The latest philosophical fuss in education
A big philosophical row is brewing in England’s primary
schools about the knowledge (sophia – or
is that wisdom?) that should be taught to 5-11 year-olds in the revised
national curriculum.
The existing curriculum is accused by Conservative Education
Minister, Michael Gove, of being too ‘skills’ based. The argument typically
centres on history which is actually developed as a subject more at secondary
school but relates to conservative cultural concerns. Traditionalists – like
David Cameron with his plans to ‘celebrate’ the pointless slaughter of the
first world war – feel history has become too ‘skills’-based. By that they
don’t mean anything practical in the way of manual skills but that history and
other teachers try to encourage pupils to think about cause and effect and why
things happen. Instead of this generalized knowledge, the government wants
pupils learning lists of kings and queens and the dates of imperial victories –
bits of information pupils can learn by rote to recite in tests!
Gove justifies his prejudice in favour of this traditional
type of schooling he enjoyed(!) by borrowing from a retired US professor, ED
Hirsch. (That’s not Ed’ but his initials without punctuation, the sign of a
true prawn – like AC Grayling, the former-London Uni philosopher who has set up
his own traditionally academic private University). Hirsch claims that he tried
to teach poor Black kids in community college about their history by informing
them about the American Civil War. This basic factual information would, he
argues, enable them to become knowledgeable about their own past and do as well
as anybody else in – guess what? – more tests!
It’s not as if nobody had ever thought of or tried this
before. In the 1960s French educational sociologist, Pierre Bourdieu, advocated
what he called ‘rational pedagogy’ – booster classes for working-class and
minority ethnic university students to help them to catch up with upper and
middle-class students who had acquired through the way they were brought up the
‘cultural capital’ recognized by higher education. In England at the same time,
educationalist Basil Bernstein argued that traditionally academic ‘Education
could not compensate for society’. The implication was – and Bourdieu came to
accept this too – that the education system would have to change to be of any
use to the majority of the population it failed.
Although there were some pioneering experiments – especially
in the old polytechnics in the UK – so that many more people were encouraged by
progressive primary and comprehensive schools to go on to further and higher
education, education as a whole since the 1976 so-called ‘Great Debate on
Education’ was narrowed to only what was useful in employment. It became training
without jobs as employment collapsed and the traditional skills of
apprenticeships were reduced to making students ‘competent’ in carrying out
basic tasks for – once again – more tests! (Nowadays we have education without
jobs and apprenticeships that
are often indistinguishable from workfare.)
Meanwhile, schools compete to cram their pupils for an
academic National Curriculum. Gove confuses tests of memory under pressure –
like University Challenge – with
‘intelligence’. He thinks this is inherited so that all the education system
has to do is pick out the ‘bright’ Men of Gold, just like in Plato’s Republic, failing the dull Men of Silver
and Bronze. So Gove thinks you don’t need to train and educate teachers, for
instance, because – so long as you know your academic subject – either you can
teach it or you can’t. Anyone can therefore teach in Gove’s ‘free schools’ as
they can in the private schools that are the model for them.
In fact, regurgitating disconnected bits of information in
traditional exams is the equivalent of training for the competence-based
assessment that replaced the real skills formerly acquired on apprenticeships.
(Even state school teachers are ‘trained’ like this nowadays and the government
last week proposed ‘competence tests’ for NHS doctors.)
Knowledge has thus been degraded to information and skill to
competence so that there is now a hopeless confusion of terms and nobody knows
what they mean any longer. Clearly a job for philosophers to sort out! As we do
so, we should remember that there is nothing wrong with training; it is basic
to putting the components of competent performance together in the exercise of
a skill but you have to go beyond training to have education. (You can train
animals after all but you can’t educate them!) But training for the assessment
of competence is what much of education is being reduced to.
Similarly, Hirsch’s idea of education is cramming bits of
information unrelated by conceptual and generalizable knowledge. ‘Funny
phonics’ even teaches reading like this – training primary children to ‘sound
out’ letters in words that make no sense which predictably inhibits reading for
meaning. Meaning and imagination come in at the level of knowledge which is
inseparable from skill because there is no knowledge so cerebral it does not
draw upon some practical skill (since the mind is not separate from the body)
and you need skill to apply knowledge.
Training for unthinking performance and schooling in the
rote learning of information restricts pupils / students to their place in the
hierarchy of competing institutions for which largely written exams function as
proxies for cultural capital. This is what reforming the national curriculum is
all about. Philosophers must contribute to resisting it!
By Patrick Ainley
The Philosophy Takeaway 'Open Topic' Issue 34
