey more than 40 years ago with an expedition of Sixth Formers, and survived an earthquake which killed some 10,000 people when we were working in Mus Province.  Turkey has made enormous strides since then (though not enough to reassure the EU that it is as yet ready to be a member).  The well-to-do of Istanbul and Ankara are successful, sophisticated and well-dressed as are the elite of Paris, Berlin or London.  But the eastern part of the country (where there is rampant population growth) remains poor.

Despite Ataturk reforms of the 1920s Turkey lacks the political will to invest sufficiently in the education of the masses, and is content to see the wealthy of the western cities solve the problems (at least for themselves) by creating for-profit private schools able to adjust their fees to what their parents are willing to pay.  Many of them pay a lot, and by  my judgement of the people in the conference, they have very good teachers (the level of their curiosity in new ideas was impressive).  In an open market the school with the most money can then buy (poach) staff from other schools.  To my English mind that did not seem right but, given Turkey’s present economic situation, it may be inevitable.  I was stopped in my tracks when one energetic school proprietor gave me his business card – on one side was the school address, and on the other side the name of the chemical processing plant which he owned!

Beyond the hotel with its magnificent views of the Mediterranean and with palm trees enclosing the swimming pool and tennis courts, was the Antalya Archaeological Museum – a place that I had never heard of before even though I now know that it had been named European Museum of the Year.  It is hard to describe the impact this had on me for, within the past 40 years, local archaeologists have identified some 4,000 sites of special significance.  I felt like Alice in Wonderland as I made my tenuous way from gallery to gallery.  I have never seen such a profusion of exquisite marble statues anywhere – statues that had as much vitality as anything produced by Michelangelo 1,500 years later.

Then, beyond the museum, is the ancient port of Pamphylia where, not being daunted by the rain, I and three colleagues made our way up the heavily worn steps, past the derelict Baptistery of an Armenian church, to the castle and the giddy streets and alleyways that must have been there when St Paul visited several times on his way to Ephesus, and to whom he wrote his subsequent Epistles.  But, in terms of the stunning archaeology of the area, Paul was a relatively recent visitor in comparison to those who had founded the province after the Fall of Troy in 1184 BC.  Yet most of St Paul’s churches were subsequently turned in mosques by the Seljuks, and now into museums given the “ethnic cleansing” of the Armenians in 1916.

So, said one of my Belgian colleagues, where do we 21^st century educationalists fit into all this?  Profoundly confused I sipped a final glass of raki and mysteriously those statues seemed to spring to life, and the man who ran both the school and a chemical processing plant appeared to my troubled mind to look like a wealthy, and worldly-wise, Roman Senator and owner of many slaves.  Traveler as I was in that antique land, which has seen the rise and fall of so many cultures, I recalled the words of Percy Bysshe Shelley, “My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings, Look on my Works ye Mighty, and despair.”

See Chapter 4 of Overschooled but Undereducated

Apes, Humans and 747s

Genetics

It was in 1997 that Henry Plotkin, Professor of Psychobiology at University College London, published Evolution in Mind.  In this he gave a fulsome explanation to Dobzhansky’s assertion that “antecedence becomes cause” – how we think today is largely shaped by the structures in the brain which have developed over enormous periods of time as our ancestors perfected ways of thinking that had enabled successive generations to survive.  Plotkin extended Stephen Gould’s assertion that evolutionary psychology has to be a key part of the explanation for human behaviour.

Geneticists are now reasonably convinced that the human species first split from the Great Apes some seven million years ago.  Since then the human genome has come to differ from the Great Apes by less than 2%.  The vast majority of our genetic composition was shaped before that split.  That 2% difference this is concentrated almost entirely in the nature of the brain – the rest of our bodily structures remains remarkably ape-like.

Seven million years is hard to envisage.  Try thinking of it in terms of generations, each averaging twenty years –this reduces seven million years to a more manageable 350,000 generations.  Can you envisage a family tree of 350,000?  Well, 350,000 is roughly the number of minutes we are awake in a year.  Try thinking of each generation as lasting a minute on that genealogical table of a whole year.  Most of us know only five or six minutes of that year-long story – our parents and grandparents, ourselves, our children, and our grandchildren.  Imagining it like that it seems incredible that the human genome has only changed by a mere 2% over that vast number of successful impregnations.  Over all that time our arms and legs remain very like the ape, but we have very different kinds of brains.

Sarah Blaffer Hrdy of the University of California – Davis in her recent book Mothers and Others; the evolutionary origins of emotional understanding (2009) gives a dramatic picture of “antecedence as cause.”  Hrdy notes that most of us are accustomed to being squeezed and strapped into rows of uncomfortable seats as we settle, along with a further 400 other travellers, into a Boeing 747 and prepare for an eight, ten or twelve-hour intercontinental flight.  Uncomfortable as this can be, there are few instances of passengers assaulting each other, or the flight attendants, or even the pilot and, to the best of my knowledge, I have never heard of one passenger murdering another.  With stiff backs and crumpled knees we proceed down the aisle to disembark in that distant airport.

Now imagine replacing the human passengers with Great Apes.  Even if you were successful in strapping them into their seats all mayhem would quickly breakout.  Unnerved by the experience, many an ape would attack its neighbour.  Ears would be torn off, and blood would flow.  The first ape to figure out how to undo the seatbelt would rush off down the aisle looking for a fight.  Others would follow.  Within an hour or so all would be carnage.

However hard you try to civilise apes by educating their young in the very best Frobel, Steiner or Montessori schools you would not change their nature enough that, when they were adults, they would be able to behave in a sufficiently civilised fashion to survive such an experience.  The reason is simple.  Apes have not inherited from their ancestors those sophisticated structures in the brain that enable us humans to follow the safety instructions and, with a fair injection of empathetic understanding, still walk off that plane a dozen hours later… even exchanging business cards with newfound colleagues!  Apes only understand dealing with the present and only distinguish very simply between friend and enemy.

That is what “antecedence as cause” means…….. and it obviously means a great deal.

See Chapters 2, 3 and 4 of Overschooled but Undereducated

The making of teachers

A question of degree

It is hard to fault David Cameron’s comment that, when a child steps through the school gates for the first time, the most important thing is who the teacher is.  To have a teacher who understands the child’s emotional and intellectual needs, and appreciates the journey that the child is embarking upon, is what every parent hopes for as they nervously wave goodbye.

What makes a good teacher is not so easily defined.  Nor for that matter is there as much clarity as is needed about how a balanced education depends upon the child’s quality experience in home, community and school.  Children need good parents, good neighbours, as well as good teachers.

In his recent speech Cameron unpacked his proposals for education.  He promised to create teachers as good as the Finns, by ending the current system whereby people in England with third-class degrees can get taxpayers’ money to enter post-graduate teacher training.  I’m just not sure how Cameron (more specifically Michael Gove the Shadow Secretary for Education) can make such a cast-iron linkage between the nature of good teaching, and a first-class Honours Degree, and between bad teaching with a third-class degree.  As a former headteacher I have seen some appalling lessons delivered by people with first-class degrees who can’t communicate, and brilliant lectures delivered by people with pass-degrees but the ability to understand how children’s minds work.

Quality education is everything to do with teachers, not much to do with structures, and very little to do with buildings.  Teachers do what they believe in extraordinarily well, but what they are told to do merely to a mediocre standard.  Productive pupil/teacher relationships are based on explanation, on talking things through, and seeing issues in their entirety.  Which is why teachers not only need to know a lot, but be wise enough to draw upon only that which is necessary for the learner to know at that stage.  To achieve that teachers need both technical subject knowledge and considerable expertise in both pedagogy and child development, combined with the old-fashioned avuncular skill of a brilliant storyteller.  In my albeit limited experience of being a headmaster of a major secondary school I found that too many high-flying academics lacked the ability to speak at an appropriate level to young people to capture their imagination.

If David Cameron is to quote Finland in the future he must tell the whole story.  It starts with an explanation that Finnish society is more strongly bonded within itself than is the case in England.  Part of that is economic; the income of the richest fifth to the poorest fifth in Finland is only 1-3.7 while in the United Kingdom it is 1-7.2.  The Finns explain their success by quoting the Czech philosopher Commenius whose book The Great Didactic said “Following in the footsteps of nature (learning) will be easy if it begins before the mind is corrupted, if it proceeds from the general to the particular; from what is easy to that which is more difficult; and if a pupil is not overwhelmed by too many subjects, and if its intellect is forced to nothing to which its natural bent does not incline it.”

In terms of their pedagogy the Finns believe that emotional development precedes intellectual growth, and so insist that every teacher hold both an Honours Degree in an academic discipline (which is what Cameron understands) as well as having completed a three-year Pedagogic Degree, also at Honours level (which Cameron either doesn’t understand or doesn’t think he has the political clout to achieve).  In practice, Finnish teachers have to combine what the English see as the separate expertise of primary and secondary practice, and apply such insights when teaching pupils of any age.  The English have to do the same, or nothing in the classroom will change.

See Action 6 of Briefing Paper and Chapters 8 and 9 of Overschooled but Undereducated

Hunter/Gatherers

The scenes of carnage in Haiti, following the earthquake of last week and the estimated 200,000 dead, is horribly reminiscent of The Road.  Scenes of looting, fighting with knives over loaves of bread, and police shooting to kill as a way of re-establishing civil order, showed just how quickly society can collapse.  A photograph  showing several hundred men swarming up through a thinly-wooded slope to the top of a hill where a helicopter was attempting to deliver a load of fresh water, begged the all-besetting question… once relief gets to where it is needed how can it be equitably distributed, for hoarding becomes the all-consuming response of an urban people fighting for their lives.

Haiti is almost entirely populated by people whose ancestors were stolen from their homelands in Africa and sold into slavery to the sugar plantations of the Caribbean.  In last month’s National Geographic Magazine there was an article on a small group of hunter/gatherers still to be found around Lake Eyasi in Tanzania.  The Hadza are what anthropologists call a ‘relict’ population – an isolated group that has somehow survived socially and genetically unchanged over something like a hundred thousand years.  They still live as did all our ancestors for probably 99% of human time.  Their numbers have been draining away for centuries as individuals have married into other tribes and lost their naturally evolved survival skills that once enabled them to survive in some of the world’s least hospitable places.

Some of those Haitians fighting to survive carry Hadza blood in their veins but history – in the form of industrial farming operated by slaves – has all but obliterated the memories of their tribal behaviours that made them such great survivors.  The Hadza traditionally own no land, grow no crops, herd no cattle and build no houses; they have no concept of time and no thought of hoarding to protect crops for when they might be short of food.  Their lives are forever dependent on sharing.  In killing a large Wildebeest, an Antelope or Gazelle, the hunter and his immediate family share the meat with anyone else who is around.  Having no means of storing any excess that might see them through future ‘starving times’ the Hadza invest in goodwill – if you help me when I am down on my luck then surely you will help me if my luck changes?  And it nearly always works, providing no one breaks the rules.  In such societies there is no fighting over disputed food, and probably there is little chance for any one person to grow too fat.  It is a society dependent on trust.

I, too, visited the Hadza five years ago.  That visit made a deeper impression on me than anything that I read in the National Geographic which seemed too ‘politically correct’, for example I did not see the women overdressed in cheap western dresses, nor could I ‘smell’ the fear that grips you when, through the cotton walls of your tent, you hear a lion roaring close by in the dark.  At one stage I noted a half-hearted attempt to grow what looked like maze on a clearing near one of the huts, and I asked the elder what this meant.  His face immediately clouded as he explained that some visiting missionaries who tried to persuade some of the Hadza women to become settled agriculturalists.  Even though in most years there is insufficient grain to grow crops, the women had been given seeds and spades and encouraged to grow maze.  “This is foolish, for in most years the crops fail”, said the elder, “but the worst of planting crops is that when people do so and the crops flourish, those who planted them won’t share out the harvest with other people.  They say it is theirs because they planted it, and because the spirit of their ancestors let it grow.  What they don’t eat in one year they want to save for a bad harvest.  They become selfish and hold it back.  It is breaking our way of live.  We believe that what people find belongs to everybody.  Planting crops makes some people more powerful than others because they can bargain with things that had previously been owned by everyone.”

That moment five years ago was a truly thought-provoking time.  Anthropologists have long speculated that there was a shift from a communal sharing ethic, the root of social conventions for 98% of human history when all our ancestors were hunter/gatherers, to the time some ten thousand years ago when our ancestors started to settled down and stake out their own turf.

For too many generations the descendants of those hunter/gatherers have had no turf of their own, nor have they been able to build a society based on trust.  To see them fighting their way up that hill to get water shows just how broken human society could become.

Finding the missing piece

Intelligent behaviour

One of the delights of Christmas is doing jigsaws.  The easy part is sorting out the straight pieces, the hard slog is working out the innumerable shades of blue in the sky, or the green and brown in the trees.   It is easy to give up, but return after a short break, and look at the pieces from a different perspective and suddenly it all seems easy!

The other delight is the opportunity to read something enjoyable, though not essential.  This Christmas I had with me a curious book from last year’s New York Times bestseller list Shop Class as Soul Craft by Matthew Crawford.  Crawford is an unusual polymath being both a Doctor of Philosophy (he is a Fellow of the Institute for Advanced Studies at the University of Virginia) and the owner/operator of an independent motorcycle repair shop.  A fascinating combination that opens up new ways of looking at processes we simply take for granted.

Craftsmanship necessitates the ability to dwell on a task for long enough to satisfy yourself, not simply the customer, that you have done it to the best of your ability.  In today’s “management speak’ this is seen as an ‘ingrown’ skill, an unnecessary indulgence, something the very opposite to what is seen as desirable in the modern world where the successful person moves, apparently effortlessly, from one high-level generalisation to another without his, or her, feet actually touching the ground.  Philosopher as he is, Crawford was amazed when he realised that there was more truly abstract thinking going on amongst the mechanics on the floor of his repair shop as they sought to tease out mechanical problems, than anything he had encountered in the intellectual discourse of university think tanks.

Crawford shows how this separation of thinking from doing owes its origins to the American engineer Frederick Winslow Taylor and his “Principle of Scientific Management” (1901).  Taylor proposed that any complex task carried out by a craftsman could, if analysed carefully, be reduced to a series of logical and sequential steps.  Employees who exactly followed these instructions, as on Henry Ford’s assembly lines, behaved in a totally mechanical way, and did not screw up by attempting to think any of it through for themselves, would be far more productive than autonomous craftsmen.

Ford found that he had to pay the assembly line operatives more than they ever earned in their own workshops – in effect he compensated them for not thinking about what they did.  Secondly, because goods rolled off conveyor belts so fast, the market had to expand by giving factory operatives access to the money to buy the excess goods.  In short, advertising was invented to create demand, and easy credit was made available for the masses to buy on the ‘never-never.’  In such a way consumer debt was created.  Financial prudence, that had been such a feature of earlier artisan life, was replaced by pride in what you could purchase due to the size of your credit rating.  Soon the workers were tied to the assembly line by the necessity of meeting their monthly payments on the goods they might well have wanted, but probably never needed.

“If the occasions for the exercise of judgement are diminished, the moral-cognitive virtue of a attentiveness will atrophy,” writes Crawford the philosopher with a spanner in his oil-stained hands, and ‘the institutional carelessness of taylorised work, turns us into uninvolved automatons.’  Which explains why, as a society of any real moral significance to anyone, we are getting, he says, “more stupid with every passing year… which is to say, the degradation of work is ultimately cognitive matter, rooted in the separation of thinking from doing.”  As it happens this was exactly the theme also taken up by Stephen Bayley in The Times recently when he wrote, “Making real products is far superior to having a lust for quick returns… anything that is made betrays the beliefs and preoccupations, the morals and manners of the people who made it.  People who make real things, not only make money, they behave better.”  It is the “behave better” part of the jigsaw which is the critical link Crawford makes between shop craft and soul craft.

See Action 1 of Briefing Paper and Chapter 5 of Overschooled but Undereducated

The Road

My sons are far better read in contemporary literature than I am, and if it were not for their frequent references to the power of the minimalist writing of Cormac McCarthy (All the Pretty Horses etc.) I would not even have noticed the release in Britain last Friday of the film version of his novel The Road, the winner of the 2006 Pulitzer Prize for Literature.  Knowing me better than I had realised my sons pressed me to see the film, but warned me that I would find it strong stuff, and psychologically disturbing.

The Road is a post-apocalyptic story of the struggle of one man to help his young son to survive an unspecified catastrophe that had scourged the world into a burnt out cinder.  Using all the arts of contemporary film making The Road is a harrowing account of ‘the end of days’ as father and son are equally at risk to bands of cannibals seeking to devour them, as they are to death from cold, earthquake or radiation.  In such a grey, lifeless world of utter desolation the father teaches his son about self-survival, human empathy and the power of love so that the boy lives – at least beyond the end of the story.

Several times over the weekend, as Anne and I have made our way through the snow-covered fields and negotiated the ice-covered pavements, I found myself going back over that story, haunted by the sheer horror of what might happen should the tenuous threads that hold civilisation together, actually shatter.  To my admiration for this demonstration of human love, expressed most poignantly when the father is dying, the boy is able to recognise in the genuine humanity of the little family which comes towards him on the beach, the possibility of his own salvation.  Shocked as I was by the degradation of humanity that the film portrays it is the grandeur of human possibilities which remains strongest in my mind.

The Road took me out of my preoccupation with thinking about the politics of schooling, and the raising of children, and reminded me of what really matters in human relationships.  As I looked again at the snow-covered fields sparkling in the late winter sunshine, I realised how few had been the number of children tobogganing on such perfect slopes on the previous days – days in which, to conform to requirements of health and safety regulations, their schools had been closed in case a child might slip, and its parents sue the school for negligence.

Had my own parents, I wondered, been negligent years ago in letting me and my friends play to our hearts’ content in the parks, and batter each other with well-earned snowballs, or did they know – or intuit – that this was a vital part of my learning how to look after myself?

If the worst were to happen (as the current President of the Royal Society has predicted might happen with a 50% probability within a century) are we giving children the physical, emotional and, in particular, the moral strength to deal with the unpredictable?  I am fearful that it is not, for it seems that we are bringing up children – and their parents – to believe that they can live in an ever more uncertain world, not by common sense, but by conforming minutely to endless red tape.

This morning I received an email from a colleague headteacher that exactly reflected on my own thoughts and tied them most specifically to schools in January 2010.  It went as follows:

I have jotted down a few thoughts on the recent nonsense over the snow!  I thought you might enjoy them.  There is an irony to the anger that has been expressed in the media regarding the recent “snow closures” of schools.

For the past decade at least, and with massive acceleration recently, the cumulative impact of interventionist and reactive, populist, political interference in education has led to a world where we are statutorily timid.  Indeed we are required to attempt to bureaucratically eliminate the risk from life.

Which is really odd, because learning surely is a risky activity by definition simply because learning is about thinking, not just conforming (as totalitarian regimes have sought to persuade their people).  The current political rhetoric is all about learning, but in reality it’s all about litigation – OfSTED, safeguarding, health and safety, and everything that serves to utterly choke learning.

Schools now have to assess everything.  They are required to have policies and plans and schemes that predict and offset every possible eventuality so as to make sure that everyone is safe and secure and wrapped up, and away from all the hazards that actually have always existed…. and which always will exist.  Anyone can see that the evil that caused the high profile cases which, in turn, provoked the CRB’s (Criminal Records Bureau) and the security fencing and so on, will always exist.  As they are bound to do, given the contrary nature of human behaviour and natural disasters.  They will never be checked by silly decorative (and expensive) paperwork.

The angry press thundered on about the good old days when we all trudged through the snow whatever. That was fine.  But did they also mention the good old days when we lived with the village pervert?  When husbands hit their wives as a matter of course after a great session on a Friday night?  When bullying was institutionally essential to the existence of empire, never mind encouraged?  Did they talk of the days when children just played in the road and came home at dark and talked to strangers (or got a clip for being rude)?  No, of course not.

This is the problem.  We have a culture that does not know what it wants.  It wants freedom and security, learning and the elimination of risk, true grit and bureaucratic timidity, risk assessments and freedom, litigation and liberty.  It just can’t be done!

Just as every one of our ancestors were on a journey, so too were their Roads unpredictable.  Likewise today our individual Roads are made by walking.  If anyone doesn’t know how to walk – mixing my metaphors I’m afraid – they won’t know how to dig themselves out of a snowdrift, recharge their souls by wondering at the beauty of a starlit night, or know what to do when everything around them collapses into chaos.

Introducing AML

The Apprenticeship Model of Learning

Human behaviour fascinates us as much today as it did the philosophers of old.  Yet it is only recently that scientists have begun to unravel just why it is that we think as we do – and why that thinking can go badly wrong.  Drawing together the research from the bio-medical, cognitive and social sciences (something made possible within the past 20 years through functional MRI scans at one level, and theoretical studies in complexity and systems thinking at the other) it is becoming possible to detect the ‘grain’ to the individual human brain.

The structure of our brains today, rather like a cross section through the trunk of an ancient tree, are much conditioned by adaptations made in the distant past to changing environmental factors.  For example having been walking upright for some 2.5 million years human spines are still not quite adapted to being vertical (consequently we suffer from bad back problems), and we each still have an appendix though a shift in human diet a hundred thousand years or more ago should have made this organ redundant many generations back.

The survival of the human species depends on good thinking, rather than strong muscles.  It is on the ability of each new generation to learn as much as it can from its ancestors, and then to go on beyond the limitations of its parents’ thinking, that our species’ survival depends.  Just as dissecting the bone structure, muscles and nerve systems of a leopard’s legs explain why it is such a splendid hunter, so the new brain-imaging technologies make it possible to appreciate how humans have emerged to be the planet’s pre-eminent learning species.

Philosophers caught glimpses of this long ago: “I learnt most not from those who taught me but from those who talked with me,” reflected St Augustine 1,500 years ago acknowledging the interdependence of mental and emotional development.  A thousand years before that Confucius had said,

“Tell me, and I hear

Show me, and I understand

Let me do, and I learn.”

The medieval craft tradition in England required craftsmen to induct their young apprentices – be they lawyers, silversmiths, clerics or linen workers – into the ‘know-how’ of their craft.  This represented a structured progression (in a Confucian sense) from ‘telling’, to ‘showing’, then to ‘doing’ so that the apprentice could eventually demonstrate that Jack was now as good as his master.  Such apprenticeship was a mechanism by which youths could model themselves on socially approved adults and provided safe passage from childhood to adulthood in psychological, social and economic ways.”

Apprenticeship was an education for an intelligent way of life; it was a context-rich way of learning that integrated thinking and doing, theory and practice at every stage.  It was ‘hands-on’, and it was as much about the contribution that needed to be made to the common good as it was to the success of the individual.  Through constant interaction with practitioners, this enabled adolescents to learn how to become functional adults in home, community and the workplace, and do wisely and responsibly whatever it was that they would eventually have to do.  In contrast today’s classroom instruction involves an enormous amount of ‘telling’, a much smaller amount of ‘showing’, and in most instances very little ‘doing.’  In comparison to apprenticeship, classroom practices are essentially a cheap, but not very efficient, way of learning.

An Apprenticeship Model of Learning (AML) has now to apply the same principles, but in the context of modern communities.

AML is based on the understanding that, over vast periods of time, the guiding principle of our distant ancestors that empowered them to make enough good decisions to survive long enough to procreate which has, over countless generations, made us the planet’s pre-eminent learning species.  Over that vast period of time the ‘guiding principle’ of those distant ancestors (if evolutionary processes can accurately be described as such a term) has given young people the ability to select, out of a number of potential strategies, those which would be the most appropriate to solving particular tasks.  To do that children need to have learned a range of skills, and to have the ability to survey their future alternatives with a mixture of emotional and intellectual skills.

AML involves frontloading the system by providing generous resources to the youngest children so that their education can start a dynamic process whereby they are given such a mastery of a range of skills in their early years that they are progressively weaned of their de­pendence on teachers and institutions.

AML would seek to strengthen the role of the family and the community as the starting place for the apprenticeship model of learning so as to integrate young people fully into the life of a community so giving them the confidence to manage their own learning, collaborating with others as appropriate and using a range of resources and learning situations.

AML has to train teachers to so understand children’s instinctive needs that, like their col­leagues in Finland, they combine a fine subject knowledge with the wisdom to draw upon this as appropriate to take a child – as in apprenticeship – to the next level of understanding. While quality education is everything to do with teachers it is constrained by inappropriate structures of schooling.

In England that means ending the split between primary and secondary schools (and between two different ways of thinking about education); it means a revolution in teacher education, and a rebirth of the historic partnership on which a balanced edu­cation has to depend – on the interdependence of the home, the community and the school. Only when this is done will there be sufficient thoughtful, knowledgeable members of the community to restore the control of the educational process to democratically elected local representatives.

Old Year’s Night

With Christmas Day falling on a Friday and, so delaying Boxing Day until after the weekend, the last days of 2009 had the air of an extended holiday, enhanced by glorious clear blue skies, and frosty mornings. The sound of children’s shouts and laughter as they dodged snowballs, and raced down icy slopes, enticed adults away from the fire, the cold turkey and mince pies before hunkering down yet again for the New Year’s celebrations. As the old year drew to its close we reflected sadly on what had gone wrong in 2009 – the Afghan War, MP’s expenses scandal, the continuing banking crisis and the failure to make even limited progress on climate change in Copenhagen. As if to compound our displeasure, the media gleefully told us that research now showed that most of us would break our New Year’s resolutions within a month.

But we are essentially a hopeful people, and tomorrow marks the birth of a New Year, a new decade. The joyous bells that Alfred Lord Tennyson wrote about in 1849 still stir our hearts with a determination to create a better future for our children.

Ring out, wild bells, to the wild sky,
The flying cloud, the frosty light;
The year is dying in the night;
Ring out, wild bells, and let him die.

Ring out the old, ring in the new,
Ring, happy bells, across the snow:
The year is going, let him go;
Ring out the false, ring in the true.

Ring out the grief that saps the mind,
For those that here we see no more,
Ring out the feud of rich and poor,
Ring in redress to all mankind.

Ring out a slowly dying cause,
And ancient forms of party strife;
Ring in the nobler modes of life,
With sweeter manners, purer laws.

Ring out the want, the care the sin,
The faithless coldness of the times;
Ring out, ring out my mournful rhymes,
But ring the fuller minstrel in.

Ring out false pride in place and blood,
The civic slander and the spite;
Ring in the love of truth and right,
Ring in the common love of good.

Ring out old shapes of foul disease,
Ring out the narrowing lust of gold;
Ring out the thousand wars of old,
Ring in the thousand years of peace.

Ring in the valiant man and free,
The larger heart, the kindlier hand;
Ring out the darkness of the land,
Ring in the Christ that is to be.

Recent Posts

• Readers responses to Michael Shaw’s review of “Over-schooled but Undereducated”, TES, 22nd January 2010
• Twisted
• Epistle from Pamphylia
• Apes, Humans and 747s
• The making of teachers
• Hunter/Gatherers
• Finding the missing piece
• The Road
• Introducing AML
• Old Year’s Night