Every child in the nursery knows that the Duke of York marched his 10,000 men up and down the hill. Sometimes they were up, and sometimes down but, as the rhyme continues, “When they were only half way up, they were neither up nor down.” Children and adults alike smile at the absurdity of the indecisive General.

When Prime Minister Blair announced in 1997 that one hour of literacy and one hour of numeracy should fill the day of every primary school child in England, he claimed that this was the best route to raise standards. General Blair’s advisors urged some quarter of a million teachers to raise banners proclaiming “raising standards; basic skills; better league tables,” so, rushing forward, they easily conquered the foothills. But some of the older teachers, trained in earlier days, realised that to teach English and Mathematics as separate subjects, disassociated from all those practical skills needed in life, was to lose the intrinsic interest of children in skills that would deepen their understanding. The General ignored their banner proclaiming “basic education is no education at all” because his sergeant majors said that getting children to think for themselves was too much of a time consuming activity.

While Blair’s ‘drill and practice’ got many of his troops into the foothills he started to discover that, to scale the real peaks of learning, was a multi-skilled activity requiring youngsters who could think for themselves, and not rely on text books. His advance stalled, his examination results plateaued out and he eventually resigned.

In late June 2009 it was rumoured that the new commander, General Brown, was to abandon his predecessor’s fascination for basic skills, and compulsory hours of literacy and numeracy and, with as much energy as the previous General, was to march his ten thousand special advisors back down to the foothills too forlorn to hold up their earlier banners. “From now on”, proclaimed Brown, “every child has to learn how to think for himself. So must the teachers. Education has become too centralised.” His advisors looked around anxiously for those who could help his troops recover from many years of being told exactly what to do, and to start thinking for themselves. Most unfortunately he discovered to his cost that most of the people who knew how to do that had retired, or resigned in dismay. General Brown consulted some of the authoritative histories of previous campaigns. What he discovered did not please him. An earlier General, a woman no less (Shirley Williams), far back in the 1970s, had brought her troops back down from the mountains only to find that there were few people skilled at producing troops able enough to think for themselves that they could readily climb the highest peaks of learning.

The General discovered another problem. Because of the failures in the 1970s the sociologists of education reminded poor General Brown that few of his staff believed in child-centred education. Suddenly it dawned on the General why his troops were neither up nor down. He started to panic. Then, whispering in his ear, came a message from those Scandinavian countries that are currently doing so well; “What you are trying to do is right, but unless your staff officers understand the reasons for doing it this way they will never empower the teachers with the skills to produce good mountaineers… sorry, good learners.”

This article is tagged: literacy, numeracy, politics, Schools.