Overschooled but Undereducated

The tranquillity of the summer holidays is soon to be broken as the media indulges in its annual analysis (orgy?) of examination results.  Each will stone their favourite victim with a welter of statistics.  Even those who have made the grade will still face sceptical employers who ask a job seeker “okay, but what can you actually do?”

It is no new problem.  Aldous Huxley, five years before writing Brave New World, wrote an essay entitled The Dangers of Good Teaching.  The language may sound slightly arcane, but the message could not be clearer – make schooling too easy for children and they will be unprepared for life.  This is what he wrote:

(Many teachers) work (their) way dully and mechanically through the prescribed curriculum.  But teachers may be, and frequently are, charming, intelligent, and persuasive.  They put things well; they may speak in a way that will command attention and awaken emotion and enthusiasm; they have a power of making difficulties seem easy.  The child will listen to such teachers and will greatly appreciate them ─ particularly if he has an examination to pass in the near future.

But the more accomplished a teacher is in the art of lecturing or coaching, the worse he is as an educator.  Working on the old-fashioned system, the clever teacher (deplorable paradox!) does almost more harm than the stupid one.  For the clever schoolmaster makes things too easy for his pupils; he relieves them of the necessity of finding out things for themselves.  By dint of brilliant teaching he succeeds in almost eliminating the learning process.

Never has the complex relationship between teaching and learning been better expressed.  Huxley then went on to say…

The experienced teacher knows how to fill his pupils with ready-made knowledge, which they inevitably forget (since it is not their knowledge and cost them nothing to acquire) as soon as the examination for which it was required is safely passed.

The stupid teacher, on the other hand, may be so completely intolerable that the child will perhaps be driven, despairingly and in mere self-defence, to educate himself; in which case the incompetent shepherd will have done, all unwittingly, a great service to his charge, by forcing him into a rebellious intellectual independence.

So, graduating students of the Class of 2009, do you understand how to find things out for yourselves, and are you confident that the overschooled but undereducated society of which Huxley complained 80 years ago, has finally gone into retreat?  Or does it live still?

See Part Ten of the Briefing Paper and Actions 1, 5 and 6

This article is tagged: Education, graduates, Teaching.