The Future of Teaching

And the Myths That Hold It Back

Guy Claxton

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9780367531638
• eBook ISBN: 9781000400403
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education Administration

It's time for the educational slugfest to stop. 'Traditional' and 'progressive' education are both caricatures, and bashing cartoon images of each other is unprofitable and unedifying. The search for a new model of education – one that is genuinely empowering for all young people – is serious and necessary. Some good progress has already been made, but teachers and school leaders are being held back by specious beliefs, false oppositions and the limited thinking of orthodoxy.

Drawing on recent experience in England, North America and Australasia, but applicable round the world, The Future of Teaching clears away this logjam of bad science and slack thinking and frees up the stream of much-needed innovation. This timely book aims to banish arguments based on false claims about the brain and poor understanding of cognitive science, reclaim the nuanced middle ground of teaching that develops both rigorous knowledge and 'character', and lay the foundations for a 21st-century education worthy of the name.

1 Punch and Judy

Forfoughten, adjective. (Obsolete). Worn out with fighting.

(OED)

A brief history of battle

In the 1970s and 80s – so the story goes – the Progs were top dogs, and the rhetoric of child-centred or holistic education held sway. According to the Trads, children were chatting, following their own childish interests, and generally fiddling about, while standards were slipping and knowledge was being ignored. Teachers, mesmerised by this holistic rhetoric, were abrogating their responsibility to actually teach: to tell children important things they needed to know and to ensure that they had learned them properly. Surveys showed that many children didn’t know basic facts about their world, and examples of laissez-faire teaching were increasingly discussed. And so, entirely unsurprisingly, the pendulum began to swing back in the Trads’ direction. In the mid-1990s a Conservative government began “putting things right”.

Out went a raft of liberal reforms, and back came Knowledge – with a vengeance. And this trend intensified still further when a Conservative government was elected in 2010 and Michael Gove was appointed secretary of state for education. But it wasn’t only right-wingers who wanted a more traditional turn. Several educational writers of a more left-wing bent, genuinely worried that children from disadvantaged communities had been particularly ill-served by the progressive ethos, joined the call for a more rigorous curriculum. Today, in the UK and in many countries around the world, it is this Trad alliance that is in the ascendant, and the Progs are on the back foot.

The Daisy chain

In June 2013, The Curriculum Centre, an offshoot of the Future Academies Trust, published a slim book by a young English teacher called Daisy Christodoulou. It was called Seven Myths about Education, and it immediately touched a nerve with the British education community. When it was reprinted by a mainstream publisher a year later, its influence expanded and it rapidly became a worldwide hit. It quickly became the go-to source of justification for the many educators who felt out of step with what they saw as a flawed progressive orthodoxy which had taken hold in a great many schools. The book boasted forewords by American academic E.D. Hirsch and widely acclaimed British educationist Dylan Wiliam. The latter said that Seven Myths “may well be the most important book of the decade on teaching (and I reluctantly include my own works in this assessment) … I’ve never said that about a book before, but that’s how good I think Seven Myths about Education is” – an endorsement that no doubt encouraged the education community to take it seriously.¹

The book offered a clear analysis of seven “myths” which purportedly underpinned the progressive view and scientific arguments as to why these beliefs were so misguided and damaging. It drew on research in cognitive psychology that showed, it was claimed, why the progressive view was simply wrong about children’s minds. It was a mistake to ask them to think about things in an imaginative, critical or independent way when they had little knowledge to think with, so the first job of the teacher was to tell them things that were true and important. When they had accumulated enough such information, the ability to think critically about such knowledge and apply it appropriately to the solution of new problems would automatically emerge. Apparently, the science required us to sweep away such distractions as group work, project work, or the attempt to teach ‘thinking skills’, and get back – to use two phrases much in vogue – to a knowledge-rich curriculum that was to be conveyed through direct instruction: the DIKR agenda.

Christodoulou was not alone in voicing these concerns. Around the same time Tom Bennett, who went on to found the influential ResearchED organisation, published a book called Teacher Proof: Why Research in Education Doesn’t Always Mean What It Claims, and What You Can Do about It.² In it he dished out a sharp kicking to many of the educational fads and fashions that had been around for some time: Brain Gym, Learning Styles, Emotional Intelligence and Learning to Learn (or L2L), for example. The latter was briskly dismissed in Bennett’s trademark style: “Learning to learn. It isn’t even a thing. We’ve been hoaxed … the hipsters are selling snake oil on this one. Don’t waste your time.” And having rubbished a four-year enquiry into L2L by academics at Cambridge, King’s College London and the Open University, the champion of research-based practice advised instead:

My intuitive default is that learning happens anyway … I have some strong opinions about this: I suspect that children learn when they are told stuff, and forced in some way to remember it, and practise it.

(p163)

A couple of years later David Didau produced What If Everything You Knew about Education Was Wrong?, which echoed many of Christodoulou’s arguments, criticisms and sources. Didau too was convinced that direct attempts to help children think and learn better were misguided and should be abandoned in favour of the knowledge-rich curriculum. In 2019, he followed up with another book, Making Kids Cleverer, which went further.³ Here is the catechism of his manifesto:

Q. What is the purpose of education?

A. Making children cleverer.

Q. How do we make them cleverer?

A. By getting them to know more.

Q. How do we get children to know more?

A. By teaching them a knowledge-rich curriculum and focusing on strengthening their access to knowledge stored in long-term memory.
[…]

Q. Why should we be interested in making children cleverer?

A. Because this seems to be the best bet for improving children’s welfare.

(p15)

In 2016, the teachers at a notorious free school, Michaela Community School in North-West London, produced a collection of essays extolling the virtues of their ultra-strict DIKR approach. Called Battle Hymn of the Tiger Teachers: The Michaela Way, they rejected any kind of collaborative group work, exploratory talk or project-based learning and echoed the belief that cognitive science had conclusively shown that there are no “general or transferable cognitive skills”, and that “learning and remembering facts … is the route to understanding and critical thinking” (p17). Like David Didau, they were guided by the assumption that “all there is to intelligence is the simple accrual and tuning of many small units of knowledge that in total produce complex cognition” (p19).⁴

Seven Myths was not the first rumbling of discontent about progressive education. Back in 1996 journalist Melanie Phillips had published a book called All Must Have Prizes, in which she anticipated the current concern about the rise of the “snowflake generation”: young people who were intolerant of challenging tasks or ideas. She argued that “at some point in the last few decades, the educational world came to agree that its overriding priority was to make children feel good about themselves: none of them should feel inferior to anyone else or a failure” (p12). Yet overprotecting children from the harsh realities of frustration, failure or disagreement in school (or at home) was simply storing up trouble for them later on, she said.⁵

Expressing similar concerns – though with a more overtly political tone – academics Kathryn Ecclestone and Dennis Hayes argued in The Dangerous Rise of Therapeutic Education that a preoccupation with young people’s well-being was leading schools to “jettison and disdain the intellectual in favour of the emotional”, and “turning schools into vehicles for the latest political and popular fad” (p64).⁶ These lines of argument appealed to those many educators who – like Ecclestone and Hayes – were especially (and rightly) concerned about issues of social equity and mobility. Some believed that the biggest crime of progressive teaching was to short change children from poor, disadvantaged or marginalised communities. The dubious concern with developing ‘life skills’ serves only to distract teachers from giving such children the one thing that would truly enable them to expand their life choices: access to the ‘powerful knowledge’ and ‘cultural capital’ possessed by those from more fortunate or mainstream backgrounds. Instead of giving them a diet containing the rich, chewy and nourishing subjects of the traditional curriculum, schools under the sway of progressive ideology were offering them pabulum and saccharine. Learning to learn and project-based learning, though well intentioned, has turned out to be tools for keeping the working class in its place.

In 2002, soon-to-become chief inspector of schools Chris Woodhead published a book called Class War: The State of British Education, in which he ridiculed much progressive thinking, describing one book (to which I have to say I contributed), Schools in the Learning Age, as “a mishmash of tautology and gobbledegook” (p49) being peddled, in the main, by left-wing academics.⁷ He imported the American term of abuse “The Blob” to describe (and deride) those who worked in teacher training and educational research.⁸

Such attacks on ‘trendy’ educators and their subversive ideas also found favour with right-wing politicians and social commentators. In March 2013, 100 such educators (of which I was one) signed a letter ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• About the author
• Acknowledgements
• Foreword
• Prologue
• 1 Punch and Judy
• 2 Values
• 3 Knowledge
• 4 Thinking
• 5 Learning (and learning to learn)
• 6 Memory: the ‘architecture’ of the mind
• 7 Teaching
• 8 Reality – getting out more
• 9 Research – but what kind?
• 10 The future of teaching
• Further reading
• Notes
• Index