Now Even Teachers are Giving up on Education

nick cowen, 23 September 2008

Yesterday’s Times reported that a ‘top-ranking state school has slashed the amount of homework set, saying that too much of it can be “depressing” and put children off learning.’ The head of the school that had taken this action was quoted as saying: ‘We felt that homework was taking over…. Ultimately, I don’t think we should set homework at all.’
Without trace of irony, the journalist reporting the item whom the newspaper describes as its Education Editor, stated the change was ‘part of a wider trend in secondary schools to cut back on traditional teaching and learning.’ I’ll say it is!

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not opposed to whatever changes are needed to revivify pedagogy in today’s maintained schools which all too often has become practically sclerotic through their forced obsession with league-tables, teaching to the test, etc.
Equally, like the head of the school which has cut the amount of homework it sets, I believe schoolchildren in the maintained sector generally receive too little opportunity in school or out of it for music and sports.
However, it’s one thing to be in favour of whatever changes might be needed to revive the interest of pupils in their education, and that of their teachers for that matter. It’s quite another to jettison a time-honoured pedagogic practice such as homework, and leave children to their own devices in the belief they know best what they need to learn and how best to go about learning it.
Unfortunately, the way the wider trend was further described suggests that the reduction in the volume of homework of which it was said to be part was made for the second of these two possible reasons. The Education Editor writes:
‘Schools are moving towards more independent study… with pupils learning at their own pace and focusing on what interests them most.’
Well, you might ask, what’s wrong with that? The clue as to what is wrong with it is contained by what is next said about this general trend:
‘That, in turn, is part of a global move towards personalising education and taking it back to the Latin root of the word, meaning “drawing out”.’
Frankly, I have no idea of just how ‘global’ the trend towards greater personalised learning is, and frankly I don’t much care.
What I do know is, and what makes me so alarmed and dispirited by reading of it so described, is that, if personalised learning simply means leaving it to children themselves to decide what to learn and how to learn it, then it has nothing to do with the classical conception of education as a ‘drawing out’ from its recipient of whatever it is whose drawing out is considered the purpose of education: be this knowledge and understanding or the mastery of some set of skills.
First, as the expression ‘drawing out’ implies, for it to take place at all requires the presence and active involvement a drawer-out, that is, a teacher. Second, without a teacher carefully superintending the whole process at every stage, the child might remain wholly unaware or indifferent to whatever it is that it both possible and desirable should be drawn out from him or her.
A classic illustration of the indispensability of the guiding role of the teacher in the educative process, when construed as a ‘drawing out’, is contained in the Meno. This is the Platonic dialogue in which, due to his process of questioning a wholly uneducated slave, Socrates is able to get the slave to ‘discover’ for himself’ what effectively amounts to a special instance of Pythagoras’ theorem.
Socrates is the first to describe this intellectual (re-)discovery by the slave as ‘recollection’, elsewhere (in the Symposium) claiming himself to be merely a mid-wife to knowledge in others.
However, as we also know, Plato’s view that all intellectual discovery is recollection, as Socrates is made to express it in his dialogues, was predicated on Plato’s belief in the Pythagorian doctrine of reincarnation. Stripped of that metaphysical context, what the idea of education as drawing out amounts to is that, so far as is possible, people can and should be led to discover truths for themselves rather than merely be instructed of their truth. For it is only by so arriving at them through active reasoning can or will or can anyone’s affirmation of them amount to genuine knowledge of them and their acquiring belief in their truth have been truly educative.
In any case, regardless of whether we are merely ‘recalling’ these truths or arriving at them for the very first time by our own ratiocination, unless you are a genius of the order of Socrates or Isaac Newton, you will typically need assistance from a teacher before being able to do so. (Apparently, as a child, Pascal discovered a good deal of Euclidean geometry entirely by himself. Well, he’s another exception too!)
The vitally important, indeed quite indispensable, catalysing role of the teacher in the educative process is one of which champions of the new and apparently global trend towards more personalised learning seem oblivious. I say this assuming the Times Education Editor is correcting in having said that what it will mean, in practice, is more independent child-centred study where the decision what, when and how children shall learn is left entirely to them.
It would seem that many in the teaching profession today no longer seem to know, or worse still care, what their true role is in the educative process, or indeed what the whole process of education itself is for. That widespread ignorance is indicated by a comment quoted at the end of the report about the school’s decision to reduce the volume of homework set. It comes from the deputy general secretary of the Association of Teachers and Lecturers who is reported to have ‘called for an end to homework in primary schools and a scaling-back at secondary level’. He is reported as having also said:
‘All too often homework tasks are mechanistic and repetitive. Rarely do they encourage the free-range research and independent learning skills that employers like to see.’
If what is set as homework is too often of little educative value, then that is a compelling reason to change what is set as homework, not get rid of or reduce the amount that is set.
Furthermore, the skills that it should be considered the purpose of homework to develop are not just, or even primarily, those an employer would like to see in their employees.
Too many teachers and politicians today seem to have forgotten that the purpose of a liberal education is to equip its recipient with the skills that enable them to make best use of the time that is spent by them not working. We work for the sake of being able to enjoy leisure, and it is to enable people to make best use of their leisure for which traditionally they were given a liberal education.
The best use of leisure goes beyond resting to be able to work again or idle amusement which is really just part of resting. Without knowing how else to use our leisure, those who have it at their disposal will only be liable to fall victim to boredom, an affliction of affluence from which so many of the current evils of our time ultimately stem.
Those who take recourse to the etymology of ‘education’ in support of personalised learning should also be made to recall the etymology of ‘school’. It derives from the Latin ‘scholia’ meaning ‘leisure’. A university is a community of scholars, and the special skills of scholars were typically inculcated and exercised otherwise than on behalf of employers.
But what’s the use? Some days, I just feel in despair when I read newspaper reports like the one which forms the subject of this posting.
Fortunately, having been blessed in earlier days with a half-way decent liberal education, I find I can perennially console myself for life’s passing woes such as that of which I read in yesterday’s Times by recourse to the exercise of those intellectual skills with which it provided me: namely, the ability to think in a reflective way.
For those wanting to know more about what the true purpose of a liberal education was traditionally conceived to be and how far that purpose is from what the deputy general secretary of the Association of Teachers and Lecturers seems to think it is, I heartily recommend Josef Pieper’s short masterpiece, Leisure: The Basis of Culture.
It should be made mandatory reading for all entering the teaching profession today, which is to say it probably is unheard of in all teacher-training colleges today.
More’s the pity.