Boston, 2002

That all is not well for young people as they grow up in England at the start of the 21st century is a matter of urgent, everyday discussion. Put in such words, that is not likely to grab a newspaper headline anything like as well as “Class War”, the book just produced by Chris Woodhead (formerly Her Majesty’s Chief Inspector of Schools) on the state of British education. This is the book, the publishers claim, that every parent should read. Why? “The issue is as simple as it is fundamental,” writes Woodhead. “Do we want to find ways to make state education more responsive to parental demand? Do we, in the jargon, want to empower the consumers?”

I am convinced – as everyone who has ever heard me lecture knows – that our formal education system needs a complete overhaul. This includes Chris Woodhead who seems to think he knows enough about my ideas to decry them as coming from one of the “Great and the Good”. But my analysis is not Woodhead’s. I do not believe that there ever was a perfect, or near perfect, system in the past that would be perfect today. I most certainly do not accept Woodhead’s assumption that good learning for all inevitably follows from good teaching.

Yet my difficulty with Woodhead’s argument goes deeper than that, as my rather difficult opening sentences suggested. School does not exist in isolation from all the other aspects of childhood – home, community, the media, friends, relatives….the list is, or should be, endless.

In Britain, as in the rest of the Western world, there is no child who, between the ages of 5 and 18, spends more than 20% of his or her waking hours in the classroom. However you do the calculation once you have allowed for weekends, holidays, time at home, time with their friends, fully three quarters of a child’s waking hours are outside school and beyond the supervision of teachers. Woodhead is not an historian nor is he -as he is quick to assure his readers – interested in the finer points of what we are fast discovering about the brain’s innate learning predispositions. Nor is he in any sense an internationalist for, if he were, he would have to explain why it is that, in the past 20 or so years, every major western country has started to experience grave difficulties with its formal education system.

Is it, as Woodhead’s argument would suggest, because the majority of teachers, in all countries, simultaneously, have all gone native? Is it that educational administrators in all of these countries have, in Woodhead’s terminology, been taken over by “The Blob” – the unreconstructed Educational Establishment (“an entity that defends it s turf with the tenacity of a wolverine”)?
Or is it rather because we have thought our way into assuming that education and schooling are actually synonymous? To educate, that is, in the classical sense of “leading children out from the security of childhood into playing their full part in the adult country” always used to mean considering the whole of a young person’s experience. The experience the child gained from its home and in particular from its parents, was deemed to be critical. In fact, the research carried out by the Kellogg Foundation in Michigan five years ago into the greatest predictors of success at the age of 18 found that four times more significant than any other factor was the quantity and quality of dialogue in the child’s home before the age of 5.

The tragedy is that, over a fifty-year period, we have progressively lost the essential partnership between home, community and school. Many commentators suggest that this is an inevitable consequence of our more complex, hi-tech entrepreneurial world. Parents have many opportunities to better themselves, so the argument goes, and they would be weak-willed if they did not seize them to better their lifestyles. Greed, once one of the seven deadly sins, has now become the major ‘driver’ of the economy – its good to be envious because it’s good for trade and therefore creates employment. It also tempts us to take short cuts in the education of children. Not ‘education’ in the formal sense that Woodhead understands, but in all those myriad forms of informal education – reading to and with our children; taking time to indulge in family activities; helping them build up their interests and hobbies, and – quite simply – always being there when our children need us. Many commentators assume that all this is inevitable, that there is no turning the clock back. This is our fate, our destiny. School has to do it all. The rest of childhood is too problematic to worry about.

“The new economy” so beloved by politicians is hard on parents and even harder on children. Children who don’t have the opportunity to grow up curious and to be imaginative and creative in small things as well as big things, quickly find life essentially dull and predictable. They look for instant thrills. Which cost money. Hard-pressed parents, feeling guilty at their own extraneously enforced inadequacies, strive to work harder so that they can give their children more ‘things’. Yet what the child needs is not ‘things’ but love, or as Karl Zinismeister spells it, T-I-M-E.

People who don’t understand children in that bigger context fall into the Woodhead trap….they see parents simply as consumers of a service. Education is something you buy or which is provided in toto through taxation. Woodhead, even though he rigorously denies this, is as much a part of the unreconstructed “Blob” as any of the most unreformed politicians and administrators that he is so quick to condemn. He is totally in the post-modernist mould; “education” is something that parents shop around for and hold someone else responsible for delivering.

I don’t know Woodhead well. I suppose we’ve met seven or eight times and corresponded about as frequently. But this is enough to convince me that Woodhead does not see children in that bigger context. That is a disaster for him and it’s been a massive disaster for very many children and teachers. It’s also been a disaster, I submit, for the country as a whole. What Woodhead doesn’t seem to understand is that the emerging ideas about how children learn appeal hugely to practicing teachers, not because they are in any sense ‘trendy’ but because they resonate so well with their day to day experience of what does and does not work for children. There is no well-organised ‘mafia’ of unreformed 1960s “progressives” around that I know of. Thinking about learning and the cumulative experiences of the teaching profession has moved on greatly since those days when Chris Woodhead himself last taught almost 25 years ago.

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