Education is about Worthwhile Nurture, Culture and Survival

Education needs warm-hearted professional firebrands in collegial schools, not knowledge-transmitting, skills-training technicians working to government manual and rule-book in gradgrind factories.

Education is not filling a bucket, but lighting a fire. W B Yeats

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Education, Education, Education !

• Was it that young people should acquire useful knowledge and technical skills in order that they could become affluent adults and so contribute to the future gross domestic product?

• Was it that they should develop human values which would help them grow personally and socially as good people?

• Was it to support their nascent creativity, develop their aesthetic values and immerse them in the culture of their time?

• Was it that they might gain a love of learning and the intellectual skills to acquire knowledge and become life-long learners?

On those rare occasions when politicians give voice to the purposes of education they usually focus on the first of these – the economic argument with perhaps a glance at the second – the moral argument. The cultural argument and the idea of life-long learning are ignored. The evidence given on this website shows politicians are more interested in the mechanics of education than the reasons for it! Perhaps we are all like this – but, from time to time, it is profitable to go back to first principles.

Worthwhile Nurture, Culture and Survival

It is a framework definition which embraces the work of primary schools, secondary schools, colleges and universities, the home life of families, and should (but sadly often doesn’t) embrace the experience of the workplace.

It has three elements: nurture, culture and survival. It sees the individual experiencing these through a variety of modes of learning, including: being nurtured, acquiring, developing, creating, receiving through transmission, conserving, discovering, renewing – and no doubt others.

First: education is the experience and nurture of personal and social development towards worthwhile living;

second: education is the acquisition, creation, development, transmission, conservation, discovery, and renewal of worthwhile culture; and

third: education is the acquisition, development, transmission, conservation, discovery, and renewal of skills for worthwhile survival.

This is a framework which provides a structure on which to locate ideas on what is ‘worthwhile’. As an example, my view of worthwhile living is based on the concept of conviviality. This is a way of living in which people gain quality of life and enjoy happiness by striving to be in harmony with themselves and with their social, cultural and natural environments.

Others take a different view of worthwhile living, seeking quality of life and happiness by acquiring and spending wealth and recognizing personal ambition and competitiveness as the driving forces needed to achieve this.

What do we mean by ‘culture’? I find helpful the views of Jon Hawkes, an Australian planner, set out in ‘The Fourth Pillar of Sustainability: Culture’s Essential Role in Public Planning’; 2001.

Culture is the bedrock of society: the tangible and intangible manifestations of our values and aspirations; our customs, faiths and conventions; our codes of manners, dress, cuisine, language; our literature; our arts, sciences, technologies; our history and geography; our sports, pastimes and hobbies; our religions and rituals; our norms and regulations of behaviour; our traditions; and our institutions of groups of humans.

Somehow, from this enormous canvas, tradition has carved out those elements that have been deemed worthwhile and should be taught in school. More recently government has taken over this role by defining a national curriculum, but hugely influenced by tradition.

But what of the third element – worthwhile survival? In terms of safety in the home and on the roads this has obviously been a prime concern of parents and child-minders. For older children and indeed for adults it has in recent years become clear that awareness of global warming and the dangers of climate change is needed. Beyond awareness is the need for individual action in terms of cutting back on consumption, conserving energy, recycling waste and, at the time of elections, voting for candidates who offer the best policies for long term and worthwhile survival. In the face of grave danger, education for creating sustainable ways of living becomes the most important element of the three, at other times it takes a back seat.

What Is ‘Worthwhile’? Who Decides?

My firm answer demands that the decisions are made by the teachers and governors of collegial schools after careful consideration of traditional practices, local needs and government-sponsored guidelines. It places great responsibility and fundamental trust on teachers and governors.

Teachers as Knowledge-Transmitting, Skills-Training Technicians

At its core is a belief that we must give even more attention to the basic functional skills and rigorous academic standards on which our economy depends. This means ensuring that high-quality teaching in the 12 core subjects and thorough testing continue to be essential ingredients.

He said that more of the school day could be devoted to the 3Rs to ensure that all pupils get a good grasp of grammar, spelling and arithmetic, adding that they need the everyday skills that employers demand such as expressing themselves clearly and having a ‘dynamic, can-do attitude’. He said that the new curriculum introduced ‘a new focus on economic well-being and financial capability’, ‘a stronger emphasis on climate change and world poverty’ and changes to citizenship classes which will help develop ‘shared British values’.

The devastating fact is that Ed Balls, like other politicians who engage in education, believes in the transmission view of what it is about. They believe that effective preparation of the young entails government telling the teachers and teachers telling the children!

They see teachers as knowledge-transmitting and skills-training technicians who need to be given a manual and rule-book in order to operate in a pupil factory and who need rigorous inspection and regular pupil assessment in order to ensure that they are working at maximum efficiency and obeying the employers’ rules.

Teachers as Warm-hearted Professional Firebrands

• Education is not filling a bucket, but lighting a fire. William Butler Yeats (1865-1939)

• Tell me and I’ll forget, show me and I may remember, involve me and I’ll understand. Chinese proverb

• Education is an admirable thing, but it is as well to remember from time to time that nothing that is worth knowing can be taught. Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)

• It’s a miracle that curiosity survives a formal education. Albert Einstein (1879-1955)

While the secondary school teacher needs to be able to relate effectively to adolescents and to be a specialist in both a subject and the pedagogy of that subject, the primary school teacher needs to be, in a time-worn phrase, all things to all people, but particularly skilled in the pedagogy of reading, writing and elementary mathematics (as the government properly expects). Both primary and secondary teachers need to develop the skills of ‘assessment for learning’ which ensures that teaching is geared to learning for all.

All teachers need to be warm-hearted towards young people as well as to have the personal skills, sometimes very demanding, to be able to maintain order and good discipline in the classroom. But there is much more to the work of school teachers if they are, in Yeats phrase, to ‘light fires’ in the minds of their pupils.

They need to have variously some of the attributes of creative artists, inquisitive scientists, well-read librarians, successful entrepreneurs, sports enthusiasts and more. They need to have empathy and respect for young people and their parents. They need to be able to inspire the young and generate enthusiasms which excite their pupils’ imagination with ideas that will stay with them for years.

Few can cover such a spectrum of interests: primary teachers need a broader coverage but can hardly be expected to excel at all. But if, as children move through primary school, they meet one year a class teacher with a bent for creative art, next year one who enjoys scientific enquiry in the classroom, next year someone skilled in drama, and so on, they are likely to find much inspiration and develop their varied talents. By comparison the national curriculum, telling teachers year by year what they must teach in science, geography, history, music, art, physical education, etc is often a recipe for boredom in both teachers and pupils. Inspired teaching comes from people with ‘fire in the belly’. While the classroom teacher must provide a variety of activities, as all parents will expect, the freedom to put emphasis on a personal strength will benefit many children.

Demanding? Yes. Some will say that it is a tall order. But others will recognize that it sets an aspiration for those who believe, as I do, that teachers must walk tall in our society. For as the late Ted Wragg said:

There is no higher calling. Without teachers, society would slide back into primitive squalor.

The Problem of Boredom

Chris Keates, the general secretary of the NASUWT teaching union, responded angrily on behalf of the teachers, saying:

the chief inspector fuels the view that every lesson of every day for every minute has got to be packed with excitement. Quite frankly, life isn't like that and education isn't like that. Comments like this make teachers fair game for everyone, including pupils.

There are many reasons why school may be boring to young people. The whole business of attending class after class, day after day, week after week, year after year must be utterly daunting to everyone who has a spark of individuality. Inevitably children will be bored some of the time. Indeed, part of the process of growing up is learning to cope with boredom. Carrying out ‘boring’ tasks is the lot of everybody and we all develop strategies for keeping going.

For most young people computer games, television, music, clothes, the lives of celebrities, and the company of their mates, are much more interesting than school work. Few are motivated by the prospects of rewarding employment at the distant end of their school days and even fewer by the idea that their skills will boost the future economy! Teachers know that, notwithstanding their best efforts, some children will remain switched off in some of their classes; what becomes important is that those children, by engaging in disruptive behaviour, do not distract those who want to learn.

Learning the basic skills of literacy and numeracy is a hard task, but pupils need to ‘keep their noses to the grindstone’ because of the life chances that are denied them if they don’t succeed. Teachers know that an essential part of their job is promoting the desire to learn, which means helping their pupils to find ways of breaking through the barrier of ennui. But, unlike the visiting Ofsted inspectors, they know their children and have some local insights into what motivates them.

In part teachers’ hands are tied by the constraints imposed – with good intent but poor understanding – by Government. It is time to release schools from obsessive testing, a constricting curriculum and ruthless inspection. Then teachers will be free to use their creative energies to tackle the difficult task of encouraging the desire to learn in their pupils.

The provision of good, all-round education for all the young people in a school cannot be determined by central government and its agencies, it must be entrusted to the teachers working collegially.

Click here to read about collegial schools




To read more about education and survival read :

The Survival of Our Grandchildren Needs a Relevant Education

I grieve at what is happening in our schools and fear for the future of my grandchildren’s generation. They are being prepared (poorly I believe) for an economic world that is crumbling and cannot be rebuilt. They are not being prepared to tackle creatively whatever problems of survival (inevitably now unknown) may arise in their lifetimes. What we can expect is that these problems will arise from climate change, economic turmoil, and the human consequences of global shortage of food, water and energy. We can hope that they will find ways to establish sustainable ways of living with a reasonable quality of life for themselves and for their successors across the planet. The legacy that we will leave them is much worse than the one we inherited. At least we should ensure that they receive an education that equips them for survival in troubled times.

These are the opening words of my 'grandchildren' essay. Click and read on.