Teachers

27 Aug 2015

Private Schools, Parents and Progressives: Why the Judgement?

Teachwell Progressive Education, Teaching and Learning, Traditional Education Child-Centred, Children, Discipline, Methods, Primary School, Secondary School, Teachers, Theory 3

School Swap on ITV got me thinking again about two Secret Teacher articles in the Guardian that I read over the summer, both of which were critical of parents of privately educated children. See here and here.

Later in the summer, I saw this in my twitter feed from the US which refutes similar articles over the pond.

What’s with this concern about privately educated children? Also, don’t these arguments seem very familiar?

Personally I am have mixed feelings about private schools.

In theory I should be against them as I think there should be a level playing field for all.

On the other hand, my mother stated she would have happily sent us to one, if they had had the money!

My cousins in India have attended private schools. Admittedly the system is different there and it is the norm to pay for the education you can afford.

Back over here, the other half went to private school in Ireland.

In the end, cultural capital will be there regardless for privately educated children, as it is in the state system for the middle classes. Tinkering with structures alone is not going to change this state of affairs.

The criticisms are as follows:

Privately educated children have too much pressure on them.
They are not enjoying their childhood due to all the stress.
They do too many after school activities.
Parents of privately educated children push them too much.
The children are assumed to be unhappy.

What is the solution? Funny you should ask that because it would appear to be the progressive favourites including:

children should not do extra activities but enjoy their childhood,
they should be doing things that ‘normal’ children do,
they should not try to excel at their age (whatever the age maybe).

I’m sorry but I am smelling a rat here – poor parenting needs to be counteracted by progressive education. I have heard these arguments before – it’s why poor children need progressive education as well.

So what’s my beef?

Firstly, if the two who wrote the articles had such moral problems with the set up (tutoring and teaching at a private school) then why take the employment? Bitching about one’s boss is all very well but doing it by implying they are bad parents is deplorable even though they have been concerned but the child does not agree.

Secondly, it is Secret Teacher and I am wondering to what extend these posts have been exaggerated for effect.Casually equating sending children to after school activities as a denying them a childhood is based on a whole series of assumptions, including there is one type of childhood that all children should have and we can measure against this.

Thirdly, some children struggle with exams and it causes them stress but it is always dismissed that some don’t at all and some positively relish them. All children are different. So what is the extent of the problem? Too often articles bandy around figures but, for example when Child line’s latest figures are examined more closely, the percentages are miniscule. I will go through the figures in my next blog (so as not to take up space here). This is typically sensationalist use of percentages and figures to obscure the real extent of the problem so that those who are ideologically committed to oppose tests have a basis to do so. This opposition to testing is another way of getting at those schools that do well in tests and dismissing the type of education that is received (much of it traditional). See what has happened there?

Last but not least, it is the adults here who seem to have a real issue. In the first article the tutor admitted to the fact that the child was happy, except on one occasion before an exam – has none of us ever had a wobble before doing something we were ok with in the end? In fact the child’s happiness seemed an affront to this tutor’s idea of what a childhood should be in the first place. The second teacher was even more worrying with her refrain that as a result of her feeling the pressure, the children must also feel it. Surely someone needs to point out that ones feelings are not the same as others…this is typical of an immature adult who conflates their emotions with their children (or in this case pupils).

Maybe just maybe these children instead of fixating on staying put as a 3-year-old have actually matured year on year and are… well living their lives in an age-appropriate way… Like many of us, they have been allowed to develop from children to young adults to adults (a biologically pre-determined set of events that all teachers should surely know about and accept as fact) and along the way they are coping with different pressures and stresses.

I am sure for some the stress is too much and we should certainly be watching out for it and helping when needed. However, we need to shift our attention away from keeping children as children. Part of childhood is growing and developing, physically, psychologically, emotionally, morally, spiritually, culturally and socially. To keep children in an infantile state for the gratification of adults is a gross abuse of our responsibility towards the younger generation.

If we don’t want to grow up fine, if we struggled with exams and pressure – then by all means find solutions for those who do. However, if you can’t keep envy, need for control and a lack of maturity at bay then maybe taking such responsible positions isn’t for you. It isn’t private school’s that should change, it is probably you.

As for private school parents – if you are per chance reading this – ignore the progressives – they just don’t like anyone succeeding for whatever reason it seems.

3 Aug 2015

Mitra Myths – Slum children with No English?

Teachwell Teaching and Learning Child-Centred, Children, Discipline, Early Years, Methods, Parents, Philosophy, Primary School, Teachers, Teaching Assistants, Theory 4

Sugata Mitra was much discussed by the Twitterati yesterday.The Guardian article is here.The TES article earlier this week is here. Tom Bennett’s critique is here.

For some it was the confirmation they needed that self-directed learning is real and superior. For others he is a charlatan whose research is deeply flawed and does not stand up to scrutiny.

One of the most interesting aspects of the Guardian article was that it did interview one of the children who took part in the original Hole in the Wall experiment. He is now a Yale PhD student – amazing success for a project you’d think.

Arun Chavan’s testimony is interesting (all the more so as it was ignored by those enthusing about children teaching themselves). The following is what he had to say about his experience.

Later, I get hold of Chavan to ask him about the impact of the hole-in-the-wall project on his educational achievement, and there’s a pause while he thinks about how to answer. “I’ve been asked this before and I’m always really uncomfortable with the idea of this as a hole-in-the-wall to Yale kind of story,” he says. “I feel like some of the most important influences I had were the people I had the opportunity to meet. It opened up my mind to a lot of things.”

It’s not a magic bullet, then? “No, technology is not a magic bullet. I wouldn’t be the only person saying it. But then, when it comes to something as complex as education, nothing is magic.”

From the horses mouth.

I then came across a TEDBlog interview with Chavan here. Here’s the crux of the matter. Mitra never looked into the backgrounds of these children or investigated them in any way. But he has categorically stated that the children were from the slums. Chavan’s testimony in that article does not seem to suggest this was really the case. Look at his answer to the following Q & A in the TEDBlog interview.

What were your first thoughts when the street-side computer appeared in your community?

I was a kid then, studying in the sixth grade. I had never handled a computer before. I thought it was great to have those computers lying around to play with. I don’t remember being afraid to use them. I think we figured out soon enough that restarting the computer fixes almost every problem!

The hole in the wall computers had been placed near slums not in them. Chavan may have been poor but that doesn’t mean he didn’t attend school. Chavan goes on to state that his father wrote and directed plays.

I really doubt even in India that a playwright lives in slums and well they write plays so are literate… which I am guessing would have benefitted his child.

Thing is, in India, as in many places, people with different levels of income may still live cheek by jowl. Just because you put the computer in an area where there are slums nearby does not mean only those particular children would have accessed them.

Chavan’s testimony in both articles does state that he feels he learnt to use the computer from scratch – fair enough. But these were not the illiterate slum children that Mitra makes them out to be. Here’s another one of Chavan’s answers in the TEDBlog:

Are you still in contact with the kids you studied with using the “Hole in the Wall” computer?

Unfortunately, I am not in contact with many of my friends from that time. Some of us went to different cities to attend college after high school. Most of those who stayed back attended vocational training programs and are working now.

Education in India is not a free affair – many costs have to be paid even for state schools. It is not even in the same league as the UK in terms of children from lower SES having the same opportunities as their peers. While Mitra emphasises the areas where children from slums could use the computers they were placed in villages. Villages in India do not contain a poverty ridden population anymore than they do in England.

Does this mean none of the children who took part were from the slums. No of course I imagine some were but the idea that it was poor illiterate slum children learning to surf the internet from scratch is far from the truth in at least some of the cases. The children were in school and had been in primary too.

Children did learn how to use a computer. Indeed Chavan states in the TEDBlog interview that this is what he takes away from it all but it is just this. It did not have a wider impact on his learning.

In the Guardian article Mitra states how he wanted to innovate further still in light of the hole in the wall project so:

“I set myself an impossible target: can Tamil-speaking 12-year-old children in a south Indian village teach themselves biotechnology in English on their own?”

He has gone into more detail in a different Guardian article here. Impressively they did. Another victory for self learning by children using the internet!! They even learnt it in a language they did not know and obviously taught themselves English through the internet (at least that is the impression that is given).

Slight problem here – the children were in a village not a slum and were not tested prior to using this technology. There is more than just a small chance they would have been attending school.

The best bit? They may have been Tamil speakers but what Mitra has conveniently omitted is that India has a three language policy.

It has done since it became independent, as a compromise solution to the need for a national language, as well as preserving local languages. Not everyone was happy about having to learn Hindi as many had learnt English as their second language up to that point. So the three languages policy was born – all children who attend school learn Hindi, English and their local language.

One of the areas that had wanted English was… drum rolls please… Tamil Nadur. So it seems that for quite a long time now people in that part of the India have been learning English at school, as their second language. Good chance their parents, grandparents, etc have too. They may even have grown up with books in different languages.

It is still impressive if they learnt and understood the basics of biotechnology but please let us not pretend that they taught themselves English as part of this process.

There are many reasons to doubt Mitra’s research, this is just the tip of the iceberg. To say that it should be adopted in classrooms is a throwback to the 1970s.

If there is one thing that does need to change in our education system – it is the attitude that any idea that a teacher likes can and should be implemented in the classroom because they are the teacher and a ‘professional’. Being professional is a state of mind not a quality that one possesses regardless of ones actions.

8 Jul 2015

Trot or Tory – Brothers Under the Skin?

Teachwell Progressive Education, Social Class, Teaching and Learning, Traditional Education Child-Centred, Children, Conservative Party, Discipline, Education Policy, Labour Party, Local Authorities, Methods, Ofsted, Philosophy, Primary School, Secondary School, Teachers, Theory, Unions, University 1

“There’s another thing I know. Whether a man comes from a mining family or a statement home, whether he’s a Colonel Blimp or a wild-eyed revolutionary, whether he believes in the cane and church twice on Sundays or blood on the barricades, whether he worships the working classes or thinks they stink, he is middle-class to the marrow of his bones when he says to them: “You do not know what’s best for you. Do as I say because I say so.” Trot or Tory, they are brothers under the skin.”

Jill Tweedie (The Guardian, Monday 27 October 1975)

I have over the last six months had a fortunate experience of working alongside (incredibly unexpectedly) one of my former teachers. I have run interventions for children in her class as well as two others in the same year group. Last week, while teaching a numeracy intervention, I asked children to hold up their cards in a way that meant that none of the others would see it. There were the usual children holding them up instead of in front of their chest as asked, being told off and then them countering the claim with an ‘I can’t help it’ excuse.

I reasoned and then when it still happened, I went old style and lectured them on being selfish and individualistic when what was needed was a group approach so I could do my best to understand what they knew to teach them better. However, this time, the lecture included an introduction to the reason they have a school in the first place, a very short explanation of what the system was like pre-1948 and how Lord Beveridge had created the plans for a better funded and expanded education service for all children.

The children listened and then found a newly discovered ability to hold the cards to their chest instead of waving them around and then something very unexpected happened.

One the boys just stopped me and said that he felt really sad. He is normally such a lively, jovial, over excited boy and loved the activity we were doing so I knew he wasn’t just being disruptive. He then went on to explain that it was the thought of all the children who did not get to go to school or learn as much as him that was upsetting him. I hadn’t thought it would hit him this way so I just did my best to reassure him that the past couldn’t be changed but that he could make sure that he took full advantage of the opportunities he had been given. `He seemed to accept the explanation but I realise that something had changed for him that day.

Then yesterday, I went to my old teacher’s class and found myself doing exactly what that boy had done the previous week. I stopped her because I was upset and because I wanted her to help me make sense of it. The thing that I wanted her help to make sense of was a fact that I had read in Peal’s book Progressively Worse (Peal, R, Progressively Worse, Civitas, London, 2014).

In the section Reading Wars Round 2 from the chapter Reform 1979 – 1986, he mentions an NFER report based on self-reported reading age attainment in the 26 councils, which found that in 19 of them, literacy levels had declined between 1981 and 1990 and that the reading age had declined on average by four months. It also revealed that the crazy idea that reading could not be taught was being taught without critical analysis by ITT.

So why was I upset? Because of the dates – that is the time that I went to primary school, one of the ones that used the reading schemes that were ‘boring’, you know the ones that are meant to have put children off reading and so needed to be scorned at and thrown away. A bit of onset and rime and some letter-sound correspondence – the old fashioned way of learning to read which was no panacea but still worked for most children.

So I felt it, the same dawning and realisation that the boy had felt at my words, that there were children who had not learnt to read as well as me. Those who, like me, had no learning difficulties had been held back by the approach to reading and whose teachers had done nothing about it. These teachers who learnt to read using reading schemes, and could see their children struggling to learn with their methods had not reflected and been critical of their practice and tried to change it. They carried on. They carried on because progressive ideologues told them too. They did it because apparently it was less boring than the way they had been taught. They did it because it should work.

Even when the report came out, its findings were dismissed. This was only the councils that conducted the NFER test, many of those that didn’t would undoubtedly have been even more progressive (not wanting to test) and the decline would have been greater. I need to get my hands on the report and see if there was any further breakdown regarding social class. Peal does not mention it so I take it there wasn’t but it doesn’t take a great stretch of the imagination to work out that the decline was an average and those affected by the greatest decline would have been poor and or working class children.

It made me cry and anyone who knows me knows that I do not cry easily. But they were just tears of sadness, that children, who like me, went to school and trusted their teachers were not taught to read properly due to the ideology of their teachers. Their teachers, instead of simply changing their method, resisted and chose to blame the background of their pupils instead. The LEAs and Trade Unions supported this stance from those teachers instead of challenging it based on the outcomes it was leading for children and the cause of social equality. The fact that the education department of the university I attended, was, in fact, well-known for peddling the very ideology and methods that held back those just like me, seems too awful to be true and yet it is.

So I went to my old teacher and expressed what I was feeling and was overwhelming me and how I just couldn’t reconcile myself with what had and is happening. I explained some of my experiences as a teacher and how as an adult the reality has dawned on me bit by bit and slowly over time that my experience of education, which like everyone else, I thought was the norm in state schools was nothing but. In fact, it seems to have been positively unique.

I was taught the 3 R’s very well and did as well as I could, I never experienced any barriers because of my background, gender, race, social class, I did just waltz my way through the education system and out the other end. With the exception of about two teachers, I only had positive experiences of being taught, pushed to do my best and experiencing varying levels of success in different subjects but coming out of secondary school with nothing less than a C even in the subjects I did not consider myself to have the greatest aptitude in.

Joining the profession as a primary school teacher. I realised that there was a real lack of diversity in education. Teaching in Brixton, I finally understood the true meaning of institutional racism and why my ethnic minority colleagues had developed a deep distrust of the white teachers that had taught them, who had grown up not seeing them as teachers as I had but racists who held deep prejudices against them. I would like to point out that the majority of my teachers were white, middle class and were without fail cut from the traditionalist cloth. It was their sense of right and wrong that caused them to give me opportunities because, like many people, they revised their prejudices in the light of real humans in front of them. They could have stood in my way but whatever their upbringing had taught them they put it to one side and made sure I did as well as I could. This is real anti-racism not the empty words from those who say what they think is acceptable.

So now, after ten years of teaching I have learnt that children my age literally grew up with a lower reading age, less ability to read, lower literacy skills because of this and the institutions that should have guarded against this or checked were too busy damning teachers and schools that took a more traditional approach, even when, and possibly because, they were successful.

So what did my old teacher tell me? She said that knowing involved both loss and gain and gave the example of learning to use an apostrophe. You gained the ability to use it but lost the ability to look at words in the same way as when you didn’t know. It was better to know as knowledge is always better than ignorance. The knowledge has left me feeling angry on behalf of my peers who were not given the same chances as me, wondering whether I really did deserve my university place or whether it really should have gone to someone brighter than me who never got the chance, how in different circumstances in this same education system in the same country I would have been taught in a way that would have led to my failure, not success. That this failure would have been blamed on my parents’ income, my ethnic background, my gender, basically anything that let those teachers continue to teach using their methods but not accept responsibility for their failure.

This morning I realised that the source of this unhappiness went deeper than the loss of my peers and their right to the same education and opportunities that I had. It was the loss of what earlier generations had tried to do – those who had learnt to read and write and had proven that children with my social class and ethnicity were just as capable as their white and or middle-class peers and deserved the same shot at an education.

Those who ventured first into further education and university and paved the way for others. The reformers who pushed and pushed so that an academic education could be made available to all. Who argued that it was our common right to inherit the knowledge passed from previous generations and, without the ability to read, we would not have access to.

It is all the people I know I have to thank for the opportunities I have had. But to know they were being given to me while being denied to others is a bitter pill to swallow.

Lesson learnt? Progressives who have been unmoved by their repeated failures, and who have turned the education system for those from challenging socio-economic backgrounds into little more than créches, are not going to change their ideas or opinions due to reason. Their deeply held prejudices infect the very fabric of the education system in this country. Their neediness would continue to lead to children ending up in nurture groups for their gratification and they will fail to follow up to see what the consequences of such interventions are. They will continue to create barriers for those who disagree and subvert reforms that would make this system more equal. As one well-known progressive confidently wrote in her blog recently, those who wish to change the methods of teachers were not going to manage it. Indeed, she is right, the progressive do indeed know how to dig their heels in and insist on their way, prevent real reform and change the circumstances for the poorest.

I do not wish to leave this blog on such a pessimistic note so here’s one thing I did learn from my experience of education. Collectively, the single greatest thing my teachers did for me was level the playing field. They did it in the only place it can be done and where it can’t be easily undone – that is in my head. So let me finish the book and figure out now what role I need to play to move things forward because if you have been given the opportunities that others have been denied, then it is surely your duty to find a way to give those opportunities to others in some way, however small.