“…the old-fashioned approach to education that still prevails in Catholic schools, selective state schools and high-performing private schools has almost no defenders.”
Toby Young,
Prisoners of The Blob
These “old-fashioned” methods, according to Young, include direct teaching instruction (aka “chalk-and-talk”) and “rote learning”. But do Catholic, state-selective and private schools predominantly use this approach? Do they turn their back on such “progressive” notions as “critical thinking” and “child-centred learning”?
The answer would appear to be No. Top performing London Oratory School, a Catholic school for boys, stresses critical thinking several times in its
sixth-form prospectus. The school even offers an exam in this “fundamental academic competency”. Bourne Grammar School mentions the development of critical thinking in its
sixth form prospectus. And a
TES article in 2012 said Eton College was “moving away from results and content to pupil-centred learning”.
It is, of course, impossible to conclude from such a small sample that all Catholic, state-selective and private schools similarly espouse critical thinking or pupil-centred learning. But these three are recognised as among the best of their kind. It would also be wrong to imply that because they encourage critical thinking they never use didactic teaching methods when appropriate.
Young’s book is an accumulation of arguments he’s
used before: he breathes new life into
zombie statistics, cites other Civitas publications liberally and even quotes Aeschylus:
"Memory is the mother of all wisdom."
But other translations* give a different meaning. Prometheus, bound eternally to a rock having his gizzards plucked out in punishment for giving humans the gift of fire, explains why he is being tormented:
“Number, the primary science, I
Invented for them, and how to set down words in writing –
The all-remembering skill, mother of many arts.”
My translation and others* differ from Young’s, but the meanings are the same: the ability to record information by writing it down is the “all-remembering skill”, the memory. Recording aids memory and this, in turn, inspires creativity, innovation and, yes, the getting of wisdom. But remembering alone isn’t enough – the knowledge needs to be used, analysed, mulled over and synthesized. And that brings us back to critical thinking.
Knowledge and the skills to use it are both needed as I argue
here. It is, as Young rightly says, a false dichotomy to separate the two. It’s strange, then, that he should argue so strongly for the former while deriding the latter and that he should frame the discussion as “we” and “they” locked in
a fight to the death:
“No matter what progressive educationalists might come up with, we’ll always have our weapons: Shakespeare, Wordsworth, Plato. This is a war we will win; but it’s important we make sure it’s a conclusive victory.’
I don't think Shakespeare promoted a particular view of education expect perhaps "the whining schoolboy...creeping like snail Unwillingly to school". Wordsworth was part of the Romantic movement which Young blames for the “child-centred” anarchy which is supposed to permeate non-Catholic and non-selective English state education. And Plato was a student of Socrates whose "method" involved skilful questioning to develop critical thinking.
Critical thinking – it appears we’re back to the beginning.
*This line is sometimes translated as “mother of the Muse/the Muses/the Muses’ arts” or “mother-nurse of all arts”. The quotation I gave above was on p34, Aeschylus,
Prometheus Bound, translated by Philip Vellacott, Penguin Classics, London, 1961.
Details of the Slow Education movement described in the TES article about Eton College are
here. Maurice Holt describes Slow Education in this
thread.
Comments
I also used the PISA data to show this wasn't true: http://www.theguardian.com/education/2013/dec/17/gove-progressive-betray...
… Read more… …
So I cannot support Mr Young's perception.
Toby Young is, as usual, talking with the benefit of complete ignorance.
A thinker will, of course, bring what s/he already knows to the question. And that previous knowledge is an accumulation of what s/he's been told, experienced, read, heard, seen, discussed... That's why education is often described as building on what's already there ie centred on what the child already knows.
But centring on what the child already knows doesn't mean never moving forward.
That's right: thinking needs something to work on. That something is acquired knowledge. And acquired knowledge is more than memorised facts.
Toby assumes memorisation only occurs via rote learning. But memorising something doesn't have to be rote learned. Repeating something makes it stick, yes, but memory can be helped by the use of mnemonics, or by singing, for example. I can remember Pythagoras's theorem because of the Danny Kaye song.
And memory isn't necessarily instant recall - memories can be triggered by sights, sound, smell, taste, reminiscing, aide-memoir, association. That's the theory behind Ted Hughes's advice about memorising poems. Rote learning is the least effective method, he writes. Instead, he advises connecting words to a striking visual image. He quotes St Thomas Aquinas, the patron saint of memory systems:
"Man cannot understand without images".
There are schools that have A Level Critical Thinking on their timetable. Indeed, at the London school I did interim sole deputy in they started in during the summer of Y10 - post GCSE RS - running into Y11 with examination in spring term. So it raises the question as to what Mr Young means by critical thinking.
Toby rightly says there's a false dichotomy between knowledge and skills (eg critical thinking) but then sets up just such a dichotomy by saying those who argue for the teaching of critical skills are anti-knowledge. He writes:
"They [the Blob] all believe that skills like ‘problem-solving’ and ‘critical thinking’ are more important than subject knowledge;"
But subject knowledge on its own is of no use unless it's used for something - for solving a problem, analysis, application. That's why many schools, including "traditional" grammar schools, stress critical thinking and even (gulp) offer it as an exam, as Andy points out.
It also appears to have passed Mr Young by that the Pearson groups paper on making education work gives equal weighting to skills alongside knowledge, which set alongside the membership of the group and its breadth of academic and workplace experience does not support Mr Young's position.
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