John Connell: The Blog

Sean Con­nery, in his thought­ful mem­oir Being A Scot, tells the story of find­ing him­self on a plane seated next to a com­pa­triot, a young woman. Talk­ing to her, he found that she was a lit­er­a­ture stu­dent at the Uni­ver­sity of Edin­burgh, and that she was cur­rently study­ing Dostoevsky’s Crime and Pun­ish­ment.

“Do you see any par­al­lels between Roskol­nikov, in the Dos­to­evsky novel, and the char­ac­ter of Robert Wing­ham, in James Hogg’s Mem­oirs and Con­fes­sions of a Jus­ti­fied Sin­ner?” he asked her.

“Oh, I haven’t read that,” said she, “I’m in the Eng­lish Lit­er­a­ture Depart­ment, not the Scot­tish.” Con­nery was bemused, but pre­sum­ably did not bother to ask why, given her odd per­spec­tive, she was study­ing a novel orig­i­nally writ­ten in Russian.

Con­nery had left school at 13 with lit­tle to show for his eight years in Scot­tish edu­ca­tion other than an abil­ity to read. But early in his act­ing career, a fellow-thespian had sug­gested a list of books that the young Con­nery ought to read, and he had sub­se­quently embarked on his own edu­ca­tion in fine lit­er­a­ture. His young trav­el­ling com­pan­ion, on the other hand, had suc­cess­fully com­pleted seven years of pri­mary school­ing, five or six years of sec­ondary school­ing, and by the time Con­nery met her at least a year or two at uni­ver­sity. So what was the dif­fer­ence between the famous actor with his paucity of for­mal school­ing and the lit­er­a­ture stu­dent with a decade and a half of insti­tu­tional edu­ca­tion behind her?

In the lit­er­a­ture stu­dent, I believe that we can see some­thing of the schooled mind at work, in this case some­one for whom the books she read were pre­scribed by oth­ers and for whom read­ing was largely a means to an end. In Con­nery, a lover of lit­er­a­ture, we can see the inde­pen­dent mind of some­one who has taken con­trol of his own learn­ing, some­one for whom read­ing was a plea­sure in itself, and noth­ing to do with pass­ing exam­i­na­tions or gain­ing qualifications.

It is inter­est­ing to pon­der the dif­fer­ences between the truly autonomous learner and the schooled mind, to explore the nature of learn­ing in an age where, although the oppor­tu­ni­ties for self-directed learn­ing are expand­ing immensely as the ten­drils of the Inter­net extend into every facet of our lives, the endur­ing insti­tu­tions of the school and the col­lege and the uni­ver­sity (all of which I am happy to refer to col­lec­tively and con­cep­tu­ally as ‘the school’) remain stub­bornly tena­cious. This durable social con­struct, one that has been shaped and adapted con­tin­u­ously through­out his­tory to suit the needs of time and place and wealth and power, has allowed the myr­iad social, polit­i­cal and reli­gious enti­ties that have sus­tained it, and that con­tinue to sus­tain it, to retain an often insid­i­ous and reduc­tive grip on the minds of those who pass through their hands. And, despite that con­stant refrain of ‘the school is dead’ that we have heard in dif­fer­ent times and in dif­fer­ent places, the school is arguably stronger in some ways today than it has ever been.

Of course, the tale of Sean Con­nery and the young lit­er­a­ture stu­dent raises more ques­tions than answers: the gulf between the autonomous learner and the schooled mind is rarely iden­ti­fi­able as a sim­ple dichotomy between the free spirit and the cap­tive will. The real­ity for most of us is that we find our­selves, through­out our lives, shift­ing back and forth along a con­tin­uum some­where between the two extremes, although we night hope that, as we grow older, we become more aware of the dan­gers of the schooled mind, and there­fore develop a greater capac­ity to break free of the con­straints placed on us by the school in our early years. Connery’s self-taught love of lit­er­a­ture was per­haps not entirely free of instru­men­tal inten­tions: as an actor, he rec­og­nized that an appre­ci­a­tion of lit­er­a­ture would be use­ful to him in his career, but it was his own recog­ni­tion, not one sug­gested by oth­ers or imposed from with­out. Equally, the young woman, we hope, would have taken up her course in Eng­lish Lit­er­a­ture because of a love of read­ing. But between those two routes into books, and most cer­tainly in the student’s response to Connery’s ques­tion, there lies a dis­cernible dif­fer­ence between the approach that each had pre­vi­ously taken to their mutual love of lit­er­a­ture. Con­nery, con­sciously or oth­er­wise, had dis­cov­ered that there is a higher and deeper and wider sig­nif­i­cance to learn­ing than can be gleaned from sub­mit­ting to the stric­tures of the class­room. The young woman had allowed her­self to be per­suaded that, like the over­whelm­ing major­ity of ‘edu­cated’ peo­ple, she had lit­tle choice but to accept those stric­tures as seem­ingly the only avail­able path to an edu­ca­tion in the dis­ci­pline that she enjoyed.

The road taken by Con­nery was one that led not only to a knowl­edge of fine lit­er­a­ture but also, I would con­tend, to a greater chance for attain­ing a degree of self-knowledge that, if not actu­ally denied by school, has rarely if ever been an explicit aim of school­ing. The school, his­tor­i­cally, has not actively encour­aged inde­pen­dence of thought, nor has it cul­ti­vated the truly spon­ta­neous or cre­ative mind. We develop such traits despite school not because of it. School is fun­da­men­tally about train­ing the mind, devel­op­ing the intel­lect (as opposed to intel­li­gence), pass­ing on the knowl­edge deemed impor­tant by a soci­ety to those whose role it will be to per­pet­u­ate and pre­serve that soci­ety at all lev­els. As such, the school con­tin­ues what already is and what has been; its func­tion, what­ever the rhetoric, is essen­tially back­wards look­ing, seek­ing to main­tain the struc­tures and rela­tion­ships from the past and present on into the future with min­i­mal change.

But given the ubiq­uity of the school, we can­not sim­ply equate the schooled mind with atten­dance at school. To do so would be ludi­crous. If the schooled mind were to be iden­ti­fied merely by dint of some­one hav­ing attended school there would no chance of escape from the con­di­tion for most of us. But school­ing does imbue the stu­dent, the scholar, with cer­tain char­ac­ter­is­tics that the learner has to find the means to over­come either while at school, or more likely once school­ing is complete.

I will come back to what that schooled mind is all about, why we must not be con­tent with the intel­lec­tual frame­work that school bestows on us, and how crit­i­cal it is that we are able to over­come at least the most dele­te­ri­ous and per­ni­cious aspects of the school’s legacy on our own devel­op­ment as ratio­nal, free-thinking human beings.

I have enjoyed read­ing the reac­tion in the UK media fol­low­ing Eddie Mair’s typ­i­cally relaxed lac­er­a­tion of The Man Who Would Be King on News­night at the week­end. Mair, for me, as some­one who lis­tens to a lot of radio, has been one of the best radio jour­nal­ist in the UK since I used to lis­ten to him years ago on Good Morn­ing Scot­land on BBC Radio Scot­land. Talk of him finally mak­ing a move onto tele­vi­sion news is both wel­come and sad, since he will be undoubt­edly excel­lent on the screen (as News­night showed) but will be missed from radio if he comes to neglect that medium.

But amidst all the chat­ter about Mair’s per­for­mance and Johnston’s dis­mal show­ing, I couldn’t help notice one telling phrase used by Leo Bene­dic­tus in his Guardian appraisal of Mair on Mon­day 25^th March.

Born and brought up in Dundee, state-educated, the son of a lorry dri­ver and a nurse, he was as obvi­ous a broad­cast­ing prodigy as you could ever find.

It was ‘state-educated’ that caught my eye. Here in Scot­land, we would sim­ply call Mair ‘edu­cated’. That Bene­dic­tus thinks it impor­tant to add the qual­i­fier tells us so much about the con­di­tion of Eng­lish education.

There is a con­spic­u­ous and abid­ing fal­lacy resid­ing at the heart of for­mal edu­ca­tion, namely that what is taught is what is learned, that what the teacher teaches is what the stu­dent learns. Edu­ca­tion sys­tems, schools, col­lege and uni­ver­si­ties around the world today rest, as they have done for much of their exis­tences, on an illu­sory foun­da­tion, and I believe that much of what is wrong with for­mal edu­ca­tion today arises from this endur­ing and mis­taken belief.

When we come to the full real­i­sa­tion of the actual rela­tion­ship between teach­ing and learn­ing, we begin to dis­cern the sheer point­less­ness of so much of what passes for edu­ca­tional pol­icy and strat­egy in today’s world. We know that human beings learn through inter­ac­tion with oth­ers, with ideas, with infor­ma­tion, with the world at large, but that ulti­mately they cre­ate and shape their own learn­ing. The inter­ven­tion of the teacher in this process is impor­tant and valu­able, but at no point in the inter­ac­tion of teacher and stu­dent, other than by occa­sional happy acci­dent, does the learner ‘learn’ what the teacher ‘teaches’.

An appre­ci­a­tion of this, the true nature of learn­ing, means that the com­plex edi­fices of cur­ric­ula, ped­a­gogy, assess­ment, accred­i­ta­tion, teacher edu­ca­tion and pro­fes­sional devel­op­ment, as well as the over­bear­ing struc­tures of insti­tu­tional man­age­ment and edu­ca­tional orga­ni­za­tion, start to crum­ble to dust before our eyes.

A let­ter in today’s Observer about George Osborne’s finan­cial com­pe­tence caught my eye — the let­ter was in response to an arti­cle by Will Hut­ton in which he had assumed that Osborne really is seek­ing to rem­edy finan­cial inequal­ity in the coun­try but he just doesn’t have the eco­nomic com­pe­tence to make it hap­pen. The sen­ti­ment in the let­ter res­onated with my own thoughts, not just about Osborne, but about the whole Tory endeav­our in Gov­ern­ment at the moment, and espe­cially about Michael Gove’s assault on school­ing in Eng­land. Of Osborne, Gra­ham Aspinall, of Sheffield, wrote:

To credit Osborne merely with eco­nomic illit­er­acy, as Hut­ton and Blanch­flower et al do, is too char­i­ta­ble. He is a shrewd ide­o­logue and strate­gist. It’s not that he doesn’t under­stand the ruin he is inflict­ing on fam­i­lies. He knows what he’s doing; he just doesn’t care. Osborne is not an eco­nomic illit­er­ate; he’s worse – a moral illiterate.

Polly Toyn­bee has called the cur­rent admin­is­tra­tion:

…the most rightwing of all post­war governments…

I agree. And deep at the heart of this rightwing gov­ern­ment is a clever, seemingly-complex (but really not), unfail­ingly polite, well-read and media-savvy ide­o­logue who just hap­pens to be in charge of edu­ca­tion, appar­ently by his own choice. At least in Scot­land we have only to con­tend with an ego­tis­ti­cal incom­pe­tent as edu­ca­tion sec­re­tary; Eng­lish state school­ing, on the other hand, is now being sys­tem­at­i­cally under­mined and dis­man­tled by a man who thinks that his own life tale, that of some­one from hum­ble begin­nings made good by a rig­or­ous school­ing of a trad­tional kind, is the model that must serve everyone.

But that is only part of what Gove is about. Gove, like many of his rightwing friends in this Gov­ern­ment and beyond, accept whole­heart­edly the con­cept of an edu­ca­tion sys­tem as a race to the line, as the means by which the country’s elite is selected and trained, and as a sys­tem designed to weed out those who are not capa­ble (defined by cri­te­ria designed to serve the rightwing credo) of ben­e­fit­ing from any kind of aca­d­e­mic school­ing. Many will throw, and have thrown, the epi­thet of elit­ist at this crew, and will intend it as cen­sure. To Gove and his col­leagues, such name-callers are merely stat­ing the obvi­ous. They would call them­selves exactly the same, being merely descrip­tive of their phi­los­o­phy and inten­tions and values.

Michael Gove is a man with a mis­sion, and he is in a hurry to com­plete it. State school­ing in Eng­land has been, for many years now, a for­eign land when viewed over the fence from Scot­tish edu­ca­tion; soon, it will be more like view­ing the sur­face of Sat­urn, an exotic place beyond our easy ken and under­stand­ing, a sit­u­a­tion not lack­ing in irony given that Gove’s own school­ing hap­pened in Scotland.

Like war, for­mal edu­ca­tion is a con­tin­u­a­tion of pol­i­tics by other means — less direct, less con­trolled, less con­trol­lable, but no less pow­er­ful in its long term effects.

I wrote the above on this blog three years ago in a post that lamented the sheer cack-handedness of most Gov­ern­ment inter­fer­ence in edu­ca­tion (they call it policy-making) in Eng­land over the past 30 years. I should have empha­sised the uncon­trol­lable effects of this ‘policy-making’ much more than I did — a long suc­ces­sion of edu­ca­tion min­is­ters in West­min­ster over the past 3 decades have attempted to inflict their own vari­ants on social engi­neer­ing, and all of them have failed spec­tac­u­larly. Unfor­tu­nately, each inevitable fail­ure leaves a legacy of yet more dis­ar­ray behind it.

Simon Jenk­ins, writ­ing in today’s Guardian, agrees:

Account­abil­ity for England’s schools is now a total mess.

Jenk­ins takes aim at the lat­est ridicu­lous ‘league table’ to be imposed on England’s schools by Michael Gove. As he writes:

The crav­ing for uni­for­mity in pub­lic ser­vices has become a frenzy.…The belief that the crooked tim­ber of mankind can be beaten straight on a White­hall work­table is the great­est of all min­is­te­r­ial fallacies.

It reminds me of Campbell’s Law, first stated by Don­ald T. Camp­bell, the psy­chol­o­gist who pio­neered the study of human creativity:

The more any quan­ti­ta­tive social indi­ca­tor is used for social decision-making, the more sub­ject it will be to cor­rup­tion pres­sures and the more apt it will be to dis­tort and cor­rupt the social processes it is intended to monitor.

Michael Gove might well be push­ing for a par­tic­u­lar ver­sion of his­tory to be imposed on England’s schools, but he is obvi­ously less than keen to learn history’s lessons himself.

This has been cross-posted from my new blog at iamlearner.net, which I have estab­lished to sup­port and com­ple­ment my busi­ness web­site at consult.iamlearner.net.

In the light of my recent post, about the I Am Malala cam­paign, it was inter­est­ing to come across the intel­li­gent and thought­ful arti­cle in this month’s Prospect Mag­a­zine by Clare Lock­hart of the Insti­tute for State Effec­tive­ness. Clare believes that the UN’s obses­sion with pri­mary edu­ca­tion in its Mil­len­nium Devel­op­ment Goals has backfired.

The UN’s MDGs were set more than a decade ago, and the one that is clos­est to being met is the one on uni­ver­sal pri­mary edu­ca­tion, with around 88% of school-age chil­dren across the devel­op­ing world in pri­mary school (in 2010, up from 81% in 1999). Clare’s arti­cle argues that the focus on pri­mary edu­ca­tion has had the unin­tended con­se­quence of skew­ing invest­ment away from sec­ondary edu­ca­tion and voca­tional train­ing, both vital instru­ments in achiev­ing the con­tin­u­ing and grow­ing needs of coun­tries for:

.…their next gen­er­a­tion of doc­tors, nurses, engi­neers, accoun­tants, and project managers.…without sec­ondary and ter­tiary edu­ca­tion, a coun­try can­not run its health, agri­cul­ture and finan­cial systems.…

And iron­i­cally, given the MDG’s right­ful focus on the crit­i­cal impor­tance of edu­ca­tion, this skew­ing effect has also led to:

.…a short­fall of teach­ers to train the gen­er­a­tion beyond them. Even main­tain­ing pri­mary edu­ca­tion ser­vices, espe­cially in the coun­tries with grow­ing pop­u­la­tions, requires large num­bers to be edu­cated at sec­ondary and voca­tional levels.

Clare is, of course, very care­ful to state that she does not want to see invest­ment in sec­ondary and ter­tiarty edu­ca­tion at the expense of the pri­mary sec­tor. She is advo­cat­ing a more bal­anced approach that recog­nises the need for con­tin­ued and strate­gic invest­ment in all key sec­tors. This bal­anced approach requires cer­tain key ques­tions to be asked, and answered:

• What are the skills a soci­ety needs to develop and strengthen its pub­lic, pri­vate and civic sectors?
• How can a coun­try equip its next gen­er­a­tion with the skills to meet those needs?
• How can edu­ca­tion and train­ing pol­icy bal­ance the imper­a­tives of sta­bil­ity, eco­nom­ics and civil inclusion?

There’s a lot to think about in this piece, but I think I am per­suaded that the orig­i­nal set of MDGs failed to set a firm and sus­tain­able foun­da­tion for the bal­anced approach that Clare favours — given that the suc­ces­sor goals are being debated right now, I would hope that these are issues that will be given due consideration.

This has been cross-posted from my new blog at iamlearner.net, which I have estab­lished to sup­port and com­ple­ment my busi­ness web­site at consult.iamlearner.net.

…the most recent fig­ures pub­lished by UNESCO in their Global Mon­i­tor­ing Report show that 61 mil­lion chil­dren don’t receive an education.

A fur­ther 200 mil­lion remain illit­er­ate despite attend­ing school. Equal­ity of oppor­tu­nity remains a hol­low dream.

The peti­tion in sup­port of Malala Yousafzai has now attracted almost 1 mil­lion sig­na­tures world­wide. As Gor­don Brown points out in a piece on the BBC news web­site, time is run­ning out on meet­ing the Mil­le­nium Devel­op­ment Goals. Progress has, to say the least, stut­tered, with many mil­lions of chil­dren still work­ing instead of learn­ing, many mil­lions of girls still being forced out of the class­room and into love­less marriages:

We have around 40 months to meet our dead­line for uni­ver­sal edu­ca­tion. We have one chance left to deliver in these three years. If the tragic story of Malala tells us any­thing, it is that we must do all we can to achieve it.

The Tal­iban thought they were halt­ing a one-girl cam­paign for the edu­ca­tion of girls; instead they cre­ated the impe­tus for world­wide move­ment that should strengthen the resolve of those world lead­ers who meet at the joint sum­mit on this crit­i­cal issue of our time between inter­na­tional agen­cies and gov­ern­ments in April of next year.

They need to do it for Malala and the many mil­lions of girls and boys around the word who are still being denied a basic edu­ca­tion. There is sim­ply no more impor­tant inter­na­tional cam­paign than this one.

Our approach to for­mal assess­ment seems to be so out­dated that even pub quizzes are show­ing it up. The irony of a team of teach­ers win­ning a pub quiz by access­ing the answers on their smart phones shouldn’t be lost on us. The kids I teach can access every­thing which is blocked to them in the class­room by step­ping out­side into the cor­ri­dor to use their phones. They can access Face­book and Youtube and Twit­ter and pos­si­bly the answer to every ques­tion we are cur­rently ask­ing in school.

Even in the pub, after his cus­tom­ary half-pint of gui­ness, Kenny Pieper can see how out­moded our sys­tems of for­mal assess­ment are.

Closed ques­tions, closed books and devices switched off are all signs of a mode of assess­ment that, while they might offer results that can pop­u­late league tables, really offer lit­tle else of value today.

Our rela­tion­ship to infor­ma­tion has changed, but the processes that test that rela­tion­ship have not.

.…for dis­cus­sion:

• The school as we know it is based on a lim­ited under­stand­ing of human nature
• School can­not be reformed in iso­la­tion from reform of the wider soci­ety in which it exists
• School has fail­ure built in
• The con­cept of mass school­ing — one-size-fits-all-schooling — is no longer valid
• School, by its nature, is designed to build soci­ety from the top-down, and ignores the crit­i­cal­ity of cul­ture in enabling learn­ing from the bot­tom up
• School iso­lates learn­ing from life
• School is the pri­mary instru­ment for social engi­neer­ing in soci­ety today — and all such social engi­neer­ing is doomed to failure
• Ped­a­gogy in school today is lim­ited by the struc­tures that school imposes
• Dis­in­ter­me­di­a­tion will hap­pen (is hap­pen­ing?) to schools — but do not look to news­pa­pers, the music indus­try or the travel indus­try as mod­els of how this will play out

Just some thoughts.….