When it comes to education, the past is our future
When it comes to education, the past is our future - Telegraph
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Two experiences this week link in my mind. The first was in a BBC studio, where I was in a broadcast debate with an atheist. It was appalling, he said, that religious believers revered a book that was written 2,000 years ago.
The second was a letter in a rival newspaper. The author, one Carl French, was incensed by the suggestion of Michael Gove, the shadow children's secretary, that schools should make pupils learn poems, and the sequence of the kings and queens of England, by heart.
Mr Gove, said Mr French, "is not only an elitist but an ignoramus when it comes to all the research and wonderful advances that have been made in everything from neuroscience and learning methods to modern forms of student-centred learning. Doesn't he realise that activities such as 'learning the kings and queens of England' is [sic] the type of turn-off to most children that got us into such a mess
?" He concluded that "A nation whose children are expected to live in the past has no future".
To both the atheist and the letter-writer, it is axiomatic that the past is a place to shun. I suspect this doctrine is widely shared, and that it helps explain why Britain is now so badly governed.
This week, Policy Exchange, the think-tank which I chair, published what it calls "a manifesto for whoever wins the general election", entitled The Renewal of Government. The book gives telling detail, right across government, of what isn't working.
Let education stand as the example. Between 1999-2000 and 2007-08, state spending per school pupil per year rose from £3,360 to £5,620. Yet the CBI reports that its members are increasingly compelled to seek recruits abroad because school-leavers are so poorly educated. Sir Terry Leahy, the chief executive of Tesco, which employs 40,000 workers under the age of 19, says that the company has to teach recruits basic literacy and numeracy itself.
During this period of the greatest state spending ever, more and more pupils 59,071 in 2006 took Media Studies GCSE, a subject that literally everyone I have ever met in the media thinks is worthless. At the same time, the number of those studying modern languages at GCSE fell from 547,189 in 2003 to 382,228 in 2008. Only 46 per cent of English state schools now enter a pupil for Biology, Physics or Chemistry GCSE. The others favour the combined science GCSE, which has multiple choice questions such as "Why is wireless technology useful?". The correct answer to tick is "No wiring is required".
What Mr French, in his cross letter, called "student-centred learning" (more often called "child-centred learning") dumbs down what is learnt. This is symbolised by the fact that Labour has changed the name of the Department for Education to the Department for Children, Schools and Families. Education in its own right is no longer considered a public good. Instead, "it's all about kids".
It might sound a good idea to centre learning on the student/child, since he will learn more if his attention is engaged. But it has the effect of distorting the subject. If you think of a skill which people take seriously driving a car, playing the piano, performing brain surgery no one thinks that you can acquire this solely by feeling good about it, understanding "why" it is as it is, and so on. You must learn how to change gear, which keys to hit when, and how to cut the right bit in the right way. If you do not, disaster will befall you (and others).
But when it comes to the classroom, child-centred learning theorists do not mind if you do not know that Queen Victoria came later than King Edward III, cannot quote a line of Shakespeare, or remember that seven eights are 56. It doesn't matter, so long as you empathise with the subject and know the "context".
Once the child becomes the centre of everything, his whims become ridiculously important. Mr French says that learning the kings and queens of England is a "turn-off". Actually, he is wrong: a great many children love mastering a body of information. But even if he were right, would it automatically mean that the subject should not be taught? Nothing worth knowing is gained without effort, and effort, particularly for people not used to it, is irksome.
If pupils can vote down a subject because it is "boring", they will vote down all the difficult ones. The result is that being child-centred becomes a way of being self-centred. The process of education as its "boring" Latin etymological origin suggests leads people out. What Mr French calls "all the research and wonderful advances" of current educational theory turn children in upon themselves.
This is not "modern" in any useful sense of that word. Our world is indeed more complicated than ever. How are young people better prepared for it if they are monoglot, innumerate, unscientific and cannot spell useful words such as "chlamydia" or "deficit"? When, as often happens now, I come across young graduates who cannot write clearly, I feel that they are as hampered in coping with modern life as is a disabled person trying to climb a steep flight of stairs.
How is this related to our attitude to the past? Because, in a sense, the past is all we have. Unless Mr French and his like are clairvoyant, they cannot tell us what the future will bring. In order to prepare for it, we must study what we can know, and what we can know is the past. Language itself is the classic example. It only means what it means because of its continuous development from what it meant before. If we understand nothing of this, we can't use it properly.
My atheist opponent attacked me for deferring to a book written 2,000 years ago. But great books written 2,000 years ago engaged with most of the moral, philosophical and political questions that still perplex us today, and their survival for so long is an index of their quality. Democracy, which we all say we believe in, is an ancient Greek word. Mightn't we understand it better if we learnt how the Greeks started it?
Partly because the Labour Party is so neuralgic about its own past, the present Government has always preferred to act as if nothing important happened before 1997. This has meant that it has misunderstood our constitution, our civil service and our system of law. It has deliberately not studied how we dealt with any problem an economic crash, for instance in the past, and so has made unforced errors in every field of government. If pupils are ever permitted to study history in the future, what a lesson they will learn from the 13 years in which we forgot the past.
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