1. So, I have a book out.

    It's been a long time coming. Since I started teaching, I knew there was something suspicious about what I was being told worked in classrooms, and what actually happened. It started in teacher training, as well-meaning lecturers and reading lists advocated apparently cast-iron guarantees that this method of educating children, or that way of directing behaviour, would be efficient. It continued on DfE sponsored training programs where I was taught how to use NLP, Brain Gym, Learning Styles and soft persuasion techniques akin to hypnosis.

    Then I began teaching, guided by mentors who assured me that other contemporary orthodoxies were the way to win hearts and minds. It took me years to realise that thing I could smell was a bunch of rats wearing lab coats. And why should any new teacher question what they are told? Establishment orthodoxies carried the authority of scripture. And often it was justified with a common phrase- ‘the research shows this.’

    I remember reading Ben Goldacre’s Bad Science, and being amused and horrified by the cavalier ways in which science could be hijacked by  hustlers. His harrowing of Brain Gym led me to wonder what else, like Descartes, I needed to question. What I discovered led me to write Teacher Proof.

    First of all I discovered that a lot of what was considered to be absolute dogma by many teachers, was built on quicksand.  Learning Styles, for example, were almost universally accepted by every teacher who trained me. It was a Damascan epiphany to find out that there was hardly a scrap of evidence to substantiate it, that the serious academic  community had washed its hands of it long ago. But it lingered on, a zombie theory, staggering from classroom to classroom, mauling lesson plans.

    Once I had peeled one strip of paper from the wall, I could do nothing else but keep pulling, and see how much came off. Much, much more, it turned out. First of all, I entered the world of pseudo-education, where optimistic internet sites boasted of Olympian gains to made by the adoption of this pill (often Omega 3), that smell (sometimes Lavender, sometimes not) or even this sound (the Mozart Effect, for instance). These, at least, seemed to be obvious pigs in pokes. Other companies sold hats- literally, thinking hats- of various colours, or exercises that promised to boost brain power. But they asked customers to gamble a lot more than a stamp, as Charles Atlas innocently proposed.

    Unfortunately, it was often just as bad when I progressed to the realms of alleged propriety; I found that a lot of what was practically contemporary catechism, was merely cant. Group work, three-part lessons, thinking skills, multiple intelligences, hierarchies of thinking like Bloom’s, all- at least to my poor eyes- appeared to rely on opinion and rhetoric as much as data. Delving deeper, I found that this was an affliction that affected the social sciences as badly as the natural sciences- perhaps worse, as natural sciences are at least readily amenable to verification. But any social science- from economics to sociology- is subject to inherent methodological restrictions that makes any claims to predictive or explanatory powers intrinsically difficult.

    Which isn’t to say that social science isn’t’ a powerful and urgent device with which to accrue an understanding of the human condition. But merely to require that its claims be interpreted appropriately. It is a very different proposition to claim, for example, that water boils at 100 degrees Celsius at sea level, than it is to say that children learn best in groups. The first can be at least disputed immediately, or not, by testing. The latter requires a plethora of causal factors to be adjusted and  accounted for. And to confound matters further, humans are notoriously hard to fit on a microscope slide. Nor are we always the most reliable of subjects.

    Sometimes this was the faulty of those writing the research; sometimes the research was, as Richard Feynman describes, Cargo Cult Science; sometimes the writers appeared to have no idea what the scientific method was, believing it to be some kind of fancy dress with which one clothed a piece of journalism; sometimes allegedly sober pieces of research were simply misinterpreted by a willing media; sometimes it was the teachers themselves that had misappropriated the findings; sometimes it was the policy makers who were hungry for a magic bullet and had already made their minds up about what they were buying.

    Whatever the reasons, it was clear: the educational research we were asked to assimilate in schools was often more like magic beans than magic bullets. That’s unhealthy. There are armies of earnest, dedicated professionals working in educational research who are horrified by some of the fantastical or flimsy claims made by the hustlers and their PRs. If educators want to get past this unhealthy  system of intellectual bondage, we need to become more informed about what the research actually says, and what good research actually means; about how hard it is to say anything for certain in education, and when claims can be ignored, and when they should be listened to.

    So I wrote Teacher Proof. It’s aimed primarily at people who work in schools, but it’s also for anyone involved in education, research and policy. I am, unashamedly, a teacher. I admit I have entered a world- of educational research- in which I am only a guest. I am aware that in my travels I may be more of a tourist than a native. But I have tried to write as honestly and as plainly as I can, about matters that affect me deeply- the education of children. If I have made any errors- and I’m sure that I have- I welcome correction, and discussion. I can’t shake the feeling that teachers would do well to make research more of their business, get involved, participate in studies, and perhaps even conduct some of their own, with guidance. I’d also like to think that researchers would be well advised to ensure their theories are tested objectively, with an eye to disproving them, in classrooms with meaningful sample sizes. There is a great deal of good that the two communities can do together.

    Perhaps then teachers can look forward to hearing the latest research, and run towards it; and researchers can see classrooms not as awkward inconveniences between data sampling and publication. There’s an awful lot of good research out there, but it gets drowned out by the bad.

    Good ideas, like decent whisky, need time to settle and mature. I suspect that we need to develop more of a critical faculty to sift the ideal from the merely idealistic. Maybe then we’ll be immune to novelty and fashion in pedagogy. Or, as I call it, Teacher Proof.
     
    Buy Teacher Proof HERE
    Posted by
    11

    View comments

    1. Really looking forward to reading this! V much agree teachers should be making it more of their business. Have just done a quick poll of colleagues asking them to rank the effect of different teaching/school techniques and then shown them how that compares to Hattie's research/effect sizes. Some fascinating reactions - but main take-away was lack of confidence these bright, talented people had talking about academic research.

      ReplyDelete
      Replies

      1. Cheers, Piers. I sense a new taste for good research, and a willingness to be responsible for it, but it's going to take time to work it's way through the system.

        Delete

    2. Tom, here's one you might like to add to your collection. Becta’s "Harnessing Technology, Next Generation Learning, 2008–2014," a hugely influential piece of educational research, contained only one reference in the entire paper to evidence which suggested technology has had a positive educational effect. That reference was to Becta's own previous 2007 technology review and the research that referred to...was itself commissioned by Becta.

      As an ex teacher and researcher, I would advise teachers to ignore anything which hasn't undergone a formal academic process, including peer review, to reach publication, especially from pressure groups with a political axe to grind. The educational world is almost suffocated by this kind of pay-the-piper ideology masquerading as "research."

      ReplyDelete
      Replies

      1. 'As an ex teacher and researcher, I would advise teachers to ignore anything which hasn't undergone a formal academic process, including peer review, to reach publication, especially from pressure groups with a political axe to grind. The educational world is almost suffocated by this kind of pay-the-piper ideology masquerading as "research."'

        Could NOT have said it better myself.

        Delete

    3. Education abounds with sellers of snake oil. About the only thing we know with any degree of certainty is the relation between social class and attainment. Knowledge which few teachers find agreeable as it tends to reduce their role in the attainment of school knowledge.

      ReplyDelete
      Replies

      1. I was very impressed when I read this major research study from the States, which looked at books in the home across 27 countries over 20 years, as a predictor of educational performance.
        http://www.unr.edu/nevada-today/news/2010/books-in-the-home-as-important-as-parents-education-level

        Delete

    4. One of the big problems with this is that management & inspectors love it. It gives them something to check & ensure the teachers are doing - Plenty of room in all this for Continuing Professional Development.
      Managers can show the inspectors they are 'improving the teaching 'in their schools/colleges/universities/etc. by setting all this stuff up.
      If you don't fully buy into all this stuff, forget promotion, too. Can't have teachers that rock the boat...

      ReplyDelete

    5. Tom: do you know if there are plans to publish the book for the Kindle or other e-book format?

      ReplyDelete
      Replies

      1. Yes, should be out in groovy electric form in a week or two. Could be earlier, or so my publisher says......

        Delete

      2. Many thanks! Not that I don't prefer Real Books, but with about 8000 books currently at home and shelves in my classroom bending under the weight of the things, my Kindle is a life-saver.

        Delete

    6. Good luck with the book Tom. I'll be interested to see if you reference Hattie in your book, and if any reference is positive or negative. I don't know of a greater body of work regarding educational research than "Visible Learning".

      This period of enlightenment in education is starting to really take hold in the UK. Of course it started back in the 1970s with work from Creemers and Hattie. As with many improvements in education, it takes about 40 years to come to fruition!

      ReplyDelete

  2. Brace yourself
    Ken Robinson, godfather of unusually-used paperclips, is back. He's famous to millions of educators as the author and speaker behind the RSA animation 'How schools kill creativity', which among other awards, is also winner of 'the most superficially convincing but ultimately brainless education clip'- joint winner with Shift Happens. You might have seen him at a TED conference, if you're extremely rich, or on Youtube if you're not. I've never really understood the Cult of Ken. He's affable, intelligent, charismatic and passionate about helping children. But unfortunately he's also quite wrong in many matters regarding them.

    This week Ken has descended from TED Olympus to lecture Michael Gove on the National Curriculum. In an interview with The Guardian he says:
    '[The] current plans for the national curriculum seem likely to stifle the creativity of students and teachers alike.' 
     This does sound bad. Creativity is one of those abstracts so nebulous that it could mean a million things to a million ears. Most people would consider it a good thing, broadly, without being able to reify it. That's what makes any discussion about it so slippery.
    'The important issue here is that when he talks about creativity, Gove seems to mean what he says but to misunderstand what he's talking about. His views also suggest some serious misconceptions about teaching and learning in general.'
     That last bit made me sit up. I am neither the Secretary of State for Education, nor a Professor, but I am a teacher, which Sir Ken has never been, so I feel entitled to comment. Incidentally, that's an odd thing, isn't it? People are never been shy of expressing their opinions about education, no matter how little experience of it they actually  have. Many spurn Gove for his inexperience, but are more forgiving of Rosen or Robinson. I suspect it's simply affinity towards whomever says what we already believe, more eloquently. 

    I also have some dark views on people with PhDs in education and beyond who have built a life in education without ever doing the damned thing itself. It is rare to find an emeritus professor of mathematics who has never added anything up in his head. Robinson's wisdom springs from a well of theory, compounded by distinguished service, garnished with laurels. But I'll tether that beast for now.

    His main objection is that the new National Curriculum will stifle creativity. I confess, I'm left scratching my head as to how this will happen. In what subject? Has he even read it? This is the same National Curriculum (draft, of course) that contains compulsory Music...and Art....and Design Technology, right? And that's just the subjects that most obviously lend themselves to interpretation as creative endeavours. Yes, I can see how having all that art and music will just strain the creativity out of kids. Christ, it's like Mao's China.

    Will this harrowing happen in English, with its creative writing component? Where forming a critical assessment of texts studied is central to the whole enterprise? Perhaps he means in History, that much debated echo chamber of neurosis, where everyone is appointed because their favourite inspirational figure has fallen off the table? I have no idea. All I know is that the proposed curriculum as it stands can barely bear its own weight, so heavy with creative pursuits is it saddled.

    Robinson's Barely

    In his piece in the Guardian, Robinson explains what he defines creativity as. He also tackles Gove over his claims that creativity requires mastery before it can properly flourish, but this is a straw man (© Old Andrew) argument. Children- and all of us- are naturally creative. We create all the damn time. Every time we imagine anything that is beyond our immediate senses, we create. When we day dream, we create. When we fear, or hope, or plan, or imagine, we create. We are the architects of galaxies within our minds. Creativity is not some skill by itself; it has no substance. Creativity is the description we give to actions, events and objects once they have been created. It cannot be taught by itself. It can only emerge, unbidden, through the material we attempt to master. It reveals itself continuously through the way we design and solve problems.

    What we can do to help kids practise creativity is to give them something to create with. In a potter's hands this is clay. In the realm of our minds, the matter is ideas: knowledge is the atom of creativity; comprehension and understanding are its molecules. A child can be creative, as can a Master of Arts. But which one has the tools to create more extensively, constructively?

    A masterpiece, apparently
    Robinson also uses an odd argument when he discusses Hans Zimmer, the near omnipresent scorer of every other blockbuster movie this decade. Apparently he was so troublesome as a child he was kicked out of seven schools. SEVEN. Only a teacher can appreciate what an arse Hans Zimmer must have been as a child to get kicked out of so many schools, and I say that as a fan. School eight had a more unusual approach, however, which Robinson applauds:
    'The headmaster took him to one side on the first day and said: "Look, I've read all these reports. How are we going to avoid this sort of trouble here? What is it you really want to do?" Hans said that all he really wanted to do was play music. With the head's support, he spent most of the time doing exactly that. Slowly he became engaged in other work too.'
    I applaud the Head for his unorthodoxy. But what do we take from this? That schools should only let kids study what they like? That they can tell all the other teachers to fuck off? That may work if you have bottomless resources, and are dealing someone as predisposed to pursue music as Hans Zimmer (who attended Hurtwood House, a private school in Surrey incidentally) but we don't just teach children what they like, because they are children, and what they like may not be what they need.

    People like Robinson seem to believe that our jobs as educators is to uncover the talents and aptitudes personal to each child, and then to elevate them. This assumes that such aptitudes exist, uncovered, undiscovered, like statues of David buried in cold lava, and our jobs are to be archaeologists of character. Who buries these statues? What fairy hand blesses each child with gifts, and then challenges its guardians with discovering them? What immortal hand or eye?

    Two problems: firstly, its doubtful such talents exist intrinsically. They must be generated, not revealed. Zimmer was the son of two musicians, who grew up in a music studio and played by himself for countless hours. I wonder if that's where the aptitude came from? I'm just guessing. Take a child into ten different lifetimes and watch as ten different lives grow from each path. DNA isn't destiny, and experience carves us into the shapes that it will. We're not just archaeologists; we're sculptors.

    Secondly, it is the entitlement of every child to the legacy of their culture's heritage, whether they bloody like it or not. Universal education has at its heart this concern: that no matter what your background, you are entitled to a broad and rigorous exposure to the best that culture, science and thought has produced. To do anything else is to deny children- and it will be poor children especially- worlds beyond their experiences, and entire universes of opportunity. Allow a child, even a parent, to decide what children should learn, and we risk a regress towards cultural solipsism. Lucky Hans Zimmer; but no culture could, or should, build an education system on his experiences.

    Is Robinson serious when he suggests this? That we should allow children to find their heart song and never mind all that beastly sums and Norman Conquest rubbish? Or that we should make lessons as entertaining as possible, and ensure that children are engaged at all times? Only a man who has never taught could think this. Or do we accept that learning, like anything worthwhile, is often hard work? That opinion won't draw applause at a TED conference populated by believers and acolytes, but it's the truth.

    Here's to you, Mr Robinson

    Robinson is a kind and articulate man, but he's as much a credible educational revolutionary as Paolo Coelho is a plumber. He may hold the LEGO Prize for international achievement in education ( and I am NOT making that up: best award ever) but his theories of what creativity is, and how it must be taught, are sophistry and illusion. There isn't a shin-bone of evidence to support what he says. Creativity cannot be taught directly. We're just not that powerful, or precise. Our medicine is not strong enough. We can demonstrate how others have been creative. We can give them an anvil, a forge and a hammer. We can show them swords, and shoes, and breastplates. We can let them try for themselves more and more as they learn.

    But the rest is up to them. And the National Curriculum in its draft form does nothing to deter this.I really like Sir Ken. But he should stick to stand-up.



    The interview in the Guardian:

     http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/may/17/to-encourage-creativity-mr-gove-understand

     Shift doesn't happen. My earlier thoughts on Ken Robinson's RSA Animate video

     http://behaviourguru.blogspot.co.uk/2011/07/box-shift-doesnt-happen-ken-robinson.html?q=robinson
    Posted by
    12

    View comments

    1. Thanks for another great piece. What worked for Hans would not work for very many of the disruptive kids I've met:

      How are we going to avoid this sort of trouble here? What is it you really want to do?" Connor said that all he really wanted to do was play on his iPhone and call other kids gay. With the head's support, he spent most of the time doing exactly that. Slowly he became engaged in throwing pens too.'

      ReplyDelete
      Replies

      1. For every shining inspirational anecdote, there's a real world parallel!

        Delete

    2. Great post, but:

      "There isn't a shin-bone of evidence to support what he says."

      There hasn't been much evidence for pretty much anything that's worthwhile that's worked outside 'hard science'. :-/

      ReplyDelete

    3. Tom
      The latest DfE 'Secondary Training Pack' being handed out this month
      ( http://www.nasentraining.org.uk/training-pack/ then number 17 in module 1) tells us the best way to deal with pupils who have problematic behaviours. 'The single most effective strategy in most cases is to work with the rest of the class on ignoring the behaviours.' I have been there and done that (although it is hard to go head to head with a child determined to draw attention to themselves by shouting out obscenties, the teacher just can't top that for interest value...) as it was the only option left, but I'm not convinced it is any sort of answer, or indeed that it is fair on the rest of the class, who might conceivably want to learn about fractions, rather than learn how to ignore their classmate, again. Obviously I should put my 'Creative' thinking hat on next time. Wouldn't it be great if Ken popped in and took a lesson or two? He could get hyped up creating spinning plates and stop them dropping to the floor, it would be easier.

      ReplyDelete

    4. It's easy to dismiss Robinson's reference to the Zimmer story as showing his complete out-of-touchness with the challenges of the classroom. Turn it into a question and it becomes more interesting. The disengaged child is not interested in what you are teaching because he cannot see the point. Enable him or her to find the smallest grain of a passion for something within their constricted worldview and they might start to see the point. Enable the grain of passion to grow and they might start to embrace the whole of the curriculum they are being offered. I am reminded of the story told me by someone running a collaborative project between a youth club and the library service in Leicester. They took a bunch of kids to buy a book at Waterstones. Some of the kids wanted to be rap artists and were very interested to discover that there were things called rhyming dictionaries. Only problem was they hadn't learned to read. Now at last they could see why that might have been a good idea.

      ReplyDelete

    5. As parent of a child who has managed - (with firm support to improve what he is "like"), I believe Ken is right in a lot of what he says BUT my son also needs to learn to improve and address his behaviour not have it accomodated all the time. I have long harboured the ambition to come to one of Sir Ken's talks and behave the way my son used to (and still does to an extent, but he is really working on it) - asking questions that have NOTHING to do with the subject in hand, constant fidgeting, - and when he gets nervous or stressed he has various verbal tics he throws into the mix. I'm posting this on the guardiarn article when I find it too - in the hopes he might read it - I'd love to know his response...

      ReplyDelete

    6. I spent the last 18 months of my primary education in a 1970s "progressive" school. They let the pupils do what they wanted (it seemed like *such* a good idea at the time). Most of us spent our time painting, making stuff, building treehouses. You know -- being creative. None of us became "more engaged" in other work: we were too busy doing what we wanted. The occasional flash-card-maths session and enforced reading became a punishment. In the meantime, my ex-classmates from my old three Rs school were getting a solid education. It took me years to undo the damage and I was one of the bright ones (my poster painting skills, on the other hand, are legend).

      Sir Ken *really* needs to get in the classroom (Sal Khan and Sugata Mitra could be his TAs). Start off easy with a mixed ability class of 27 kids (only three statemented), let them do what they want and then see what creativity *really* means. Good luck with the kids who like making sculptures with their own shit; and the ones who just like punching stuff; and the ones who *really don't know what they want to do*. Parables, soundbites and wishful thinking won't help you there Ken.

      ReplyDelete

    7. I think you do Sir Ken an injustice but lumping him in with 'shift happens'. While Ken, perhaps rather regrettably, uses headline grabbing examples such as Zimmer to get attention, there is significantly more substance to his actual research. But you know that because you've read it, right?

      Take for a moment Sir Ken's broader point that the educational paradigm is wrong and needs changing. Imagine, if you will, that Sir Ken is right. Who would be best placed to notice this fundamental corruption, those on the inside helping create the paradigm or those on the outside looking at it?

      We teachers are a large part of the very paradigm that Sir Ken disputes. Of course you disagree with him!

      Just because you struggle to define creativity, doesn't make it nebulous. Sir Ken defines it as 'original ideas that have value.' This doesn't mean 'do what you like' - a gross over-simplification. It means 'create original ideas that are worthwhile, and to do that you'll need to build on the sum of existing ideas.'

      What Sir Ken is calling for is an agent-centered approach to education, in which the abilities and interests of students (think virtues) are developed. Virtues aren't developed in a vaccum, they are developed in the context of the best ideas that have already been created. If only I knew an education blogger who'd written a book on a virtue ethics approach to teaching...

      ReplyDelete
      Replies
      1. Kris Boulton23 May 2013 10:47

        What I took from this comment:

        "You disagree with Sir Ken because you're a teacher. If the system were broken, being a part of the system would make you unable to see that it were broken, or why."

        So, I disagree with this. I don't feel the need to justify it much; it feels fairly a priori false: an extreme and preposterous supposition. For the sake of adding at least a little backbone to the statement, though, disagreeing with Sir Ken's view of what should change, and how it should be changed, does not automatically preclude the possibility that one believes change of some sort is desirable. Mr Robinson's perspective on education is not the only one.

        Other than that, I couldn't see what point was struggling to make itself here.

        Delete
      2. Michael J Russell23 May 2013 14:34

        I think what the poster above is saying is that if a complex system really is broken it might take someone outside the system to identify it. Think Billy Beane or Peter Palchinsky depending on your flavour.

        I.e. just because Ken Robinson isn't a teacher doesn't invalidate his argument. If the steak is burnt you don't need to be a chef to send it back.

        Delete

      3. Yeah, but teachers faced with difficult classroom situations week on week are some of the most creative people I have met in my life. They will try anything, and they will discuss it with their colleagues. With all due respect, the teachers of a school know what works for the kids at that school better than Mr Robinson, because they have a whole lot of communal experience of trial and error. And they will know those children as individuals with individual needs.

        Now I'm not saying that each individual teacher has the power to change an entire school single-handedly - a misguided or disrespected management team can make any teacher's life difficult. But where this is not the issue and there is a disengaged student, I can't see Ken's advice working in the overwhelming majority of cases. If Ken had some teaching experience, it would cause him to test and (I strongly suspect) rethink his ideas.

        Until HE tries them and they don't work, he will have no reason to change his tune. While he does seem to care about kids and education, I'm sure he enjoys being up on stage spouting popular ideas that get people talking. Why risk that..?

        If everyone's steaks that you reckon are burnt (having never tried cooking) how do you know your new method is going to fix anything? It'd be a shame if everyone got food poisoning.

        Delete

    8. If you scratch the surface of so many popularised educational reforming voices like Sir Ken's, what you find is a worrying antipathy for schools. My favourite example is from the BSF world. Anyone who bothered to scratch the surface would have found that the leading researcher quoted ubiquitously by Partnerships for Schools and local authority staff, to the point where leading builders and architects really were trying to create (oh the irony) schools from his ideas, had written a PhD entitled "Schools as Prisons" and made no attempt to disguise his own awful school experience.

      For me, nothing I've seen even approaches the school (at its best) as a way of educating children to be independent thinkers, as well as positive contributors to society and adult life. I've long been concerned at the covert anti-schools agenda that lies behind so many "reforming" or "innovative" educational proposals.

      ReplyDelete

  3. 'I can't wear the same thing twice.'- Kelly Mok
    I turned down a job teaching in a Hong Kong school a few years back. If I'd seen Tiger Teachers (Unreported World, Channel 4) before I responded, I might have thought twice. The Chinese island has seen such an explosion in after school tutoring that celebrity super tutors have emerged, some of them earning millions of pounds every year.

    Tutors like Richard Eng, the founder of the Beacon College, an extra curricular institute that sees 40,000 students walk politely through its doors, sit quietly and say f*ck all as Tutor Kings and Queens like Richard apparently do little other than lecture to them for an hour and a half. The students are prepping for the Hong Kong Diploma of Secondary Education (HKDSE), the ultimate arbiter of University entrance. If you thought our exams were high stake, take a look at JJ, the student the program followed through his time at Beacon College. I've seen hydraulics on Tower Bridge under less stress. JJ was wound tighter than a mousetrap as he prepared for the Rubicon of the exams. Access to Uni would open opportunities of salary and occupation that would be closed if his grades didn't cut it. But if you expected his parents to be awful Tiger Tyrants, they were surprisingly low key. Mum was brutal when poor JJ opened his mock results; 'You're not going to pass,' she said, in her best Mum-of-the-year impression. Dad was more sanguine. 'As long as he's happy,' he said. 'I just don't want him to have to drive a cab like me.' And I thought, you didn't do so bad, mate.

    The competition for Uni entrance is so intense that it creates a Malthusian pond: 80,000 students compete for 17,000 places, and there are no illusions about the value of coming second in this race. In a culture where certification is a matter of status, failing to get into tertiary education is a badge of caste.

    Which is where the Tutor Kings and Queens appear. There's always a profit to be made in any circumstance: in war, munition stocks rise; in peace, mortar. In any market, where there is demand, there is supply. If extra tutoring conveys an advantage, then in order to flourish, that advantage is desired. The problem with advantage, as any giraffe knows, is that once everyone has it, it no longer represents an advantage, and the extra tutoring serves to simply prevent falling behind. And the spring tightens further.

    Dickmobile
    Richard Eng is one of the most famous of the new wave of Tutor Kings. Richard wears Louis Vuitton, drives a Lamborghini with the number plate RICHARD, and is clearly somewhat of a dick. Although he's 49, he looks half that; some of the other teachers on his Beacon College website look like they could be heart throbs and pin-ups. The documentary showed us the fruits of his trade: a penthouse apartment and a privately educated daughter with ambitions of Stamford University in the USA. She won't have to sit the HKDSE, of course, as she doesn't attend state school.

    What does this show us? Eng himself admitted that the Hong Kong system of examination was a 'factory for creating losers.' His decision not to send his own daughter to state school (a habit, coincidentally, apparently common in Hong Kong educationalists) is a bitter signal of its perceived weaknesses. It's an odd mirror for us in the UK: the Hong Kong system was, until recently fairly closely modelled on the British system. In primary school, many children regularly have two hours of homework every night. Behaviour is famously excellent, although even I have my limits as to how much is too much. It's one thing for pupils to do exactly as a teacher asks. It's another for this to allow the teacher to become little more than someone dictating from a powerpoint. With the little we were shown, I was deeply unmoved by the quality of the cramming sessions: sitting in silence as someone drones at you wouldn't be my preferred activity for remedial learning. Still, maybe we didn't see it all. Compared to this, I felt practically progressive. THAT'S how drilled it looked.
    Timetables...taught by a dick

    And what about state schools? What do they think? Here's a quote from the Slate:
    'Not for nothing do most of this city's rank-and-file teachers despise the tutorial industry. Educators at Hong Kong's heavily subsidized local schools earn about $60,000—roughly half of what a tutor who's just becoming a public figure brings in. Very few tutors have teaching backgrounds; cram chains like Modern Education are more likely to scout out young, charismatic lawyers or former beauty contestants. And in the contest to capture students' attention, plain, hardworking professors simply can't compete with miniskirted billboard personalities. In a strange irony, regular teachers often find that their lack of glamour makes them less credible as educators: Parents and their kids tend to believe that since mainstream schools are free and all teachers paid the same wage, the instructors have no real incentive to adequately prepare pupils for the public exams.
    The truth is that formal schools simply don't have the resources to pore over old tests, spot trends, develop shortcuts, and predict questions. Tutors deal in quick tricks proven to boost results. Their extracurricular sessions may not relay much in the way of real knowledge, but they deliver what they promise: high scores. "We're a supplement to day school, like a vitamin," says Eng.'
    THE DICK FORCE FIVE
    There is a danger, always, to easy adoption of international examples as evidence for improvements at home. Hong Kong is often lauded as an international jet rocket in the literacy and numeracy rankings, but with such a vast culture of docility in the classroom, and cramming after school (believed to be 85% of the school population), it's little wonder that we should see variations between Jimmy Lau and Jimmy Law. Given that behaviour in the UK is still a significant problem, and that after school tutoring is still a minority sport over here, I can't see parity any time soon. The worry is that we look at other aspects of the Kowloon model and mistakenly assume that aping them will benefit the children of Motherwell and Chester. Ironically, reformers in Hong Kong have looked to Britain for ways of driving improvement, settling on, among other things, project work, creativity and discovery learning, which just goes to show that it's possible to go backwards as well as forwards in educational reform. Give it a decade, and you'll see a Chinese Old Andrew or an Oriental Behaviour Shogun banging on about synthetic phonics, assertive discipline and the good old days.  

    I'm a huge fan of hard work; I also love the idea of kids slogging away to learn. But this Hong Kong market model is a beacon all right- it's a lighthouse, warning us from the rocks. The point of school isn't to get kids into university; the point of school is to educate children, because we view education as intrinsically valuable. University is an extrinsic end, and a very noble goal for anyone who wants to work hard enough to get in. But this miserable dystopian world of pass or fail is the death of both education and social mobility, as advantages are only conferred to those already enjoying advantage. Add to that the celebrity world of image-driven after-school tutorials, and it seems to make an educational culture more cruel for those at the bottom, not less.

    Actually, maybe I made the right decision after all.



    http://www.channel4.com/programmes/unreported-world/4od

    For the whole program.

    http://www.slate.com/articles/double_x/doublex/2011/08/meet_the_glamorous_celebrity_tutors_of_hong_kong.2.html

    Slate article by Hillary Brenhouse



    Posted by
    Labels: tiger teachers
    4

    View comments

    1. Fascinating stuff. I'd read about this recently. I am dying to know what the 'quick tricks proven to boost results' are. Not that I would use them, you understand. I'm all about the deep-level understanding, me.

      ReplyDelete

    2. "Ironically, reformers in Hong Kong have looked to Britain for ways of driving improvement, setting on, among other things, project work, creativity and discovery learning, which just goes to show that it's possible to go backwards as well as forwards in educational reform. Give it a decade, and you'll see a Chinese Old Andrew or an Oriental Behaviour Shogun banging on about getting synthetic phonics, assertive discipline and the good old days."

      That is basically what's happened in Japan.

      ReplyDelete

    3. The problem is the Confucian education system in general right across East Asia. Then the whole idea of "face" drives it. So the education system itself is embedded within a deeper social malaise. The deep issues with education in the West - although quite different - are also embedded within a social and civilisational framework.

      ReplyDelete

    4. I worked in a Hong Kong state primary school as an English teacher, and I fell in love with the place but couldn't stay in a system that clearly does so little for it's children apart from drive them towards exams. SEN children are not recognized, there is no sense of emotional support, and there was a huge tutoring centre next door to the school and children just walked out of one and into the other. 5 year olds had bags bigger than them and their classroom were just small scale models of the Year 6's, all with individual desks. Primary children have to attend interviews in English to attend the best secondary schools, and parents pour huge amounts of money into tuition for these interviews. I had one friend who was asked to tutor a three year old for her English interview to primary school. The culture of education at school and at home bears no comparison to the UK in it's present form, it makes me so furious when Gove just rolls out their results as an example of UK teachers not driving kids hard enough.

      ReplyDelete

  4. The last GTC ad campaign
    One of my deeper shames is that I possess a certificate for NLP (see below). Worthless, utterly without value. Everyone at the course got one, which means that it's as precious an accolade as the sensor that toots when I walk into my local newsagent. You turned up? Congratulations, welcome to the Star Chamber. It's like getting a 'Yes' from David Walliams.

    But imagine if teachers could be certified in a way that you'd be proud to hang on your wall. I bring this up because an idea has broken the surface that's been submarine for several years: a Royal College of Teaching (RCOT). I wonder how many teachers are aware that there already is a College of Teaching? Well, there is, and what's more it's been around so long (since 1846), I'm surprised Dan Brown hasn't written a part for them as the shadowy overlords of education across the centuries. These days it's based in the Institute of Education, London, no doubt in some crepuscular underground ossiery. Plotting.

    Support for the idea of a RCOT has been very broad indeed. In fact, it might be the most omnipopular suggestion since Bank Holidays or pudding. An unlikely Justice League of Education has put its mighty shoulders to this: the NUT, the NAHT, the ASCL, the NASUWT, Michael Gove, Labour, the Council for Subject Associations, the Education Select Committee, have all dropped their white balls in the bag. With that kind of political will, it feels like pushing against an open door, or perhaps jump-starting a speeding train.So who's shovelling the coal?

    Michael Gove indicated his support for its inception last week, although he stressed that it would be independent of the DfE, perhaps aware that his patronage would be considered by some to be as welcome as Julia Burchill helping Suzanne Moore win an argument ('Here, let me put your ashtray fire out with this bucket of petrol'). He's right to do so. The establishment needs to stand very still and quiet if it wants these deer to come closer.

    A blue print for the RCOT is already being drawn up by the Prince's Teaching Institute, one of the Heir Apparent's charitable trusts formed in 2006 to promote the work of a series of Summer schools, themselves designed to 'bring together voices in education', which is a gloriously aristocratic ambition. Its provenance might suggest it might embody a somewhat homoeopathic attitude towards education. But an examination of their website reveals distinctly independent DNA: teacher training based on subject knowledge; professional development aimed at revisiting core knowledge, sabbaticals and so on. Now that makes a refreshing change.

    Before we are teachers, we are subject experts, otherwise we aren't fit to instruct anyone else. And yet, once we become teachers, how often are we encouraged to revisit the fuel and the flame that fired us in the first place? Most CPD consists of anodyne INSETS that are endured rather than enjoyed or embraced. Try telling your line manager you want to go on a training day specific to your subject, and watch the blank stare. Tell them you want to explore 'Displaying progress in 20 minutes for Ofsted' and their saddles will ululate like an Afghan widow.

    First session of the proposed Royal College
    The PTI's aims are interesting. They advise teachers to take a step back from the centrifuge of the school once in a while to re-evaluate and reignite their passion and raison d'etre for teaching. I took a teacher fellowship sabbatical a few years ago and it sharpened- possibly saved- my career vim. Priests do, and I suggest that we should too.

    Everyone *Hearts* the RCOT. Why?

    The reasons are obvious: in the Guild of Teachers mirror, everyone can see their ambitions reflected. To understand it further, look at where such a body places itself. For the immediate future, it's likely that its ambitions would be to provide a supplementary certification process to existing qualifications like QTS. It would be, in effect, a value-added supplement to the minimum height requirement of profession entry. Membership (in increments of mastery) could confer upon its participants the kudos of having achieved a certain level of acumen, CPD and evidenced attainment, which would then be redeemable in the job market.  That, so far, is as uncontroversial as custard.

    It's what comes afterwards that makes this a Game of Thrones. What if such a body started to appropriate QTS itself? Or certified approved CPD linked to job development? It could provide a magnetic north for teacher standards; it could define and prescribe the Shibboleths of good practice. In short, it could transform the way that teachers are trained, hired, evaluated and indirectly, promoted, retained and distributed. It could help to define what a teacher is. Add to that powers of excommunication and sanction, and you have three hotels on Mayfair.

    No small prize. No wonder people are- for the best of reasons- queueing up outside in their sleeping bags waiting for the doors to open.

    The fine print

    One of the main challenges in its emergent phase will be dealing with the Manichean cage fight occupying education for some decades, which might be broadly characterised by the child-centred and knowledge-centred approaches. Of course, depending on the mood and balls of the RCOT, they could simply pick a lane and race it like a dragster, but that would cleave a profession in two like Solomon's baby. If it were to assume powers of registration and accreditation it could be a powerful force one way or the other, and culture change would happen anyway. A wise body would accommodate both poles wisely.

    My shame. Luckily I escaped.
    So what should it be? What shouldn't it be? We don't need another union; that pitch is as crowded as a conga in a coffin. We certainly don't need another General Teaching Council, unlovely, unloved and missed by no one, which by its death rattle had become, to teachers, nothing more than an annual debit on their bank statement for which they received...well, nothing really. It's greatest failure lay in what it didn't do rather than what it did. It didn't map good teaching- it merely punished the bad, and not always wisely, as a number of odd, high profile cases showed. It was meant to regulate the teaching profession- membership was compulsory in order to teach in maintained schools, and by its demise it had 500,000 teachers on its register- but the bar it set was so nebulous and so shallow that its impact was cursory.

    So what could a RCOT be? It could be what the GTC was meant to be, but wasn't.

    1. A regulatory body. Membership could be seen as a badge of credibility, something to be striven towards. At first, an aspiration. Later on, perhaps a minimum bar.
    2. A body of advocacy- not for pay, conditions, the profession of teachers- but for the practice of teaching. It could observe, analyse, dispute or promote the very best thinking in education- from both research and the collective well of experience, and take a lead in promoting and disseminating these treasures.
    3. A critical friend to itself. Teaching is not nursing or medicine. It is far more prone to dispute than either, because even the building blocks of educational debate are disputed. Because of this an RCOT needs to be a fluid, genuinely introspective body that welcomes, absorbs and accommodates the inevitable challenges from within and without that such a large and broad church will entail.
    4. A guarantor of CPD- or even a provider.
    5. An independent voice for teaching and teachers, liaising with all of the satellites that orbit our heavenly bodies. At present the press turns to a handful of names in its Rolodex when they need a quote. We need a body that can meaninglessly represent teaching, not merely telegenic partisans.
    6. A certifier of teacher development- what Tim Oates of Cambridge Assessment calls an 'advanced certifier'. Doctors are required to evidence continued commitment to professional development; imagine if teachers had to do the same, not by ruinous days spent in mid-price conference hotels scooping up pens and shortbread, but revisiting their subjects, and learning skills they genuinely want and need.

    I've frequently written with frustration at how, in education, we have student voice, stakeholder voice, parent power and Westminster voice- but never teacher voice, which is odd when you consider that we are the professionals most affected by it all. What an odd omission. Who would think it logical or fit to exclude such an important community? Yet here we are. There is room, of course in any discussion, for those not blessed with the scars and spoils of the classroom, but for too long the room has been missing an elephant: us.

    The RCOT needs to be constructed by teachers; populated with teachers; run by teachers. The iron, right  now, is red hot. The need has rarely been greater. The will is there. If we succeed, we can fix teaching from within, without waiting for someone else to do it for us. We can transform from many quiet voices into one authoritative one- not the moronic bellow of a crowd, but the careful proclamation of experience.

    Get this wrong, and it'll take decades to clear up the mess. Get it right, and we could change the lives of millions of children for the better. This engine runs on hope.




    Posted by
    Labels: royal college of teaching
    5

    View comments

    1. Thanks, I really enjoyed your take on this. After a long chat with friends who run RCTs for the NHS, I'm starting to think that NICE might be a better model than the Royal College idea. http://www.nice.org.uk/aboutnice/whatwedo/what_we_do.jsp It's got to be something with teeth though.

      (Plus I do think everyone should be asking how much of this is a panacea/distraction technique from Gove.)

      You're right about it being run by teachers, but as soon as a teacher starts running it, he/she isn't in the classroom anymore by definition. It's also a huge group of very disparate people to get to agree on anything. Interesting times ...

      ReplyDelete

    2. It seems so sensible and logical that something is bound to mess it up. Most likely that instead of allowing it to establish over time, something will push it to a scope-explosion (for example, a government contract to manage teacher training or a certificate being adopted as a standard for UPS). The rapid growth will mean that it ends up staffed by the recently-redundant ex-DCSF, ex-national strategies, ex-QCDA, ex-GTC bods rather than the desired stream of credible chalkface professionals. The resulting organisation would be fairly indistinguishable from any other QANGO and thus rapidly fall from favour with the teaching profession. The death knell will come when it asserts it's independence from government, at which point it loses the large government contract and implodes as it can't sustain the weight of it's own bureaucracy.

      I really hope this doesn't happen, but I've seen enough organisations formed and dismantled to know that any RCT is going to have to be very strategic in order to avoid this fate.

      ReplyDelete

    3. Tom,
      As far as this goes, "...revisiting their subjects, and learning skills they genuinely want and need." If you haven't had any contact with them, then do look into the Prince's Teaching Institute. This is precisely what they are all about. (And apologies if you already know all about them.)

      ReplyDelete

    4. "their saddles will ululate like an Afghan widow"? What does that mean? Otherwise loved the metaphors...

      ReplyDelete

    5. ...I meant simile, obviously... Sorry, Sir.

      ReplyDelete


  5. 'Will this be on the test?'

    There isn’t enough porn in schools. 

    This apparently odd conclusion isn’t the title of my career suicide note (at least I hope not), but the view of the Sex Education Forum, a group of sex education advisers. They want pornography taught in terms of "media literacy and representation, gender, sexual behaviour and body image". 
      http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-22308393

    Their intentions are entirely honourable, but misguided. The first, minor complaint I have is that it provides yet another mis-use of the word literacy to include...well, just about any understanding whatsoever. It's this kind of dilution of denotation that dissolves meaning until a word can point to just about anything, and therefore nothing. It's explains why understanding an IKEA manual can now somehow be called literacy when it used to mean spelling, grammar and Shaw. 

    It isn’t the content of the SEF's cause that I reject- in fact a lot of what they say is perfectly sensible: porn creates unrealistic expectations of body shape, sexual experience, reinforces the idea of the male gaze, and escalates the arms race of who does what and to whom. They even want the positive side to porn on the curriculum- many people use it as part of a loving relationship etc, although I feel that far more use it as part of a loving relationship with a locked door, drawn curtains and a remote control. 

    At University I found myself, as the only man on a Feminism course in politics, writing an essay on porn (‘the depiction of vile whores’ in Greek). Commentators like Andrea Dworkin and Germaine Greer were pretty clear: porn was corrosive, addictive and oppressive. Most women in the industry were victims collaborating in their own oppression; addicts or the products of fractured histories based on abuse and desperation.

    Running clubs in Soho, I saw the industry up close: creepy all-night book shops that stocked Taschen and Penguin classics upstairs, while beneath the decks, buggery and bondage  stacked the shelves (a legal loophole allowed them to stock the lucrative bongo as long as 75% of their wares were PG or below). There was even a porn cinema, The Astral, on Brewer Street, the demise of which it is impossible to be sentimental. One of my club promoters had a sideline in making stroke movies for the Fantasy Channel, and he even filmed a few links and promo trailers in the bar when I wasn’t looking. At one point he asked if I wanted to guest star in one, but I demurred. I assure you, you will Google in vain.

    I’m often asked at what age I think it appropriate to allow a child to have a smart phone. I answer, ‘That depends- when are you happy with them seeing porn?’ Human nature is curious; anything forbidden immediately becomes precious, and the market price escalates. Few things are as forbidden, or as interesting, as sex, especially for the emergent adult. When I travelled as a 17 year-old through Europe, my eyes were out on stalks as I saw the permissiveness of continental adverts and TV- we even had programs like Eurotrash that offered us Brits a What-the-butler-saw keyhole of their damnable foreign lasciviousness. Now, yesterday’s porn is today’s scenery. 

    Children now exist in a society that sexually, permits everything except prohibition. When I’ve taught sex-ed, the breadth of novelty of the pupils’ apprehension exceeded the vocabulary of a 19th century trapeze artist. Yet this surface knowledge of eccentricity (‘Sir, what’s a Plushie?’ Me: ‘You never need to know.’) is accompanied by the same incomprehension that children have always had for events and experiences that are beyond their capacity. This is the danger, particularly of porn for children. Girls have enough problems with unrealistic expectations of their bodies, without porn multiplying them with its pneumatic cartoon characters acting as role models. I’ve heard young boys talking about anal sex as if it were something you brought up on a first date, something that proves she’s into you. 

    In the absence of parents talking to their children about such matters, porn fills the vacuum. It’s a tragedy that something so mechanical should be used as the template for the intangible sorcery of human relationships.
    And yet I don’t want it in the school curriculum. Because this is another example of schools being expected to fix every problem in society with a badly delivered lesson. For a start, the timetable is already stuffed with English, Science, etc which makes it hard to know when this is going to fit, especially when it competes with a million other, equally worthy causes like lessons on vandalism, social responsibility, healthy eating, voting and on and on and on. It’s as if we were walking down a street full of chuggers and being asked to justify why we weren’t dropping our change into the cans of every one.

    Society has many issues. People need to stop looking to schools to fix them, because we can’t. What we can do, if you let us, is teach them about the great legacy of human thought and knowledge. We can try- try- to act as good role models, and to instil them with manners and codes of community conduct. 

    We are not the pilots of their lives. We don;t have time to teach them every thing society would like them to know. We can do our best, and their parents can too. Beyond that, they’re on their own.

    Posted by
    1

    View comments

    1. Of course schools shouldn't be seen as being the solution to social problems, but I do think they have a part to play, even if it's only to improve academic attainment.

      This (US) meta-analysis makes clear the links between risky behaviours and educational outcomes and makes the point that while the causal relationship may not be there it is clear that there's a mutually reinforcing one when things start going off the rails.

      You'll know that the National Curriculum tells schools that a lot of these issues (SRE, drugs and alcohol, healthy eating) should be addressed in Science lessons so they'll no doubt get some classroom time, the question for me is how to ensure that any time in what is a busy school day is more likely to make a difference to the behaviours and attainment of the pupils.

      For that to happen perhaps we need to follow the evidence focusing on the causes of risky behaviours, and the skills and values needed to negotiate the decisions that young people face.

      To be clear I'm not arguing that parents don't need to step up, we do; we can't shy away from these tricky conversations, nor assume that a single conversation will be sufficient (for example, a recent Department of Health survey found that 75% of parents say they've had a conversation about drugs, but only 36% of teenagers recall that talk).

      But schools, can and do make a difference with the programmes they run, helping the personal, social and health development of their pupils.

      ReplyDelete

  6. Well, here are some quotes nobody expected from Michael Gove:
    'I’m a great fan of Andrew Old, whose brilliant blog Scenes from the Battleground provides one of the most insightful commentaries on the current and future curriculum that I’ve ever read; but I’m also an admirer of John Blake of Labour Teachers, who has transcended party politics to praise all schools which succeed for their pupils, even if they are academies or free schools…'

    This is exactly how it must have played in the DfE last week:


     Then this:

    'I also hugely enjoy the always provocative work of Tom Bennett, the Behaviour Guru, who champions teachers at every turn while challenging them to up their game.'

    By which point this is me:


    Next time I get stopped for driving drunk with my knees at the wheel on the M11 I'm pulling a Reese Wetherspoon, throwing a copy of this speech at the Feds and shouting 'Have you read THIS?'

    Got home from a busy day releasing butterflies from children's hearts, to find that Michael Gove had mentioned my unworthy self and several others in his address to the National College of Teaching and Leadership. I'm not going to be cool and pretend it's anything other than plusgood because it wasn't so long ago that I was plugging into my first blog and wondering how you got anyone to read the damn things. The temptation to style it out with a casual shrug and play the demagogue is an itch that chafes my contrary nature.

    I was asked if I thought it was a good thing, to be thought well by an an SoS, and I realised what a double-edged butter knife of Brutus recognition by the Alpha class can be. Some rakes suggested it was done with political purpose, and my weary inner inquisitor thought, 'What isn't?' Politics is a Hall of Mirrors, of appearance, semblance, and the semblance of semblance, regressing into infinity. And sometimes it's just appearance. Who knows? Speculation about the interior lives of others I'll leave to psychologists and other clairvoyants.

    It was reassuring to see DJ Gove dropping shout-outs to voices from the Cursed Earth of education, like Daisy Christodolou, the anonymous Old Andrew (brilliantly referred to as Andrew Old: 'To you, Mr and Mrs Old, a son'), David Weston, Matthew Hunter and others. These people are in it for the love, plugging away, saying what they believe like John the Baptist without the locusts and honey (apart from Andrew). Not me. I get a pound for every word I write. I just gave Paul McCartney money for the meter.

    I often hear that teachers are constantly battered as a profession. I think the reality isn't quite the match of the charge sheet; the principal culprits, if any, are a handful of journalists trying to plug into the Zeitgeist and blowing everyone's fuses for shits and giggles, hits and headlines. At the least (and here I lay myself open to accusations of playing the dupe) was a speech aimed at the back of the stalls and the upper circles. It was the equivalent of Justin Bieber lolloping out on to the stage of Wembley and shouting 'I love London' as Twitter creams and palpitates.

    Some of the more social-collectively minded of the named elect will probably have some explaining to do at tomorrow's breakfast table ('So, WHAT do you call THIS then? Who have you been talking to on that social platform when we've been out campaigning for oppressed centaurs?'), but I have no figs to give. My house allegiances are long gone, like tears in the rain, Deckard. I've been called a bleeding heart and a bully, and it stopped meaning anything to me years ago. Faithful are the wounds of a friend, but the kisses of the enemy are deadly, goes the proverb. Worst dating advice ever.

    The story the papers are running with is, of course, Gove's thoughts on the creation of a Royal College of Teaching- which needs a blog in itself, and not the vanity of a handful of bloggers. Appropriately enough, Gove says:

    'The creation of a Royal College is not DfE policy - on the contrary, I’ve had nothing whatever to do with it - which is why it’s such a good idea. Now, I realise that any endorsement from me might blight its chances before it even gets off the ground'

    Some of the teachers he names might feel the same. Maybe it is just a ploy to sweeten the profession. If he announces tomorrow that the Tech Bacc has a 'kids up chimneys' component, I could be convinced that we were being softened up for bad news.

    I won't let this change me. Kids at school are the most effective humility bomb you'll ever encounter. I've just got over them finding out my book was called Behaviour Guru, which is like painting a target on my ass, and rightly so.

    Touch me.


    Posted by
    2

    View comments

    1. Do you think Gove actually reads blogs or does he get one of his £1000-a-day SpAds to summarise them for him? He's surely too busy using his intuition to dream up new education policies to read anything.

      ReplyDelete

    2. "I also enjoy listening to [insert cool edgy artist here] with his/her [insert seemingly knowledgeable comment here].

      "It's all because I'm truly passionate about [Insert current departmental responsibility here].

      Subtext: Let's appear to be in control of my brief until I can go for PM.

      ReplyDelete

  7. The Office of the Children's Commissioner, yesterday
    Fans of witless bureaucracy and low expectations of children were not disappointed today as the Office of the Children’s Commissioner (OCC) launched their report ‘Always someone else’s problem’. Here’s the groovy gist of what it says over 56 gripping pages:

    1. Many schools exclude children illegally
    2. Exclusions are beastly things anyway
    3. Schools that do this should be fined and prosecuted.

    I’m not kidding about that last bit. The OCC wants to get tough with naughty schools, which is deeply ironic when you think about it, which they haven’t. Now you don’t have to read it. I’ve written about the OCC before, mainly along the lines of how unlikely I would be build a commemorative shrine were it to suddenly sink into the ocean like Atlantis.

    Cards on the table: they are absolutely right that this happens. In fact, rather than their cautious estimate of 2 or 3% I would say it is far more widespread than she suggests. It isn’t the data I substantially disagree with, but their conclusions. Let me clear about something else: they absolutely shouldn’t. There is little a school does that shouldn’t be absolutely transparent, and nothing that it does that should be against the law. If a school has a policy, or the governing bodies have statutory guidelines and requirements, they should be followed.

    Ghost exclusions

    But why do schools act in this manner? Speaking as someone who actually works in a school, rather than reads about them in the papers, I can tell you. They ghost-exclude because they’re terrified of doing it properly. Because the system has been skewed for so long against excluding at all, that they’re scared- correctly- they’ll be clobbered by Ofsted.

    Inclusion has become the new orthodoxy. When I entered teaching I was mystified why so many apparently unteachable children were allowed to remain in classrooms where chaos reigned. Answer: inclusion, that contemporary, well meaning but ruinous excuse for adult responsibility. The aim was to make sure no one was marginalised. The reality was classroom after classroom ruined by a tiny minority of extreme spectrum children, whose needs exceeded the capacity of a mainstream teacher to provide. They need special provision; they got sealed in a classroom with everyone else. Everyone lost, everyone.

    We have failed generations of children in this way. You want to radically improve every school in the UK? Scorch the moronic practice of inclusion at all costs, and pay for appropriate in-school internal exclusion facilities, with trained teachers, facilities and teaching materials. You’ll see exclusions wither, I promise. And pay for external provision- PRUS, specialist schools- that can cope with small groups of extreme spectrum children. To do otherwise is as sensible as shoehorning a dozen sick and a dozen well people into a lift and hoping they all get better.

    The peril of no destination
    'Your value-added is f*cking unacceptable, Bennett.'

    The fact that there is a section in the report titled ‘Lack of a meaningful sanction’ (against schools) suggest to me that the authors are masters of parody and irony, because no one could write that sentence and fail to apprehend that the lack of a meaningful sanction is exactly what they are advocating in schools, which means that boundaries will be entirely unenforceable. Can you guess what this looks like to a teacher? Let me assist.

    It means this: when schools don’t exclude as a matter of procedure, without fear of rebuke, then children quickly realise that if they defy the class and school rules then….nothing at all will happen. Consider the classroom teacher who needs to set a short detention for, say chatting. What happens if the child doesn’t turn up? Well, the sanction tends to escalate, both in severity and up through the hierarchy. But what happens if the child doesn’t attend, or continues to tell the teacher to blow their lesson plans out their ass? It has to go somewhere. Such children (and they aren’t many, but they are a consistent minority in every school) need to be taken out of the classroom.

    But what if the child still tells the teachers, and the world, to go f**k themselves? Then the child is beyond the means of the school to manage. We literally cannot control their behaviour- only they can do this. All we can do is offer incentives and deterrents to behaviour, and hope that they amend. Greater society also has this last resort- the gaol; not to be wished for, but necessary, as inevitable and indispensable as a lavatory bowl. There has to be a terminus for repeated bad behaviour, to be used as little as possible but as often as necessary. I work with many, many teachers who are told variations of ‘we don’t take children out of classrooms.’ The people who suggest this invariably don’t have to teach them. Maggie Atkinson certainly doesn’t.

    A well run LSU/ PRU is a place where children can access one-to-one support, and trained staff. It should be a positive step to exclude, because it’s what the child and their peers need. Ah yes, the peers- only a teacher can tell you what the damage caused by reports like this looks like- exhausted teachers lashed by rude, often violent children, and classes torn apart by the selfish, desperate actions of a few. From the way the OCC writes, you’d think classes were stocked with nothing but avatars of kindness and altruism. They are not. They’re people, just like us.

    The pointless OCC (and why do children need an expensive office to look out for their interests? What the Hell do you think we’re trying to do, turn them into nuggets and drop them in a fry basket?), if it was genuinely interested in the well being of children and not merely concerned with showing how lovely they are, would say something like this:

    • Schools to provide appropriate levels of internal provision for children based on education and socialisation, not just a holding pattern over the school runway.
    • No condemnation to be attached formally to any school that excludes whenever it needs to; not from Ofsted, not from Governors, not from the anodyne OCC
    • Exclusions to be seen as either a way for children to obtain and access appropriate services, or as an admission that the pupil is beyond the capabilities of the school to manage, or the relationship has broken down too severely. Maggie Atkinson, I’ll wager, has never had to teach a child that punched her in the face, or sexually harassed her, as many teachers do.
    • Schools to be funded appropriately for taking an excluded child. Some schools specialise in these kinds of children; if you’re good at it, encourage schools to take them for positive reasons.
    • Ofsted to ask the right questions about behaviour, such as ‘Why is this child still in a mainstream classroom,’ rather than ‘Why have they been excluded?’ Again, my challenge to many inspectors is. ‘Howe would YOU deal with this pupil?’ and I’ll stake my shirt that many of them wouldn’t have a clue.
    I asked someone from the DfE what penalties exist for schools that exclude children. The answer is surprising; very little. Of course, schools lose the finance for pupils they permanently exclude. The only other penalty is the possible disapproval of the inspector, who might take a dim view of exclusion as so many of them are suckled on the dogma of yesteryear. In which case, Sir Michael Wilshaw needs to add this thread to any subsequent inspector training: inclusion not always good; exclusion not always bad.

    There are a dozen things wrong with this report, and that’s before I get past the title:

    • The authors go to great lengths to include the views of children, but the only time teachers are asked their opinion is as part of a survey where they are merely asked to report quantitatively about ghost exclusions, which is a bit like asking a pineapple what their opinion is of canning factories (Christ, someone will jump on that metaphor, I know). If you’ve ever taught any naughty (sorry, troubled) kids then you might be unsurprised that when you ask them what they did wrong, they often deny it or even- vaudeville gasp- lie about it.
    • Putting targets before real improvement. I’ve heard from teachers who were told that their exclusion rates had to plummet in the next 12 months. There are two ways of achieving this: putting structures in place that mean exclusions are needed less, or just cutting the number of children excluded, with no other effort made. Can you guess which option is easier? I’ll leave that with you.
    • My main problem is that the OCC seems most upset that paperwork hasn’t been done, rather than supporting the right of children to be safe and learn in an environment that promotes their flourishing. It’s anti-education; the administrator’s gag reflex. It ignores what children need, and focuses on what form needs to be stamped.
    There are schools doing incredible work in the area of exclusion and inclusion, largely because they have clear and rigorous behaviour policies that serve a greater aim: the well being of the community AND the individual, but not at the expense of the many, as most inclusion policies are; which is odd- isn’t the many composed of the sum of the few?

    You’ll already know most of this, if you’ve ever taught difficult classes. Unfortunately for most of us, the panjandrums of the commentariat often haven’t. The OCC wants to paint the whole world with a rainbow, and that’s a lovely ambition. It wants to teach every child to sing their heart song; I just want to teach them, to be safe, given boundaries set with compassion, not unconditional and bottomless altruism.

    I want what’s best for them, not just what they want. That’s the difference.





    http://behaviourguru.blogspot.co.uk/2012/03/what-is-childrens-commissioner-actually.html?q=atkinson
    What is the Children's Commissioner actually FOR?

    http://behaviourguru.blogspot.co.uk/2011/03/children-should-run-everything-claims.html?q=atkinson
    Little bit of satire.

    http://behaviourguru.blogspot.co.uk/2010/10/inclusion-ruining-education-since-1978.html?q=inclusion
    Inclusion, the opiate of the chattering classes

    http://behaviourguru.blogspot.co.uk/2013/02/when-everyones-special-no-one-is-how.html?q=inclusion
    When everyone's special, no one is.
    Posted by
    Labels: Inclusion children's commissioner exclusion
    7

    View comments

    1. If have a solution. Open schools dedicated to servin the kids no one else wants. The difficult pupils, the ones no one else wants, the poor, the ones who have turned to drugs, violence, the ones from broken families. Who would run such a place? Why, we have in our midst the ideal candidates. Organisations dedicated to working with the worst off, the poor and dispossesed. These organisations can open schools (I envision them being faith organisations, since they have the clearest expression of need to help the poor). Unfortunately wealthy middle class parents would be turned away from 'faith schools', because their needs is not as challenging. These middle class children would end up in bog standard schools, unable to get into the faith schools (which I understand perform highly - the perfect place for our most needy). Actually, I assume this is what is already happening.

      I'm marking controlled assessments and I'm tired.

      ReplyDelete

    2. Tom, as ever I am awed not only by your ability to hit the nail so squarely on the head, but by the fact that you have the guts to persist in telling it like it is. I've just left a school in which - to misquote Mr Spock - "the needs of the many were outweighed by the needs of the few or the one"; where so many kids were having their education ruined by the actions of a determined minority.

      I've long thought that what's termed "inclusion" is, in effect, "exclusion" for the majority.

      Keep up the good work.

      ReplyDelete

    3. I teach alongside the PRUs and other LA services that take on the excluded. We help those students - intensively, massively, tirelessly - and many turn themselves around. What's even better is that the classes they sprang from are allowed to get on and learn in peace - so for every child I see in every one of my lessons, that's about 30 others getting some education in another school too. And we may not be cheap, but wasting the teaching efforts of the many isn't either. Nor is prison, or lives dissolving in a horrible social-services-defying mess. We need to exclude when the behaviour calls for it, then we need to get going on the many things that do help turn "the troubled" into the "only averagely messed up like the rest of us".

      ReplyDelete

    4. First of all sarcasm is the lowest form of wit, and coming from a teacher as well! I have witnessed first hand the fall out from a school of excluding a 13 year old child, who by the way came from a very good background,it can be horrendous. They were ripped away from their friends, lost all confidence, had depression, and never returned to school. The school failed in many ways, and broke many guidelines along the way. The amount of lies and cover ups that followed the exclusion by the school and the LA , was something I witnessed first hand. When challenged by the parent who studied the guidelines, they illegally extended and then moved to permanent exclusion. I have come across great teachers, but I have also witnessed first hand teachers shouting in childrens faces, some talking disrespectfully to children, and others who make kids look stupid in front of their peers. Respect is a 2 way street which unfortunately is not always given to either the child or the parent. Some parents I know are very wary of fully challenging their schools about anything, in case it harms in any way their childs education. This is the reality! We know some parents and children are not perfect, but I can assure you nor are some teachers! I would also point out it is no coincidence that the majority of exclusions happen in year 9. Why, because by then the school will have a good idea whether the child is going to help them up the league tables! It is also no coincidence that the majority excluded are SEN or black children! Also once kids are excluded and put into Prus an extremely low percentage will gain 5 or more GCSEs. Finally 70% of excluded children will end up in prison, and create more problems for society.

      ReplyDelete
      Replies

      1. YOUR child, perchance?
        Exclusions peak in Year 9 because after two and a bit years, you've finally accrued anough evidence to satisfy even the most blinkered, rosy-spectacled Appeals Panel that This Is Over. When a child, who will have been given every chance, every provision, every intervention probably since Primary, has spent the last three years disrupting the education of everyone around him, it's a relief to move him out before GCSE exam classes' chances are ruined as well. Nothing to do with KS3 league tables.

        The personal qualities and behaviours that cause a child to be permanently excluded are the same in most cases as those that land them in prison. Not the fault of the PRU.

        Delete

    5. It is a rare case I would guess that pupil exclusion is due to teacher error - you are right anonymous, some teachers do behave badly, but they are the minority. Exclusion in Yr 9 mostly? Yes, it is clear that many students behaviour will affect league tables, but the schools exclude to avoid the majority having their GCSE's ruined by someone generally so behind because of their behaviour they also can't access the curriculum at that level which in turn generates further deterioration in behaviour as then they know their peers thin that they are 'naughty' and 'thick'.
      Sarcsem is also born of frustration, by hard working, sharing teachers experiencing this at the chalkface, the message Tom shares is listened to by many and undeniably true. If you facts are correct anonymous then this further fuels the need for specialist envirnments that are intrinsically liked to the SEN and black communities; support is vital and needs to directed appropriately, PRU's do amazing work and as a country we need to look at their provision closely, not highlight facts that are created from multiple other social and personal factors too numerous to mention, but relevant to the journey of an excluded student ending up without GCSE's or in prison. Schools fail at times, people fail at times, Tom is highlighting the pointlessness of the OCC and how their polciies hinder progress with really disruptive kids and allows schools to consider serious paths of deception. No school excludes easily; judge the systems, not each other.

      ReplyDelete

    6. I have recently spent a great portion of my working week, in a main stream primary school managing the behaviour of one or two children with significant needs regarding behaviour; It is exhausting!!! The learning and emotional well being of the other children (& staff) often seems to take second place. If a school tries everything before permanently excluding and can show this, why fine them?? It feels like a cover up by Gov/LA's with managed moves, do these work?? Rather than making things easier with behaviour, the reality is it is harder.

      ReplyDelete

  8. One of the most rewarding things I do outside of teaching is acting as resident Agony Uncle on the TES website's Behaviour Forum. I, and many other teachers do what teachers do best: offer free advice and perspective to those wading through a river of chains. Occasionally a correspondent raises a problem and I think, 'Christ, have we sunk so low?' Most of the problems to which I respond are fairly straightforward; but a large percentage involve teachers being placed in unnecessarily difficult situations by school management systems that seem designed to encourage poor behaviour, and in this case, give up on the kids. Here's a summary of what someone said recently:

    'I feel embarrassed posting this, as I'm an experienced teacher who would normally feel  that my behaviour management was pretty good - but I am at my wits end with a Y11 class (bottom set).

    ...Only about 5 out of 28 would do anything they were set.  They were just about polite enough that when I insisted they face the front and listen so that I could talk through brief powerpoint, explain the objective and set the work they did so without interruption.  This was hard work. 

    One pupil told me 'We are leaving school in 4 weeks - and no one cares if we do this' to which most agreed, despite me telling them strongly, 'Yeah?  Well I care!'
    Very few did anything more than a couple of sentences of half assed effort.  2 or 3 did nothing. I have this class 4 times a week.'

    So far, so normal. I get this email a dozen times a week. It's awful that this is repeated so often in classes up and down the country, but that's another issue. No, this is the bad bit: he carries on-


    'I feel really pathetic writing this - I have spoken to [the] HOD - who tells me, 'Oh no one expects them to do anything'.  SMT have told me I cannot [my emphasis] phone home, that I can issue detentions 'but they won't come' and that 'well...they are leaving soon...it's very difficult to get them to do anything'.

    As there does not appear to be any consequences for their behaviour they will quite happily just sit and chat through every lesson, but I am obviously not happy about this....I'm just highly frustrated and pissed off that no one will back me up and that the class won't do as they are told.' 

    Once I'd pulled my head out of my keyboard this was my response:

    You know, if more parents knew about this kind of attitude then there'd be an earthquake in the scandal rags. Can you believe that a school would just give up on its children like this? Sure, what they're saying makes perfect sense- but we're paid to do more than just baby sit them; we have to have high expectations from them every day up until the minute they leave. That's the job. If the school doesn't give a shizzle about these kids, it doesn't deserve to have any.

    Your strategy has to be to insist upon full school support. Follow the behaviour policy to the letter, and expect/ demand the support. Remind line management what the policy is. The surest way to fail is by not trying in the first place. Have kids removed who fail to comply. If you can't motivate them in the short term you can at least present them with an immediate inconvenience (ie hassle from senior staff/ yourself etc) to the point where they consider it easy to work than not. 

    We're paid to believe in them even when they've given up. If we give up, God help us.


    This is institutionalised thinking at its worst. The minute we cease to believe that we are responsible custodians of children's futures, and that we have the power and duty to do something about it, then we should quit the job on incapacity grounds, and let someone else look after them. Does a doctor give up on a patient because they probably won't make it? Does a fireman ignore an alarm because, well, there'll be more fires tomorrow, and you can't beat fire? This school might as well have said, 'We couldn't give a damn about these kids anymore. Damaged goods.' It's the same diabolic thinking that inspired a thousand 'Reaching for a C' programs, where schools ignored their consciences and treated one group of students (C/D borderline kids) as more important than the others (the safe bets and the no-hopers).

    When I ran restaurants I had a door hostess called Suky who wasn't the sharpest blade in the drawer. One Saturday night an angry customer grabbed her and said, 'We've been waiting for an hour for a table!' Suky replied, with perfect sympathy and sincerity, 'I know! It's mobbed isn't it?' Maybe she went into education afterwards.

    The next time a line manager tells you that nothing can be done, you might want to think about finding a department with a different line manager, possibly in a different school. We're paid just as much in April as we are in September. Our salary is the same whether we're launching year sevens into secondary or parachuting sixth formers into University. They need us every minute they live under our care. Of course for that to happen, we actually need to care, and vast number of teachers do, of course. Which is why it's so depressing to hear this kind of croaking.




    Posted by
    5

    View comments

    1. Agreed, i work with children who feel like they have been given up on. Their behaviour reflects this! Don't give up, it is at the heart of what we do. I feel so sad that this School's attitude has sunk to the bottom-we live in an aspirational society. I suspect that those children will remember that this teacher turns up every week and is refusing to give up on them; he will have got through to them even if they don't believe in their selves yet-one day they will.

      ReplyDelete

    2. not giving up has its rewards :)

      https://lh4.googleusercontent.com/-G9fRxVzokQY/UXQz27cj4RI/AAAAAAAALK8/NLM63mpt54E/s539/45251_10151478997057221_5988232_n.jpg

      ReplyDelete

    3. This is all part of the problem of what happens when the emphasis in schools is on results. We have lost our purpose when we cannot see that even in 4 weeks we can make some kind of difference, give the kids some kind of learning experience.

      ReplyDelete

    4. While I was doing my PhD I did some supply teaching. I was given one class of GCSE students and (for a change) a task: read them a story. It was for 8-10 year olds. I queried this and the HoD said that they were bottom set, were a behavioural nightmare and would be leaving shortly anyway.

      When I got into class, they were a nightmare, especially as they saw a supply teacher as fresh meat... just like me as a teenager. But once they realised I wasn't going to read them a bloody story they relaxed a bit and got talking. Turns out that they knew damn well that they'd been abandoned and they even knew that the shiny new academy wanted them out for statistical reasons. They were depressed and defeated. It was like nobody had actually talked to them properly before. They were just Problems.

      I left that day determined never to go near a school again, and utterly miserable about these kids. Too late for them, and god alone knows how many more that school, its managers and teachers managed to ruin.

      ReplyDelete

    5. I've spent the last 10 years teaching only young people (aged 11 to 70) who wouldn't go to school, got thrown out etc etc None of them like being bossed about, conned, lied to. They all look scary and sullen on day one. I'm very kind to them, endlessly polite however much they tell me to fuck off, spend a lot of time silently waiting for them to calm down, stop eating the pens, and start to feel safe. I've only met 3 I really didn't like. The rest all ended up enjoying learning and being polite to me. I've had lots of lovely letters like yours. Sadly though, my technique doesn't seem to please Ofsted or any of Gove's fans. At least I can sleep at night.

      ReplyDelete

  9. KING LEAR: Dost thou know me, fellow?

    KENT: No, sir; but you have that in your countenance which I would fain call master.
     KING LEAR: What's that?
     KENT: Authority.

    Who can you trust? I think this every time I come across a quotation on the internet. Education is my thing, so I'm not occupied by the ones that fill cat calenders and planners with rainbows. Today I read about an incredible conversation that took place between Charles Dickens and Fyodor Dostoevsky, as reported by Claire Tomalin in her biography of Dickens, except that it was entirely untrue. History, that ruined rubble of bone and boulder, is vulnerable to the pen of invention, and the dead cannot plead for themselves any more. Just as monasteries used to manufacture relics to borrow the authority of God (including, I might add, the foreskin of Christ in some cases, not once, but often, and in many places) so too do many people repeat the thoughts of great men and women in an attempt to support their claims. Unfortunately, many of them are as authentic as the Nazarene frenellum.

    You'll have seen this one:

    'Those who know how to think need no teachers.'

    Gandhi


    People love quoting this.

    You see this one a lot. Like many neat aphorisms, it has the virtue of pith, the whiff of innovation, a pinch of ancient wisdom and of course the USP of originating from Mrs Gandhi's high-achieving son. It's elegant, symmetrical and attractive, so rhetorically it benefits from an aesthetic magnetism as much as any logical appeal to verity. And, of course, it's Bapu, one of the few moral Übermenschen who successfully escaped the gravity of messy reality to become an international avatar of wisdom and compassion. If he said it, it must be true. That way we can relinquish the necessity to examine the argument.

    That's not by itself a complaint. We put our trust in authority figures all the time; we have to. If a fireman tells
    me that I should turn back because of a nearby fire, I rarely question it. When a mathematician tells me I've given him the wrong change, I'll auto-defer. It's an efficient way to conduct everyday life.

    So back to the artist formerly known as Mohandes Karamchad Gandhi. He seems to be saying that teachers are, at least sometimes, unnecessary. It seems to suggest that thinking skills are more important than merely being taught content. This is a familiar tango in education, and Gandhi seems to be throwing his loin cloth in with the skills corner, and suddenly it isn't looking good for the Facts brigade. Who have they got? David Starkey? BOOM Starkey's on the mat and begging for the bell.

    But did he actually say it?

    A quick search of Mother Internet will give you a lot of this:



    Which is to say lots of quotation websites. Or websites quoting it. I ploughed through about ten pages of this before my brain started to melt. Nobody, nobody gave a source.

    So I tried a Google Book search. Maybe it could be found in the dry pulpy scrolls of the ancients:


    This, for page after page. No references, no sources, just the quote again and again, and always used by people who unsurprisingly had an axe to grind about thinking skills. Now this doesn't mean that Gandhi didn't say it. Perhaps this says more about my own research capabilities, and if anyone can provide me with a credible reference I am perfectly happy to reverse my suspicion that Gandhi did not in fact say this. But in a way it doesn't matter if he did or didn't.

    Why? Because it proves a point: establishing the provenance of this quote isn't easy, and if I couldn't do so in an hour of searching and asking, then I suspect- and this is purely speculation- that most people quoting it couldn't either. What we have is another splendid example of cognitive bias: we perceive and promote that with which we agree or are attracted to with far less scrutiny than that with which we disagree.

    Even I'm doing it right now, picking on a crypto-quote that- and I'll be honest- I think supports a weak position. I think that 'knowing how to think' isn't an entity separate from the quality of the content that informs it. I think that thinking can't be taught; I think that thinking is the name we give to a process, rather than a talent. But in my defence I'm making that explicit, and I'm not using Gandhi to back me up.

    What this shows is that when it comes to knowledge claims, belief and passion play as much a part in most of our reasoning as any appeal to logic and rationality. When someone throws a quote out in the middle of a discussion in what appears to be an attempt to justify a point or advance an argument, I'm often tempted to say, 'So you like Winston Churchill/ MLK/ Che? Groovy. I like Tom Jones,' for all the use it provides.

    There are others you'll probably know, which have already been elegantly punctured by others, so I'll outline them only for the sake of summary:

    'Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire.'

    Yeats

    You don't have to move far on the internet before you trip over this one. It's attributed most commonly to Yeats, and sometimes Socrates. It might as well be attributed to Gile Brandreth, because neither of them said it.


    People LOVE this quote. It's like catnip, or Umpty Candy. It's manna for anyone who eschews content and believes in child-centred education (itself a weasel term- is education ever not about the child?). It is endlessley requoted and cross-quoted, and carved in marble anywhere anyone believes in the laughter and magic of children.

    See? Don't waterboard your students with useless facts. Set light to the bastards. 

    It might be true, it might not- I feel not- but one thing's for sure. It didn't come from Yeats. Plutarch said something like it, and that raises another point: mostly people requote it with no understanding of the context, or often, indeed, who Plutarch was. It borrows authority like a crown and sceptre. It becomes dogma, rather than a catalyst for understanding. It fills a pail, instead of lighting a fire, if you'll excuse me.

    For a full explanation, I beg you to look at the excellent site The Quote Investigator, where you'll find elegant post mortems of this quote and many more.

    One last one, for dessert:

    'Everybody is a Genius. But If You Judge a Fish by Its Ability to Climb a Tree, It Will Live Its Whole Life Believing that It is Stupid.'

    Albert Einstein.

    It would appear that the World's Smartest Man™  is an enemy of linear assessments, or monocular interpretations of intelligence. In fact, a quick search for 'Multiple Intelligence Theory' and this quote throws up a plethora of sites eager to link both:

     

     And you can buy this quote in a variety of classroom-friendly formats:

    There are, it would appear, and enormous number of people dedicated to protecting fish from being made to endure cruel forms of assessment, and I think we can all get behind that. But Einstein wasn't one of them. The Quote Investigator tracks it down here: the closest is from a man called Matthew Kelly (Not the beardy presenter) and decidedly not the Father of Relativity and Athena Prints. Unless of course the Quote Investigator is itself an enormous meta-hoax, and the machines won the great war of the 21st century and this is all a Matrix.

     Does it matter who says something? Yes, if you believe in telling the truth. Does a single sentence, vivisected from its context mean anything more than its explicit meaning? No. Nor does it support an argument. Quotes should probably only be used to provide a shorthand way of expressing something already being discussed, or as a signpost to an argument already understood between two debaters. This week, when the 'distinguished' Dr Jean Denis Rouillon announced that women shouldn't wear bras, and he had the science to prove it, a million women went 'That's great. How many breasts do you have again? Oh.'

     If you like Fake Quotes, or you just want to get ahead of the curve, check out this page:

     https://www.facebook.com/FamousFakeQuotes

     And the next time you see Abraham Lincoln, or Siddartha Gottama, or Jesus, or John Lennon being used to support iPads in a classroom, or chalk-and-talk, or any damn thing, think of this:




    Posted by
    Labels: gandhi quotes
    0

    Add a comment

  10. Scene: 13th Century BC Greece; the throne room of Agamemnon, King of Mycenae. The King waits alone in front of a huge enchanted mirror. Suddenly the surface of the mirror ripples with a rainbow of colour, and two men step through, both dressed strangely.

    The King: By Zeus you have returned. To what strange land did Circe's mirror take you?
    First traveller: To the 21st century, Lord Agamemnon.
    The King: And what marvels does such a future hold? Show me.
    First Traveller: It is a world of magic, majesty. (He empties a bag on the floor in front of the King) See: this black box of glass allows the owner to talk to anyone across the known world. Like the Delphi oracle it answers any question man's mind can frame, and like a mechanical homunculus labours silently to its master's tasks.
    The King: It shines like a lamp. Here, give me it. (He examines it) What's this?
    First traveller: Angry Birds, majesty.
    The King: I would know these Angry Birds.

    Three hours later

    The King: We shall return to conquer these magical swine later. What other miracles will our descendants enjoy?
    First Traveller: Every joy and comfort that philosophy can conjure, majesty. The art of the apothecary has been elevated such that many live into great ages of forty, fifty and more. It is possible to wear the same teeth throughout a man's life. Horses have given way to iron wagons, driven by trapped Djinn of fire that roar and steam as they propel men along faster than wind. Great cities stud the world as bright and as tall as Olympus. Men fly around the world inside giant falcons...
    The King: Like the Birds that are Angry?
    First Traveller: (pauses) Sort of. Sure.Wars are settled as the Gods do; by hurling great thunderbolts of fire across nations, and by all manner of Hephaestian device. It is a world of the casually miraculous.
    The King: Astonishing. Nature itself bows to the sorcery of mens' minds, centuries hence. What a future you have shown to me. And you, man: what part of our kind's destiny did you explore? What have you to tell me of our path, millenia from now?
    Second Traveller: (puts hands in pockets) Er...
    The King: Speak. Your companion has sought the marvels of men's conquest of nature. What did you explore?
    Second Traveller: Schools, sir. I spent some time speaking to their wisest augurs, and studied their greatest arts.
    The King: Ah, this is happy news! What secrets of men's minds have our descendants divined? What alchemy have the wisest of their mages discerned?
    Second Traveller: Well....
    The King: Well what?
    Second Traveller: Well it is said that children learn best when they are taught by experts, and given new information which they are then asked to recall and explain. It is also said that this should be neither too easy, nor too hard.
    The King: (not impressed)....go on.
    Second Traveller: (visibly sweating) And they also say that they should probably be tested from time to time. And shouldn't muck about.
    The King: Is that it?
    Second Traveller: Pretty much.
    The King: Hmm. That sounds exactly how my own education went. Is there nothing to match the invention of the Furious Birds of Nemesis? Be careful how you reply, or you will suffer the fate of the Boss Pig in Ham 'em High.
    Second Traveller: There's this, my liege. (Pulls out a cap)
    The King: What's this?
    Second Traveller: It is a Hat of Thinking. Placing it on a child's head gives it the wisdom of Hera.
    The King: (trying it on) My mind is no clearer.
    Second Traveller: It is because you are so wise already.
    The King: Ah yes, I knew that. What else?
    Second Traveller: (warming to a theme) It is said that children learn best, not when taught by a teacher, but by each other, in groups.
    The King: That seems somewhat counter intuitive.
    Second Traveller: You can't argue with science, majesty.
    The King: Let it be so throughout the land from now on. And let the spinning wheels of Mycenae weave a coloured hat for every child, until we rear a nation of Apollos. Anything else?
    Second Traveller: Yes- the children should be taught through the medium of drama and role-play. They should cast their books...
    The King: Nobody has books. This is the 13th century BC.
    Second Traveller:....their scrolls aside and be taught instead how they feel about carpentry, blacksmithing, war and nature.
    The King: How are they expected to...are you sure this is all legit?
    Second traveller: Their sages were quite clear on the matter.
    The King: Well...if you say so. I'll have every script and scroll pressed to feed the furnace. What more?
    Second Traveller: If it pleases sir, I have a most wonderful thing that will transport teacher and pupil alike to greatness. (pulls out a piece of paper)
    The King: A note?
    Second Traveller: A design, majesty. It is the architect's plans for the fabled Learning Bicycle of the 21st Century. I wasn't quite clear how it worked, but it seemed very popular.
    The King: Let us build a fleet then, and raise an army of....
    Second Traveller: ...of Independent, creative digital natives and discovery learning explorers.
    The King: You know, for a minute there I thought you were going to say that we had learned nothing in all those centuries. Of course, I would have to kill you for your failure.
    Second Traveller: (going pale) Yes, they have this philosophy too in the future. They call it high-stakes accountability.
    The King: Instead, you are more the hero than your companion, for his marvels have run out of power and we have no leads or wall sockets to restore the spirits inside. I will announce you as Prince of Education to the people.

    [Kingdom promptly falls]

    Note:
    King Leonidas has 300 Followers. 
    Xerxes likes this.
    Posted by
    1

    View comments

    1. Agamemnon always had a troubled relationship with prophecies: it was a dodgy weather forecast that led to ten years of war with Troy and a very angry wife when he got home.

      Great article, though.

      ReplyDelete
Loading
Send feedback