Elizabeth Truss argues in today's Telegraph that teachers spend
"too much time preparing lessons and not enough time teaching them"
For every lesson I teach, for every hour lecture I spend an equal amount of time preparing for that lesson or lecture. Let me quote Churchill on this
If you fail to prepare to you prepare to fail.
The Education Minister of course sings from the same hymn sheet as her boss, the master of propaganda, and in doing so will probably cause more damage to children, and co-incidentally adult learners, for generations to come. What she has failed to grasp is that it is not that teachers spend little time reading from standard texts but that they are forced by continued changes in policy to reinvent the wheel as she likes to argue.
Standard texts can be excellent teaching aids but they do not encourage 21st Century thinking and can drive us back to Victorian control of the masses? If you look at this from a Marxist point of view, and for your information I am not a Marxist, or indeed a feminist one, and I am most certainly male, then this ideal of standard text begs of control and corruption of the mind. We need a reality check here about the modern world.
I remember the first lesson I had in every subject at secondary school. Highest common factor and lowest common multiple in mathematics, the hydrological cycle in geography, the stone age in history, the rules of a laboratory in science, the ancient city of Ur in religious study, Beowulf in English, I am Jean-Paul and this is Marie-Claude in French and finally in art, what is red?
Now pretty much all of those subjects barring one used a standard text however the one that has the most profound effect upon my life has been, without understanding it at the time, the last. What is red?
What is red?
For one hour thirty four pupils sat in an art class with Mr Hickey our art teacher and not a pot of paint in sight. Not one student understood what the hell he was going on about but now I do because what he was doing was very clever indeed. In fact worthy of a true psychologist I would say.
He was doing something that no other teacher would do on that first day, in fact that first year, he was teaching us to expand our mind!
You see the Victorians had ideals. Some of these were good, especially those about striving and keeping going and inventing. However Victorian politicians were no different than modern ones. They were not interested in the betterment of society they were interested in their own self promotion and keeping people in their places. And when threat of revolution started to show in the underbelly of the working classes then the best way to stop that was to 're-educate' people. Have we heard that a few times over the years?
Education was just as much a weapon then as it is today when in the hands of politicians. It converges our thinking and gives us a factory mentality. Which in the days of the industrial revolution drove Great Britain's massive manufacturing base. Sons would follow fathers into the mines, the steel mills, the shipyards, daughters would follow mothers into the factories until it was time to produce offspring. It was control, a neatly ordered Empire run on a semi-feudal system.
Yet all that changed in the 1980s when we stopped building and started worshiping the market. With lives changing forever during those heady and desperate days the fundamental shift that took place in this country has led to a deep resentment of those who were once powerful but have seen their house pulled down from inside. It is the final destruction of the class system and yet through education policy there is this want to return to the 'good old days'.
Does it matter that the OECD are saying we're down in the league tables? Not if you look at some of the countries who are high in them. Countries where it is still about control.
Napoleon once called us a nation of shop keepers. And he was right except I would say we are a nation of entrepreneurs not shop keepers. This country has over the generations given the world some of the finest minds and greatest thinkers in all areas of learning from commerce to computers, from shipbuilding to science, from arms to arts and why?
Because somewhere an art teacher asked the question: "what is red?"
If we are to truly compete in this world in the 21st century and beyond then we do need to reinvent the wheel. We need as Sir Ken Robinson argues to become divergent in our thinking. We need to open our minds to endless possibilities. That can not be done by learning what is on page fifty three of science for the 70's alone. There has to be thought, there has to be discussion and there has to be enlightenment.
This, minister, is why I spend hours preparing my lessons and why standard texts are placed in the position they should be, a mere point of view. Critical analysis of any subject relies on the triumvirate of practice, theory and reflection. If you only have a one sided theory from a one sided text book you will only get a one sided answer.
So go write that in a textbook!
