The Copy Cat and The Elephant.

I spent yesterday afternoon living in the echoes of a period drama.

Alas, devoid of lakes with dashing young Colin Firths emerging, or chivalrous gentlemen reminiscent of Eddie Redmayne (see adaptations of Birdsong, Les Misérables…), this rather glorious building houses my next favourite things: books. And lots of them. It is, unfortunately, not Mr Darcy’s countryside dwelling, but in fact Royal Holloway University: not a bad place to have five minute’s walk from where I’m currently living, huh? Despite being far too old to pretend I’m a fresh-faced student, the lovely library staff are kindly letting me use the university libraries and their contents to research some of the ideas that I’m working on at the minute. Hoorah! Beats working from home any day (the constant distraction of making cups of tea and eating cake somewhat stilting my literary progress). Thus I spent yesterday ensconced in a cloister somewhere in a tranquil tower, ploughing my way through books regaling tales of education of times gone by. Rather yawn-worthy reading in places, admittedly, but also a telling tale of what a mish-mash muddle our country’s education is.

It was only 130 years ago that Education For All was established here in the UK. Obviously there had been schools before then, established in the middle ages to teach Latin grammar etc. However, circa 1800, we didn’t have many schools in the UK; those in existence predominantly run by the church. It wasn’t until 1880 that compulsory education for children between ages five and ten was established. 

The upper age limit crept up to thirteen over the next few decades, with Higher Elementary Schools emerging in early 1900, providing education from ten to fifteen. Post World War Two, compulsory education until aged sixteen emerged. But within all of this growth, the concept of what education entailed was very much driven by the schools; responsibility for curriculum development and choice placed with the teachers. Teachers were able to teach what was relevant to their local areas, their local industries and their local environments; adapting their teaching methodologies and contents accordingly.

Enter Headmistress Thatcher and her education advisors.

It seems that the onslaught of the National Curriculum, as part of the grand Educational Reform of 1988, is where things really started to come unstuck; with our wise owls governing not only what is taught, but also how it is taught and how to measure “success”.  Its implementation did not go down well with educational experts. The following comment on the National Curriculum sums up general feelings:

It was huge and therefore unmanageable, especially at the primary level, and its introduction resulted in a significant drop in reading standards. It divided the curriculum up into discrete subjects, making integrated 'topic' and 'project' work difficult if not impossible. But perhaps the most damaging outcome of it was that it prevented teachers and schools from being curriculum innovators and demoted them to curriculum 'deliverers'.

The introduction of the N.C stopped learning for life and introduced learning for examination success. I was still in primary school when it was introduced; aged nine, and thus not remembering much of the contrast to my days, other than suddenly doing a lot more weekly spelling tests and maths tests in my final few years (fortunately I escaped before SATS came in, phewee). What also emerged in this furore of educational reforms were league tables; rankings of abilities, with schools’ successes being measured against each other. This in itself, I feel, has created so many of our country’s issues, creating a copy-cat culture, with schools feeling they have to look to others’ practices, feel abashed by their own progress and thus compete to be the better school. Amusingly, however, it seems that the whole of our educational models for the National Curriculum have been based on total copying; looking to Finland for inspiration, to Sweden for impactful models and to Germany for interesting education structures. A fuddled and muddled mish-mash of systems, policies and practises to make a uniform educational model for all of our children.

Thus, in just over one hundred years, we have created an “Education For All” that has stopped teachers from teaching, children from learning for life and education from being relevant. Impressive progress, huh?

There are many elements of educational progress that I lament (part of the focus of the book I’m writing), and the constant changes to curriculums and the loss of time to actually teach for interest (rather than pass exams) used to really frustrate me. As more and more changes are made to curriculums, less and less time is given to actually exploring ideas and allowing students’ minds to be opened. Exams, exams, exams: pop the kids in one end; churn out the results the other.

What bugs me immensely is how this fragile and fractious education system is firstly being heralded around the world as the pinnacle of developmental progress, and secondly how it has been flung into the corners of the world during years of colonialism for other nations to implement as their own education. It beggars belief to be honest, that we are still telling the world to be like us and copy our ways.

Here’s a little recipe that I’ve created; to kind of illuminate the fundamental problems with distributing our concept of education as a global model:

A Recipe for Education

Ingredients

11 million children

610,000 teachers
24,328 schools

1 National Curriculum

1 Government

(Several colonised countries – optional extra)

         Method

1.       Place one child in a room and stir in the myriad of complexities that come with that child.

2.       Multiply that child by 30 to form a class.

3.       Spoon in the National Curriculum subjects, one every forty five minutes, for six hours.

4.       Sprinkle in a range of differences in children’s learning abilities.

5.       Dollop in some teachers, not forgetting the differences between one teacher and another (this may take a while).

6.       Ladle in a whole heap of different days, weather patterns and timings.

7.       Pour in the differences between one year and another.

8.       Increase those complexities by twenty and you have a Primary School.

9.       Allow your ingredients to expand to around forty times the size and you should end up with an average sized Secondary School.

10.      Keep on multiplying and multiplying until you have roughly 24,328 portions.

Congratulations! You know have now made the UK’s Education System.  Tuck in quick, while it lasts!

For a new taste, why not take your bake your recipe and give it to other countries across the world, forgetting to add in an entire history and civilisation of a completely diverse culture?

I was trying to understand the impossibility of this single model of measured education, when so many factors are immeasurable. There is no conclusion of a unified or globalised education that reads anything other than madness and sadness in my opinion. Education cannot simply be a one-size fits all model; something that can be dictated by few and rolled out to masses. It is simply not going to work, and what is happening more and more is our education system is squeezing more and more creativity, individuality and vision out of our children, replaced with a homogenous culture all processing the same facts and information through measured models of success.

A marvellous former student of mine sent me a few poems he’d written recently to take a look at (poems, by the way, that he’d written independently of school, with no help from the education system; simply using his own talent and interests before they were shaken out of him, quick smart.)  One in particular resonated with me and the thoughts I’ve been having of late; of the sadness of a world with so many of us looking out to far off shores for a better life, for brighter lights and richer futures, whilst failing to see just how beautiful life is right in front of our noses.

An Elephant Dreams.

                                                                                                                             

Way out in the Savannah

Where the quiet cacti grow,

Where the mighty, heaving sand dunes

Like frozen oceans flow,

In a quiet clearing

Where the grinning lizards creep,

Lies a herd of drowsing elephants,

Trunks a-twitching in their sleep.

An elephant dreams of many things,

Depending on its mind;

I mean, some will dream of grass and sand

And other things of that kind,

But most really dream of the world beyond,

Of planes and boats and cars,

And ele-phabulous parties

In ever so ele-gant bars.

Some will dream of shopping trips,

Of necklaces and rings,

And ele-fads and fashions

And all new ele-fangled things.

Some dream of the music business,

And being worldwide superstars,

Or conducting symphony orchestras

In pieces by El-gar.

But, my dear elephants,

Why dream of such trivial stuff?

Are not the Savannah’s dreaming dunes

Comfort to you enough?

Why dream of the nasty human world,

With its stress and money and fear,

It’s ele-mentary to see that you’re really better off here-

Way out in the Savannah,

Where the quiet cacti grow,

Where the mighty, heaving sand dunes

Like frozen oceans flow.

(Kind permission granted by Mr Pip Williams to use poem in blog. 

Keep an eye on that name btw; you’ll see it on the stage and read it on the shelves some day soon.)

Obviously I love this because of its resonance in Africa. It makes me think of my experiences with students in Tanzania where (through powers of the media) so many children are being made to feel that the western world holds so much more possibility and opportunity than their own exquisite environment. Amongst this poem's clever little ditties and puns, a poignant message emerges – our escapism into a copy-cat world sometimes loses sight of what possibilities and beauties lie right in front of us.

Since 1880, education has moved from local to global; from teacher led and personal, to government dictated and impersonal; from meaningful to meaningless. One of the most painfully amusing things I read yesterday was that, in the future development of educational models, Mr Cameron has taken on some “celebratory advisors” (none of them teachers of course) to work on developing the curriculum: Carol Vordeman heading the task force reviewing the teaching of maths…

…A bit of an insight as to where things may be heading….

One of the things I love about teaching my subject, English, is the escapism it promises; enter the classroom, open the book and you’re whisked a million miles away, into another country, another life; another existence. I always loved the fact that, as an English teacher, you get to be a bit of a renegade. You don’t have to teach facts and stats, dates or static information; you get to choose the book you teach and how you teach it (well, if you jump out of the N.C. for a while anyway). Teaching English, in my opinion, has always been teaching more than just reading books and learning to write: it is teaching life. You learn about people, about emotions, about life and death. You learn skills – communication, empathy, compassion, and understanding. You learn to shape opinions and have a voice. (National Curriculum learning objective number 2.16…) And you learn to write. In my opinion, handwriting is another part of yourself; you can tell facets of people’s personalities from the way they write. One of my (terribly meaningless) skills was to be able to know all the students I taught from reading their handwriting (always amusing when I got them to write something anonymously and hand it in…ha, got you there kiddies!) Everybody’s handwriting is utterly unique to them and is an extension of who they are. Sad am I, therefore, when I read of theorists proclaiming that handwriting will be irrelevant in years to come; fading more and more out of daily use as our cyber world extends. That's progress. Sigh.

For me, the pleasure I get in reading books simply extends out into the pleasure I get from teaching books; it’s all about escapism.  England is rich with literature:

Yet teaching English, and English Literature, doesn’t restrict you to England. Growing up, I used to travel vicariously every time I opened a book; today in the tropical heat of Jamaican shores, tomorrow in the trenches of Ypres, or feasting with the Ibo tribe in Nigeria, or in the dusty plains of the Australian outback. I think that reading is the reason I travel so much. Having spent so many years travelling in my mind, I wanted to experience life outside of the book.  

My escapism comes from dreaming of another world, a better world, a world where life looks brighter, more hopeful, fuller, and richer. I wonder, then, as a product of the National Curriculum, have I, like those elephants, also been educated out of loving my own world and into wanting one that does not exist on these shores?

If we want our own little island to stay strong, our children to develop our future, and our culture and identity to remain, do we not need to start shaping our country’s education back into itself? Maybe it is time to stop looking to the rest of the world to compare with what they’re doing, stop being a copy-cat and start focusing on what matters to us. As it is, our tiny little island is floating further and further into confusion and yet is still telling the rest of the world to follow us. As a starter, perhaps we should give Geography a little bit more kudos in our National Curriculum: after all, as unwavering Historians and colonialists, we always were very good at arriving, telling the world about what we’ve done and what we’re taking, but never quite certain on which direction we were going in next.

For me, I know exactly where I am going right now: I'm heading back to the library to look for Mr Darcy...