I remember how it was -- JR
Saturday, January 22, 2022
‘Progressive education’ faces a steep learning curve
CLAIRE LEHMANN
As the summer holidays wind up and children return to the classroom in coming weeks, debates about education are likely to heat up – and for good reason.
Schools in Australia have been intermittently closed over the past two years, with pupils in Melbourne and Sydney spending the bulk of last year at home in front of a computer screen. The impact of school closures on educational outcomes is not yet known, but it is likely that a concerning trend will have been accelerated.
Every three years, an organisation called PISA (the Program for International Student Assessment) tests a randomly selected sample of pupils from OECD countries to assess levels of education around the world. The most recent set of results, released in 2019, confirmed that standards in Australian education were in decline, with 41 per cent of our 15-year-olds failing to meet what are considered minimum standards for reading, and 20 per cent being functionally illiterate.
Why? Education researcher and primary school teacher Greg Ashman believes Australia’s educational decline is in large part due to a suite of teaching methods loosely described as “progressive education”. Progressive education is not synonymous with progressive politics; rather, it is an approach to teaching that prioritises skills-based learning over memorisation.
In The Brain That Changes Itself, Norman Doidge writes: “Up through the 19th and early 20th centuries, a classical education often included rote memorisation of long poems in foreign languages, which strengthened auditory memory (hence thinking in language) and an almost fanatical attention to handwriting, which probably helped strengthen motor capacities and thus not only helped handwriting but added speed and fluency to reading and speaking. Often a great deal of attention was paid to exact elocution and to perfecting the pronunciation of words. Then in the 1960s educators dropped such traditional exercises from the curriculum because they were too rigid, boring, and ‘not relevant’. But the loss of these drills has been costly; they may have been the only opportunity these students had to systematically exercise the brain function that gives us fluency and grace with symbols.”
The most widely valued skills in progressive education are not fluency and grace with language or mathematics, but the higher order skills of critical thinking and problem solving. An article published by the ABC on Monday, “Could our education system be more engaging and fun for our kids? These schools think so and are giving it a crack”, reflects this approach well:
“Students and educators spend parts of their days outside school grounds, exploring local parks and beaches and interacting with the community. They have reading and maths lessons on the beach … Ms Nuss (Principal of the Village School at Coolangatta) started to question why school couldn’t be more like kindergarten … Why can’t children wear tutus to school? Take their shoes off in the classroom? … Our unofficial motto is ‘Failing Forward’. We fail almost everyday at something; as long as we can learn from it, it was a good fail or lesson.”
This may all sound harmless in and of itself, but there is no evidence wearing tutus or taking shoes off helps children learn to read and write and memorise their times tables.
Another teacher profiled in the article reports that “There are fabulous teachers trying to make their classrooms more relevant and engaging, and schools adopting programs to enhance skills and more real-life experiences, but there are still many, many classrooms that have a teacher at the front of the room, kids sitting in rows being asked to regurgitate information without thinking, analysing, critically or creatively problem solving to come up with solutions”.
The problem with such an assertion is that there is no evidence critical thinking and problem solving are skills that can actually be taught. Psychologists suspect we can only think critically about a subject after we have accrued some deep knowledge in it. This makes intuitive sense. To think critically about 19th century English literature you would need to have read Dickens, the Brontes, Hardy and more. To think critically about trigonometry, you would need to have developed some deep mathematical knowledge. Critical thinking does not occur in a vacuum.
The notion that critical thinking is a skill that cuts across domains is a fallacious one. Expertise in one area often corresponds with blindness and ignorance in another. Such epistemic overconfidence leads epidemiologists to pontificate on racism and medical doctors to sound off about climate change.
It is often argued today that memorising facts is redundant because knowledge is just a couple of clicks away. This may be true, but as our digital information ecosystems continue to be polluted with propaganda and disinformation, it is not an ideal scenario to have children searching the web for reliable sources. Ideally, children would accrue a foundation in the basic disciplines before venturing into the Wild West of the internet.
The educational mania for soft skills comes from a place of good intent. We all want our children to be able to communicate well, think creatively, critically and solve problems. We all want our children to be able to adapt to novel environments and find solutions that are not immediately obvious. Nobody wants their child to sit inside a dusty classroom rote-learning arbitrary facts they will have no use for later in life.
However, children only get one shot at school. The schooling years are some of the most important years of their lives, and time squandered during this period can never be regained.
If teachers want their pupils to think critically, the first step is helping them to build a deep foundation of knowledge that enables them to do so.
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Facemasks no longer required in English classrooms
The move, announced by the Prime Minister on Wednesday, comes alongside the immediate lifting of guidance advising people to work from home if possible.
And Boris Johnson said the legal requirement for people with Covid-19 to self-isolate is set to be axed by March 24 - and earlier if possible.
He said that in future, the virus would be treated like flu.
It comes after Covid-19 infection levels fell in three of the four UK nations for the first time since early December, according to the Office for National Statistics (ONS).
Mr Johnson said this data showed that while there were some places where cases were likely to continue rising, including in primary schools, “our scientists believe it is likely that the omicron wave has now peaked nationally”.
Face coverings will not be required for teachers or pupils in classrooms from Thursday, and no longer needed in communal areas from next Thursday, when the Plan B rules expire.
Union leaders reacted with anger on Wednesday, accusing the Prime Minister of flouting his “duty of care” to teachers.
The UK’s largest teacher union warned last night against lifting restrictions “too quickly” saying that this could lead to “more disruption” for schools.
Dr Mary Bousted, joint general secretary of the National Education Union, said: “Rather than announcements aimed at saving Boris Johnson’s job, [the] Government should be exercising a duty of care to the nation’s pupils and the staff who educate them.”
She acknowledged that Covid-19 cases in secondary schools had fallen but said it was “uncertain” that this trend would continue since children had only been back in the classroom a few weeks following the Christmas break.
However, recent polling by parent voice charity Parentkind found that almost two thirds of parents of secondary school children are not in favour of face masks in the classroom.
Nadhim Zahawi, the Education Secretary, said: “Face-to-face education for all students has consistently been my priority, and that is why I am removing face coverings from classrooms – as promised – on the earliest possible date, making sure there is as little disruption to students’ learning as possible.”
Business leaders expressed relief about the end of guidance advising people to work from home, with hopes that the change - which takes immediate effect - could spur economic recovery.
The Prime Minister said the moves over the next week, which will also see the end to mandatory Covid-19 passes, will return the country to Plan A.
Plans to bring Britain closer to normality by spring
But he signalled an intention to go further, and bring Britain closer to normality by spring.
He told the Commons: “There will soon come a time when we can remove the legal requirement to self-isolate altogether, just as we don’t place legal obligations on people to isolate if they have flu.
“The self-isolation regulations expire on March 24, at which point I very much expect not to renew them. Indeed, were the data to allow, I’d like to seek a vote in this House to bring that date forward.”
The Prime Minister promised a “long-term strategy for living with Covid-19” which would “protect our liberty and avoid restrictions in future by relying instead on medical advances”.
On the use of face coverings, Mr Johnson said: “In the country at large, we will continue to suggest the use of face coverings in enclosed or crowded spaces, particularly when you come into contact with people you don’t normally meet, but we will trust the judgment of the British people and no longer criminalise anyone who chooses not to wear one.”
On Wednesday night, Sajid Javid, the Health Secretary, said Britain had reached a moment “we can all be proud of”, adding: “I’d always said that we’d open up the country as soon as the data supports it.”
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Could the art of handwriting be lost forever due to technology?
Handwriting could “go the way of Latin and Greek” and be “lost within a generation”, a leading author has warned after news that a major exams board was set to trial digital exams at dozens of schools.
Colm Toibin, famous for penning novels such as Brooklyn and The Testament of Mary, said that “it would be a huge loss if [handwriting] were to go”, and called learning to write an “an identity-forming business”.
AQA, Britain’s largest exams board and the provider of three-fifths of all GCSE and A-levels in England, announced on Monday that it was trialling online exams for GCSE maths and English at 60 to 100 schools this summer.
If successful, the programme would be rolled out across most subjects, although Colin Hughes, the chief executive of AQA, told The Times that the board would keep some written exams to protect handwriting from dying out.
“I would be very reluctant to move to a situation where students could get through the whole system without ever actually having to show that they can write something down using a pen and paper,” he said.
He also claimed that online exams would be much greener than shipping millions of exam papers around the country before collecting them all again in Milton Keynes to digitise them.
Speaking to BBC Radio 4’s Today programme, Tobin suggested that opting for convenience could kill off handwriting and its esoteric charms.
“If you began to say everything would be much more efficient on a laptop, [handwriting] would go eventually, it would within a generation, almost disappear,” he said, adding: “It goes the way of Latin and Greek.”
He also lamented the loss of handwriting as a marker of identity, adding: “You would know when a letter came from someone, oh that’s from Auntie so-and-so, that’s her handwriting.”
Asked about his own writing habits, Tobin said he wrote all his own novels in longhand form. “It sort of matters to me that I’m actually making the letters, that I can touch the paper, that I’m somehow more deeply involved,” he said.
In contrast, recent research has found that much of the general public has almost no need for the scratch of pen against notepad, let alone extended longhand writing.
A survey of 2,000 people last September found that one in 10 people had not put pen to paper in over a year, while a quarter of 18- to 24-year-olds had never written a letter or kept a diary.
The ability to write clearly is not directly linked to literacy, despite popular perceptions, although a 2014 study found improved recall from people who handwrote notes during lectures.
The study’s author’s hypothesised that the slower nature of handwriting forces individuals to paraphrase and therefore mentally process spoken
For all the author’s gloom, there are some signs that the public shares his affection for the personal nature of handwriting. In 2019, when the British Museum put on an exhibition on writing, it asked visitors how they expected to send a birthday card in 2069.
The top answer: a handwritten card.
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My other blogs: Main ones below
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/ (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
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