Educating Ruby (5 page)

Likewise, a detailed, critical review of E. D. Hirsch's work by Kristen Buras in the
Harvard Educational Review
, in which she carefully rebuts all of Hirsh's claims, has gone unmentioned by many Trad defenders.
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Hirsch says schools and teacher training have been ‘taken over by progressive doctrine': they haven't. He says proper knowledge has been driven out of the curriculum: it hasn't. He says ‘traditional subject matter' is beyond question: it isn't. He says the effort to memorise material produces understanding: it doesn't. He says you have to have memorised swathes of ‘knowledge' before you can engage with it critically or creatively: you don't. And on it goes.

Because Trads like to keep things simple, they reduce knowledge to facts (and ignore the fact that most knowledge actually consists of webs of ideas that have withstood empirical tests). They reduce the subtle art of teaching to ‘knowledge transmission' – just telling. They like to make assessment as rigorous as possible by making everything
right or wrong – which, of course, ignores thinking. And they have a simplistic view of students' minds which revolves around memorising: putting facts into storage and hauling them out on demand. This world view obliterates much of what is interesting and true about the mind as something which grapples with ideas, copes with degrees of uncertainty, interprets and muses – and sometimes improves – on what it has read or heard and, critically, is capable of getting better at grappling, interpreting, musing and, indeed, memorising.

Young minds are full of habits and processes that are capable of being stretched and strengthened by the right kind of teaching, but which are often not. A major study conducted by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Harvard and other partner universities found that students' performance on tests is powerfully predicted by their level of these mental skills and habits, but that studying in the traditional Hirschean way does not develop these skills.
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They
can
be developed. It is extremely useful if they
are
developed. But, because this leads into slightly more complicated conceptualisations of young minds and how they may be taught, this possibility is often simply ignored or rubbished.

We have already noted Trads' tendency to reduce the multi-hued world to black and white. So, there is content – stuff to be learned and mastered – and then there is process – the way it is learned. Trads define them as separable and set them in opposition. So they wrongly conclude that, if you are interested in the processes and skills of thinking well, that must mean that you have stopped caring about
Shakespeare and algebra. This makes as much sense as saying that paying attention to the skill of hammering means that you no longer care where you are putting the nail. Duh!

Trads sometimes claim there are two kinds of people, novices and experts. Experts know enough to be able to think and solve problems. Novices don't, so they have to be filled up with facts before they become capable of thinking. Which means the attempt to get children wrestling with problems they are not yet ‘expert' about is ‘progressive nonsense'. But both understanding and skill grow precisely by working at the limit of what you currently can do or know. Knowledge is not like a pile of bricks which, when it becomes big enough, magically turns into a house; it is like a tree that grows by daring to put out shoots into the unknown. Put four 6-year-olds around an internet-enabled laptop, give them 45 minutes to find out as much as they can about a difficult question (What would happen if all the insects died? Why do people dance?) and just see how much they learn, and how they stretch their abilities as researchers. Any parent knows that children's most powerful learning tools are questioning and thinking, not memorising and regurgitating. Duh!

This apparent inability to count beyond two, and the consequent tendency to turn every issue, however complicated, into a Punch and Judy show, means that debate in education makes agonisingly slow progress when it is dominated by Trads. Although there are not very many of the most rabid Trads, they unfortunately make up for scarcity with volume. And they get in the way of precious, faltering attempts to think carefully about what a 21st century education could and should really be like.

Because they can only see in black and white, Trads try to persuade the world that all moderates are really
romantics: that anyone who questions their regressive nostrums is a ‘trendy liberal' who would turn all children into illiterate, uncultured savages. Academics like Robin Alexander at Cambridge or Andrew Pollard at Bristol, innovative head teachers like Sir Anthony Seldon at Wellington College or Tom Sherrington at Highbury Grove School in London, or thoughtful ex-teachers and administrators like Sir Tim Brighouse, who have spent decades thinking about schools and trying to improve them, are lumped together and treated like airheads. As we've said, some high-profile Trads have dubbed all academics who disagree with them ‘The Blob'. They think millions of intelligent, well-informed teachers and parents are so gullible that they have become ‘Prisoners of the Blob'.

Parents need a more honest and accurate picture of what the Mods are up to, and how their work over the last few decades, far from ruining schools, has been quietly laying the foundation for an education that is of real benefit to all young people (and not just the half that will go to university).

It is time, we think, to encourage teachers, parents, employers and children themselves to hold hands and speak up. Parents worry about exam stress and the loss of their children's joy in learning. Teachers know that controlling crowds of bored teenagers, or squeezing a few extra children across an arbitrary assessment borderline, is not what lights their fire. It is not why they wanted to become teachers in the first place. Employers know that being able to knock out an essay on the causes of the First World War or solve quadratic equations is no guarantee that youngsters are ready for the world of work. University admission tutors want to know if applicants can think on their feet, and not just trot out well-rehearsed answers to anticipated questions. And children themselves want to feel that what they are doing in school is really preparing them to be confident, capable, learning adults. All these causes for concern are deep and real and valid, and not to be pooh-poohed by those who cannot see beyond the status quo. Millions of us know that the examination game cannot be the be-all and end-all of education, that there has to be another way of ‘winning' at school. This ‘other game' is what we are going to describe in
the coming chapters. It is about how we can help children and young people to get a really good start in life from their schooling even if they didn't do well on the tests. And it is about why high achievers need this other game just as much.

There may be a number of reasons why opposition to the Trads is not more vocal. Teachers need to know that their concerns and ideas are welcome in their staffrooms – but not all head teachers are ready to hear it. Parents may think it is ‘just us' or ‘just our family', without realising that dozens of people in the same street are dealing with very similar misgivings. They may not quite know how to put those feelings into words – parents are often intimidated by schools, especially if their own experience as a schoolchild was not happy or successful. Some parents may feel that school is more or less the way it has to be, and lack confidence in their ability to challenge and suggest. Some may be well aware of their and their children's concerns, but feel that they have no option – if they are to do their best for their children – but to tell them to knuckle down and ‘suck it up'. To play the game as well as you can and hope to get a place at as good a university as possible seems like the only sound advice they can give, and so they stifle their doubts.

John Watts, a wise head teacher in the 1960s, said that “parents, however much they have suffered at school, or even if they left with a sense of failure, usually attribute the shortcomings to themselves rather than to the system, and thus find it difficult to envisage school in any form other than the one they themselves experienced”.
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So they sit on their hands.

There is another Trad myth that says that everyone can do well if they try hard enough – except, sadly, for those who, when the brains were being doled out, were at the end of the queue and got small ones. This means that, if you did poorly in your exams, it was either because you weren't bright enough or you were lazy. This turns out to be another of those pernicious over simplifications.

First, exams like GCSEs and A levels are competitive. Not everyone can be a ‘winner'. There have to be a good number of ‘losers' in order to make success worth having. If everyone got four As at A level they would be of no use to employers or admissions tutors, would they? Here's a thought experiment. It is the morning when everyone gets their A level results letter, and your daughter is waiting anxiously for the post. She opens it and finds that she has got her four As. She rings her best friend, Rachel, and is (mostly) pleased to find that Rachel has got four As too. They go down to the school and are surprised to discover that everyone in the school who sat A levels that year has got four As. And then, on the news that night, it is reported that every single candidate in the country achieved four As. Just imagine her emotional trajectory throughout the day, from delight, to pleasure (tinged with a bit of competitiveness), to puzzlement, to dejection and despair! In reality, examination boards (and politicians) are constantly tinkering with pass marks and grade boundaries to ensure that nothing like this fantasy can actually happen. A lot of children have got to do badly at the examination game; it's a statistical necessity. It's deceitful to claim that everyone can win if they try hard enough.

On the traditional view, intelligence is something that neither you nor your teachers could do anything about: it was largely decided by your genes. A lot of children come to believe, from pretty early on, that they are destined to be the losers – and it is because, in Jack Dee's words, you are just thick. But we know this isn't true. Children's performance at school depends on a host of other factors, such as whether they are worried about what is going on at home, whether they have a good teacher, whether they like their teacher, whether they are willing to devote their intelligence to things that seem pointless, whether their experience has taught them that trying hard is usually worthwhile, whether they much prefer practical and active learning to academic and sedentary learning, and so on. If your child is struggling at school, one thing is certain: it is
not
because they are stupid.

One factor that makes a huge difference to how well children learn, in school and out, is what Stanford researcher Professor Carol Dweck has called a growth mindset.
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Over decades of painstaking analysis of pupils, Dweck has been able to show that there are two broad categories of learners. One she calls ‘fixed mindset' and the other ‘growth mindset'. Some children have picked up the idea that their intelligence is basically limited to however much ‘brains' they were born with. If they can't do something easily, they quickly conclude they just haven't got what it takes, and
that's that. By contrast, there are other children who believe that their brains are more like muscles; they get stronger and smarter through exercise. So they like it when they have to think and try hard, because they see this as mental exercise and an opportunity to get smarter. They see their ability as expandable rather than predetermined. Here's the kicker: children who have growth mindsets consistently outperform their classmates on public examinations
and
are generally better at doing all the things that successful people tend to do (e.g. managing their emotions, coming up with creative ideas, having a go at new things). It is not just how clever you are (as measured by some kind of IQ test) that matters, but how you think about ‘ability' itself. Those who believe that they can get smarter normally can, if they try. Which of these two groups would you want your child to be in?

Can you move someone from a fixed mindset to a growth mindset? And if so, how? The answers to these two questions are ‘yes' and ‘by helping them to think differently about the reasons for their successes and failures'. The best way to help someone develop a growth mindset is through the way he or she is given feedback after any activity. For example, if you write an essay and your teacher simply says to you, “Well done, Luke, you're good at English,” or even, “That wasn't so good, Anna, I don't think you're cut out to be a writer,” all they are hearing is some generalised praise (or criticism) that applies to them
as people
. Feedback like this is known as ‘person praise'; that's to say it focuses on the individual rather than on what they have actually done to contribute to the grade achieved.

As a teacher or a parent it is easy to give this kind of feedback in the belief that we will be motivating the recipient. We'll be encouraging Luke if we keep telling him how gifted and talented he is. But we are not! We may even be
damaging his likelihood of success. The most useful thing that parents and teachers can do is to give learners accurate, specific feedback on things they have done, especially noting where they have shown particular initiative or spent extra time on some aspect of an assignment. How you praise children really matters.
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Growth mindset learners make more mistakes – and more
interesting
mistakes – than those with fixed mindsets. Why? Because we learn most when we are pushing ourselves, not merely staying within our comfort zone, but exerting ourselves to try something more challenging or adventurous.