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A teacher recounts the activities of consultants who are paid to give advice to desperate school leaders; how this advice has often been harmful and is usually expensive. “They are unaccountable…
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In my last post I argued that there may be a split between traditionalists who see knowledge as the ultimate end of education, and those who see it as a means to develop the intellect. Here I discuss how differing positions on this issue may affect how we approach education.
Traditionalists do seem to agree on a lot. However, I think that there are a number of debates that change depending on whether knowledge, or cleverness, is the aim of education.
To begin with, the question of how we select which knowledge is worth learning changes. While progressives have always challenged the body of knowledge to be learnt (the tradition) on a wide variety of grounds such as political incorrectness, obsolescence, irrelevance and the nature of those making the selection, I’ve never really had much time for these arguments. There is knowledge that is considered the best in our culture. There is knowledge that, in our culture, is undeniably associated with being educated or clever. As long as one doesn’t hope to socially engineer a new culture using children as the means (which does seem to be the aim of some progressives) the tradition in our culture is not difficult to locate. While one might seek to change or add to culture, that does not have to be done through schooling, and so the debate about what should be considered best in our culture is a distinct one from the question of what is considered best in our culture. By keeping those debates separate we can accommodate both cultural difference (e.g. by accepting that, say, a British Muslim might include Arabic in their tradition or a British Jew might include Hebrew) and keep a distance from the more difficult debate about what has value rather than what is valued. While the realm of the intellect is recognised in all cultures, the best way to develop the intellect can still be dependent on culture and we have a frame of reference for what is to be taught that can be explored but doesn’t have to be justified from first principles.
If, however, knowledge is being learnt for its own sake, I think the question of “which knowledge?” becomes more complicated. Is the knowledge valued in one’s own culture better to learn for its own sake than knowledge valued in another culture? Will it become necessary to justify directly what is the best knowledge in the world rather than what is considered to be the best knowledge in one’s own culture? This is not necessarily something that an advocate of knowledge for its own sake would shy away from. I have heard many people explain why Shakespeare is correctly held in such high esteem, or why Latin and Greek literature is the greatest inheritance that can be received from past civilisations. However, it is a more difficult argument to have, particularly when any argument that could be used to justify the value of a particular type of knowledge which suggests that learning it is valued as a way to achieve another aim would inherently undermine the idea that knowledge is valued for its own sake. Is it even possible to argue about what is the best knowledge if knowledge is only valued for its own sake?
There is, however, a way in which seeing knowledge as the aim of education might simplify arguments. If one adopts the view that knowledge is an end in itself, it becomes impossible to argue that the ends of teaching can be achieved through ways that are not focussed on knowledge. In that sense this could almost be seen as the strongest form of traditionalism. Those of us who see knowledge as a means to an end allow progressives a means to challenge us over whether there are alternative, and better, means to the same ends. We might end up having to justify our viewpoint by considering empirical evidence rather than through the adoption (usually on ethical grounds) of particular goals. There are relevant empirical questions over whether (as many progressives claim) learning in particular ways improves thinking, or how thoroughly we must know something for it to be useful in our thinking which I do not think can be answered without considering empirical evidence.
Alternatively, if the communication of particular knowledge is the only aim of teaching, it might be possible to view teachers only as people who know what is worth knowing and are able to judge what is worth sharing. From such a point of view, in which teacher knowledge and judgement form the basis of all teaching, it might be possible to argue that these are the only important aspects of teaching. This might seem an odd step, but there are those who believe in the centrality of knowledge to education who reject almost any discussion of the most effective ways to teach, rather than of what to teach. In particular, they reject the use of research to establish how best to teach and how best to learn. For teaching to be informed by evidence of what works is, from this point of view, a distraction from teaching informed by judgements of what is worthwhile. This may seem to be a false dichotomy, but it is the best (and I think fairest) description I can give of the position of those who consider themselves to be advocates of knowledge and teacher authority who reject the use of evidence and research to inform teaching. However, even though I think this is probably the best possible case against being informed by evidence that a traditionalist teacher can give, I still think it goes nowhere towards discounting the value of research into how memory works.
But I do think the simplified argument for traditionalism has an appeal. I think most traditionalists (and also many progressives) are very suspicious of “instrumentalist” views of education. The idea that education is a means to an end (or ends) that is (or are) not inherently an aspect of education can lead to many dubious suggestions about what and how to teach. By arguing that we should approach education as a goal in its own right, not a means to some other social, political, economic, moral or religious goal we avoid many bad ideas. I think, however, this may have led to an excessive anti-instrumentalism that also seeks to reject any intellectual goals for education. There may be a point of view that people like me are giving too much ground over to the progressives. My talk of intellectual development may have created a space where people start talking of creativity, deep understanding, critical thinking, higher order thinking, independent thinking, i.e. all the vague terms that progressives use to distinguish their view of the intellect from one that revolves around knowledge. From this point of view, I am simply not traditionalist enough; I lack true faith in the importance of knowledge. My defence, however, would be to ask where would the most extreme anti-instrumentalism actually lead? Could we actually argue that knowledge serves no purpose? I think that in eliminating all space for instrumentalism in the argument for knowledge we would end up having to argue that we gain nothing from knowledge. We’d have to argue that it does not give us the capacity for anything greater than we could achieve without it. We’d insist that it gave us no insight, wisdom or happiness. We’d claim that we gained no moral, spiritual, intellectual, social or practical advantage from it. In doing so, we’d have eliminated many arguments against knowledge, but only by accepting that there is no particular reason knowledge had value to us in the first place.
Because progressive education is actually a fairly loose set of ideas, and ones which are constantly represented as something new rather than the continuation of old arguments, traditionalism seems very monolithic and coherent by comparison. While there may be those who think traditionalism in education is about corporal punishment or selection, it is fair to assume that somebody is a traditionalist, if they see the following beliefs as central to the educational enterprise:
Progressives will often seek to fudge some of this, usually redefining some of the words (“authority” or “knowledge” are particularly prone to this); adding qualifiers that actually undermine the points or claiming that they can’t be progressive if they acknowledge some subset of the points. However, it’s usually fairly clear what is a traditionalist point of view. Attempts to subdivide this into distinct ideologies have been fairly unsuccessful and largely ad hominem. The age, contemporary prominence, willingness to refer to science and empirical evidence, gender, routes into training, subject, years of time spent teaching, and political affiliations have all been used to attempt to identify supposedly important differences between traditionalists with the hope of identifying one group as a passing “neo-traditionalist” fad rather than the re-emergence of old arguments that had been temporarily suppressed in recent years.
But while I reject the idea that traditionalism of today is of some different stripe to the traditionalism of the past, and will not look for generational differences, I do wonder if there are fundamental disagreements that might be important among those who, nevertheless, still subscribe to the axioms of traditionalism I identified above. In particular, I have started to wonder about the aims of traditional education.
Progressive education has always adopted new aims, and recycled its old ones. So much so that lists of the aims for schools written by progressives can seem almost endless (e.g. our old National Curriculum or Every Child Matters) and yet say very little about anything that is clearly the responsibility of teachers rather than parents. Progressives frequently disagree on what education is meant to achieve, or alternatively they accept that it has many purposes and refuse to acknowledge the necessity of choosing between them. By contrast, because traditionalists support knowledge-based education, there is quite a clear belief that education is about the academic and the intellectual, and I had assumed that this limited the scope for disagreement. While some caricatured traditionalism as being about passing tests (an utter straw man) and others have suggested it is about the needs of the economy (a position I suspect might actually be held by a handful of traditionalists, but still far more common among progressives) most traditionalists seemed fairly consistent. While some traditionalists considered knowledge to be “power” or “capital” I could still accept those as referring to the powerful, or well-endowed, intellect that resulted from knowledge. So much so that I, perhaps, had failed to realise that not all traditionalists agreed with my position, which I shall now elaborate.
My position, (which I have laid out at length before) is that just as it is better to be healthier, or physically fitter, it is better to be cleverer. My position is that there is an intellectual domain, familiar to all of humanity, and it is a good thing to have a more developed intellect. My belief is that this development, this process of making kids cleverer, is as clearly the purpose of education, as it is the purpose of a hospital to make people well, or a gym to help people get fit. Trying to nail down a specific purpose for being cleverer is as pointless to me as trying to find one for being healthy or physically fit. Education might help you get a job, but just as a hospital has not failed if a patient they treated is well but doesn’t return to work, a school has not failed if their students do not take particular career opportunities. Similarly, our personal lives and future happiness might be affected by our teachers and our doctors, but they have no responsibility for any aspect of them that is not derived from our intellects or our health, respectively. I valued cleverness for its own sake, and if I accepted it as having any instrumental value it was in the broadest possible terms. It might give one more humanity, autonomy or opportunity but these were remarkably generic values rather than particularly specific ends for education.
By contrast, I valued knowledge, not for its own sake, but because I was convinced by specific arguments that knowing things makes us cleverer. Precisely what we need to know might vary between cultures, but knowing more of those thoughts, ideas and discoveries that are considered best in one’s culture made one cleverer by the standards of one’s culture. And it is here that I think there might be other traditionalists who disagree. I think there might be traditionalists who, while being equally sceptical about education as a means to the non-academic ends so beloved of progressives, might actually think that I have gone too far by seeing knowledge as a means to an end, rather than an end in itself. I think there are some traditionalists who value knowledge because it is worth knowing for its own sake, rather than because knowing it leads to a developed intellect. I consider thinking, rather than knowing alone, to be the highest end of education, I’m just convinced that knowing leads to thinking.
In my next post, I will explain why I have come to believe this difference actually matters.
Every so often there’s a comment posted on my blog that’s so brilliant, and so long, that it deserves to be a blogpost in its own right. This one from my last post is by Nick Hassey, who I assume is the researcher with that name who works for Teach First, rather than some completely different person with the same name. Apologies if I have got that wrong. Also, apologies if you have read this already. And thanks, Nick.
A college of teaching should be where school teachers set out what support and training they need, what that support should look like to be of most use to them, and for the college to then identify who can provide this support and training. It must be a voice from the front line because this is what is currently so lacking and so urgently needed. It’s absolutely true that universities and others have valuable insight into education and teaching, but the value of other royal colleges is that its where front line staff within a clearly defined field (say GPs) can say what they need undiluted and unfiltered through other organisations and then try and do something to address this need. Excluding people who aren’t teachers from the college isn’t to diminish their work or expertise in the slightest – it’s just to say they are not school teachers and their support and training needs will therefore be different to a professional teaching in a school.
Indeed this is how each of the medical colleges basically started. As medicine developed and became increasingly specialised new colleges were established out of existing ones to provide support and training to particular professionals who had distinct needs. They excluded other professionals not because they thought they were better but because they recognized that they needed specific types of support that the other professionals wouldn’t benefit from. School teachers require different training and support to those in universities and from consultants and from researchers. It’s not to say one is better than the others, just that this college of teaching isn’t the right body for them to receive training and support from. If university staff in education departments don’t feel properly supported in their training needs they should set up their own college.
Others with an interest in education would therefore still be involved, a college isn’t the Freemasons, it’s not all secret knocks and totally closed doors to anyone who isn’t in. Teachers would still debate these ideas with others – the college could even invite people like me to events or to debate with others, or to advise, and non members would probably deliver much of the training selected by the college. But they wouldn’t be in the college as members, because that must be reserved as a place for teachers, and teachers only, to say what their experience is telling them they need. The whole point is to establish teaching as a profession, where professionals set out what they need, not what someone else says they need, so when the decisions come it must come from a body that only consists of people from the profession.
In this sense not only does it have to consist only of teachers but it isn’t clear what anyone who wasn’t a school teacher would even want to be involved – if you’re not school teacher what would you benefit from getting training and support in how to be a teacher? Dealing with people who leave the classroom for a while are easy to deal with as they can just re-join when they return to the classroom.
It’s feasible you could set up a rather complicated constitution that allowed non school teachers to join but not vote but that’s complicated and it’s still not clear what benefit they’d get from being in the college so why would you bother asking them in in the first place? If it’s to keep their voice involved I’ve already explained how they can kept “involved” without the danger of providing membership. The only reason I can think of for why someone who wasn’t a teacher would want to be involved at that point would either because you want to be part of a cool club, in which case – become a teacher – or because you’d be worried somehow teachers on their own might pick the “wrong” type of support or training. However the whole point of a college of teaching is that it’s a body where teachers set out as a profession what they think they need – if you don’t think they’ll make the right choice as professionals then the whole idea of a college is redundant.
My last post, which was about why I would not be joining the proposed College of Teaching due to the ridiculous decision to let anyone with “an interest in education” join, seems to have received a lot of interest. I don’t know how many of those who responded positively to the post were already against the College Of Teaching idea, and how many were, like myself, people who turned against it because of this particular issue, but there was no shortage of agreement. Two blogs worth looking at that seemed to take a similar line can be found here and here.
Of those that argued against my post, there were two blogposts that stood out as offering new arguments.
Firstly, David Weston argued that it would be a mistake to do anything as divisive as limit the professional body for teachers to teachers:
But, as I’ve argued befor…, the huge shifts we want for our profession won’t be brought about, I believe, through divisiveness, staking out territory or denigrating groups. I feel our power lies in coming together *and* elevating our practising professionals.
This is a well-trodden path. Hugely respected bodies such as the Institute of Physics, Royal Society of Che…, Institute of Mechani… and British Computing So… (to name a few close to my heart) have levels of affiliate membership that are for everyone with an interest or association with those subjects. By doing so they bring anyone with an interest in to their tents: to influence, to unify, to safeguard standards.
It is hard to sensibly argue that these institutions are anything but prestigious and influential. In the same way we aspire for teaching, they invest powers of governance in those who have achieved the most in their practice. They create other levels of affiliate membership for those who teach the subjects (even if no longer practising the science), but constitutionally enshrine the need for practising and eminent members to maintain the purpose and prestige of the institution. By coming together, they influence more greatly and maintain standards more firmly, while having the broadest and most influential voice heard by the public and by the government.
After the way teachers have been treated in recent decades, often by those who claimed to speak for teachers, I don’t want non-teachers in the College of Teaching in any level of membership. However, I appreciate that an argument can be made on the basis of some other professional organisations for an associate level of membership for non-teachers. However, David’s response seems to miss that this associate level of membership is intended to be the only level of membership for 4 years, not some additional layer added once those in the profession have been recognised. In this way, the comparison to other professional bodies is highly misleading. I’m willing to bet none of them went four years allowing everyone to join at the same level of membership.
As for the point about being divisive, you cannot create a professional body for teachers without dividing teachers from non-teachers in your organisation. Nor can you move forward toward creating such a body without, at least, attracting the opposition of those who don’t want teachers to be established as professionals. This last point seems particularly critical. Whichever organisation, or organsiations, would have opposed a College of Teaching made up of teachers needed to be opposed not appeased. They are the enemy of this project. The price paid to win them over has been to give in before we have even started. This was not an acceptable compromise, it was a stitch-up. And while it might not have divided the education establishment, it cannot be said to have paved the way to uniting the profession.
The other blogpost defending the creation of a professional body of teachers that isn’t made up of teachers was from Alex Wetherall. His argument is basically that we cannot draw the line:
Who do I think are teachers? Well I’ll provide some anecdotal examples: My daughter is currently four years old, passing through the last year of the EYFS of her education. It started at pre-school when she was 3 and will continue until she moves up into Y1 aged 5. She is currently taught by a teacher and teaching assistant (who is a fully trained teacher – who has taken a role as a TA). She was taught in pre-school and now in school following the same curriculum and the people providing her education are subject to Ofsted judgements, and so, whilst the setting is different I would argue that the qualified people running the preschool count as teachers; all of the people in this example are teachers in my opinion. Others disagree.
My wife worked at a F.E. college, teaching students Childcare Studies. She was training to be a teacher, following the PTLLS, CTLLS and DTLLS route. She stopped to be a full time mum, but had she not, she would have continued to teach 16-19 year olds as well as the same course to adult learners in the evening. She marked, planned, wrote schemes of work, wrote reports, did parents’ evenings, and taught lessons. This sounds very familiar. She didn’t class herself as a teacher by the time she stopped as she was still in the middle of her training, but had she carried on she would have been a teacher in my opinion.
My PGCE tutor Dr Anne Scott was a Biology teacher for 10 years in state schools after completing her PhD, including being Head of Department in a large state comprehensive school. She has been a PGCE tutor at the University of York for the last 15 years, also undertaking work to develop curricula for Biology for Nuffield foundation. I can testify that she had to mark my assignments as well as provide effective feedback and support through my 1st year of learning to teach. She taught many sessions to her students – she was and still is a teacher (IMO).
Phillip Moriarty is a Professor of Physics at the renowned University of Nottingham. He carries out research, but he also teaches courses to undergraduate Physicists and has a “very keen interest in outreach activities and primary and secondary teaching”. He has told me he would definitely consider himself a teacher (as would I), and depending on the distinction between teachers would possibly join a College of Teaching.
Four different examples of teachers who would possibly not be allowed in the College of Teaching (not Teachers, Teaching!) if some had their way. They would not be allowed to gain from the advantages the CoT proposes to provide.
Part of me just finds this absurd. Of course a professor of physics is not part of the teaching profession. Nor is a teacher trainer. Nor is a TA. By contrast, an FE lecturer teaching 16-19 year-olds is usually a teacher. Even I could have picked trickier examples than this. But this is a non-argument anyway. Even with better examples, it is still the continuum fallacy: the idea that if it is tricky to draw a dividing line precisely, covering all cases, then all distinctions must be impossible. This is a fallacy because it is not the case. Even if we wanted to argue about some cases, there are definitely some people who are teachers and definitely some who are not. Where we draw the line might well be a sensitive issue, resulting in a controversial conclusion, but not drawing the line, or putting it off, is not a reasonable option if you actually want to invest in teachers rather than in a miscellaneous group of people lining up to benefit from public money.
The other argument I’ve heard, this time more on Twitter than in blogs, is that if teachers like myself do join the College Of Teaching, then we could seek to shape it in the way we want, i.e. as a professional body for teachers. I can’t help but think this is doomed. The powers that be have already reneged on the original intention expressed here:
One thing remains clear throughout this discourse: any independent chartered body must be of the profession, for the profession and run by its members.
If they didn’t let this idea make it into the first proposal, why should we expect their placemen to endorse it at a later date? Moreover, to me this is the ultimate humiliation of the profession. Here we have a body that is meant to have been set up to empower us, and we are seriously being asked to join on the basis of begging others to let us have control? Tom Bennett summed it up here, before this latest blow:
I’m not joining a College of Teaching to humbly request that it be a professional body for teachers. If we have to ask permission to be a profession, then we aren’t one.
I feel conflicted because I have seen how many of the people involved in the project of creating a College Of Teaching have the best interests of the profession at heart. I also feel personally invested because so many of the teacher bloggers I respect are very hostile to the idea and I’ve tried to persuade them that we should at least give it a try. So none of what I’m about to say gives me any pleasure at all, but the latest proposal for the College of Teaching is pretty much the worst case scenario. Actually it’s worse than I ever imagined.
I had said I wouldn’t join if they let non-teachers in, and I included ex-teachers who are now consultants or teacher trainers in that. It’s turned out to be even worse than that. The proposal for setting up the College of Teaching says:
Membership will be open to all with an interest in education but chartered membership status will, in the first instance, be developed for and only available to practising classroom teachers.
And, in case, you think this is just some category for supporters with the “real members” being the chartered members, the plan is that the full chartered membership scheme will launch after four years. So that’s four years when literally anyone can get involved, and that’s when the millions in public money will be spent and when the structures will be set up.
How is this going to establish teachers as professionals? How is this anything other than an insult? How is the resulting organisation going to be anything other than a threat to the professional identity of teachers? I won’t be joining on this basis. I will be arguing against any public subsidy to such an organisation. I will be arguing against the existence of such an organisation. I will be arguing against any attempt on its part to speak for, assess, categorise or influence teachers.
In fact, the one thing that everyone agreed on, is that it should be independent of the politicians, hasn’t even been achieved. Under these terms the politicians could join. In fact, one wonders which organised groups with a political agenda relating to education will try to take over. Certainly, if there’s a real prospect of millions in public money in the hands of an organisation open to anyone with a beef about schools, why would we expect any of it to end up being spent on something that’s actually of benefit to teachers, the people with the least spare time to organise and the most reason not to trust such organisations?
The efforts to accommodate every vested interest in education have resulted in a plan that is not even about teachers, and may even be a threat to their professionalism. This is very disappointing. I hope the government have the sense not to fund it.
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Politician’s Logic and The College Of Teaching
February 11, 2015I was recently reminded of the politician’s logic described in the above clip:
It stemmed from a number of conversations about the College Of Teaching on Twitter, and the argument of this blogpost by Tom Sherrington.
Ignoring the ad hominem implication that anyone who objects to a plan to spend more than £10 million of public money on a loose and unaccountable assembly of interest groups, is somehow simply resistant to change, this argument amounts to:
I suspect that this logic might indeed win over some of the politicians and the public will end up bankrolling this project. But let me be utterly clear why this won’t win me over. The status quo of having no professional body for teachers has existed for a grand total of 3 years. Prior to that there was a professional body called the General Teaching Council of England (GTCE) which existed for 12 years and which few teachers had a kind word for. So, the creation of a new professional body is not a once in a lifetime proposition, not a radical departure, but a second attempt at something that was tried and failed in recent memory.
Once we actually recall this little bit of history, we remember that the status quo of not having a professional body for teachers was deliberately chosen over an option (the GTCE) that was seen as worse than the status quo. If we accept this as the case, then the precise details of the proposal do matter. If any professional body will do, then why was the GTCE not good enough? When the discussion of a College of Teaching started, the desire not to repeat the mistakes of the GTCE was a key theme. Only as it became clear that teachers would have as little, or even less, say over the CoT as they did over the GTCE has the GTCE disappeared from the argument.
Now, of course, it could be the case that the people arguing for uncritical support for the CoT proposal, would also have opposed the abolition of the GTCE. Perhaps they genuinely do think that any professional body is better than none. But if so, then they are keeping quiet about it. If not, then there is no excuse for suggesting anybody else accept the CoT proposal on the grounds that any professional body is better than none. For myself, I know from experience that having a professional body for teachers that is not accountable to teachers is worse than the status quo of having no professional body. And for that reason the issue of who will make up and run the CoT is not a “detail”; not something that can be adjusted later, and not something that can be decided by non-teachers and left for teachers to swallow.
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