by Guy Claxton
Why are schools designed in this dysfunctional way? Because when they were being developed in the 18th and 19th centuries, they were built on a false view of the human mind. They aimed to develop a general-purpose, all-round educated person by making school a place separate from life where there were no specific goals to which learning could become attached. This meant knowledge and skills would be represented in children’s heads in a generic, free-floating way, waiting to be ‘hooked’ by any relevant need or circumstance that subsequently came along. School learning was made to be ‘off the job’, so to speak, so that what was learned would be retrievable under all appropriate circumstances.
But sadly the mind doesn’t work like that. Every experience we have is indexed in the neural memory store in terms of the context in which, and the purpose for which, it was learned. What was going on? Where was I? How was I feeling? What was I up to? Did it work well? Everything we learn is automatically tagged in terms of these markers. We need these tags to tell us when to retrieve something we know and activate it. So there is no off the job; wherever we are, we are noticing our surroundings and our own priorities, and what we learn is registered and recorded in that context. School is definitely not off the job. It is not an absence of those cues and concerns; it is a very particular, and in many ways peculiar, constellation of cues and concerns. The miracle is that some of what we learn in school does stay with us and comes to mind when it is needed in the outside world. Sadly a huge amount of school learning does not.
This doesn’t mean that we can’t help learning to become gradually more generic or disembedded. We can. The point is that the broader relevance and utility of what you are learning has to be discovered. Transfer is also a learning job, and it is one often neglected by traditional teachers, carrying a naive theory of mind, who vaguely assume that if you have learned something ‘properly’, if you were ‘paying attention’, then transfer ought, magically, to happen. It doesn’t. If you want your students to develop those more general-purpose learning skills and attitudes you have to work at it by, for example, varying the contexts and the tasks, and explicitly getting them to discover for themselves which of the habits and procedures they are developing apply when.
If your child is struggling at school it may well be because of the peculiar nature of school itself, not because they are ‘low ability’ or ‘unmotivated’. These labels simply conceal all the deeper questions that need to be addressed. We hope that this discussion might help you to shift the conversations you are having with teachers on to a more productive plane.
When I was in Year 8, I sat next to a very quiet student in my English class. One day I caught sight of her cutting her wrists with the point of her compass. It was in plain view during our lesson …
Several people missed terms at a time for feeling depressed, and some were admitted at eating disorder clinics. I myself had an eating disorder between 13 and 17. Norms are powerful at school, and it just so happened that one of the norms at my school was to have a thigh the same size as your calf. I never told my school, and my school never suspected anything – it was the norm so I was no anomaly. I think I felt out of control and anxious about being valued. Maybe this was a symptom of the systematic disempowerment of young people at school, although there were definitely other factors aside from school.
The academic pressure is ridiculous. I was once told by my statistics teacher that I was spreading myself ‘too thin’ and that if I wanted to carry on with maths the next year, I needed to stop doing so many extra-curricular activities. This was despite me scoring 94% average. People have totally lost sight of what learning is about in the first place!
Natasha, undergraduate, previously at an
independent secondary school
1 N. M. Gwynne, Gwynne’s Latin: The Ultimate Introduction to Latin Including the Latin in Everyday English (London: Ebury Press, 2014).
2 Edward Thorndike was the first to discover the lack of transfer effect and a quick Google will show you many more contemporary studies in a similar vein.
3 David Perkins, Post-primary education has little impact on informal reasoning, Journal of Educational Psychology 77(5) (1985): 562–571.
4 Linda Gottfredson, Mainstream science on intelligence, Wall Street Journal (13 December 1994).
5 Kristen Buras, Questioning core assumptions: a critical reading of and response to E. D. Hirsch’s The Schools We Need and Why We Don’t Have Them (essay review), Harvard Educational Review 69(1) (1999): 67–93.
6 See Amy Finn, Matthew Kraft, Martin West et al., Cognitive skills, student achievement tests, and schools, Psychological Science 25(3) (2014): 736–744.
7 John Watts, The changing role of the classroom teacher. In Clive Harber, Roland Meighan and Brian Roberts (eds), Alternative Educational Futures (London: Holt Education, 1984).
8 There are many books you could read here, but perhaps the most accessible is Carol Dweck’s Mindset: The New Psychology of Success (New York: Random House, 2006).
9 See Po Bronson, How not to talk to your kids: the inverse power of praise, New York magazine (3 August 2007). Available at: http://nymag.com/news/features/27840/.
10 If you still need to be convinced, try reading David Perkins, Outsmarting IQ: The Emerging Science of Learnable Intelligence (New York: Free Press, 1995); Keith Stanovich, What Intelligence Tests Miss: The Psychology of Rational Thought (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009); or Robert Sternberg, Beyond IQ: A Triarchic Theory of Human Intelligence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984). They are all very accessible.
11 See http://www.oecd.org/pisa/keyfindings/pisa-2012-results.htm.
12 See OECD, PISA 2012 Results: Creative Problem Solving: Students’ Skills in Tackling Real-Life Problems (Volume V). Available at: http://www.oecd.org/pisa/keyfindings/pisa-2012-results-volume-v.htm.
13 Charles Fadel, What should students learn in the 21st century?, Education Today (18 May 2012). Available at: http://oecdeducationtoday.blogspot.co.uk/2012/05/what-should-students-learn-in-21st.html.
14 See http://www.thefivethings.org/charles-fadel/.
15 J. Abner Peddiwell (Harold Benjamin), The Sabre-Tooth Curriculum (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1939). We have adapted and abridged the original to save space.
16 Peddiwell, The Sabre-Tooth Curriculum.
17 Lauren Resnick, The 1987 presidential address: learning in school and out, Educational Researcher 16(9) (1987): 13–20.
Chapter 3
Competence and character
Intelligence plus character – that is the goal of true education.
Martin Luther King
We’d like you to try another thought experiment. It’s in two parts. In the first part you will finally meet the Ruby who gave this book its title. Imagine you are the head of a secondary school and you are walking down the street when you are stopped by an ex-student who left about two years ago. Ruby says she just wants to thank you for the great education she got at your school. You remember Ruby well, so you recall that she left at 16 with two rather poor GCSEs (a D in drama and an E in English). So you scratch around for a response. (You can tell she is being sincere.) You say, “Ah yes, I remember you had a big part in the really successful performance of The Crucible, didn’t you? And I know you made some great friendships.” “True,” says Ruby, “but that’s not what I’m talking about. I’m talking about the quality of the education you gave me. It was wonderful. Really.” And now you are rather flummoxed, and you say, “Sorry, Ruby, I don’t understand what you mean.”
The question is: what does Ruby say? How can Ruby honestly feel that those years were well spent, when she was a ‘loser’ at the examination game? You might like to discuss this with someone before you read on. (You might like to be reading this book with someone else – your partner, your child, your mother – so you can discuss and argue along the way.)
Here is the kind of thing that we think Ruby might say. We’ve neatened up her words so this is partly our voice, as well as Ruby
’s. But see if you think this is plausible.
You helped me develop my self-confidence. By that I mean you treated me in ways that helped me build my self-respect. You taught me that, even though I wasn’t an egg-head, I wasn’t stupid. By the way your teachers responded to me, you gave me faith that what I thought was worth thinking. You helped me to become optimistic and positive in my outlook on life. You gave me the feeling that there were many worthwhile things I could achieve and become, if I put my mind to it, even though they were not academic things. All of the teachers in your school believed in us, and so helped us to believe in ourselves. And you made me discover that, if I put in the effort, it often paid off. By pushing me and not giving up on me, you helped me learn to be a can-do sort of person.
You helped me become curious. When I asked questions your teachers didn’t make me feel stupid or tell me ‘I should have been listening’. If my questions were a bit wacky you explained why in a respectful way. You made me feel that the questions I asked were worth asking, even though there wasn’t always time in class to go into them. You encouraged us all to try new things, and made it so nobody ever laughed at anyone for having a go, even if they weren’t very good to start with. I learned that everyone makes mistakes: it doesn’t mean you are no good, it means you are learning. So I’m always up for a challenge now, and I’m exploring all kinds of things I would never have dreamed of – especially through books. You really helped me to see reading as a pleasure, not a drudgery. And you encouraged us to question what we were being told (or what we read, especially on the net). We could always say, “Hang on a minute, Miss, how do we know that’s true?” And your teachers would say, “Fair point, Ruby – how could we check?” So now I’m quite bold about challenging things I read or am being told (but in the respectful way you modelled for us).
You helped us all become collaborative kinds of people. Sometimes you called it ‘conviviality’, and talked of the friendship and comradeship that learning so often requires. Your teachers showed us how to discuss and disagree respectfully, so we naturally treated each other like that. I’m now not afraid to ask for help, or to offer it when I think someone needs it. You taught us never to laugh at anyone just because they didn’t know something. I learned to be more open and friendly to new people and to want to help them fit in and feel at home. We were a very non-cliquey school. I learned to be a good team player, and to know when to button my lip (that took some learning, but it was worth it). I think I’m more generous-spirited than I was. And I’m definitely a better friend: you helped us understand why it is so important, for our own sake, to be trustworthy and honest in our dealings with people – and to admit when we had screwed up or apologise when we said something out of order.
You definitely helped me become a better communicator. Because I learned to enjoy reading, I think I have a better understanding of people and a richer vocabulary – especially for talking about emotional or intimate kinds of things. I like looking up new words and trying them out. I love how we can be really into what Liam called ‘the craic’ one minute, just joshing and having fun, and then we can switch to being serious and soft if someone is troubled about something. We talked a lot in class, and your teachers helped us to recognise the different kinds of talk we could have, and how to be appropriate. And I learned that sometimes I need to be quiet and by myself too, and that doesn’t mean I’m shy or upset. I’ve learned that sometimes I need to stop and think before I speak – but not always. And I’m happy to talk to anyone – teachers, strangers, my friends’ grandparents … even the Queen if she came by! It’s part of being confident, I suppose, and not being on edge that what I say might be stupid.
You helped me discover my own creativity. Your teachers often set us puzzles and asked us for our ideas, so we got used to thinking aloud and building on what other people had said. We learned not to dismiss things that sounded daft too quickly, because they could often lead to interesting and novel ideas. Your teachers often set us great projects that really stretched us to achieve more than we thought we could. And there were plenty of opportunities (though not always in lessons) for us to pursue our own interests and experiments, and to learn to think for ourselves and come up with our own proposals. You gave us opportunities to be funny and zany, and you also made us think about our own education and come up with suggestions for improvement that you took seriously. Some teachers even taught us how to do wacky things like learn to toggle between being clear and logical and then going dreamy and imaginative – how to control our own minds better to get the most out of them.
You helped us all discover the value of being committed to what we do. Through being given the chance to learn independently, you helped me learn to take responsibility, to sort things out for myself and to stick with hard things and not wait to be rescued. (I remember one assembly where you talked about Ricky Gervais discovering what he called ‘the joy of the struggle’: I’ve never forgotten that.) Teachers used to go on a bit about ‘resilience’, but I think I have really learned how to be patient and persistent, and to know when to push myself and when it is smart to take a break and cool off. I’m not afraid of hard work, and you showed me that worthwhile things usually don’t come easily, so when I do go to university (I will, you know) I will be ready for the self-discipline and slog I will need to put in.
And you also taught me the pleasures of craftsmanship. I used to be a bit slapdash, but now I take a real pride in producing work that is as good as I can make it. I mean college work – homework assignments and so on – but also when I practise the guitar the week before we have band rehearsal. I don’t want to let the others down, but, more importantly, I don’t want to let myself down. It’s not just about determination; it’s about being careful, and thinking about what you are doing, and taking time to reflect and improve, and going over your mistakes and practising the hard parts. You used to talk to us about the three Es of ‘good work’ – being engaging, being excellent and being ethical (I think it was from some prof at Harvard). I liked the ethical bit. My friends laugh, but when we are writing lyrics I won’t stand for anything sexist or abusive these days! I want what I do to be, not goody-goody, but good in all three ways.
Now, obviously we have made Ruby up, but we think what she says is really important. She is trying to capture another side to what goes on in schools which, when it works well, produces more young people who are enterprising, friendly, moral and imaginative. She has tried to capture them in what we call the seven Cs: confidence, curiosity, collaboration, communication, creativity, commitment and craftsmanship. This, in a nutshell, is the ‘other game’ of school. If you cannot be a winner at the grade game, you can still come away having been a winner at the character game. The first requires losers; anyone can win the second. And the second actually counts for more in the long term, in real life.
If you had longer, Ruby could have told you about her friend, Nadezna, who was not so fortunate. She went to a school down the road where instead of the seven Cs she learned the seven Ds. Instead of becoming confident she became defeated. Instead of developing curiosity Nadezna became disengaged. Instead of collaboration she developed distance from all but members of her own gang – her world became split into a very narrow group of us and a very large group consisting of everyone else called them. Instead of communicative she became, with the wider world, largely dumb (or at least monosyllabic). Instead of becoming creative she became deadbeat: passive and lethargic. Instead of committed she has become a drifter, unable to stick at anything, moving on whenever things threaten to get difficult. And instead of cultivating craftsmanship she has become a dogsbody, capable only of menial tasks and unable to raise her game when greater precision or responsibility is required. Between Ruby and Nadezna there is, of course, a whole spectrum of attitudes – but we know which end we want our children, grandchildren, nieces and nephews to head towards.
* * *
One of the absurdities of the current education system is the single-m
inded obsession with results at any price – especially at secondary school. Schools are judged on the examination performance – mainly at GCSE and A level – they manage to wring out of children, regardless of whether this is appropriate or of any collateral damage that may be caused. We’ll come back to this later, but just a quick illustration here will do. In England, there is a very important metric by which schools are judged. It is the percentage of students who manage to attain a C grade or better in at least five subjects, of which two must be English and maths (soon to be superseded by the even more stringent Progress 8).1 If your 15-year-old son is heading for a D in one of his GCSE subjects, but the school thinks that, with a bit of help he might just make a C, in many schools he will get extra tuition and a lot of coaxing and coaching. Transforming a D into a C counts for a lot, whereas transforming an E into a D doesn’t. If he is not judged to be capable of getting a C, he won’t get that attention. The quality of his teaching will vary dramatically, depending not on what suits him, nor on trying to get the best out of all pupils, but because schools need to game the system – and your son becomes a pawn in that game.
We were reminded of this when thinking about Ruby and Nadezna. How lovely it would be to be able to transform all of Nadezna’s Ds into Ruby’s Cs – for all the tens of thousands of Nadeznas there are out there. But that would be a very different ambition from the petty, pernicious little game that is played every year at the moment.
We don’t think Ruby is at all unrealistic. We know schools, as you probably do, where a lot of care goes into creating a culture that successfully incubates qualities like the seven Cs; and we know schools that don’t. And we don’t think this is a reversion to some feeble and discredited notion of ‘child-centred’ or ‘progressive’ education. Our guess is that millions of parents would like their children to go to schools where values like these – some of them quite ‘old fashioned’, some more specialised for the modern world – are being explicitly cultivated; and millions of teachers who are not lucky enough to be working in such schools already would love to.