Education: Blaming the tools when it all goes wrong

(This is the text of a 9,062 word essay which I shared with an acquaintance on 23rd May 2017. I'm having a clear out and disposing of the source material. I wanted to keep the final version. The text contains spelling, formatting and content errors and has been redacted)  

There is no such thing as bad weather, only poor clothing!

Scandinavian Proverb

Introduction

The perceived problems with education are a reflection of the problems with wider society. Education is part of the solution, but it would be a mistake to try to fix “education” in isolation.

A lot of the problems are that society is not sure what it wants “education” to achieve. Formal education is given too many, inconsistent and conflicting requirements.

The result – we finish up wearing the wrong clothing for the prevailing weather conditions.

Summary

This is way too long. A classic case of “I didn’t have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead.”

I look at:

·         What we want from education,

·         How education might work in a simple society

·         What constraints do we have?

·         How do we “do education”?

·         Who are the “stakeholders” in education?

·         The problem of measurement

·         Some discussion

·         There are some good links at the end.

This is really a review, and some rambling discussion, rather than a carefully argued proposal. Education seems to give rise to these paradoxes!

What is “Education” for?

For this section I’m going to use a loose definition of “Education” which encompasses formal Education, from kindergarten to university, your Open University course, Evening Classes, what I dish out through Udemy, and the mass of other “personal development” activity which people undertake. I think that “learning” is a better term to describe the process, because “Education” tends to be used to imply something formal, performed in an institution, but more of that later.

The way I see it, “Education” (especially the formal kind) fulfils a number of roles. Not all these roles are comfortable to accept, but I think they are all real. These are “what Education is for”. Misunderstanding what people want “Education to do” is a sure way to end up with being dissatisfied with what “Education actually does”.

Here are the things which I think different bits of society (“Stakeholders” if you insist) expect Education to do:

·         Child-minding, Keeping them of the streets and safe from harm – Often overlooked, but this is a genuine expectation. This is most obvious from kindergarten to the end of secondary school. You could argue it happens at University too. It ceases only when the subject is truly considered to be an independent, responsible adult. On this basis, some university dons never really graduate!

·         Socialisation: Freemasonry uses a chisel as a metaphor for Education and says:

“The Chisel points out to us the advantages of education, by which means alone we are rendered fit members of regularly organised Society.” (my emphasis)

It’s difficult to date this precisely, but it is 17^th to 18^th Century, so this belief or purpose has been recognised for a long while. At its most basic this is potty training, “sitting still” and “taking turns”. It’s a genuine objective. You also get “rebellion”, but even rebellion is against the norm. Rebels have to rebel against something. To be a non-conformist, there needs to be something which represents conformity!

Socialisation also involves learning how society expects people to interact together. That makes it “slippery” because different societies have different expectations and any one society’s expectations change over time.

·         Learning Enabling Principles – This is one of the things which probably generally recognised as an objective of formal education. This is theory. This is generalities and generalisation. This is reading and writing and ‘rithmatic (but apparently not spolling!) and grammar.

·         Performing Tasks – This is literally doing stuff. This is applying the “principles” to “practice” and learning how to perform the task to an acceptable standard. This is reading-a-book and doing-a-sum. Some people will make the distinction here between “Education” and “Training”. I recognise that, but the distinction I am trying to make is a little different.

I came across a German saying which sums this up:

“Theory is when you know everything, but nothing works. Reality is when everything works, but you don’t know why!”

I’m not sure “reality” or “everything works” are quite right, but there is a little wisdom there: there is a state of being when things are working (or not working) to a particular level of success, but you really don’t have a theory why.

Learning Principles and Performing Tasks need to be mutually supportive. You can understand the principles and not be competent to perform the task. You can perform the task and not understand the principles. This is most obvious with activities which have a physical or manual component. Sailing a boat can involve theory (however it is expressed) and practice.

Usually to become a true “master” you need to have a theoretical component. You certainly need a theory to move competence to a slightly different task, or to consider changing how a task is to be performed.

·         Entertainment! Yes! Really! People undergo education in order to be entertained. The do it because they like it. By “entertained” here I mean to experience a sense of achievement and satisfaction. This is what all self-improvement is about

I don’t claim that his is a complete list, but it does indicate the broad range of things that we expect Education to do for us.

Education for a “Hunter-Gatherer”

To test some of my suggestions, let’s look at them in the context of a “Hunter-Gatherer” community. Surely there is very little “Education” going on? Actually, I think there is rather a lot of education happening, and some of it is fairly formal, involving formal roles too.

·         Child Minding – Without getting into a “sexism” and Feminist argument, if you are a hunter-gatherer, looking after very small children is a job for their Mothers, but once they are weaned the situation changes. Looking after two toddlers is hard work, but it is not twice as hard as looking after one, and it does not take the full capabilities of an adult.

·         I expect that in many hunter-gatherer communities the “child-minding” role is specialised and delegated to older children, especially the girls, or the elderly. This has multiple benefits: one girl can “mind” several children, it promotes social cohesion between the families involved, it releases the Mother to go out “gathering”, while Father is out “hunting” (or hanging around doing nothing), and finally the “minding” task has the effect of educating/training those performing it about how to do “parenting”.

·         Socialisation – The socialisation aspect of education is undertaken by the entire community. Children are put into the care of their youthful teachers for the daytime, and that is part of the socialisation process for the teachers (and is part of the socialisation of the teachers too). Responsibility (for the teachers) and delegation (for the parents) are useful lessons. If learned properly, then these lessons will increase the cohesion of the society as a group (whatever form that society takes).

At other times of the day younger children may be cared for by their grandparents and even other older members of the community. Remember a hunter-gatherer community is probably only a few extended families. In an odd way, caring for the young and Education may overlap with caring for the elderly. Granddad may be ga-ga, but he still tells gripping ghost stories (which just happen to have an educational content).

·         Learning Principles – In the hunter-gatherer community the “teaching of principles” is one of the jobs of the older folk. This is Granny or Granddad telling the children stories. Many of the stories will have no purpose at all, other than entertainment, but others will be teaching “principles”. In many cases the principles will be encoded as some sort of metaphor or parable and the storyteller himself may simply be repeating a popular tale without understanding it.

Learning principles is also done by structured demonstrations. This is how you choose a particular piece of flint and the justification for the choice is that “the flint demon” (or whatever) likes this particular colour.

·         Performing Tasks – In the hunter gatherer community learning to perform tasks is done by copying other people. At first the copying is done in safe environment, inside the community but difficulty of the task increases, as does the degree of independence in performing it. Children copy their parents and older children. The children copy “The Elders” too, in fact, everyone copies everyone to a greater or lesser extent.

·         Entertainment – Everyone sits down to listen to the stories. Even the best hunter and the head man listen to the storyteller and take turns to tell stories themselves. The same goes for music and dancing. The boundary between the audience and the performers is blurred. There are boundaries between different social groups but they are flexible. Children are encouraged to watch, to participate, maybe even to lead as seems appropriate.

The picture I am painting may sound like a sort-of Socialist utopia. I don’t mean it that way. The society I am describing may be highly structured and highly unequal. For all I know “the elite” may spend all day taking recreational drugs, indulging in deviant sexual practices and contributing little actively to society. No doubt “the elite” will also try to adjust the structure of society in ways which benefit them.

I The key points I take away from this scenario are that for the hunter-gatherers:

·         “The society as a whole” and everyone within it feels some involvement and responsibility in bringing up (educating) the children. Even “the elite” are involved, even if it is only telling stories or leading ceremonies.

·         Whatever methods they use, they feel that if it fails, they will all suffer, if it succeeds, then they will all benefit. They all feel that “they are in the same boat”. There is no escape either. Even “the elite” feel that if they mess up the raising of the young ones (even their own young ones) too much then society will fall and their elite position will not save them.

·         Education is not something that happens in a single place and at a certain age.

·         Educating is not the sole responsibility of a certain class, though there may be specialists, especially those who cannot contribute to society in other ways (like the older children and the elderly).

Constraints and limitations

Education does not take place in a vacuum. I’ve already addressed the expectations that people (whoever they are) may have of it but there are also what I think I will label as “Constraints or limitations”.

By “Constraints and limitations” I mean things which limit how much we “Education” we do, and how we do it.

·         Availability of Resources – This is probably the single biggest limitation. If we cannot afford it, then we won’t do it. Education (and other child-caring) and caring for the elderly are probably among the ways that society “takes-up the slack”. If we use the example of the hunter-gatherers, then if there is a famine, then education may become a low priority. The child-carers may be released from their duties to gather food or hunt, or the whole community may “up sticks” and migrate, in which case education (and maybe even the children) will become a low priority.

·         Priority given to Education - Although the resources argument has a great deal of power (you can’t spend what you haven’t got), it is noticeable that relatively poor people put a very high value on “education” and it is sometimes seem as a route out of poverty. These are decisions which are taken at both the individual and the collective levels.

People will sacrifice a lot in order that the next generation are better educated. This value placed on education varies from society to society. It is part of the justification for how much we are prepared to “spend” on education.

This “priority” discussion can be extended to how we distribute the resources we spend on education across objectives (Child-minding, Socialisation, Principles, Tasks etc.), social groups and methods. Sometimes the results are surprising: “foreigners” and social climbers may spend an enormous amount of effort on “socialisation” and conforming to the local society, while at the same time expending effort on doing the exact opposite by maintaining a separate social identity.

·         Skill of the teachers – How skilful are the “teachers” you have at your disposal? In this sense I mean “how good are they at teaching?” and also “How good are they at teaching in a particular way?” This is actually quite a tricky question. People can be skilful using particular formats, teaching particular topics to particular audiences. It isn’t simple. You only have to use the counter-example of imagining a university lecturer trying to teach quantum physics to 3-year-olds to realise that if you are going to be successful you have may have to match the topic the teacher and the audience.

·         How knowledgeable are the teachers? – It is a given that you can’t teach something that you don’t know. But on the other hand, you don’t have to be very knowledgeable about something in order to teach it. There are plenty of apocryphal tales about “the teacher being one step ahead of the students” and a lot of people who give instruction for “task” education have very narrow knowledge, but may have lots of experience; think about instructors in the armed forces.

This question of “how knowledgeable” is rather difficult to tackle. It seems obvious that you want knowledgeable people who “know their stuff”, but trying to enforce that as standards, and especially across different topics and for different groups of learners proves to be very hard.

·         Status of the teachers – What sort of status do you want to give your teachers? How much do you want to pay them? How much are you able to pay them?

This proves to be another tricky one. There are real contradictions here, and there are some significant “political” (small “p”, not necessarily party politics) factors too.

Let’s look at who actually does the “teaching”. There is change from kindergarten (almost exclusively female), to university (majority male). There is certainly a case for examining this from a feminist stand-point and asking if this is really what we want society to be doing?

There seems to be a problem with the perception of “teaching”. On the one hand it is described as a “profession”, but on the other, the conditions of employment are really not that good. Part of the issue seems to be that “teaching” is in some cases used as a default occupation where “those who can, do; those who can’t teach”. This results in oversupply of poor quality providers.

Another aspect of this is an over-emphasis on the “child-minding” aspect of education – “keeping them off the streets” (or the unemployment statistics).

·         Efficiency and Effectiveness – You want both, but they are not necessarily the same thing! Let’s take some contrasting, and extreme examples:

o   If we only have one instructor, and we want to “tell” 100 people, then the traditional university lecture may not be very effective, but it is very efficient and at least some of the message will stick.

o   On the other hand, one-to-one coaching is probably the most effective way of teaching many things, but it is woefully efficient and very expensive.

o   The “cellular” approach used in some developing countries can work quite well. Teach some “teachers”. Send them out into the bush to teach their villages. Get them to send their best pupils for more instruction. Keep repeating. Very efficient, but the lessons have to be very simple. You can get a simple message out to a lot of people very quickly. The Communists did this a lot.

·         Aptitude – Aptitude is overlooked in the mainstream education system. Some people start off having potential to be very good at something. The problem is that the only way to really prove if aptitude is there is to give it a go! This suggests that having a standard basic curriculum and then allowing (or even encouraging) digression from it might be a very good approach for finding people with unusual or unexpected aptitude for topics..

·         Motivation – This is another factor which is overlooked in current mainstream education. People need to be motivated in order to do anything.

"He who has a strong enough why can bear almost any how."

Friedrich Nietzsche

Motivation can be positive or negative, “the carrot or the stick” and it can be internal or external. One major difficulty is that what motivates one person may be ineffective or counter-productive with another.

Adults are probably better at providing their own motivation. In fact, it might be argued that one of the objectives of the Education is to teach us how to understand, manage and regulate our own motivation.

We need to consider whether all motivation is a good thing. Can there be such a thing as “false or deceptive motivation?” An example of such motivation might be persuading parents to pay for expensive tuition when the child does not enjoy the topic and there is no realistic prospect of it producing a return (financial or otherwise) for the parents or the student. Such motivation is deceptive in that it benefits the teacher but not the people undertaking the education or paying for it. 

Education: Structure, Formats and Techniques

Teaching in age groups

In your note you mention “teaching people by school age” (or not). One formal way of describing this is teaching according to “cohort”, where people are taught according to their age range (usually grouped by “year”). This is a feature of the current education system and it is a feature which is most debatable.

The positive aspect of teaching according to cohort is that it lines up with Piaget’s theory of development. If you don’t get hung up on the details, it makes a lot of sense: babies are different to toddlers, who are different to infants, juniors, teenagers, young adults etc. These differences seem to be more obviously due to physical causes at the younger age ranges. It also seems pretty clear that there are approximate ages at which “transitions” occur, and these transitions are reflected in the breaks between the different types of school which occur in most societies (5, 6, 11, 18 etc). There are also some slightly fuzzy breaks, for example one at about 14 or 15 years old. This is actually recognised in some schools (Billy Bunter of “The Remove” (= Lower Fourth Form)) and in the Irish Education system as the so-called “Transition Year”. So, up to a point, some teaching in age groups makes sense.

Teaching in cohorts has the advantage of being efficient (even if you argue it is not effective). It can become the classic sausage machine. Someone goes in, they receive the standard processing for a fixed period, and then they come out at the end having been transformed in a specified way, or not!

That leads to the criticisms of teaching in cohorts:

·         It assumes that all students in a particular cohort are the same (or are the same within “streams” or “sets”)

·         As a result it is bad at handling the particularly able or those who have problems with a topic. In its simplest form it is especially bad at dealing with those who have inconsistent abilities.

·         Teaching in cohorts also contains an implicit assumption that certain subjects are taught almost exclusively at certain ages! Woe betide the “late developer”, adult learner, or person who didn’t have the opportunities.

In summary then, teaching in cohorts is probably justifiable as a basis for the structure of education, but there is a real risk that it limits the best and abandons the less good. Lots of people will “fall off the edge” for various reasons, and there may be no opportunity to get back on! The benefits of teaching in cohorts are strongest when people are developing physically (basically  “children”) and tail off and become negligible when dealing with adults.

Teaching Medium

One of the things you notice when you look at “Education” is how much of it is still focussed on the written word. I do it myself, both as a teacher and a learner, but it is something we should stop and think about.

On the psychology and hypnotherapy courses I took, they told us to use all the senses. They spoke about VAK: Visual, Auditory and Kinaesthetic. They pointed out that people respond differently to messages through the different senses. This is why people giving lectures will sometimes use a schematic diagram, and a list of bullet points and speak the words all to deliver the same basic message. The different channels reinforce the message (or should do, if it is done well).

Even that doesn’t do the “getting the message across” using different channels problem justice though. Still using the VAK model, you can see that further sub-categories (some of which are overlapping) are possible and useful:

·         Visual

o   The Written word

o   Pictures – as in “art”

o   Pictures – schematics and infographics

o   Pictures – Formal representations

·         Auditory

o   The spoken word

o   The auditory presentation of words – volume, rhythm, rhyme and all that

o   Music and all that involves

·         Kinaesthetic – is hardly used at all in mainstream education once you get out of infant school. Yet what else is “drill” for soldiers than training in obeying words of command and in using weapons (tools)? Why don’t we use kinaesthetic learning more than we do?

Even though I’ve given examples of how the different senses can be used in education using the VAK model, there are other senses which I haven’t touched on at all. What about taste and smell?

Let’s use a couple of examples which I think illustrate what might be possible, if we looked at what you might call “the teaching medium” differently.

One example is “the Church”, especially the more extreme forms like the Roman Catholics at one end of the scale and the more extreme Evangelicals at the other. I’m not talking about “the message” here, but how it is delivered. The Medieval cathedral: the building itself, the stained glass windows, the organ , the bells and smells (!). With the Evangelicals you get audience participation in the ritual, lots of singing and dancing and even dance!

Another example is my chemistry master. Mad as a Hatter! He was only effective as a teacher when dealing with motivated pupils, but then he was very effective. He’s the only teacher I know who (seriously) suggested tasting chemicals! Now, I wouldn’t suggest just going around tasting every white crystalline solid, but if you want to know if something is salt or sugar, what is the quickest way to find out?. If you are aware of the possibilities and that excludes the truly dangerous, then dabbing something on the tip of your tongue and then rinsing your mouth and spitting a couple of times is a very effective technique. Slaked lime tastes completely different to citric acid! Another of his innovations was a card game he called “Happy Valencies”. It worked best for ionic compounds, but the idea was to make up compounds from random elements, and or radicals. I don’t remember the rules, but I remember it was some fun. The benefit was not so much in winning the game, but in the discussions between the players about whether something was correct: do you think this is a valid formula? Can you have Vanadium Bi-carbonate?

What really surprises me is the limited range of media which are used in mainstream education. Even with the rise of the internet, we really haven’t got far beyond the printed word and the lecture. Let’s face it, among the better things you can find on the internet are the TED lectures (basic audio visual lectures, which Michael Faraday would probably recognise), and some of the tutorials on YouTube.

Given that the range is limited, the question is “why?” My answer to that would be two-fold: first, the availability of broadcast media, and second: expense.

·         The broadcasting medium of the formal education system is the spoken or written word. Lectures have been with us since at least the Greeks and Printing has been with us since Caxton. The ideas are entrenched. That’s not entirely bad. The printed word still runs most of the internet. Video and audio are coming but I don’t see much attempt to “integrate” them with classroom teaching. They are mostly used as just add-ons or substitutes.

·         Expense – It takes a lot of effort to produce even a short audio visual presentation. The cost is in two parts: the creative bit and the technical bit. The cost of the technical bit has dropped dramatically, even while I’ve been doing it, but too many people still think it is easy. It isn’t, but once done adequately, then even relatively poor material can be used again and again beneficially. It seems to me that the effort required to do the creative bit has remained the same, or possibly even increased, if people try and produce original and engaging content.

Teaching Techniques

I’m not quite sure how to separate this from the “Teaching Medium” but I think the distinction is clear from the examples.

There are different ways of teaching, and learning some are more passive and some more active (for both the teacher and the learner). They are not mutually exclusive, and an effective education scheme should probably use many of them, tailored to the needs of the students and constrained by the abilities of the teachers. Let’s look at some of them (I’m sure there are others):

·         Teach and listen – This is the traditional teaching style. The teacher gets up and tells you something and you take notes (or the teacher gives you the notes). It should be supported by exercises but too often isn’t. Many text-books in school are designed to be extensions of this approach. It’s great strength and great weakness is that the teacher does not actually have to be all that good at the topic, and can be “one chapter ahead of the students”. I have done this myself for some technical topics. Given suitable material, I would be quite happy to take a class in “bear hunting” or “how to dismantle an atomic bomb” (thankyou U2), but please don’t ask me to demonstrate either!

·         Demonstrate – The teacher shows the students how something works or how to do something. This is particularly useful for anything practical. Yes, you can learn physical skills from pictures, but it is much easier if someone shows you how. To do this the teacher has to be able to perform the demonstration. Demonstrations can be rehearsed and prepared, but anyone who has demonstrated anything will tell you that, even if you are skilful already, doing a good demonstration takes a lot of practice, and it takes nerve too. The teacher has to be prepared for something to go wrong. Even “here’s one I prepared earlier”, implies at least double the apparent effort! Doing demonstrations is inherently risky and expensive.

·         Experience – This is where the student does it for themselves. It is a very effective because they experience lots of little nuances which it is hard for even the best teacher to communicate by a lecture or demonstration. All the comments for demonstrations apply to this with knobs on! Managing students “experiencing things for themselves” requires a teacher who is knowledgeable and competent in the topic, able to teach it well, and is able to deal with the random effects of the student doing peculiar things. A devious mind which is prepared to “fix” the experience (a couple of drops of sulphuric acid in the water!) can help too.

·         Tutor – This is where the student performs exercises and the tutor gives feedback on how the exercise has been performed. The strength is that it can be tailored to the students’ needs and can be a powerful way of dealing with the more able and the less able in a particular topic. The weaknesses of the “tutor” approach are that it is expensive – it has to be “one to few”, it requires a skilful teacher, it depends on the relationship between the tutor and the student, and it can become very boring for the teacher (you see the same stupid errors again and again). For all these reasons it is probably best suited for well-motivated, mature (but not exclusively adult) learners.

·         Coach – The classic example of the coach is the sports coach, but it can be applied outside a sporting context. The distinction between the coach and the tutor is that, in the coaching situation, the student is performing the task for real some of the time. This means that the best coaches are the ones who have some experience of performing the task which is being “coached”. The coaching relationship is very dependent on the relationship between the coach and the performer. When the coaching relationship works well it is enormously beneficial to the student, but it can work badly and be damaging when the criticism is, or is perceived to be, negative and destructive.

·         Master and Apprentice – Master and Apprentice (or Apprentices) is one of the traditional ways of learning a trade. When it works properly it is extremely effective but it is open to abuse (traditionally richer parents paid for their sons to be apprenticed to a craftsman, equally traditionally apprentices were used as cheap labour, abused. Apprentices also tried to “get-off” with the Master’s daughter. (If that was carried out successfully it was a sure-fire way to a partnership. If it failed it could finish up as termination of contract with extreme prejudice!). Sticking with the “functional and effective” form of apprenticeship, the apprentice gains real practical experience direct from a master. The weakness is that it takes a long time and requires a real master of the craft who is also capable of teaching. Another weakness is that the training can be dependent on the nature of the work that the master has on hand. More recently this criticism was addressed by formal education in the form of day release schemes and the like. I rather like the idea of “apprenticeships”, providing they are done properly. 

·         Collaborators – This is an extension of the “Apprenticeship” idea which takes it a stage further, to something closer to a partnership. The relationship is still unequal, but the idea is that the participants are both bringing something to the collaboration. This kind of learning is sometimes found in academia and the arts, perhaps especially the performing arts, where youthful vigour and strength may be being traded with experience. Collaboration is a genuine learning and teaching experience, but the relationship is so personal that I don’t think it can be mandated in formal or structured situations.

Just to extend the discussion a little: think about what you remember from early life. Do you remember nursery rhymes? Of course you do! Now ask yourself whether you remember poetry or songs better than simple prose text? Most people do, yet the ideas of rhythm, rhyme and cadence are hardly used outside music classes (or, just possibly, enlightened English Literature lessons). Except for a few mnemonics and colour schemes, we just don’t do these things, yet we know they work.

Why don’t we sing or dance the Periodic Table, or differential calculus? The answer to these rhetorical (there are an awful lot of “rh” prefixes in the relevant words, which I think indicates Greek roots) questions, is that to do these things means changing the medium of teaching, requires wider and deeper skills from the teachers and challenges the hierarchical relationship between the pupil and the teacher.

Who are the “Stakeholders”?

I think “stakeholders” is an awful term, but at least it serves as a way of saying “everybody who has an interest”.

·         Learners – I wonder how much attention is given to what “the learners” get out of their education or learning experience? Probably not enough! When children are young then “education” is imposed on them with an emphasis on the “Child-minding” and “Socialisation” aspects. For adult learners, the emphasis changes to “Learning Principles”, “Learning Tasks” and “Entertainment”. The emphasis changes between people and through life. “Learning Tasks” is probably the lowest common denominator. Understanding what they get out of it, and therefore their motivation better would make the learning experience more effective and probably more fun. I think the purely social side of learning (and even “work”) is greatly undervalued. I know among the reasons I went on my Creative Writing course were, “networking” and “meeting people”.

·         Parents – Parents have several different expectations of “education”. They want children to do it because it is “good for them”, and they also want it because of the “Childminding” aspect. The phrase “in loco parentis” is telling. At least some of the time that means that they are expecting the education system to replace them! That can be a mixed thing. They are giving up control, without thinking about the control they are giving up.

·         Teachers – Obviously the objective of Teachers is to teach, to educate. In your note you mentioned them “having their rice-bowls taken away”, and I think that is a fair criticism, because teaching is also a way of earning a living, not just a vocation. Problems I perceive for the teaching profession are that expectations of the formal education system have changed and increased, without the training for teachers (or the selection of teachers for that matter) being improved. There is a feminist argument to be made here – on the one hand, “teaching” (certainly up to the beginning of Secondary School) is seen as a “feminine” and low-status occupation, and then it becomes steadily more “masculine” as you move into higher education. In defence of teachers, they are filling the roles that are created for them. They are doing what they are expected to do. Those expectations are muddled and in some cases perverse.

·         Educational Establishments If teachers can be accused of acting in their own interests, against the interests of wider society, the same charges can be laid against the Educational Establishment and educational establishments.

Taking the example of UCC (University College Cork), the original building (1849, so mid-Victorian) is deliberately modelled on an Oxford or Cambridge college. They in turn were modelled on medieval monasteries. Not only are the buildings modelled on their predecessors, but the names of the roles and the administrative structures are too.

The educational establishment (as distinct from “teachers”) is extremely resistant to change. Although that is irritating, it may actually be a good thing too, because at least it acts as a force counteracting politically motivated change.

Both education and medicine were once the province of the church. That has to be the Roman Catholic Church, because in Western Europe there was no other kind. Without being particularly anti-church it is easy to attribute at least some of the problems with education, medicine and society as a whole with the attitudes of the church in earlier times.

·         Suppliers of Educational Material - There is a whole industry concerned with the production and sale of material for education. School text-books are big business. Here’s an interesting thing, since I’ve been watching my children grow up and move through the education system, I’ve noticed that the publishers of schoolbooks are doing two, contradictory things; on the one hand they promote the use of single-use “work-books” (which can be quite a good idea), and pretty constant revisions to the curriculum when drive new editions of text-books, but on the other hand I can show you examples of where the curriculum and the exam questions are constantly being recycled. In some cases the “facts” being used are decades out of date. We’re not talking about radical scientific advances we’re talking about industrial processes. The problems I spot are the industries where I have first-hand experience – the problems are not huge, but they are significant. The nuclear reactors shown in the diagrams are designs from the 1950s, the oil distillation columns and flow-sheets are pre-war and the thermodynamics (such as it is) is obsessed with steam, and most of the kids will never see a steam engine or steam turbine. I have also noticed that the quality of the checking of material going into text-books is not really that good. Misleading typographical errors do get in.

The problem with this is that in most cases, “the teachers” do not recognise these problems, because they are not in a position to. They teach to the curriculum (which in some cases is churning, but not necessarily moving forward) because that is what they are paid to do (and they are criticised if they don’t), and use the text-books which they are told to use (because there isn’t much else and you need to have a common text).

Why does this happen? The publishers are now in it for profit, rather than interest in communicating the topics. Churning the curriculum and the content of the text-books is good for profits, because it is relatively low cost and it means that old editions cannot be used, therefore creating new sales. On the other hand, creating really new content is hard and expensive. Even deciding what to include and what to leave out is hard. It is hard and expensive, so it doesn’t get done. The results are bad for the teachers, because they (especially the ones who are “teaching from the curriculum and the text-book” rather than from deeper knowledge) find themselves running to stand still, and bad any consumers, because the real content is ossified. Of course, all the change creates the illusion of change and the impression that “something is being done”! That means the politicians like it, or don’t notice it.

·         The Qualification and Certification Industry – Have you noticed how keen people are on “Qualifications”? It’s like the Scarecrow being given a diploma by the wizard in “Wizard of Oz”.

There is a whole industry (somewhat independent of the “Education”) devoted to issuing and validating certificates and other credentials. Issuing credentials is not that hard: you test someone in some way, you give them a “certificate” to say that they have met the requirements, and you keep a record that you have issued the certificate. If you out-source the actual testing, then there is nothing else to do! The only thing you really need is a reputation (and perhaps a small computer for the records). The certification industry, loves “re-validation” and “continuous professional development” schemes because they create work for it, regular, predictable work they can charge fees for.

I’m not against “qualifications” as such. I have plenty of them! And I worked hard for some of them too (I didn’t work hard for my “Ordination” or “Doctor of Divinity” (yes, you may address me “Reverend Doctor”. I stopped short of Archbishop, because one must have some ambitions!), but I have the certificates and I never use them!). We have to recognise “certificates” for what they are: a short-hand way of saying that someone is qualified to do something for people who do not have the time, inclination or skill to prove it for themselves. If you want a welder for a pressure vessel, you look at his Lloyds Certificates and then you set him a trade-test and say “weld that”, and then you x-ray and ultrasound the results (if you care).

Like I say, I’m not actually against certificates, but they are very popular with frauds, HR departments and with recruiting agents (who couldn’t tell if someone who someone could do “x” if it got up and bit them!). I have seen a lot of people (and I know you have too) who seem to be highly qualified, and who can’t do the job. I have also seen a lot of people who are interested in learning to pass the exam rather than be any good at the job.

·         The Powerful – As I have been writing this I have come to a rather cynical (surprise, surprise) conclusion about education. That conclusion starts off with my “Socialisation” category in the “Purpose” section. Socialisation is a genuine and essential objective. However, socialisation can also be intended to provide “control”. Look on it as a “feed-forward” (not “feed-back” control system). The thing about “feed-forward” systems is that they set everything up to make life easier for the feed-back systems to keep everything on track. They produce stability, but they mean it is very hard to change. They presuppose what the result should be and do not take account of feedback from the environment and real results.

The thing that makes me suspicious about the current education system is the way it is partitioned vertically. I’m not just talking about the socialist ideal of “Comprehensive education”. That is probably not a good objective anyway. I am talking about the way the education system is in silos, which assume that someone will go into one stream at the start and then proceed to the end when they “pop-out”. In Britain they seem to be going back to the idea of Grammar Schools – but that implied a “pass-fail” test at 11-plus. The post war education theorists didn’t intend that in the first place. They intended a bit of that, yes, but they really intended testing on “aptitude” with there being three tracks: Grammar, Secondary Modern, and a Technical School. The “Technical Schools” were hardly ever implemented.

My point is that at several levels, the education system seems designed to promote “Us and them” thinking, with one group being in charge and the other taking orders. There is precious little encouragement to “crossover” at any point. (And of course, those in power would not wish to!)

·         Consumers of the product You will hear a lot of complaints from “industry” that “education” is not providing what they need. This is especially true with regard to the STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering. Mathematics) subjects. You can add “Computer Programming” to that as well. I am coming round to the conclusion that this is actually a delusion. What they are really asking for is more people with the “Task Oriented Skills” they need. They want the education system to do their “Training” for them. They want to be supplied with “fodder” and then when they don’t up-skill their workers, they want to be supplied with new “fodder” which meets their requirements (which they didn’t state in the first place). And they don’t want to pay the taxes which would support the provision of such people.

How do you measure success?

One of the issues with the Education system is the question of “how do you measure success?” The problem is that what you choose to measure and how you measure it has started to influence what is being taught! I think I see an increasing preference towards short answers, yes/no and multiple choice. Such approaches have a place, but not everything can be reduced to simple questions. I’m not arguing that all examinations should be “wordy essays” either. They have a place too but they shouldn’t be everything.

My real point is that we may decide that something is worth doing, but is “worth doing badly”. Some art (as in decoration) is like this. Art used as therapy is like this – we don’t care what it looks like but perhaps the act of producing it is beneficial to the student/patient so we show them how to do it. First Aid can be a bit like this. Yes I want people trained not to do dangerous things, but most of all I want them to be prepared (Scouts’ motto “Be Prepared”), not panic and to be able to do something, almost anything. I don’t care if they have got a Red Cross Certificate, and I certainly don’t care if they have a Red Cross Certificate which is out of date!

Mainstream education is beginning to ignore some of this and take the view that if it can’t be measured (worse, if it can’t be measured easily), then it isn’t worth teaching. I have a bee in my bonnet about the decline in the amount of practical work done in Chemistry (mostly because it is perceived as “dangerous”, but also because the teachers are uncomfortable with practical experiments. Using videos (which have a place as well) is becoming commonplace. As I have said to **** “do you want to send them to University without having done practical experiments? They have really dangerous things in university labs!”

Education in Ireland

I’ll start by saying that education in Ireland is not that different to education in the UK. That is not surprising, the linked history and shared culture mean that a lot of institutions in Ireland are either derived from the UK version (eg the law, education and medicine) or are a reaction against the situation in the UK (the status and role of the Catholic Church).

Something that you have to bear in mind is the moment when Ireland “forked” (to use the code-version analogy) from the UK. This is something that happened between 1916 (the Easter Rising) and 1922 (when the Ireland became an independent country). The significance of this is that the UK situation that Eire is derived from or reacting against is often as it was towards the end of the First World War! We have all moved on a bit since then.

The majority of Irish primary and secondary Education is effectively run in the name of the Catholic Church on behalf of the state. The amount of influence the Church actually has varies, and has diminished considerably since the foundation of the state. That diminution has accelerated in recent years, as a result of changes in the political situation and scandals involving the Church.

Historically, Ireland has a tradition of higher education (“land of saints and scholars” and all that), but the layering of a dominant Anglo-Irish aristocracy over an “Irish” peasantry means that there was less of a demand/need for a domestic higher education system (some contentious theorising there). Higher education was concentrated in Dublin (“within the pale”). The institution which has become UCC (University College Cork) was founded in 1845 along with another 2 colleges. One of its original purposes was to provide doctors for the armed forces of the British Empire. More recently there have been other Universities and Colleges formed, and there are smaller colleges of further education.

Just as in the UK, the whole education system (certainly up to Secondary level) has a Public and Private sector. This is also mixed with a religious ethos. Many of the prestigious private schools are run by, or on behalf of, Catholic Religious Orders. There are Protestant (Church of Ireland) private schools, but very few. Just as in the UK it is possible to buy an education that will get you into a prestigious college.

I would describe a lot of the Irish Education system as a little old-fashioned, and maybe none-the-worse for that. We have done alright out of the Irish system. Remember, a good system can produce bad results and a bad system can produce good results. I think that attending relatively small schools with stable teaching staff in a community which has a strong identity has had more positive effect than anything to do with any particular “system”.

The one major (and it is pretty major) criticism I have of the Irish system is their obsession with the “Leaving Cert”. In my opinion this distorts the whole of the secondary education to a serious and damaging extent!

The Leaving Certificate works in a similar way to the English and Welsh ”A Levels”. The function is the same: to provide an exam to demonstrate achievement at the end of Secondary Education and to provide a “points” mechanism used to control access to Higher Education. The problem with the Irish Leaving Cert is that it is “all or nothing”. You cannot top it up with additional subjects later. If you have one bad result, then you resit the whole set of exams the following year. You can use either result, but you can’t mix them. The result is that there is an obsession with the Leaving Cert results. There is a whole sub-culture of extra tuition (“grinds”) and there are no “A Level” courses for individual subjects at evening classes (because there is no point). What there are, is specialist schools (paid for) who specialise in getting people to pass exams. And (here’s a good one), weaker students take extra subjects, because by doing so they can boost their points score. The whole system promotes “rote” learning, discards people with unusual skill profiles and generally increases stress. The Leaving Cert takes “teaching by cohort” to the extreme. It is not a good system, and it is a system which is almost guaranteed to produce “undesired consequences”.

Discussion

Without really meaning to, I’ve scattered “discussion” through this essay, but I would like to bring together some of the themes I’ve identified as I’ve been writing.

·         There is widespread agreement that there are problems with the education system in the UK and Ireland.

·         Although people might not identify the expectations I have described, they would probably recognise them when they are pointed out.

·         The problem is not so much the objectives as the relative priority given to those objectives by different “stakeholders”.

·         One of the issues is that the different stakeholders are all pursuing their own agendas. There is nothing wrong with that, but some of the stakeholders are pursuing their own agenda without any consideration of the others or regard to “Society as a whole” (whatever that is).

·         I think an extreme case of this is the way “those in power” (right and left wing) use a divided education system (private for the privileged and public for the rest), and continue use the education system to promote “socialisation” (or conditioning or indoctrination) into particular roles.

·         The education system is being used partly as an instrument of control. It is being used to control the “socialisation” aspect, but also the teaching of “task” and “principles” to say nothing of being used to manipulate unemployment figures (“child-minding”).

·         Such control is a legitimate concern of the state and the powerful (whether we like it or not), but with the conflicting input from the various stakeholders, the result is confusion.

·         Another factor is that the state or official system is being asked to do too much. There are too many conflicting requirements. The result is not a workable compromise but instead a rather wasteful muddle.

·         In many cases there are attempts to apply too much control, especially the formal, bureaucratic form of control. It’s classic micro-management.

·         Education is not something which is easy to control. Even if we restrict ourselves to “formal education”, that takes from age 5-16, that’s 11 years, rising to 16 or so years if you include higher education. If the decision making is centralised with all policy being made by central government, then that’s all wrong. Changes may be made at 2 to 3 times the rate at which one can monitor the actual effect of those changes! It is not a design for a controllable system. At the same time, most people would argue that education needs to be more responsive. That suggests more change, more frequently. The only way to achieve that is with some level of de-centralisation with delegation and central coordination (maybe a small, core national curriculum).

What would I do differently?

·         The first thing I wouldn’t do, is try to change everything. There has been too much of that.

·         If I were to change one thing in Ireland, it would be to remove the “Leaving Cert” and replace it with exactly the same exams, but allow students to take individual components separately.

·         I would aim to start removing rigid age bands. Some banding is convenient, but the rigidity is a problem.

·         I would promote “life-long learning”. Part of that would be to pare back the compulsory and rigid bits of the formal state system while promoting add-ons running along-side and in addition to the state, formal system.

·         One benefit of having “extra bits” is it would create opportunities to experiment with alternative teaching methods. Things that seemed to work could be disseminated. Things that didn’t work would probably die out without much action being necessary.

Conclusion

At almost every level “education” seems to be filled with contradictions. In some cases these give rise to what seem to be paradoxes.

Part of the problem seems to be that formal education is asked to do too much. The competing requirements, especially the use of education for “control” by conflicting groups mean that it cannot achieve any objective effectively.

Answer: Do less and do more. Have a less rigid formal structure, with a firm (but not rigid) central curriculum and timetable and then promote additional and life-long learning as add-ons.

Things worth watching

These are not “references” in the conventional sense, but they are worth watching. They are only 15 mins each. They are all by Ken Robinson. The first one is best.

At his best Ken Robinson is an engaging and thought-provoking speaker, but at his worst you could criticise him for diagnosing a problem without really offering a solution and for saying “I wouldn’t start from here if I were you”!

·         “Changing Education Paradigms” TED Talk lecture to the Royal Society of Arts in London.

o   Attractive animation to go with Robinson’s words: https://www.ted.com/talks/ken_robinson_changing_education_paradigms

o   Transcript (why is it on a French language website? I don’t know!): http://sauvonslarecherche.fr/IMG/pdf/RSA-Lecture-Ken-Robinson-transcript.pdf

·         “Schools kill creativity” TED Talk. https://www.ted.com/talks/ken_robinson_says_schools_kill_creativity

·         “Bring on the Revolution” TED Talk. https://www.ted.com/talks/sir_ken_robinson_bring_on_the_revolution

Here is a presentation by Dennis Yang,the CEO of Udemy. This is a sales pitch. I’m not pushing anything, but it is interesting to hear the sales pitch from the service provider’s point of view:

·         https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oGovuRndBkk

Piaget’s theory of development:

·         https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piaget%27s_theory_of_cognitive_development

The “Remove” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Remove_(education)

Mark Timberlake (I know you haven’t heard of him) on “Avoiding Get Rich Quick schemes”:

·         https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IJ9oGXwkfZo

The metaphor used is interesting.  I like Mark, and he is one of the people I “follow” on the internet.  I don’t agree with him about everything, but he is more successful (using various measures) than I am, so he is worth copying. Example of “informal education”. Things I like are:

• ·         Good High “production values”
• ·         Experimentation with different techniques
• ·         Aiming to run as a low investment “craft” business