Sunday, May 01, 2005

REBELLION IN FAVOUR OF STANDARDS IN FRANCE

They reject so-called "child-centred" teaching in favour of knowledge transmission

'Modern pedagogy's only use is to justify the abandonment of the ambitions we once had for our children. We are facing a real cultural catastrophe', writes Marc Le Bris, a 50-year-old head teacher at a primary school in Medreac, France. His book is an attack on the child-centred philosophy that has dominated reforms of the French education system in the past 30 years, and a defence of the Enlightenment idea of an education based on the transmission of knowledge to every citizen.

A schoolchild in the riots of May 1968, the author of this passionate book started his teaching career as a moderniser. When he left teacher training in 1977, he had learnt 'one thing above all': that 'old-fashioned teachers were almost incompetent; they were ridiculous...unthinking labourers working the wrong way round'. 'Yet', he writes, 'the pupils of the older teachers...obtained the best results. At the start of secondary school, their pupils were better prepared. My pupils, pampered by modern methods, were subjected to an academic handicap of which I am ashamed today.'

Along with Rachel Boutonnet and Fanny Capel, Le Bris is a member of Sauver les Lettres (Save Literature) a collective founded by teachers in the year 2000, during the protests that forced education minister Claude Allegre's resignation. The organisation campaigns against child-centred education through its website, numerous books and other public initiatives. At the beginning of February 2005, one of the group's surveys showing the decline in French pupils' spelling ability received wide publicity in the French and the British press.

Child-centred education is based on the constructivist theory of learning, according to which learners construct their own knowledge by analysing experience. For Marc Le Bris, this is a false theory, because the whole of humanity, not the individual child, constructs knowledge. The dominance of constructivism means that pupils will be, at best, autodidacts lacking the solidity of systematic learning.

In Britain there is also a strong aversion to the transmission of knowledge. The idea that pupils must be 'active' and become 'independent learners', rather than depend on the teacher, is seldom questioned. An independent school head teacher recently asked me: 'We are often accused of spoon-feeding our pupils. How can we help them become independent learners?'

Rachel Boutonnet could have answered that question. A French primary school teacher with a master in philosophy, she kept a diary throughout her teacher training and her first year as a teacher, which she published in 2003. She rejects the idea that traditional teaching methods make pupils passive: 'I think it is impossible to learn in a passive way. If you have learnt something, you must have been active;...in order to listen, you must concentrate. What the speaker is saying, you must make your own. This often requires effort and will power.'

She also questions the belief that so-called active methods lead to pupils' autonomy: 'the fact that pupils are "in research mode" doesn't mean that they are active. Often...they just ape an activity. They go through the motions that the teacher has scripted for them. Intellectually speaking, they are passive.'

The constructivist method is not so much an alternative to previous teaching methods as an anti-method. Boutonnet captures well the destructive impulse behind it: 'by refusing to transmit knowledge, the teacher trainers nevertheless transmitted something. They could not avoid this, since they were in the position of teachers.... This something was the rejection of knowledge. In this, they were the experts.'....

Despite overwhelming evidence over the years that synthetic phonics is by far the best method (2), educationalists in France and the UK have been reluctant to implement its adoption, because its principles conflict with the child-centred model. As Geraldine Bedell explains in an excellent article in the Observer, this resistance is due to the belief 'that synthetic phonics is traditionalist teaching of the stuffy grammarian type.... True, some educationalist conservatives may favour it - but there is nothing cramping about being able to read'

More -- much more -- here




LIFTING UP THE POOR

Dumbed-down education where qualifications are increasingly meaningless means that poor but bright kids now have no way of proving themselves

What if academic selection was fundamentally less elitist than the current regime of bog-standard comprehensives with personalised learning plans? It's just a thought. Or it was, before a new study seemed to show precisely this point. The study, carried out by researchers at the London School of Economics (LSE) and widely reported in Monday's newspapers, compares social mobility in Britain with the situation in seven other wealthy countries. It found that British children from poorer families have less chance of improving their lives than those in every country apart from the USA. Unlike any other country, social mobility in Britain has worsened over time - which, apparently, is partly a consequence of the demise of the grammar school system.

So kids who are born poor in Britain get a lousy education and stay poor for life. This grim conclusion will come as little surprise to anybody with a basic understanding of real life in Britain 2005. It should, however, come as something of a shock to those in the upper echelons of policymaking, who continue to peddle the fantasy that everybody gets equal educational chances these days, and if all kids just had more schooling, social inequalities would magically disappear. So three-years olds are pressured into pre-school, 18-year-olds are pushed into university, and the Labour Party manifesto promises 'No more dropping out at 16'. When will they ever learn?

Education is not a panacea for social problems. It never has been, and it never will be. A decent education, within a hierarchy that rewards academic merit, can help a few individuals progress beyond the circumstances of their birth - enabling, in theory at least, the son of a dustman to become a lawyer, the daughter of a dinner lady to become a doctor. The problem that this study seems to show is that in Britain today, we don't even have that.

The intellectual hierarchy embedded in the grammar school system has been flattened out and levelled down to provide every child with an equally mediocre education. Those who do well in this situation are not the children who are poor but bright, but the children who simply happen to be born middle-class, living in areas with better-resourced schools that are attractive to better teachers and with access to private tuitition or private schooling, and greater ability and expectation to go on to higher education. As one news report described the LSE's findings: 'Educational opportunities improved for those born in the early 1980s but social inequalities widened because children from wealthier families benefited overwhelmingly from the increase in places at university'

How did it all go so badly wrong? Whilst international comparisons of social mobility are useful, the issue is not that Britain fares badly compared to other wealthy nations. The fact that four of the eight countries studied by the LSE were Norway, Denmark, Finland and Sweden, much less populous and diverse societies than the UK, with a very different relationship to the state, indicates the limitations of such comparisons. And it is important not to romanticise a 'golden age' of grammar schooling. Many of those who pushed for comprehensive education in the 1960s were motivated by well-founded concerns about the way that academic selection reproduced and ossified social inequalities. Grammar schools selected a small academic elite, comprising children who passed the 11-plus examination. This provided the scope for some working-class kids to 'make good' in education - but it was generally the case that those who came from wealthier backgrounds were most likely to achieve educationally, whilst those from the poorest backgrounds were most likely to end up taking the second-best secondary modern route into manual work.

Today's stubborn campaign to abolish Britain's few remaining grammar schools seems to be motivated by little more a base desire to bring all schools down to the level of the bog-standard comprehensive. The argument seems to boil down to: 'If our kids can't have a good education, why should anybody else's?' But half a century ago, when grammar schools were not simply the odd quirky institutions but part of the established education system, the arguments against the grammar system often involved a genuine, if idealistic, belief that all children could enjoy the quality education that had previously been offered only to a few, giving all children, irrespective of background, a shot at academic and social advancement. That this never happened was not because of the abolition of the grammar system, or the failings of the concept of comprehensive schools. It was because of the UK's increasingly instrumental approach to education.

In today's society, increasingly devoid of either political vision or economic dynamism, education is promoted as the way to solve all manner of social ills and realise all kinds of individual ambitions. Under the weight of all these expectations, it fails to fulfil any of them; and in the process, education is screwed up as well. So we end up with the worst of all possible worlds.

Schools become sites of socialisation and life skills, with pupils put through a battery of courses on sex, drugs, citizenship and 'circle time'. For every overblown social 'problem', from teenage pregnancy to childhood obesity to the pensions crisis, there is a policy-solution that revolves around the schools. Train up the dinner ladies! Teach saving and budgeting schools! Install nurses with unlimited supplies of emergency contraception! Enforce more physical education! End bullying, child abuse and domestic violence!

As the importance of knowledge - education - moves further and further down the list of a school's priorities, the more we hear tales of woe about university undergraduates who cannot structure an essay or new recruits to the job market who can barely spell their own name.You wouldn't now expect any school-leaver to be able to recite a poem or conjugate French verbs, though they are frighteningly well-versed in the language of self-esteem.

Education is also, paradoxically, promoted as the key vehicle for social mobility. If kids start 'pre-school' at aged three, we are told, they might become middle-class in outlook by aged five. The more qualifications that children ratchet up whilst at secondary school, taking their pick from a bewildering array, the more likely they will be to go on to university - and everybody knows that a degree is how you increase your earnings, so that's social mobility, isn't it?

The actual consequence of persistent grade inflation and accreditation mania is conveniently ignored. When all have top grades, those who choose university are those who can afford to spend three years frittering away their pocket money and immediate future; those whom universities choose are the candidates who have interesting travelling experiences, middle-class hobbies and intantigible qualities like 'confidence', because who's to tell if they are brighter or dimmer than anyone else in the A-grade pile?; secretaries have degrees in business studies, are called executives and are paid like secretaries. The degree-as-social-mobility line is a con, and no doubt many of the refuseniks from poor backgrounds are smart enough to know this.

The crusade against academic elitism has made the education system into a naked reflection of a more basic social elitism, where 'What's your name and where d'you come from?' ends up counting for more than intellectual application, and good fortune is more a driver of social mobility than exam results. The idea that education can move people forward in leaps and bounds has been usurped by the prosaic notion of 'value added' - that if children leave school slightly more literate and numerate than when they started, that's good enough. But it isn't, and it shouldn't be. Real education has its own value; today's brand of vapid instrumentalism isn't worth the interactive whiteboard it's written on.

Source

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For greatest efficiency, lowest cost and maximum choice, ALL schools should be privately owned and run -- with government-paid vouchers for the poor and minimal regulation.

The NEA and similar unions worldwide believe that children should be thoroughly indoctrinated with Green/Left, feminist/homosexual ideology but the "3 R's" are something that kids should just be allowed to "discover"


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