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Cedric Cullingford: Lessons to learn from lifting the shackles on education
MINISTERS confirmed yesterday that they were abandoning Labour's flagship programme which saw teaching methods centrally prescribed.
The move has to be greeted with satisfaction and relief but tempered by the realisation of how grudging
this really is as it fails to admit how disastrous educational policies have been over the past 20 years and what a damaging effect they will continue to have.
I am always amazed how politicians can never admit that they are wrong, as if they were threatened by reality. Never mind the facts, they seem to say, feel the rhetoric.
But while Children's Secretary Ed Balls signals that there will be less centralised control, he goes on to assert that the mantra of failed policies will remain.
He reasserts the clichs of "accountability", which in reality means the abnegation of personal responsibility and the refusal to make
decisions in the face of extreme sanctions from government inspectors.
He reasserts the importance of "standards" as if the tests and targets were still significant despite the fact that real standards have fallen dramatically – in critical thinking, creativity, social awareness and communication skills.
Despite the lessening of the stranglehold on teachers, he reasserts that literacy and numeracy hours will continue, however negative their effect, as if every policy could never be fundamentally found wanting.
There should be two key principles in educational policy. The first, a finding which holds true in every country in the world, is that
the less centralisation there is, the better the performance of teachers and therefore pupils.
The second key principle is that pupils have a desire to learn, a need that is manifest from the very beginning, something that goes to the heart of the human experience.
This need to understand is, however, distorted and suppressed by the system that insists on imposing facts. Pupils want to learn but
resent being taught. Teachers know this; which is why they also resent being controlled.
The evidence about the nature of human learning is overwhelming. This happens to go against the fundamentals of education policy. All the best teachers do their work by not taking too much notice of the statutory orders; the best schools are those that ignore them. Such a difference has nothing to do with fashion or as the politicians still use as a straw-man; the 1960s.
We live in a time of greatly expanding knowledge of how people learn, about genetics and the influence of the circumstances in which they learn.
There is one central insight in genetics that is of profound significance. It is the fact that genes themselves are not fixed, but like learning devices. We have fewer genes in our bodies than some
insects; but feel the difference in quality.
Experiences, and therefore education in the broadest sense, and not just the imposed curriculum, are of crucial importance, but these experiences that form character are subtle, social and emotional.
Nothing could contrast more clearly with the National Curriculum. The subtleties of learning and of influence depend on dialogue, on the ability to explore and criticise, to observe the real world and the people in it.
The great question children ask, as all parents know, is "why?" Why do people behave as they do? All the genetic wires are linked to this fundamental question, the one left out so conspicuously from the
National Curriculum, with its lack of vision and batteries of tests.
One day, perhaps, all the evidence will be so apparent to so many people that there will be a complete change to the system of education, based on reality rather than on political clichs.
Meanwhile, we can at least greet with some relief a small concession to the actual experience of teachers and pupils.
That one of the principles of
a disastrous policy – fierce central control – is being slackened, if not discarded, is a step forward so that at least one of the chains shackling all thought and all enterprise has been loosened.
Any sign for the loosening of shackles is to be welcomed, even if the educational slave-trade continues. The big question remains about when that will finally be abolished.
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Saturday 26 May 2012
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