Educating Ruby

by Guy Claxton

  But what about parents? What do they think? Most of them are downright confused. How can the UK be so far down the list when we have so many world-class engineers, scientists, architects and writers? How is it that we have so many Nobel Prize winners in science and medicine? How come we have so many wonderful universities? At a local level, parents may draw comfort (or concern) from the performance of their own child’s school which seems to be better/worse than the UK’s showing in PISA. For many parents, high-stakes test results like these can contribute to a sense of unease about what their child’s school is or is not teaching.

  A few determined parents go online, look at the OECD’s website and find out more about the tests. They quickly discover that the rankings are based on the results of two-hour paper and pencil tests. Some begin to wonder how reliable such tests can possibly be as a judgement on an individual’s subject knowledge, let alone as an indicator of ‘what they can do’. Those parents who keep searching quickly discover that the OECD is itself concerned about such limitations. To counter them it introduced a new creative problem-solving test in 2012 (the UK came eleventh in this new test). The creative problem-solving test is “an assessment of student performance in creative problem solving, which measures students’ capacity to respond to non-routine situations in order to achieve their potential as constructive and reflective citizens.”12

  Sounds interesting, you may be thinking. But read on and you discover that this test is entirely computer-based. You are left with a slight niggle that, useful as computers are, screen-based performance may not always be a reliable indicator of real-world problem-solving.

  But you’ve got the OECD bit between your teeth by now and you keep searching. Surely, you think, such an important organisation as the OECD must have done some more nuanced thinking about what it is that children need to learn today? You type ‘OECD’ and ‘what children need to learn today’ into your search engine and, lo and behold, you discover some discussions about the purpose and future of education (much more interesting than those simplistic league tables) which have left you wanting to know more. You happen upon a fascinating blog by Charles Fadel on an OECD site promoting discussion about what students should learn in the 21st century. His questions really make you think:

  Should engineering become a standard part of the curriculum? Should trigonometry be replaced by more statistics? Is long division by hand necessary? What is significant and relevant in history? Should personal finance, journalism, robotics, and other new disciplines be taught to everyone – and starting in which grade? Should entrepreneurship be mandatory? Should ethics be re-valued? What is the role of the arts – and can they be used to foster creativity in all disciplines?13

  At the weekend, you find yourself having dinner with friends and conversation turns to the schools your friends’ kids go to. As it happens – for the convenience of this imaginary example – one couple sends theirs to a private school, another to the local state one and a third to the latest example of a new kind of school in England. Let’s call it a free school.

  Questions breed more questions as the wine flows. How much history do you need to learn? Are you stupid if you can’t recall the date of the Great Fire of London? Is Google dumbing us down? Is Google opening up a brave new world? Should all children be taught how to spot bias online? When do you need to know Newton’s laws of motion? Do you need to know Newton’s laws of motion at all? How is your daughter taught to do long multiplication or long division? Is it better or worse than the way you remember learning how to do it? And so on.

  Later, you go back to your internet search and find out some more about the author of that OECD blog. Charles Fadel, it turns out, is also at Harvard, where he is thinking about how we can change the way we design the curriculum of schools. You light upon a helpful paragraph of his (which seems to be reflecting our experience with the Trads):

  Conversations about education abound with false dichotomies, and absolutist views, that must be transcended.

  The lack of a balanced conversation leads to many OR debates; for instance:

  ● Knowledge OR skills.

  ● Science/Technology/Engineering/Math (STEM) OR Humanities/Arts.

  ● Didactic OR constructivist learning.

  ● Formal OR informal learning.

  ● All technology OR no technology.

  ● Character developed at school OR at home.

  The balanced reality is that these are all AND propositions, working in concert with each other, and reinforcing each other, in a judicious, impactful feedback loop.14

  These kinds of tensions, and the questions they generate, are exactly the kinds of issues we need to be grappling with. We’ll be adding some more of our own to this list as we go through the book. But it isn’t easy.

  The Sabre-Tooth Curriculum

  But before we go any further let’s deal with a question that seems to us to be one of the most important of all:

  Should we expect the curriculum to change significantly as the world out there changes, or are there some things that we just have to know and just have to be able to do whatever age we live in? (And is this really an and?)

  And related to this:

  To what extent should we teach things just in case they might be useful at some unknown time in the future, rather than at the time we need to know them in order to get something done that matters to us? (And is this an and too?)

  Let’s approach these questions via a story from the earliest beginnings of education. In 1939, an American scholar called J. Abner Peddiwell published an article about the earliest known form of education. He traced it back to the Chellean period, about half a million years ago, and specifically to an innovative individual called New-Fist-Hammer-Maker, or New-Fist for short. New-Fist thought children’s play should be directed more purposefully towards the acquisition of useful skills. These included grabbing fish from the nearby pools, clubbing the little woolly horses that grazed on the edge of the forest for their meat and leather, and using firebrands to scare off the sabre-tooth tigers that came sniffing around at night. The village agreed, and so the first curriculum was born.

  All went well with the Sabre-Tooth Curriculum until, gradually, over hundreds of years, the climate became wetter and colder. The ponds became cloudy so it was no longer possible to see the fish to grab them; they had to be caught using a net. The land became marshy, and the slow-footed woolly horses migrated east, to be replaced by much fleeter antelopes that could not be crept up on, but could only be shot with bows and arrows. Sabre-tooth tigers too moved away and instead came fierce grizzly bears that were not at all afraid of fire, but had to be trapped in camouflaged bear-pits dug on their trails.

  One of New-Fist’s descendants, Shoe-Stitcher, took stock of the situation and realised that the children’s curriculum needed to change. Instead of grabbing fish with their bare hands, they should learn net-making. Instead of horse-clubbing, they needed to learn how to make bows and arrows and shoot straight. Instead of making flaming torches, children needed to learn how to dig the right size pits, and how to disguise them with branches and leaves. But the Board of Education strongly disagreed. The minutes of the critical meeting record the chairman as explaining that these new abilities were mere technical skills, whereas the traditional curriculum developed properly educated bodies and minds. In rather patronising language, he explains:

  Don’t you understand? We don’t now teach fish-grabbing to grab fish; we teach it to develop a generalised agility which can never be developed by mere training. We don’t teach horse-clubbing to club horses; we teach it to develop a generalised strength in the learner which he could never get from so prosaic and specialised a thing as antelope-shooting. We don’t teach tiger-scaring simply to scare tigers. Oh dear me no. We teach it for the purpose of cultivating a noble courage which carries over into all the affairs of life, and which can never come from so base an activity as pit-digging.15

  But Shoe-Stitcher was not to be shut up so e
asily. “Can’t you see that times have changed?” he said in exasperation. “Why could we not develop those generalised qualities by teaching the children something really useful?” At this the chairman became even more pompous and hectoring:

  If you had any education yourself, you would know that the essence of true education is timelessness. It is something that endures through changing conditions like a solid rock standing squarely and firmly in the middle of a raging torrent. You must know that there are some eternal verities – and the Sabre-Tooth Curriculum is one of them!16

  This modern fable was actually composed by a bona fide, though mischievous, academic professor by the name of Harold Benjamin. What do you think? Are there eternal verities which you would want your children to learn? Or are there things which your children are learning which seem to you to fall into the category of ‘fish-grabbing’? If so, what are they?

  It seems to us that the Trads are often unable to say why we should not be teaching net-making, archery and bear-pit-digging (or, in our case, computer-coding, internet-mental-health-protecting and public-figure-lie-detecting). We suspect that Mods, on the other hand, would find much enjoyment, as well as food for thought, in this parable. It will chime with their doubts about whether all children today really need to learn how to add fractions, solve quadratic equations and tell a sine from a tangent or a gerund from a gerundive. There will always be a minority of children who might go on to use these skills and knowledge in their professional lives, and a slightly larger minority who will simply enjoy mastering the rules of micro-worlds such as algebra and trigonometry. But there are millions of youngsters for whom these subjects are just a pointless grind, and there are a thousand other topics one could argue for with equal justification: Sudoku, crossword puzzles and Minecraft, to name just a few.

  The belief that calculus, for example, is an essential part of the preparation for life for all young people is just that, a belief, not an established fact. There is no evidence that youngsters who are made to study trigonometry lead lives that are any more fulfilled or intelligent than those who are not. And there are lots of good free courses online (e.g. from the Khan Academy) that will get you quickly up to speed if and when you need it. (If you are not a teacher, when was the last time you needed, in your real life, to solve a quadratic equation? Or recall, without recourse to your iPad, the capital city of Mongolia? Or explain the difference between a terminal and a medial moraine, or a breve and a minim?) The question of what is really worth knowing, in the Google age, is wide open, and one we will return to in Chapter 4.

  School and real-world learning

  If school is meant to offer young people a powerful preparation for a successful life (and not just for university), why isn’t it more like real life? The way learning is organised in schools seems, in many respects, very different from, or even at odds with, the experience of learning that people have in their homes, workplaces, playgroups, sports and athletic clubs, online chatrooms and meditation retreats or when watching gardening or cookery programmes on television.

  One of the classes that I teach are Year 11, the very bottom class, not doing GCSEs because it’s thought that they’re not capable of it. Instead they’re doing a BTEC qualification in science. Teaching them essentially becomes an exercise in getting them copying stuff off the board, out of textbooks, off the internet. Absolutely no learning is going on at all. Their understanding is no greater than before. It is entirely an exercise in filling in loads of paperwork to get them a qualification. These are kids who are mostly very vulnerable, they have really complicated special educational needs. Pushing them through the system to get this totally irrelevant qualification, that’s got nothing to do with their lives, is a complete waste of their time and a complete waste of my time. It’s completely insane, and doesn’t help anyone. There are so many more important things that we could be doing to prepare those kids for the world.

  Kate, trainee science teacher, West London

  Nearly 30 years ago, Professor Lauren Resnick, then president of the American Educational Research Association, gave a presidential address which was entitled, ‘Learning in school and out’.17 She pinpointed, on the basis of a wide variety of research, some key ways in which learning in school frequently differed from learning in these out-of-school situations. First, real-world learning is often collaborative whereas learning in school has traditionally been predominantly solo. Even where schools do lots of group-work, come exam time everyone has to revert to individual pieces of work for which they alone can be held responsible. Educationalists are beginning to devise ways of assessing collaborative endeavours, but they are in their infancy as yet.

  Second, assessment in school is usually based on the ability to explain, describe, analyse or compute something. It is based on products that mostly involve manipulating symbols on paper or screen. In real-world learning the hallmark of success is usually practical: did the baby get to sleep? Did the bridge stay steady when people walked across it? Did the painting get accepted for the show? Do people come back to the restaurant? In a music exam or a driving test, you may have to do a bit of theory, but the acid test is visible in the way you actually do something. Real-world learning is about getting things done; in school it is about generating ‘performances of understanding’ for the sake of showing that you can. People who are good at doing, but not very good at explaining, are massively handicapped in school by this difference.

  Third, in the real world we learn because we want or need to – in order to achieve a goal that we ourselves consider worthwhile. Learning connects directly with the work or life situations in which we find ourselves. In school, by contrast, you are required to take on trust the idea that, someday, all this will make sense and turn out to be really useful – but not yet. And the timetable of what you are learning is dictated by someone else. The reason you are learning this now is because it is the next lesson in the teacher’s scheme of work, not because you and your friends have stumbled on an interesting question that you feel motivated to pursue, or because your iPad suddenly won’t connect to iTunes. So the motivation is quite different in school and out. And not all youngsters are willing or able to mobilise their full intelligence if they do not value what they are being asked to do. Many of them are mistakenly judged to be ‘less intelligent’ because of this.

  Fourth, learning in the real world is very often accomplished with a whole array of tools and resources that are marshalled and drawn upon as necessary. In the real world we are mostly ‘me plus’: me plus my computer, me plus my iPhone, me plus all my notes and books, me plus all my contacts, me plus my mug of coffee. A plumber is completely hamstrung without her socket set and her mobile phone. When she meets an unfamiliar boiler and needs to call her contact in the parts department of the manufacturer, nobody would dream of calling that cheating. School traditionally tries to strip down learning so that it becomes the manipulation of words, numbers, chemical symbols or algebraic equations by a solitary mind.

  Sugata Mitra, one of the most interesting and renowned educational thinkers in the world right now, has said that he could transform education with a single change: simply allow everyone to take their smartphone or their Wi-Fi-enabled tablet into the examination hall. Why create this artificial barrier? It’s like taking Ronnie O’Sullivan’s snooker cue away and saying, “Now show me how good you are.” (There’s more about Mitra in Chapters 4 and 7.)

  Fifth, real-world learning is often physical. It involves the body in a variety of ways. Cooking, hairdressing, caring for young children or old people, wiring an electric circuit and playing netball all involve bodily activities such as bending, kneading, touching, listening and smelling, as well as taking care of your implements and materials. In school, subjects assume importance in inverse proportion to the amount of bodily activity they involve. If you can stay clean and still while you are learning, that is good, so maths and English come out at the top of the pecking order. Traditionalists can’t wait to introduce s
tudents to the pristine abstract worlds of subjunctive clauses and Pythagoras’ theorem. History and geography are a bit messier. Art and music are pulled down the hierarchy by their essentially sensory natures. Media and business studies are tainted by association with the real worlds of television and commerce.

  And down the bottom of the pecking order come dance, drama, design technology and PE. Cookery, dressmaking, woodwork and metalwork are so shamefully reminiscent of old-fashioned trades and crafts that they cannot be spoken of directly; they now inhabit a shadow world of food technology and resistant materials. Instead of learning how to bake Mary Berry’s amazing tiramisu cake, you study ‘nutritional properties’ and ‘packaging and labelling’, the curriculum being designed to drag students back from the ghastly brink of real physicality into the safe, clean – and, it has to said, often cheap – world of categories and issues. Youngsters who are best at thinking while they are doing tend to drift down this hierarchy of esteem, not because they are less able but because they find it difficult to master the peculiar trick of detaching cognition from action. It may be a worthwhile trick to master, but, because of the simplistic ‘folk psychology’ that underpins much of education, students are not helped to do so.

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