Problems in Primary Education (RLE Edu K)

R Dearden

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9780415697613
• eBook ISBN: 9781136492570
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

The first part of the book discusses aims, who should determine them and how they might be determined. The second part discusses some more specific topics of learning and teaching, such as learning how to learn, the integrated day and the use of competition. The author distinguishes three broad levels of thought in looking at schools: the details of choice and decision; the general principles which are, or ought to be, guiding that detailed practice; and the theoretical commentaries on the guiding principles available from the various disciplines which constitute the study of education.

Part one

Aims and principles

Chapter one

Who should determine aims?

Schools are rather special places with special purposes. They are places which have been specially arranged and intended so that people may learn things, and may do so under the directive guidance of teachers. Schools do other things as well, of course, some of which are also done by other institutions. But the essential point and purpose of a school, the feature which distinguishes it from a recreation ground, factory, restaurant or whatever, is that it is specially arranged and intended for learning to take place under the directive guidance of teachers. This is no less true of our primary schools, or of our first and middle schools, than it is of schools of any other kind.

This is not to deny, of course, that schools do have, in varying degree, wider human and welfare functions. They may be convenient points at which to make available certain medical services, for example. But if teachers lose sight of their primary purpose, then very likely their energies will be dissipated in roles which are too diffuse for effectiveness and for which they are in any case untrained. The principle should not be that a teacher must be equally concerned with his pupils in every aspect of their existence, but that he should be primarily concerned with such aspects as bear upon (sometimes indeed even make impossible) his role as a teacher. Rather than attempting to be a doctor, social worker, magistrate, psychiatrist and so on, a more modest and realistic claim would be to be able to recognize when someone else's expertise is needed. The point here is to distinguish between recognizing that effective teaching requires an awareness of much more than goes on in one's classroom, and losing sight of relevance to teaching in that widening awareness.

Logically, then, the first question to ask about a school would be what the people going there, the pupils or students, should be learning. If nothing much is learned, or if what is learned is of little value, then the place may possibly be doing the job of some other institution rather well, but the distinctive purpose in having a school will have been lost, or defeated. The quality and extent of what is learned there form the heart of a good school. This is not to imply, however, that what is learned should be confined to facts and skills, very important though these are. Interests, attitudes, habits, virtues and relationships may be just as important, perhaps even more important, items of learning which the teachers properly set themselves as aims.

What, then, should the pupils in our primary schools be learning? What, in general terms, should we be aiming at? What is success and what is failure in the way of learning in a primary school? As soon as such logically first questions are asked, and squarely faced, the difficulty of answering them becomes apparent. For it seems unlikely that anyone could himself be sufficiently widely educated, sufficiently aware of the natures and differences of primary school children, and sufficiently versed in the practical possibilities of a school's situation to be able to form an adequate and comprehensive judgment. So difficult is this question, in fact, that it has been customary to let tradition settle it. Attention can then be given to the much easier and more businesslike questions of method and of organization.

But schools are unlike business enterprises in many ways. Those who operate businesses may set before themselves as their primary goal the maximizing of profits. This is a goal that seems unambiguous and which naturally and immediately shifts attention to the practicalities of how the thing is to be done. But with schools, concerned as they should be to give an education, there is nothing corresponding which is so clear and unambiguous as maximizing profits. It is irrational, therefore, to be fully preoccupied with questions of means when the ends are genuinely so open to debate. And indeed various circumstances have, over the course of the last decade or so, put strong pressure on those who work in schools to reflect upon their aims. There has been such a spate of innovation, whether originated, pressed, canvassed, carried out or only heard of, that the need for some broad and overall perspective has been felt as perhaps never before. And indeed, to return to the business analogy for a moment, even the apparently clear-cut aim of profitable production in business has become less clear-cut as job-satisfaction for employees and wider social responsibilities affecting the public interest are brought into the reckoning.

The Plowden Report on aims

Since a logical priority over other questions attaches to the question of aims, and since the innovations of the last decade have given a special urgency to that question, it was surprising that the Plowden Report was so unsatisfactory on this point. The relevant brief chapter¹ gives a strong impression that it was touch-and-go whether to regard the question as worth raising at all. There were, in fact, three reasons for hesitation which deserve attention, and which do have some force.

The first reason was that general statements of aim are often rather loosely connected with the actual practice of teachers. This is quite true. Grand-sounding phrases such as ‘our cultural heritage’, or ‘the full development of each child's potential’, may have their place on speech day platforms, in prospectuses, or in students’ essays, but when it comes to the crunch at nine-fifteen on Monday morning, such notions are apt to flee to the remotest corners of consciousness, or beyond. Then again, and it is not an unconnected second point, general statements of aim are apt to be rather platitudinous. Every-one is apt to agree with them, which is a sure sign that they are nerveless, or empty of content. As soon as you approach something with more bite in it, such as someone's assertion that the use of competition is a good educational principle, consensus vanishes. Agreement and platitude do tend to go together where aims are concerned.

Each of these objections – that general statements of aim are loosely connected with practice and that they are apt to be platitudinous – is well made, but such objections are relative to those sorts of general statements. Aims do not have to have this unsatisfactory character. If they often do have, then that is surely a reason for doing better, not for abandoning the whole enterprise in a blind concentration on more limited and logically subordinate questions of method and organization.

But the Plowden Report's third reason for hesitation was more interesting. It was that successful teachers and headteachers are often unable to state their aims. The implication is the obvious one that if their degree of success is achievable without stating or formulating aims, then what is the practical value of that difficult enterprise, especially for people who are already hard-pressed with claims on their time and energy? Yet surely it is not being claimed that these very successful practitioners are literally aimless in what they do? Surely they do more than radiate sunny personalities and spread cheer around? Surely they achieve something worthwhile in the way of learning, and not just by accident? Without aims, what are the criteria of success and failure by which to judge one's efforts? If we have aims, our energies are released and purposefully directed, and we are more likely to hit the mark. What we do is more likely to be consistent, and gaps and omissions in what we do are more easily recognized. We can take our bearings rather more clearly when confronted by choices of priority and by suggested innovations.

In reply to this, it might be said that the achievement of aims is quite possible without teachers having to think about them, provided that what they do is tightly controlled by some source of authoritative direction. Many educational systems are indeed organized on that pattern, and those who wish teachers’ initial training to be confined to supplying immediate classroom survival equipment are cast in the same mould. Nevertheless, this kind of external authoritative direction was very far from what the Plowden Committee had in mind, or would have been sympathetic towards.

A way forward here is to distinguish between having aims, and being able to state them, with its associated intellectual operations of formulation and justification. Plowden's ‘successful practitioners’ doubtless had aims, but they did not have the ability to communicate them very satisfactorily. In much the same way, we all of us use words with confidence and accuracy which we would nevertheless be hard-pressed to define. Again, a newspaper editor may run a highly successful newspaper, yet be unable to articulate just what are his criteria of ‘news’, or exactly what effect he wants to produce. To use a phrase of Polanyi's, there is ‘tacit knowledge’ as well as knowledge which is available in a clearly articulated verbal form.

But there are some respects in which Plowden's successes would have been less successful, just because they could not state, and consequently could not justify, their aims. They would have been unsuccessful, not as teachers of children, but as teachers of teachers. They would also have had problems in explaining to parents, or to school visitors of whatever kind, just what it was that they were trying to achieve. The latter inadequacy may be frustrating or embarrassing, but the former is worse in making others dependent on one's authority. It was in fact headteachers who were principally the subject of discussion. If a head-teacher cannot communicate his aims and principles, his ‘philosophy’ if you like, then his staff will be made very dependent on his judgment. The least that one might claim here is that the teaching of teachers would at least be expedited if the point behind it could be formulated and stated, justified or discussed. But so long as ‘successful practitioners’ have aims without being able to formulate them, they will be apt to remain either the sole beneficiaries of this knowledge, or else be forced into giving detailed direction to others in a way which is at best very slow to create independence.

The school's autonomy in determining aims

An assumption made so far has been that it should be the teachers, led by the headteacher, who should determine the aims of a school. Yet the slightest acquaintance with the educational systems of other countries, or indeed with the earlier history of our own system, is sufficient to put that assumption in question. Is it justifiable that the schools should have such a degree of autonomy? On the face of it, there are several other groups who might have as good a claim, or even a better one, for example the parents, an appointed panel of ‘experts’, or even the pupils themselves. The staffs of schools may disagree amongst themselves over the degree to which headteachers should make unilateral decisions on policy, but should the question of aims properly be settled in the school at all?

Whatever discretion in this aspect may in practice be allowed to the schools, as a matter of law it would seem that the education authorities have the right to determine aims. They are charged with providing an education which is desirable in view of pupils’ ‘different ages, abilities and aptitude’. Within living memory it was not unknown for authorities to require the submission for approval of detailed minute-by-minute timetables. The greater discretion of recent years, extending as it has to the allocation of finance, may prove to have been a phase only. Certainly authorities have issued to schools directives on the teaching of French as well as the eating of sandwiches, on sex education as well as on heating, and on corporal punishment as well as on staff quotas. Some energetic and even visionary chief education officers and advisors have put their stamp on whole counties, while others speak of the urgent need for methods of evaluating performance. Fully to comprehend the untidiness and uncertainty of this situation, one has to try describing it to a foreigner, preferably one from a very neat and tidy system.

There are, I think, three main reasons why this recent tradition of school autonomy might be questioned. The first of these reasons arises from the mobility of the adult population, coupled with the diversity of practices in schools. The consequence of this is that children of mobile parents may suffer and become confused through the diversity of practices and expectations which they meet. They begin reading with traditional orthography, only to move school to one where the initial teaching alphabet is used. Similar experiences occur in relation to the learning of a foreign language (which may be productive of problems for the secondary school) and also in relation to the content and methods of mathematics teaching. These problems may to a lesser degree occur within schools as well as between schools, if teachers do not or are not required to co-operate closely. Something can be, and to a varying extent is, done to alleviate these consequences by local consultation and agreement between headteachers, or an acceptable ruling can be given by the local education authority. But a degree of unwanted and unintended consequence remains, so that the case for school autonomy has to show that it can outweigh, even if it cannot wholly remove, these disadvantages.

The second attack would be on the teachers’ competence. I do not have in mind the teacher near retirement who will not inconvenience himself by troublesome changes, or the school which is quite unresponsive to legitimate parental complaint. We are concerned here with the general case. Every system produces schools of varying quality as judged by the system's own criteria. The present attack would be directed at the limited knowledge and limited abilities of teachers in relation to the massive literature of research and expert discussion which now exists internationally on schooling and education. How can an individual teacher in a classroom embrace all of this in the scope of his judgment? Even the headteacher, hopefully with more time to stand back, reflect and compare, cannot keep abreast of every relevant piece of curriculum development, every new publication and project, or the findings of experts who have the time and resources to draw widely and think deeply. The quasi-Platonic solution, widely adopted elsewhere, is therefore to settle questions of aim and principle, even of detailed curriculum organization and teaching method, by groups of relevant experts. We shall return to this, the most substantial attack on school autonomy later.

Yet a third attack might be from the direction of the parents. They might question the teachers’ right to be the architects of their children's education. Is it not sufficient invasion of parental rights that children should, in effect, be compelled to attend school, without any further exclusion from a say in what the children should be taught? There are certainly many ways in which parents can be encouraged to take a greater interest in their children's education, and to take a more active part in helping and supporting the schools, but should they not determine the aims and policy? Let us consider first this parental claim.

If right is grounded in competence, then where school learning is concerned parents have a weaker case than the teachers. If they did not, there would be something sadly wrong with the teachers and indirectly with their training. The answer then would be to institute reforms designed to make teachers more competent, rather than to hand over to the parents. As things are, teachers have been through a selection process and have been trained. To this training they add experience and further inservice work. They are also in a better position than are parents to assess institutional possibilities and practicalities. And they work, not in a vacuum, but properly subject to very many pressures, such as the scrutiny of their professional colleagues, the limits of children's co-operation, the promotional policies current in the district, and the comments of visiting inspectors and advisers. Most parents, by contrast, have only their own dimly recollected and possibly idealized schooldays as a basis on which to judge. To this argument based on greater competence can be added the longer-term interest of teachers in the success of their school, whereas parental interest is typically and very naturally more transient and particular.

Assuming that parental control would be in the hands of elected representatives, rather than in the hands of the parent body as a whole, then there are well-known dangers over securing a true representation of parental opinion. Less commonly noticed is the point that it is not only the parents who have an interest in the schools, but the whole community. This interest derives both from the fact that the education service is the largest single consumer of local government finance, collected from parents and non-parents alike, and also from the fact that the pupils are participant members of a wider community which has to live with them, and in the productive work of which they will ultimately have to share. If a democratic argument demanding accountability is pressed in support of a parental right to control the school, then that argument must allow for accountability much more widely than simply to the parents. As things are, such accountability is formally provided through the managers, the local education authority and the local and national electoral systems. Wide accountability is thus already present, even if insufficiently strongly so in some people's view.

On the question of parental control, the Plowden Report would seem nearly to have got it right. That report advocated much more interaction between teachers and parents, both in help and support for the school from parents, and in greater openness of the school to parental inquiry, curiosity and sometimes complaint. Behind all of this lay the perception that children's attitudes to learning are crucial to the success of the school, and that parental interest or the lack of it importantly determines those attitudes. But on the question of aims and policy, both for conduct and for curriculum, Plowden was clear that the school should be self-determining. That is not to say that parents should never, no matter how extraordinary the circumstances, put pressure on a school to change or else justify itself. But between that pressure and actual policy should come the school's own professional, and one hopes principled, judgment, based on competence. And if disagreement is too deep for that to be an arrangement satisfactory to a parent, then there should be a parental right to change to another school.²

The determination of aims by experts³

The question we are considering is whether primary schools should continue to enjoy the degree of autonomy that they now have in determining their aims and general policy. A second possible claimant to that right can easily be imagined, since in most countries in the world such an alternative already exists. This alternative would be for panels of ‘experts’ to be appointed who would draw up curricular principles and guidelines, perhaps embodying a considerable degree of detail as to what should be done and when. Basically the argument would be the Platonic one that the wisest should rule. And since so much of the case for the schools as against the parents as the agency to determine aims has depended on an appeal to superior competence, it surely only requires an agency which is in turn superior in competence to the teachers for the determination of aims to move out of the schools and upward to that agency. Such an agency (a panel or committee of experts) could be drawn from the most experienced teachers as well as from other groups, but for most teachers it would be their source of pedagogic direction. And not only would it claim greater competence, but it would also introduce that uniformity of practice which the geographical mobility of parents makes so desirable.

It would be no objection to such centralized direction to say that there could not be any such competent body, since ed...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Title Page
• Original Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Part One Aims and principles
• Part Two Teaching and learning
• Notes and references
• Index