Education for responsibility

The issue, What is schooling for? is narrower than the question What is education for? More education takes place outside of schools than inside, over a lifetime and not just during years of compulsory schooling. There are different models, such as

• The transmission of valued knowledge (raising questions of who values it)
• The inculcation of a moral viewpoint
• The inculcation of ideology (and the prohibition of banned ideologies)
• Motivation to learn (pupil-centred approaches).

Preparation for adulthood might be added to this list so long as we bear in mind that schooling, like childhood, is properly a ‘thing in itself’ and not just a preparation for something else. The quality of schooling is part of the quality of childhood: poor schooling can disable a child intellectually, emotionally and psychologically. Getting it right is a solemn duty.

In the UK, being responsible is a thing in itself and not just a preparation for being responsible later as adults. At first, responsibility was seen as coming from religion-based morality (specifically from Christianity). The rise of secularism transmuted this in the 1960s into moral education, though early forms of this retained their Christian ring. By the 1970s this had again been transformed into pastoral care and personal and social education: pastoral care offered pupils adult mentors to guide their social and moral choices, with some staff paid extra to do this, and others being form/class tutors or teachers. Personal and social education became a taught curriculum subject at the same time, and was called ‘Preparation for Adult Life’ in one school I taught at (Wiltshire,UK, 1970s). By the 1990s, the fashion was for Citizenship Education, exploring not only democracy but also how to be a good citizen – social and political responsibility.

The NC was organised under subjects such as history, geography and English, so these other topics had to be additional, cross curricular. One cross-curriculum theme was Economic and Industrial Understanding, which amongst other things was a preparation for adult life and work.

In the UK, education for personal responsibility has been a stable educational aim, for which many strategies have been tried. Teachers generally would pay lip service to its importance. However, the structural pressures on schooling and the curriculum have emphasised curriculum subjects, which use up the majority of school time available; very little time has been available for pastoral subjects such as personal, moral and social education, or religious education. Teachers are not trained to plan or deliver pastoral subjects. To a small extent, education for responsibility permeates curriculum subjects such as English, if the teacher wishes it to. The lack of structural time in the timetable has meant that other topics such as responsibility, morality, enterprise and understanding of work are covered in special events rather than in the daily timetable. This suggests that these topics are marginal, although sometimes special events are more memorable and enjoyable than daily grind.

Education for responsibility needs to be better planned, through special programmes and permeation throughout the subject curriculum. Every subject could develop lessons applying the subject to life. My colleagues and I suggested ways to do this, subject by subject, a decade ago in Spiritual, Moral, Social and Cultural Education, edited by Stephen Bigger and Erica Brown.

International Primary Curriculum

In 1988, the Conservative Minister of Education Ken Baker launched Primary Schools into a mind-numbing and stultifying two decades  of facts facts facts and tests tests tests. Those of us who expected Labour to reverse such stupidity were disappointed. Pupils have been turned off and demotivated by irrelevant material. Teachers have been overloaded, because when this error was pointed out, they were tasked to deliver in addition moral education, citizenship education, environmental education, economic and industrial understanding and anything else that hit the tabloids.
The International Primary Curriculum (http://www.internationalprimarycurriculum.com) was developed for international schools abroad with funding from Shell. A friend, a primary teacher in Pakistan, is totally enthusiastic. Whilst covering National Curriculum subjects, it organises its termly work around topics which interest young children and offer opportunities for active creative endeavour. She had just finished 'Airports'. Rainforest, Mission to Mars and Beyond, Chocolate, Fit for Life, The Olympics and Making the Newsare also available. The teacher receives a pack with information and activities which cover the different curriculum areas. The school has to plan ahead for curriculum balance. A team of advisers guide and approve the school plan. A number of English primary schools are also finding IPC useful. Primary teachers and teacher trainers from the 1970s and 1980s are chuckling. As my friend said, "Its great. This was the way I was taught."

Interviews

Mark Twain once wrote about interviews, interviewing and being interviewed. This will eventually become available on http://www.marktwainproject.org. (My source: BBC Radio 4 today). There are lessons for the unwary researcher, and for those interviewed. Twain condemns the interview as an intrusion into personal life which can do damage, psychologically and socially. The interviewer has his/her own agenda, explicit or implicit, in which the welfare of the interviewee has no secure place. The interviewee is faced with a range of questions, most of which are hard to grapple with simply. The interviewer wants a soundbite answer that can be easily quoted.  The interviewer moves from question to question, and before thoughts can be marshaled, has moved on to the next topic. The interview therefore ends up being unsatisfactory in human terms and unreliable in research terms. The interviewer at last finds an area of interest that the interviewee can get his/her teeth into. It is relevant, appropriate, authentic... Sorry, the interviewer says, its not on my schedule, can we move on?
There are lessons here for the qualitative researcher. Interviews are not the magic answer to data collection. The interviewee might be open and honest, and might not be. The interviewee might have a grip of the questions, and might not. The real insight offered by the interviewee might be missed by the questions asked. I have been interviewed by researchers. Once, I was misquoted (the words were on the tape but quoted without the contextual meaning). Once, the questions allowed no reflection and required soundbite answers. Interviews are only as good as the skills of the interviewer.

Interviews need to be flexible and semi-structured. A first interview may be necessary to identify areas of particular relevance that a second interview can then focus on. Informal contacts, even emails, could help to determine what an interviewee is and is not interested in. An interviewee may not tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. I would not, for this requires a depth of trust that will be hard to achieve. The interview would emphasise how the interviewee would like history to be written. The interviewer needs not to be a passive receiver of information, but an interrogator of it. "Yes, but, why did you do that? Is that ethical? is it fair?". A line of questioning that would inhibit the interviewer to open up. The interview is therefore a problematic data collection method. That is not to say it should be avoided - it may be an only way of eliciting information - but that it should be used with caution.

Values we live by.

A challenging question posed by Jack Whitehead, who came over for lunch. What are the values that underpin my academic life? This post may be some time being constructed, as it is complex. My academic work ranges from Biblical studies (my PhD), the secular study of religion, engagement within education, equal opportunities, and children's literature. Other interests include growing plants, social history and heritage railways.Is all this coherent or is it the product of a butterfly mind?

First let us examine the idea of 'butterfly mind'. A standard academic career chooses a narrow topic around which a person can become a world expert for ever. In my original field of Old Testament Studies, one might do a PhD on Amos chapter 3 and study nothing but that for the next 50 years. Pretty boring, an example of a pointless life. My PhD was on Hebrew Marriage and Family, a broad field, my first book was on the whole of the Old Testament. So looking at the whole must be part of my psyche. For the secular study of religion, I look at all religions everywhere. A recent paper is on the San bushmen of the Kalahari. For inclusion and engagement within education, I am interested in the holistic question of what (in practical terms) it means to educate and be educated. We can look at the whole through many spotlights, which for someone not knowing the overall picture, might seem to be alighting on disparate subjects.

On religion, if you dig  there is a layer deep down which most religious people would agree with, whatever their faith label. That is where I want to be, engaging with it as a secularist to see if this spiritual core speaks to my non-supernaturalist assumptions. The mythic and legendary elements are still interesting, but I would look for possible motives of this material. This raises the question of whether a secular (non-supernaturalist) person can be considered spiritual. This is concerned with the core values of humanity and feeds into concepts of spiritual education. My interest in multicultural education is, in addition to promoting understanding across cultures, is about building relationships at a personal level between people across the world.

On education, my chief concern is what 'proper' education is. This invites (with Ivan Illich) us drawing a distinction between education and 'schooling', schooling being about what schools do, good or bad. If schooling is (or is not) education, we want to understand what that means and implies. When in charge of research activity across the Faculty of Education, I used the strap-line 'motivating learning', assuming that education involves facilitating active learning rather than acquiescing with passive sequences and memorisation. I make a further underlying assumption that education should change lives, including the lives of the marginalised and vulnerable. Alas, the history of schooling has not done this. Professional development for teachers needs therefore to address the underlying concept of education rather than remaining compliant to a political hegemony.

Children - and people - learn in informal ways perhaps more than through the formal curriculum so my study of children's literature is interested in what children learn when reading fiction. This work has also included writing experimental children's fiction.

The world needs some serious new approaches to learning if today's children are to become the responsible and effective citizens of tomorrow.  This is not within the existing school and university curricula - mostly these are barriers to real learning, somebody's empire. Encouraging teachers and pupils to be critical is a starting point - challenging all items of so-called-knowledge and exploring a varied range of ways of describing life experience. Through scepticism lies understanding and empowerment. The process is supremely important, not the recollection of so-called knowledge.

This brings me back full circle to Biblical Studies, which I explore on http://4004BCE.blogspot.com. Some will recognise 4004BCE as the date once given (and the date taught to me as a child) for the creation of the world - or more precisely, on the evening of September 23rd 4004. Most of what we think of the Bible is wrong, and sentimental. All books were political documents, with a political purpose. Most stories combine legend with fiction, much as TV series of Robin Hood do. To draw out the truth about the Bible and the religions based on it, scepticism offers new understandings of how these troubled people came to terms with their world.

So, motivated learning, sceptical learning, critical learning, problem solving all help to free people from delusion, illusion and false knowledge. Education first is about crap detection; and second about how to recycle that crap in ways that stimulate understanding and personal growth.

The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold.

Young teenage girl Susie Salmon is murdered and her body cut in bits and only her elbow found. The readership know who did it because the girl's spirit/ghost remains closely and tells us so. We know that the same man has killed many other girls and occasionally women. Susie speaks to some of them in heaven. The police make no progress even though the girls father points the finger at the right chap. The girl's sister is more proactive and she becomes a new target. The police investigator is having sex with Susie's mother and allows the murderer to escape. He kills again, and is never caught - he dies in a freak accident trying it with another girl. Susie has appeared to her friend Ruth (and to her brother) and briefly changes places with Ruth so she can have sex with her former boyfriend Ray (now Ruth's boyfriend). They all live happily ever after (Ruth and Ray anyway, Susie finds a more distant heaven). Good grief.  What ambition.

http://fiction4children.blogspot.com/2010/03/those-lovely-bones-alice-sebold.html

Children's stories as helpful sedition

Bigger, Stephen and Webb, Jean (2010) Developing Environmental Agency and Engagement Through Young People’s Fiction. Environmental Education Research . ISSN 1469-5871 (electronic) 1350-4622 (paper) http://eprints.worc.ac.uk/788

Bigger, Stephen (2010) Literature For Learning: Can Stories Enhance Children’s Education? Almas , Vol. 11 . ISSN 1818-9296 http://eprints.worc.ac.uk/793

The first paper explores how 20th century children's stories encourage social (and environmental) action, active participation in changing and protecting the world rather than passive acceptance of adult policies. They are therefore (in a positive way) seditious, encouraging children thinking for themselves and taking action. We argue that this can be a role model for children growing up, for whom real life is anything but this.

The second paper is for a Pakistani journal, promoting informal education through story.

In children's stories, adults often lack the wisdom that children have, leaving the child characters to battle through in opposition to achieve good over evil. This is the opposite to real life in which children have to accept adult decisions as final and are taught to be dependent by the education system.

Encouraging reasoned and values driven independence of thought and action should be a priority of upbringing. This means encouraging children to be social critics, media critics and literary critics. If this sounds negative, criticism should promote appropriate counter-action - so encouraging children to be social activists, responsible media producers, and thought-provoking writers for the next generation.

The Infant Brain

Melvyn Bragg's In Our Time today is on The Infact Brain - http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00r2cn4 (time limited, copy below).

My take on it: The current position is a combination of Piaget's constructivism, Chomski's hard wired, and brain neuro-science. Children even at 1 or 2 years old are logical, but have insufficient knowledge to tackle problems as an adult would. The solution is that we need to give them more knowledge/information quicker so that they can work things out. The worst thing we can do is to give them misinformation which will delay their rationality because falsehoods are presented to them as truth. Adult talk to children is always about fairies, father christmas and other irrational beings which will get in the way of developing rationality. Children need accurate knowledge and information from the beginning if they are to develop rationally. They do not need childish language or ideas, and lies (however good the cause) are a form of abuse. So goodbye Santa Claus.

Programme blurb (copyright BBC):

Melvyn Bragg and guests Usha Goswami, Annette Karmiloff-Smith and Denis Mareschal discuss what new research reveals about the infant brain.

For obvious reasons, what happens in the minds of very young, pre-verbal children is elusive. But over the last century, the psychology of early childhood has become a major subject of study.

Some scientists and researchers have argued that children develop skills only gradually, others that many of our mental attributes are innate.

Sigmund Freud concluded that infants didn't differentiate themselves from their environment.

The pioneering Swiss child psychologist Jean Piaget thought babies' perception of the world began as a 'blooming, buzzing confusion' of colour, light and sound, before they developed a more sophisticated worldview, first through the senses and later through symbol.

More recent scholars such as the leading American theoretical linguist Noam Chomsky have argued that the fundamentals of language are there from birth. Chomsky has famously argued that all humans have an innate, universally applicable grammar.

Over the last ten to twenty years, new research has shed fresh light on important aspects of the infant brain which have long been shrouded in mystery or mired in dispute, from the way we start to learn to speak to the earliest understanding that other people have their own minds.

With:

Usha Goswami, Professor of Education at the University of Cambridge and Director of its Centre for Neuroscience in Education

Annette Karmiloff-Smith, Professorial Research Fellow at the Centre for Brain and Cognitive Development at the Department of Psychological Sciences, Birkbeck College, University of London

Denis Mareschal, Professor of Psychology at the Centre for Brain and Cognitive Development at Birkbeck College, University of London.

FURTHER READING

Gliga, T., Mareschal, D. & Johnson, M. H., ‘Ten-month-olds' selective use of visual dimensions in category learning’, in ‘Infant Behavior and Development’, 31, 287-293, (2008)

Goswami, U., ‘The Wiley-Blackwell Handbook of Childhood Cognitive Development: 2nd Edition’, ‘Blackwell Handbooks of Developmental Psychology’ (Oxford: Blackwell, August 2010)

Goswami, U., ‘Cognitive Development: The Learning Brain’ in ‘Psychology Press’ (Taylor & Francis, 2008)

Goswami, U.,‘Blackwell Handbook of Childhood Cognitive Development’ (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002 & 2004)

Johnson, Mark H., ‘Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience’ (Oxford, Uk: Blackwells Publishers, 2004)

Karmiloff, K. & Karmiloff-Smith, A., ‘Pathways to language: From foetus to adolescent’ in ‘Developing Child Series’ (Harvard University Press, 2001)

Karmiloff-Smith, A., ‘Beyond Modularity: A Developmental Perspective on Cognitive Science’ (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press/Bradford Books, 1992, reprinted 1995).

Karmiloff, K. & Karmiloff-Smith, A., ‘Everything your baby would ask if only he/she could talk’ (London: Cassell/Ward Lock, 1998)

Mareschal, Denis, Quinn, Paul C. and Lea, Stephen E. G., ‘The Making of Human Concepts’ (Oxford: Oxford University Press, March 2010)

Mareschal, D. Johnson, M. H., Sirois, S., Spratling, M., Thomas, M. & Westermann, G., ‘Neuroconstuctivism Vol. 1: How the brain constructs cognition’ (Oxford UK: OUP, 2007)