Category Archives: Education

Us and Them

Education, Politics

When did you last hear the Defence Secretary criticize members of the armed forces as “lazy, useless and cowardly”? Or the Secretary of State for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs refer to farmers as “idle, corrupt and inefficient”? Well, of course, to the best of my memory, neither of these things has ever happened. It seems to be an accepted convention that the relevant government ministers for the military and for farming are broadly supportive of the people working in these jobs. They even tend to actively promote and support their interests.

Yet the same clearly does not apply with all types of employees and their relevant ministers. I’m thinking in particular here of social workers and teachers.

Social Workers

It’s been well known for some time that people working in social services get a bad press. A notorious example was the tragic case of “Baby P”. This led to the hounding by the press of the head of Hackney Social Services. The tabloids effectively bullied Ed Balls, minister at the time, into leaning on the local authority to sack her. She, rightly, went on to win her employment tribunal case for unfair dismissal. It’s obvious that social services departments have been understaffed for years: I remember attending a talk given by the chief executive of a former local authority lamenting his 48% vacancy rate in permanent posts.

Overworked social workers daily have to make heart-rending decisions such as whether to keep a dysfunctional family together. Often they are “damned if they do” and “damned if they don’t”. It makes you wonder why anyone would choose social work as a career. Unremitting criticism, including from the responsible government minister, is bound to be counter-productive in the longer term.

Teachers

A similar trend is apparent in our schools. A government report issued in August forecast a shortage of teachers as a result of too few people taking up training. A record number of teachers are leaving the profession. It’s not hard to see why.

Over the past couple of decades, the teaching profession increasingly used evidence-based research to improve teaching practice. They gradually learnt what worked and, as a result, standards improved. The great British public – or at least the media – would have none of this. When exam results fell year on year, as they did occasionally, the press screamed at teachers’ failures to do their jobs. More often, results rose year on year. And the result? The press complained that exam standards were falling – the tests were getting easier. Another example of “damned if they do, damned if they don’t”.

At least during the New Labour years, Education Secretaries gave praise where it was due, whilst continually demanding ways to improve teaching and learning. And yes, teachers complained at the excessive pace of top-down reforms and the amount of testing.

gove cartoon
Michael Gove

Things changed dramatically after the 2010 election. Murdoch journalist and new-kid-on-the education-block, Michael Gove, declared war on teachers. “The blob” was his favoured term of abuse. Reforming zeal took on a whole new dervish-like form. Policy changes became based not on the evidence of what works, but on ministerial whim. Websites, blogs and social media were dedicated to the teaching profession swapping tales of Gove’s latest stupid pronouncement. Most of the profession was laughing at him behind his back as means of coping. The Department for Education and Ofsted vied with each other to heap the most criticism on the reviled teachers. Staff working as school inspectors for outsourced private companies would often swoop like an invading army on schools who failed to adopt the new ideas. The aim was to force reform against the wishes of parents, governors and teachers.

In my role as a school governor, I attended a meeting last month with a number of head teachers which was basically to make contingency planning for a feared possible Whitehall swoop. Our aim was damage limitation. At the end of a nearly two-hour discussion, we turned and looked at each other. We sadly lamented that none of the time we had spent in that meeting was in any way focussed on the children’s needs or on improving their education. Such a waste of time and energy! This pattern gets repeated all over the country. And mightily disheartening it is too!

Gove’s successor, Nicky Morgan, has toned down the rhetoric, but much of the madness and dogma continues.

So what is it about the military (including arms manufacturers) and the farmers which leads Government ministers to act as their cheerleaders – but for teachers and social workers it’s a constant barrage of criticism?

Write your answers on one side of the paper only, please.

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Splitting the Atom

Education

Have you ever split an atom? No, me neither – there are few who have. But many people know that Ernest Rutherford (1871-1937) is credited with doing this first. How do we “know” this? This could be for any number of reasons:

  1. We were there when he did it in Manchester, in 1919, according to most websites I’ve looked at (e.g. the official Nobel Prize site), or possibly 1917, according to Wikipedia.
  2. A teacher told us at school or university
  3. A self-appointed “authority” figure, e.g. politician, judge, priest, rabbi, imam told us
  4. We read it in a book, magazine or newspaper article
  5. A parent or friend told us
  6. A “bloke down the pub” told us
  7. We saw it on the BBC / Fox News / CNN / Al Jazeera, etc.
  8. We saw it on the internet (Google lists around 223,000 matches to choose from if you type “Rutherford split atom”)
  9. We dreamt it (but it was such a vivid dream!)
  10. And so on…

It’s a safe bet there’s no one left alive in category 1. So we all “know” that Rutherford was first to split the atom from someone else, either by word of mouth or via some technology, print or electronic. The problem is, what conscious or subconscious process did we go through to decide whether we believe what we heard, read or saw? For example, there are still some conspiracy theorists who don’t believe we landed a man on the moon in 1969: it was all faked in a television studio.

As we grow older, there’s an increasing danger that we learn things from an ever narrower range of sources, whether it be the friends we choose, our choice of daily newspaper, TV or radio news channels or trusted websites. The odds are that we choose those sources run by people who share similar views to our own. Despite our protestations, we all like a bit of “I told you so”, even when we’re only thinking it for ourselves. New “facts” which fit our preconceptions are instantly added to the pile of the things we “know”, those that don’t fit are either rejected or consigned to the “I remain to be convinced” pile.

Who Do You Believe?

Life’s too short to learn everything by personal experience – and some just too plain dangerous: you would not jump in front of a train just to be sure it’s not good for your health! So, obviously, most of what we “know” we learn from others. But who do we trust to tell us the truth and how do we make that judgement? A 2005 MORI poll gives some, slightly dated, insights. In these days of instant access to information via the internet and other electronic media, we are in danger of overload and it’s a challenge to find the time to process it into something meaningful.

There have been times in recent years when education reforms appeared to be taking us back to a 1950s world where rote learning of selected “facts” and the ability to regurgitate them was to be the basis of assessing students’ performance. Beyond key skills such as literacy and numeracy, this makes no sense in the 21st century. We must equip the adults of the future with two skills fit for the information age:

  1. Prioritising and selecting from an excess of data and processing this into digestible and meaningful knowledge
  2. Assessing the reliability and accuracy of information, based upon an informed awareness of the motives and agenda of the person or organisation giving it.

This must surely be the prime moral responsibility of education to our children and future generations.

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Useless and Pointless Knowledge

Education, Ethics

Bob Dylan released Tombstone Blues, from which the above title comes, in the same year I started my maths degree course. The Mathematics Department divided into two distinct cultural camps: pure and applied. The pure mathematicians were snobs. They looked down on their lesser “applied” colleagues, who got their hands dirty by supplying useful tools for scientists, architects, meteorologists and all sorts of other people in the “real” world. To the purists, the quest was for “beauty” and the term was often used synonymously with “uselessness”: the more useless, the more beautiful.

One small part of my course concerned number theory and a subset of this dealt with prime numbers and modular arithmetic. (Links are provided for anyone who is curious or sad enough to want to know more; otherwise, read on…) Frankly, I found this part of the course a bit boring and – dare I say? – pointless. However, its enthusiasts pointed out how elegant, how beautiful and, above all, how useless it all was.

Fast forward thirty years. My son was now a student, reading computer science. He told me about an assignment he had to do, concerning encryption on the internet. The purpose of the assignment was to find the most efficient way to write computer code which would encrypt and decrypt data to keep it secure over the web. These were the days before superfast broadband, and speed of transmission was all-important. Imagine my surprise when I discovered that underlying the encryption systems was the same useless maths I had learnt thirty years earlier!

My point is this. In the days since I was a student, the debate around education and its purpose has shifted more and more to a purely economic one. The talk is all about training the minds of the next generation to maximize their own job prospects and for the greater good of “UK plc”. Whatever happened to the idea of knowledge, insight and even appreciation of beauty as moral goods in their own right?

So, the next time you stand in awe at a beautiful sight, when someone tells you some strange, new fact that doesn’t fit – that makes you think: “hang on a minute” – or, more basically, the next time you’re doing some online shopping, just spare a thought and raise a cheer to all that “useless and pointless knowledge”!

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