Seven Myths About Education

Daisy Christodoulou

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317753407
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

In this controversial new book, Daisy Christodoulou offers a thought-provoking critique of educational orthodoxy. Drawing on her recent experience of teaching in challenging schools, she shows through a wide range of examples and case studies just how much classroom practice contradicts basic scientific principles. She examines seven widely-held beliefs which are holding back pupils and teachers:

• Facts prevent understanding
• Teacher-led instruction is passive
• The 21st century fundamentally changes everything
• You can always just look it up
• We should teach transferable skills
• Projects and activities are the best way to learn
• Teaching knowledge is indoctrination

In each accessible and engaging chapter, Christodoulou sets out the theory of each myth, considers its practical implications and shows the worrying prevalence of such practice. Then, she explains exactly why it is a myth, with reference to the principles of modern cognitive science. She builds a powerful case explaining how governments and educational organisations around the world have let down teachers and pupils by promoting and even mandating evidence-less theory and bad practice.

This blisteringly incisive and urgent text is essential reading for all teachers, teacher training students, policy makers, head teachers, researchers and academics around the world.

Myth 1

Facts prevent understanding

Where is the evidence that people believe this and that it has affected education policy and classroom practice?

Theoretical evidence

Perhaps the earliest expression of the idea that learning facts will not bring true understanding came from the Swiss philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau in the eighteenth century. In Émile, or Education, he advises that you should ‘give your scholar no verbal lessons; he should be taught by experience alone’.¹ The reason for this is that learning facts is ineffective: ‘What is the use of inscribing on their brains a list of symbols which mean nothing to them?’² The pupil might be able to repeat exactly what you have told them, but they will not be able to use the facts they have been told or understand how those facts can be deployed in different ways:

You tell me they acquire some rudiments of geometry, and you think you prove your case; not so, it is mine you prove; you show that far from being able to reason themselves, children are unable to retain the reasoning of others; for if you follow the method of these little geometricians you will see they only retain the exact impression of the figure and the terms of the demonstration. They cannot meet the slightest new objection; if the figure is reversed they can do nothing.³

Not only is such fact-learning ineffective; it is also immoral. In rendering the pupil passive, it not only ensures they are not learning, it ensures they are having all the joy and excitement of childhood knocked out of them:

No, if nature has given the child this plasticity of brain which fits him to receive every kind of impression, it was not that you should imprint on it the names and dates of kings, the jargon of heraldry, the globe and geography, all those words without present meaning or future use for the child, which flood of words overwhelms his sad and barren childhood.⁴

In the late nineteenth century, the educationalist John Dewey also emphasised experience and the importance of learning by doing. Rousseau thought the child ‘should be taught by experience alone’; the phrase most commonly associated with Dewey is learning by doing. For Dewey, the problem with many of the schools in his time was that the pupils were not active:

The child is thrown into a passive, receptive or absorbing attitude. The conditions are such that he is not permitted to follow the law of his nature; the result is friction and waste.⁵

We see it again; teaching facts makes the pupil passive; making the pupil passive means they must ignore their natural inclinations; ignoring their natural inclinations makes them unhappy and does not help them to learn. And again, the problem is with teaching facts to the pupil:

We present the child with arbitrary symbols. Symbols are a necessity in mental development, but they have their place as tools for economising effort; presented by themselves they are a mass of meaningless and arbitrary ideas imposed from without.⁶

Paulo Freire was a Brazilian educator whose most famous book, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, was written in 1970. Like Dewey, his theories have enjoyed great influence: Pedagogy of the Oppressed has sold over one million copies worldwide.⁷ It was undoubtedly more popular in its 1970s heyday, but a measure of its continuing influence can be seen by the fact that it came tenth in a Teachers’ TV survey in 2007 to find the most inspirational education books.⁸ Freire also criticises how facts prevent pupils from truly understanding the reality around them:

The teacher … expounds on a topic completely alien to the existential experience of the students. His task is to ‘fill’ the students with the contents of his narration—contents which are detached from reality, disconnected from the totality that engendered them and could give them significance.⁹

He developed his famous banking concept of education, illustrating how facts prevent understanding:

Education thus becomes an act of depositing, in which the students are the depositories and the teacher is the depositor. Instead of communicating, the teacher issues communiqués and makes deposits which the students patiently receive, memorise, and repeat. This is the ‘banking’ concept of education, in which the scope of action allowed to the students extends only as far as receiving, filing, and storing the deposits. They do, it is true, have the opportunity to become collectors or cataloguers of the things they store. But in the last analysis, it is the people themselves who are filed away through the lack of creativity, transformation, and knowledge in this (at best) misguided system.¹⁰

All these metaphors should remind us of another famous writer on education, Charles Dickens. Although Dickens was a novelist, not an educationalist, his works and characters are so famous and influential that they merit mention here. His depiction of Thomas Gradgrind’s school at the start of Hard Times is a literary masterpiece:

Now, what I want is, Facts. Teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts. Facts alone are wanted in life. Plant nothing else, and root out everything else. You can only form the minds of reasoning animals upon Facts: nothing else will ever be of any service to them. This is the principle on which I bring up my own children, and this is the principle on which I bring up these children. Stick to Facts, sir! …

The speaker, and the schoolmaster, and the third grown person present, all backed a little, and swept with their eyes the inclined plane of little vessels then and there arranged in order, ready to have imperial gallons of facts poured into them until they were full to the brim.¹¹

As we can see, the metaphor at the end has very much in common with those metaphors used by Rousseau, Freire and Dewey. Dickens criticises those people who would view children as passive receptacles to be filled with facts. The rest of the novel makes it clear what happens to children subjected to Gradgrind’s methods. They turn into emotionally stunted and broken adults, like his daughter Louisa, or into emotionless, heartless snitches like Bitzer. Hard Times, incidentally, came seventh in the same inspirational books on education poll previously mentioned. It is also striking to note how often the name Gradgrind is mentioned in serious discussions on education. The current affairs programme Newsnight recently used a lengthy clip of a TV version to illustrate a feature on exam reform.¹² Comparing a teacher or anyone involved in education to Gradgrind is an insult, suggesting that the teacher is both emotionally stunted and doing great emotional damage to their pupils.

One common trope is seen in all of these writers. They all set up polar opposites between facts, which are generally seen as bad, and something else, which is generally seen as good. Facts are opposed with meaning, understanding, reasoning, significance and, in Dickens’s case, fancy or what we might today call imagination or creativity. If you want pupils to understand the true meaning of something, to be able to reason, and to be creative and imaginative, then facts are not the way to achieve such an aim.

Sometimes, it is argued that these theorists were not hostile to facts per se, merely to certain prescriptive and artificial methods of learning such facts. In Chapter 2, I shall consider this argument in full and look in closer detail at the practices these theorists preferred instead of fact-learning. But for now, I just want to consider their attitudes towards facts themselves, and I think it is fair to say that both their arguments and the language they use show that they are deeply uneasy about the very idea of facts.

Modern practice

At first sight, it might seem as though these ideas are about as far away from the modern education system as possible. After all, are we not being frequently told how stressed our pupils are? How many exams they have to sit? How awful and joyless their childhoods are? Surely the problem here is exactly the one that Rousseau and the others diagnosed: too much fact-learning. It is indeed true that our pupils have to sit very many exams. It may well be true, as the United Nations claim, that they are the unhappiest in the developed world.¹³ But their problems most certainly do not derive from being overloaded with facts; actually, as I want to show now, current educational practice is guided very clearly by the ideas I have outlined previously.

There are two main ways in which we can trace the influence of such ideas: in the curriculum that teachers are told to deliver and in the pedagogical techniques that they are trained and told to use. We can reliably know the curriculum teachers are statutorily required to deliver by looking at publications of the National Curriculum (NC) for England and associated documents. We can reliably trace the pedagogical techniques that are used in English schools by looking at the reports and other publications of the Office for Standards in Education, Children’s Services and Skills (Ofsted), the English schools inspectorate. In this chapter, I shall look just at the NC; the following chapters will consider the publications by Ofsted.

First, I shall consider the reliability and significance of the NC as a source, which is fairly easy to prove. Since it was introduced in 1988, maintained schools in England have been statutorily required to deliver it. So if we find that the NC does, or does not, require something, then that is significant.

In the primary curriculum, last revised in 1999, and the Key Stage 3 (KS3) curriculum, last revised in 2007, there is a deliberate reduction, and in some cases complete removal, of subject content. This move was sometimes taken to mean that the curriculum freed up teachers to teach what they liked. This was not quite the case. While these curricula certainly had very much less prescribed subject content, they still had a great deal of prescription. But in this case, the prescription was for skills, experiences and certain methods, rather than content. Consider the history curriculum, for example. The 2007 KS3 curriculum prescribes not knowledge but instead a list of skills. The things that pupils should learn are as follows:

Historical enquiry
Pupils should be able to:

a identify and investigate, individually and as part of a team, specific historical questions or issues, making and testing hypotheses

b reflect critically on historical questions or issues.

Using evidence
Pupils should be able to:

a identify, select and use a range of historical sources, including textual, visual and oral sources, artefacts and the historic environment

b evaluate the sources used in order to reach reasoned conclusions.

Communicating about the past
Pupils should be able to:

a present and organise accounts and explanations about the past that are coherent, structured and substantiated, using chronological conventions and historical vocabulary

b communicate their knowledge and understanding of history in a variety of ways, using chronological conventions and historical vocabulary.¹⁴

Most subjects in the 2007 curriculum are like this. For example, here are the essential skills and processes of the science curriculum, which are actually remarkably similar to the history skills:

Practical and enquiry skills
Pupils should be able to:

a use a range of scientific methods and techniques to develop and test ideas and explanations

b assess risk and work safely in the laboratory, field and workplace

c plan and carry out practical and investigative activities, both individually and in groups.

Critical understanding of evidence
Pupils should be able to:

a obtain, record and analyse data from a wide range of primary and secondary sources, including ICT sources, and use their findings to provide evidence for scientific explanations

b evaluate scientific evidence and working methods.

Communication
Pupils should be able to:

a use appropriate methods, including ICT, to communicate scientific information and contribute to presentations and discussions about scientific issues.¹⁵

The key concepts for most subjects follow a similar format: enquiry, evidence, communication. The guidance that comes with this curriculum states clearly that there is deliberately ‘less prescribed subject content’ and, instead, more of a ‘focus on the key concepts and processes that underlie each subject’.¹⁶ Here we see the opposition that we saw Dewey, Rousseau and Freire make. They opposed facts and under...