How shall we judge Education?
This is not a happy time in the educational world. It is a time of doubt and difficulty, uncertainty and fear. Schools are still working under great difficulties, often unable to get teachers for urgently necessary subjects. Teachers’ salaries still lag behind the cost of living, and new buildings that were hoped for may seem as far off as ever. There is a bulge in the school population that cannot be accommodated without loss of efficiency. Parents are disturbed and often angered by what appear to be the injustices of the selection tests for secondary schools, and bewildered by the uncertainty widely evident among even the experts as to whether the tests are satisfactory.
It is unfortunate that in this time of anxiety there has been something of a campaign, conducted sometimes at a low level, to play upon parents’ fear and bewilderment, questioning the competenc[e] of teachers and training colleges and the sanity of the inspectorate. The campaign is directed largely against what are called progressive methods and the harm they may be doing to basic training. Thought (sic) it may have begun with some justification this campaign is likely to throw people off their balance at a time when they have been made unusually anxious by the procedure of the selection tests. A remark of an inspector, torn from its context, is used to make the inspector look not only foolish but dangerously irresponsible – and with him perhaps the whole inspectorate.
In this unhappy situation I want to appeal for steady thinking and standards of judgement based on an understanding of what children need, not on fear and distrust. We must not let education rock backwards and forwards, as politics tends to do, between the advanced and the reactionary. We must not let children become the mere instruments for experiment on the part of teachers who want to turn everything upside down. On the other hand we must not allow teaching methods to turn back to the time when instruction was given merely to make them efficient tools in offices and factories. Children are human, they are persons, and our educational methods must be judged as coolly and objectively as possible by what they do for the whole child.
We must beware of being moved by scares. There’s this question of illiteracy. It is true that a surprising number of army entrants proved to be illiterate. But the amry (sic) sweeps every man into its net; and in a time of full employment, when everyone not in a mental hospital has to be considered for a job, we are bound to discover, and be exasperated by, illiteracy, dullness, incompetence. These things have always existed, but circumstances are thrusting them under our noses. Neither teachers nor teaching methods are always to blame Most of my teaching life I have been in contact with the grammar school type of child: the top 15% of the nation’s intelligence. Even in some of these children one can find illiteracy – serious difficulties in expression and extraordinary spelling, which no teaching, either of the stimulating or plodding sort can seems able to eradicate. Now remember that the great majority of teachers – those in the primary and secondary modern schools, are coping with a range of intelligence going right down to those on the borderline of mental deficiency. Those actually classified as mentally deficient are put in special schools, but there is a very large number of children almost equally deifcient (sic) in the ordinary school classes – large classes – and they are working often alongside others of average or high ability. I think these near-to-bprderline (sic) cases are the most difficult and the most neglected of all. Without greatly extended school accommodation and the provision of teachers specially trained to cope with their difficulties it is inevitable that many of them will remain illiterate.
Then there is the scare that is being raised about certain modern methods that are here and there being used – activity methods. There is a fair amount to be justly criticised in these, just as there is in the criticsm (sic) of visual aids, esoecially (sic) when they become a fashion too much encouraged by the manufacturers of gadgets. But it would be sad if the criticisms, some of them highly coloured, were to result in the sweeping away of something which, at least in intention, is necessary for the all-round development of children. These activity methods differ from orthodox or old-fashioned methods in that the children, instead of spending most of their time sitting in desks listening or doing things that are the same for all, move about a good deal, perhaps making things that are based upon their classwork, or in some way giving their thoughts prfactical form, or through carrying out certain projects getting new ideas that will carry forward their mental development. Certainly some of the things one hears of seem pointless and futile, and I certainly sympathise with the scientists of the Royal Observatory when they find themselves bombarded with letters asking for information that could be obtained in five minutes from a book. It may even be treu (sic) that some schools are indulging in these methods just to show off. The method requires unusually good teachers able to evaluate the results of what they are doing; and in the hands of moderate teachers may produce only chaos. But let’s try to estimate what may be good in it by referring to something that is well-established and proven and which has something in common. I’m thinking of the way we teach science. A good science teacher gives his pupils plenty of work in a laboratory. This involves not only fomral (sic) exercises in which the result is known in advance, but also projects in which the pupils find out things for themselves and are encouraged to make observations not mentioned in the text-book. Through this practical work facts and ideas become real in a way they never could otherwise, and as a result science teaching has become an immensely lively and efficient thing, as anyone will realise who knows the activities of the Sciences Masters’ Association or seen its exhibitions. Now activity methods are designed to achieve a similar effectiveness over the much wider field of general education. But because that field is so much wider it is more difficult for teachers to estimate just what they are doing, how much they are really achieving. It needs a good teacher to make full use of a child’s desire to be active, and children can waste a great deal of energy. Nevertheless the intention and desire behind these methods is as good in its way as is the impulse behind scientific laboratory work. It must be watched and criticised, but with sympathy and we should not be stampeded by scaremongers into a wholesale condemnation of a development which in the long run will increase the efficiency of education as a preparation for life.
I would say that in every subject we teach it is important to make children active rather than passive. Too much sitting in desks makes slavish minds, or bored minds. To become real, ideas must be applied, acted upon, used. Education has in the past often been sterile precisely because thinking that has no issue in action, that has no understandable purpose, ultimately breeds a contempt for thinking. In science teaching I know what activity implies. I would like to go on to talk about other subjects, especially to say things about the value of the drama, but I suggest that you ask the teachers of these other subjects. That, by the way, reminds me that the one way to resolve the misunderstandings between a teacher and parent is through parent-teacher associations. Get the teacher to stand up and explain himself; if he is a good teacher he will not be afraid to do so.
Now I must carry the matter a bit further. Some of the anxiety about the quality of teaching arises from a concern about the efficiency of the nation, of its industry and leadership. What human qualities does efficiency depend upon? Certainly upon a thorough knowledge of skills whether of hand or brain. But alone these are far from enabling us to get the best from people. I think we are past the stage of thinking that only a few people need to have the ideas and the rest should obediently carry them out. We surely do recognise now that constructive ideas often come from surprising, often humble, quarters; that enterprise and ingenuity are widespread, though perhaps hidden, in our population. I note with interest that some industrialists are beginning to wonder whether a big industry is necessarily more efficient than a small one, whether perhaps the small one doesn’t get something from these hidden resources in its workers that the big organisation cannot so easily tap. I think that in schools we are still far from developing fully the latent qualities of our pupils and I am afraid of education becoming more tightly organised than it is already, lest this task should become yet more difficult. We need to encourage teaching methods, or learning methods, that enable a child to think his own thoughts, to reach down into his own unsuspected resources. We teachers all know what a thrill it is when a birght (sic) child comes out with an original idea that sets one’s own mind racing, or asks a searching question that cannot be slickly answered. To have hatched an original idea is a great stimulus to a child. Many of the less clever children could have this experience and thus make much better use of their minds; but this will not happen if we become frightened into making education a matter only of acquiring skills, cramming the three Rs, or practising inlligence (sic) tests.
In judging a school’s methods, then, I suggest you should ask yourselves whether it is bringing out a child’s originality, ingenuity, inventiveness, enterprise. It is qualities such as these that distinguish the man who moves on from the man who stays put. It ishould (sic) be asked too whether the education rpovided (sic) is fostering true courage of mind and sensitiveness of spirit, for it is qualities such as these if the nation is to be a community of responsible people and not just a collection of successful technologists. These qualities I have mentioned are an immensely important part of a nation’s capital, but we rarely recognise it. There’s a startling and saddening aspect of the difference between peace and war. We all deplore the horror and tragedy of war, yet the terrible emergency it creates brings to the surface qualities that in peace time are hidden. In war time we cease to think of any man as ordinary; on the contrary every man is a potential hero, a person with courage and resource and a capacity for responsibility. How is it that so soon in peace we go back to thinking of the man-in-the-street, and the woman too, as being just ordinary, with ordinary needs, the most ordinary possibilities. If we continue to think of them in this way we shall get no more than an ordinary contribution from them to our common life. We must not let this defeatism invade the classroom, but must bring to the surface those qualities and resources that the war proved so many of these people to possess. This means that we must at all costs maintain in the classroom the utmost liveliness and vigour.
I am tempted to throw in here the judgment (sic) of competent observers that one or two of the schools using the modern methods now being so strongly criticised have astonishing success in enabling children from the humblest of homes to gain poise and self-confidence and a sense of responsibility, in place of the shambling inferior attitude so often seen in such children. I am sure that it is by achievements of this sort that we are most likely to cope with the problem of juvenile crime. If our educational methods do not give children a sense of significance in a wholesome way of living, they will seek it in evil activities.
I do not think that this lively quality in education has to be gained at the cost of discipline; but It may cause us to think carefully about what we want in the way of displine (sic) – what true discipline is. First, it would be foolish to assume that where orderly and outwardly disciplined conditions exist good work is necessarily being done. Discipline can be demanded by a teacher for one of two reasons: because he thinks that discipline is a good thing in itself, or because he knows that discipline is necessary to get any job done efficiently and well. In the first of these reasons the person is subservient to the discipline; in the second the discipline serves the person; it is his to use intelligently. This second reason seems to me the only true reason for the establishment of discipline. Discipline for its own sake has fortunately never been happily accepted by the British people, though its creeps in here and there. And haven’t we seen the evils it can lead to elsewhere in Europe? Children can distinguish pretty well which reason a teachers (sic) has for his discipline. In their hearts they reject the man or woman who just (sic) wants discipline for its own sake or for the snese (sic) of power it gives; but they respect the teacher who himself accepts discipline in his work and shows them how it is the way to knowledge in the task they have in hand. We must not judge the quality of a discipline too hastily – by whether a class looks orderly or not. An orderly class may be utterly dead. A class disciplined in the good sense may be noisy precisely because it is intensely alive and genuinely getting on with the job. You cannot judge unless you know what is going on in the children’s minds, and you must be patient if you want to know this. My own classes are often perfectly quiet, but if anyone side-tracks me on to, say, Fred Hoyle’s theory of the origin of the earth, a glorious hubbub breaks out. An uninitiated visitor entering at this moment would no doubt be shocked. But when this hubbub subsides it is productive of lively and acute thinking.
I do think that children need to learn that the freedom they rightly desire can be achieved only through the acceptance of a discipline: the freedom to achieve their ambitions and even the freedom to enjoy life, but discipline forcibly demanded by teachers does not necessarily bring the acceptance of this fact. We have often to demand and secure discipline for our immediate purposes, but there must always be in our minds the intention to replace this by a discipline that is undestood (sic) and accepted. So it is necessary to give children some opportunity to make decisions for themselves, to organise and control some part of their lives. Examples of this are easily found in the out-of-class life of boarding schools. It is exceedingly interesting to find how boys and girls when they are relieved of the fear of adults, will discuss freely and optimistically what freedom they want, then fall to planning how to make these freedoms possible. But soon they discover that they can have the new freedom only through the acceptance of a new dsicpline (sic) – a self-imposed one. It is a matter of urgent necessity that children should be allowed to discover by real experience this most important truth. If we keep too tight a hold over them we shall make this experiences impossible, and we shall breed in them only irresponsibility.
This takes me to a yet deeper point. Teaching, I believe, is a personal matter. Among the reactions going on at the moment, I think there is a reaction from too much emphasis on the personal element in education. It is said that we must concern ourselves more closely with the objective task, less with satisfying the personal needs of children or with creating a personal relationship between adult and child. It is true that too much attention to the persoanl (sic) element may make the perosnal (sic) relationship itself go bad. But though some shift of attention may be necessary, it will never alter the fact that education takes place in a relationship of persons, and unless that relationship is fearless and wholesome the education will suffer. I would even say that the ability to turn our minds outward, to pursue truth with clear and honest minds, is an ability that is made possible largely by the quality of our rleationships (sic) at some stage in life. In other words, we set each other free to think. This may not be obvious in the more narrowly technical fields of thought, but it must be evident that in all the larger issues of life we cannot think clearly if our relations with all those with whom we exchange our thoughts are unhappy. So I say that it is most important that teachers should enjoy their job and that children should enjoy their teachers. Given these conditions, and provided other circumstances are not unfavourable, children will begin to accept and enjoy the discipline that all objective study involves.
It is impossible to be an impersoan l (sic) teacher. The man who thinks he is appears to be teaching impersoanlly (sic) not really giving himself wholeheartedly to his pupils, is in fact having a negative personal effect on them. All seeking for knowledge is something that people do and the greatest satisfaction and stimulus in education comes to a boy or girl meeting a teacher who is a real person, who is humbly and delightedly seeking for new knowledge himself as well as passing it on. Haven’t the autobiographies of our best thinkers – their memories of those who taught them – proved this over and over again?
Sometimes when I see new magnificently equipped state schools, and when I have had time to get over my envy at the sight of their laboratories, I say to myself: “Have the authorities given as much thought to the living conditions, the way the people are to work together, as they have to the school’s material structure will they discover when it is too late that they have a listless community housed in an educational palace? Here I must bring in another point. I believe that you get the best work from, and the greatest enjoyment in, a group of teachers when you give the school the greatest possible measure of autonomy and responsibility for its own life. Some state schools have all that could be wished in this respect. A Director of Education told me the other day that he wanted all the schools in his county to feel genuinely independent. I hope this is a widespread intention. Our present fears about education will have a bad effect if they lead to a distrust of teachers and a tightening of central control. Where a healthy autonomy or independence exists, parents too, have the greatest reason to feel that the school is theirs and their children’s.
So far I have thought only of education in schools, but I think that nearly everything I have said has some implication for university education also. In universities as well as in schools there is doubt as to whether people have a satisfactory aim or whether what is aimed at is being achieved. I have heard it emphatically stated that the universities are not concenred (sic) with education but with the disciplined search for truth. This I think brings in a false dualism, a dualism that ultimately makes nonsense of the search for truth. It arises from a worship of the text-book and the thesis as the repositories of truth. But books are an inadequate reflection of the glory of human thought, and it is too often forgotten that it is only in the mind that tryuth (sic) takes its shape. The text-book is but a means of communication – as indeed is any form of words, written or spoken. What we call its ideas or truths have to re-enter a living mind before they can mean anything at all. What they come to mean in that new mind, the nature and directions of the processes they start there, will depend on a whole complex of intimately personal qualities. So I would ask the universities to recognise that theirs is not just an academic or intellectual responsibility, but one that involves meeting the needs of people, of providing a rich and varied experience. To accept this more clearly, with its implications, would bring a great reward in fertility of ideas.
Here again I would ask people not to judge by what they can easily see or measure. In schools we are tempted to snatch at the nearest ruler we see – one that measures intelligence test results or General Certificate successes – to test the quality of education, perhaps to the complete disregard of the qualities of mind and character that a school should be fostering. Similarly in the university the Honours Degree in all Ph.D. thesis is all too quickly taken as the measure of rpogress (sic). It is true throughout education that wah tmatters (sic) most is not that which is measurable. Sir Richard Livingstone and others are pleading for the inclusion in university education for all students of activities and studies that will help to keep specialist pursuits within a pattern of general culture and all-round awareness, to encourage in students a sensitiviness (sic) to life in all its aspects and a desire to discover an underlying meaning that holds all experience together. He calls this a religios (sic) endeavour, and I agree. Yet there will be many who do not accept this label but accept the substance. Without the acceptance of this general aim, education is apt to split up into fragments and the teacher’s work to be at the mercy of every varying force.
That brings me back to my first point: the fear and anxiety that many feel. No sound action will srping (sic) from these feelings, whether they concern the personal welfare of our children or the welfare of the country. We have to decide what our supreme values are, or at least the direction in which we are likely to find them. Then we can consider lesser claims, where they can be fitted into the pattern. We may decide that what is supremely good is incompatible with the lesser claims. If we decide to sacrifice the greater to the less, let us do so without hypocrisy and cease to use the word education. In making our final judgements we must beware of those who say that the “tide of opinion” is turning this way or that. Too often tides of opinion are blind tides, as impersonal and destructive in their effects as were the tides that wrecked our coasts.
Archive reference PP/KCB 6/6/2 document 05