EDUCATION
I first went into teaching for want of something better
to do. And, quite honestly, because I fancied the long summer holidays. I
feel no shame about that. It is very civilised to have long holidays and
for someone like me with many interetss I do most of my deepest thinking
during these long holidays, without which my life would be pretty drab and
unfulfilling. In any case, the long holidays teachers enjoy are essential
for them to deeply unwind and de-stress from what is an unbelievably
stressful job.
During my one-year postgraduate training I became
seriously interested in mixed ability teaching methods and deschooling,
hot subjects at that time in the mid 70s. But my idealistic views and
somewhat laid-back approach faced a rude awakening in my first teaching
post in a secondary school [11-18 year olds]. I soon became increasingly
disenchanted that schools somehow fundamentally fail their students. In a
way they regard themselves to be successful, such as in qualification
terms, but at a deep level they are not able to radically change people a
great deal, or society, nor to cater for the bottom 5% or so of low
achievers, who sink through the net of social deviance and who then seem
destined to irretrievable enter the realm of criminality. Schools should
be doing more for them, in my opinion. School just tends to become school
and it contains those who love it and those who see it as little better
than a prison of boring drudgery. And nor do schools really involve
themselves in their communities as many claim to do. And educationalists
seem blandly indifferent to these important failures.
I tried to teach enthusiastically and made numerous
contributions to environmental education at county level in my first 5
years. Yet still I became essentially doubtful that I was really achieving
anything of lasting significance or value. It all seemed very stale and
boring, both the kids and the staff, especially the staff. Staffrooms are
pretty loathsome places, where wretched, bored-stiff adults go to escape
from the children they are meant to be inspiring in the world of learning.
I also found most teachers to be very boring, sad figures who have little
or no interest in doing anything new or creating innovation in their
field. I regard most of them as deeply conventional supporters of the
social and political status quo and to consistently shy away from new
ideas and methods. They are confomists. They seem an integral part of an
adult Mafia which suppresses kids rights and natural enthusiasm
and enforces social conformity, rather than inspiring them and channelling
their restless energies into something wonderful. Most certainly they do
not encourage them to reach for the stars. They act mostly like the
police, seeking to control children rather than respecting them as the
human beings they could be. That particular aspect of teaching I found to
be the most loathsome.
There are also very few really excellent and inspiring
teachers and that is probably why schools often seem to be such dead and
boring places to be in. Staffrooms also seem permeated with petty
bitchiness and aggressive territorial disputes tend to break out, on an
almost daily basis, about who is meant to be sitting in that chair, who
should hang their coat on that hook and who has been looking at whom for
longer than is considered to be morally decent. All that type of stuff is
a bit of a yawn, a big turn-off.
I became interested in child-centred learning and I
still believe that it is the best, the fairest and the correct way to
teach. Well, in truth it is more a form of non-teaching which seeks most
of all to create a satisfactory learning environment, an ambience for good
learning. I really enjoyed teaching the Nuffield science and Nuffield
Biology like I did in the early days and even Environmental science was
taught largely through child-centred practical investigations, literally
learning through guided discovery, which is the true spirit of this
approach. Children always seem to learn best through doing and making
things and this really comes over in classes where they are allowed to do
and make things most of the time, rather than sitting in neat little rows
silently writing. That is tedium.
The thing which I suppose really killed off my interest
in teaching as an institution was the management and promotion structure.
It soon became apparent to me that promotion meant less and less teaching
and that seemed to be the main attraction for those who sought it. In
other words, bad teachers and those who crave money and power over others
are the ones who get promoted, while the rest are left in the classroom.
This did not matter so much to me as I prefer teaching to having power
over others and a nice desk job as a bureaucrat. I could at least enjoy my
teaching. But it saddened the idealistic and romantic side of me, as I
would have liked to change things more or work in innovative educational
initiatives. In the end I did none of these things as I got side-tracked
into doing other things in my free time like painting, writing and
generally socialising. I soon realised that promotion was the only way to
get changes in the system and I was determined not to play that game,
which I still regard as fundamentally unethical both in principle and in
fact. If I had my way I would pay everyone the same and then apportion
tasks solely on the basis of talent. Those who can teach would teach and
those who could not would be given desk jobs or shown the door.
So, while I was keenly interested in education at a
fundamental philosophical level, and I would have liked to be involved in
it at a training level, yet my experience of the people in it and its
rigid power structures put me right off such a route. How can you change
something like this? One person against a massive power structure? It
seemed a daunting task I was not prepared to even consider as a realistic
proposition. And it seems to me that over 90% of the people in it and with
power over it are dull, boring, confomist and talentless people who are
only concerned to maintain the status quo and suppress kids. How can that
possibly be a fulfilling task? That is not education.
And all too often in the larger schools and colleges
the management structure becomes an overpaid, oversized and
overprivileged, self-serving elite class, which contributes virtually
nothing to the education of students or the smooth running of the place,
but merely protects, serves and furthers its own [greedy and relentlessly
expanding] bureaucratic interests and power. That is the danger of
overmanagement and it is the natural consequence of an upside-down form of
thinking where the primary educational function of an institution
[educating youngsters] becomes subordinated to the unbridled power of
petty bureaucratic structures. Or obscured altogether. The best management
is minimal management, as the Chinese say, like cooking a small fish: do
it lightly.
And having now been teaching for 25 years I feel that
that is how I remain: attached but detached, committed but ambivalent. I
also think that the best lessons always power themselves and are largely
unplanned. The most loosely-organised and open-ended lectures allow
inspiration for all, where there is a loose framework for experimentation
or discussion to take place, or a combination of tasks ending in
discussion. The best, the most stimulating and the most exciting lessons
tend to occur spontaneously rather than as pre-planned events, and it is
still my view that planning should be kept to a bare minimum and that
overplanning stifles excitement, ruins the class and causes it to be very
predictable, boring and destimulating. While some planning is vital and
the teacher must know their subject very well, but to stimulate, excite
and really get a good lesson going, it should arise spontaneously of its
own accord in a pleasant working environment of mutual respect and
enjoyment of learning. And if the teacher does not create that precious
space in their lessons for such arrivals then they simply will not
appear in them.
Early on in my teaching life I became somewhat
fascinated by marks and figures of class test results and the like. These
form the daily bread and butter of the profession. Yet they form a
delightful meta-world of data and ideas. It led me to wonder why a student
always seems to get more or less the same mark regardless of who tests
them or how. As if their innate intelligence really is fixed and
pre-ordained from birth afterall, as the behaviourists claim; an idea I
never found attractive. Nevertheless, it is a curious fact that student
marks rarely change as they go through school, the best and the worst
keeping faithfully to what seems to be their chosen path. This led
me to entertain the notion that schooling has little fundamental impact
upon a childs intelligence. Quite a startling and unpalatable
conclusion to arrive at. I also noticed that the same basic sequence
emerges in a class whatever task they are given. More or less always you
can predict the top 5, the bottom 5 and the middle five in any test. Why
should this be so?
Reading the writings of Illich, Goodman and D H
Lawrence, as I did in those misty early days, really brought home to me
the realisation that schools are not radical places or tools of liberation
as they should be. They are largely unpoliticised and essentially
unstimulating places to be in. They do not empower and envision children,
but mostly restrict and disempower them and reinforce social norms
regardless. I have therefore come to regard them as deeply
conventionalised offshoots of social conformity, social control and
suppression. I have seen nothing in 25 years to encourage me to change
that view. And thus I remain deeply sceptical of their value as
institutions for truly educating human beings to become decent happy
citizens.