THIS ARTICLE ARGUES AGAINST SIXTH FORM SPECIALISATION
1947
Education in the Sixth Form
The Education Act of 1944 opened up a view of great possibilities in educational development. The Ministry’s new pamphlet on Secondary Education is outstanding in its recognition and clear statement of the fact that educational policy and method should be concerned with every aspect of a child’s development, with his growth in body, mind and personality, as a living whole. If its hopes for the future of the “new” secondary schools – those that are to accommodate the bulk of the child population – are realised without too much delay, the nation will have an immense achievement to its credit.
The pamphlet, however, has little to say about the education of the outstandingly intelligent child. In a short chapter on the Grammar Schools a few interesting hints are thrown out as to possible developments, but there is no evidence that the Ministry recognises the strong and well-established influences that limit the Grammar School’s development, unless it is in the fact that the Ministry seems to avoid the issue by saying that to secure flexibility and unity in the curriculum is a problem that “only the schools themselves can solve”. It is important to show that this is untrue.
There are some disturbing facts is to be faced and serious needs to be met if the material expansion of educational facilities is to be accompanied by the cultural revolution the country ought to achieve. A hint of the disturbing facts is to be found in a report, given recently in the Times Educational Supplement[1], of a Manchester University investigation into the general mental quality and basic knowledge of candidates for Science scholarships. What it reveals is alarming. Intensified specialisation during war-time has encouraged schoolboys to master very advanced work (e.g. in atomic structure) to the neglect of basic knowledge, and so to neglect their general education as to become almost illiterate. Even what they know many of them cannot express coherently.
Although the investigation reveals a degeneration relative to pre-war days, many teachers who knew what was happening within the schools would agree that the tendencies it reveals were in some measure evident long ago. From the point of view of those concerned with education and in the comprehensive sense, with the regeneration of true culture among our people, with the development of really fine mental qualities in the nation’s youth, advanced work in the secondary school has for the last thirty years given much reason for disquiet and little for congratulation. Even if we were to admit that the technical instruction in Sixth forms has been excellent in method and achievement, there would still be little reason for complacency in view of the desperate situation into which unbalanced technical achievement has thrust the modern world.
The condition of advanced science teaching in schools is especially important in view of the Barlow report and the demand for a greatly increased output of scientists. Are we giving enough attention to the quality of our young scientists and have we taken any significant steps to discover what goes to the training of a really good scientific worker? In his report of this Manchester investigation Mr Lovell stresses the importance of team work in modern science and the consequent need for those civilised characteristics and general mental qualities that make co-operation and clear understanding possible. I would go further and say that we still need the qualities that mark the outstanding scientist. The greatest scientists seem nearly all to have been men of great mental sensitiveness and clear imagination, with a facility for the most lucid expression of their thoughts. Remember that a scientist has to state things to himself as well as to others, and therefore an illiterate scientist is a inhibited one. It is such qualities as those mentioned above that make possible the flash of inspiration that suddenly illuminated a complex research and simplifies its problems. We shall have these qualities in our future scientists only if during their school days we keep their interests and their field of awareness as wide as possible and refuse to put them in blinkers. By narrowing their field of vision to specialised subjects we shut out a whole world of valuable stimuli. By forcing the pace we may destroy creative genius.
It should be added that the science teachers as a group are not to be blamed for what has been happening. Anyone who follows the activities of their Association will realise that educationally they are among the most enlightened. But they are not the master of the situation in which they find themselves. Moreover, it must not be assumed that what Mr Lovell’s report calls the “horrors of specialisation” are seen only in the science student. We may find the worst illiteracy in him because less of his time is spent in writing. But specialisation can be just as serious in its results, even in those subjects known as the humanities, if we judge the results from the point of view of the general mental attitude encouraged and of the education of the student as a socially and politically responsible human being. It is still possible for a history student to secure an honours degree in his subject, knowing nothing about science, or even about its impact on history except in a uselessly superficial manner. It is probably true to say that history students, or student in any other arts faculties, are no better adjusted to the mental demands of the modern world that are the science students. History students who do not understand science – and these are the great majority – are not historians but antiquarians. For them history is a subject of academic study, not something we live in and make. Even students of literature, called upon as they are to try to understand human life in all its aspects, often become remote and ineffectual because their vision is limited so early to “set books” and periods.
As an aside, why should it not be possible for an advanced pupil to study both science and history and to submit them both for a scholarship? No combination could be better for the understanding of the modern world, yet no Sixth Form organisation as far as I know allows it. From every point of view, except that of its educational value, it would be inadvisable!
Looking over the whole field of Sixth Form work in schools, at a time when the country is trying to make an open road to the university, the prospect is depressing. We see youngsters encouraged to “get rid” of School Certificate, and thus to get rid of any pretence at general education, at the age of fourteen or less, in order to have as long a time as possible for specialisation. The effect is felt right through the school. As soon as a pupil can provide the “right” answers to the usual question, long before there is any coherence in his thinking, any power of assimilation, most of his studies are cast aside, to remain in his memory only as school subjects, devoid of relevance to life. Girls’ schools seem to show rather more wisdom than boys’ schools in this matter.
If we do not call a halt to stop this process, the ultimate effect on our culture will be deplorable. What is to be done about it? The answer is to be found in the recognition of this fact, true in education as elsewhere: we get what we are prepared to pay for. We make the payment in the form of a scholarship to a few of the boys and girls at the end of this tragic process of specialisation. In spite of the increased number of awards, the competition remains as fierce as ever and the payment goes not to the candidate who can provide the best evidence of being having been educated, but to the one who has been most successful in canalising his interest and energies into a narrow field. The award if State and County scholarships remains based on Higher Certificate with two of three subjects taken at the scholarship level. The candidates whose ill-balanced training the Manchester report deplores are among those who score highly on advanced questions.
Administrative difficulties prevent the personal investigation of a candidate’s mental qualities, awards have to be made according to lists of marks and, apparently, no account is taken of the candidate’s achievements in School Certificate – the only statistical evidence of general education.
The Ministry instructs the local authorities in making awards to look only for the student of “high promise”. Promise of what? The writer has it on good authority that this implies those who are likely to obtain a first or good second class honours degree. We are no nearer to a definition of “promise” in terms of education, but even accepting this, are we certain that the method of selection is the best way of achieving this end? Do the scholarship holders generally secure these degrees and the rejects (if they read the University) fail to get them? I suspect there is a sufficient margin of error to invalidate any clear line between the quality of the winners and that of many of the losers. Some counties recognise this by making it possible for those who have an ordinary Higher Certificate but who gain university entrance, to apply for assistance. In other counties it is “all or nothing”, and thus there is at present a most serious anomaly in the system of awards; to many boys and girls it is a serious sad misfortune that they live in certain counties.
Undoubtedly there are many teachers and parents who are as acutely aware as the writer of the evils of specialisation, but it is also true that if they insist on delaying School Certificate to an age at which what is learnt can become significant and assimilated, if they insist during the following two or three years on the maintenance of wide interests and awareness and the acceptance of social responsibilities, in short if they insist on being educators – then they jeopardise the children’s prospect of a university education.
It must be clear that it is the child of the poorer parents that who suffers most; the child for whom most of our educational battles have been fought. The middle-class boy can, if he wishes to, keep up his interests, take “college entrance” which is usually of moderate academic standard, get himself assessed in a more personal way by interview, and have reserved for him one of the third class seats for which poorer children are not allowed to compete. In point of fact a good many of these young people, who have done nothing startling at school, but whose adolescence has not been overshadowed and dulled by anxiety, secure first class degrees. That should make us think. For the working class child examination success is of the most compelling urgency. As Spencer Lesson until recently Head of Winchester, wrote in the Times Educational Supplement for December 21st. 1946…..Only the strongest schools, that are assured of unusual teaching strength and unusual strength of boy or girl material on which to work, can safely ignore this pressure without risk to the prospects of their scholarship candidates; for a majority education at that stage may in very truth cease to be education at all and become no more than the acquisition of specialist knowledge in order to meet the cost of university education.
The Labour government is undoubtedly in earnest about education. But there may be among its supporters certain habits of thought standing in the way of progress though arising from something real and true in the past. To many of the earliest workers in the Labour movement, education, even the acquisition of the ability to read, must have been a tremendous thing, giving them a sense of their place in history and a new understanding of life, as well as a political tool. Later on, education in its socially organised form became the ladder up which the poor man fought his way to equality with the rich. For many a politically conscious working man the “scholarship” from the elementary school was the first rung on the ladder for his child and became of almost sacred significance. Its significance is transferred now to the University scholarship and there is a danger that those who fought their way up the ladder will continue to think that because it was a necessary ladder it is therefore a good ladder. In reality, many a child has paid a heavy price in spirit by the time he has reached the top. He has become dull and pedestrian just when we need him to be immensely alive and creative.
The first move towards a redirection of advanced education in school lies in the hands of those who, under the direction of the Ministry, are re-planning the examination system. We know that School Certificate at least in its present form, is to be abolished. But school Certificate with all its inadequacies was is at least a test of learning over a fairly wide field. The Higher Certificate examination is to be in two parts, one of which is to be used for University entrance and presumably scholarship purposes. In this proposal there is nothing to assure us that extreme specialisation will not continue to be the condition for entrance and scholarship; in fact the partition of the examination almost hints at the opposite. The Ministry has given us plenty of evidence of its interests in the education of the average child as a whole person in a social context. When can we have the assurance that our future arrangements will have an equal regard for the general quality in mind and personality of the intellectually gifted?
Kenneth C. Barnes
Archive reference PP/KCB 6/6/2 document 11