There is Another Way

The second big book of Independent Thinking

Ian Gilbert

• Publisher: Independent Thinking Press
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781781352366
• eBook ISBN: 9781781352380
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Edited by Ian Gilbert with chapters by Mark Anderson, Lisa Jane Ashes, Phil Beadle, Jackie Beere, David Cameron (The Real David Cameron), Paul Clarke, Tait Coles, Mark Creasy, Mark Finnis, Dave Harris, Crista Hazell, Martin Illingworth, Nina Jackson, Rachel Jones, Gill Kelly, Debra Kidd, Jonathan Lear, Trisha Lee, Roy Leighton, Matthew McFall, Sarah Pavey, Simon Pridham, Jim Roberson, Hywel Roberts, Martin Robinson, Bethan Stracy-Burbridge, Dave Whitaker, Phil Wood. We are living at a time when loud voices from inside and outside the profession are telling teachers and school leaders 'this' is the way education should be done. This is how you should lead a school. This is how you should manage a class. This is how children should learn. This is what you should do to make children behave. These messages are given as if there is only one way to achieve these things their way. However, with decades of experience working in all types of school around the globe, the many associates of Independent Thinking know there is always another way. This book is for educators everywhere who are hearing these loud voices yet who know that children deserve something better. Full of inspiration and ideas for how to achieve just that, There is Another Way is a call to action to swim against the tide and reclaim the heart of education. All of the royalties from sales of this book will go to the Big i Foundation.

Chapter 1

If You Want To Teach
Children To Think

Politics, Hegemony and Holidays In the Dordogne

Ian Gilbert

When you want to teach children to think, you begin by treating them seriously when they are little, giving them responsibilities, talking to them candidly, providing privacy and solitude for them, and making them readers and thinkers of significant thoughts from the beginning. That’s if you want to teach them to think.

Bertrand Russell

In 1951, the British philosopher, mathematician and, to be frank, bit of a ladies’ man, Bertrand Russell, published an article in the New York Times entitled ‘The Best Answer to Fanaticism – Liberalism’. For Russell, liberalism isn’t about opposing authority but having the freedom to oppose it if you so desire. He doesn’t claim that the freedoms to discuss and question will always lead to the best outcomes but that ‘absence of discussion will usually lead to the prevalence of the worse opinion’.¹

Russell’s education was as privileged as it was lonely, as is so often the case for our landed gentry. A series of tutors followed by the best that Cambridge University could offer helped develop the man who was undoubtedly one of the greatest thinkers of the 20th century, one who saw critical dissension as much as an exercise required for a good mind as for a functioning democracy.

If this is so, if we do want to teach children to think, and not just to combat fanaticism, to what extent is this actually happening in our classrooms? Are we genuinely fulfilling Russell’s dream of treating young people in such a way that their thinking counts? The fact that they should be thinking counting more so? Or can a child perform admirably in a ‘successful’ school, winning a whole raft of GCSE grades and plaudits without ever having a thought of their own? Could it be argued that the current penchant for the teaching of knowledge in a direct transmission model, regimented by a highly structured system of sanction and control within an equally highly structured school system with its own command, control, measurement and punishment processes in place, is a direct attempt either to get children not to think at all or at least not to think for themselves?

And what about their teachers? Could it be argued that the current predilection for ‘education research’, the silver bullet to end all silver bullets, is an equally well-designed ploy to prevent educators from thinking for themselves too? Is the push to identify and promulgate ‘What works?’ a means by which ‘What else might work?’ can be conveniently overlooked, and the questions ‘At what cost?’ and ‘Works to achieve what?’ fail to get a look in?

Which, of course, brings us to the question of hegemony. I don’t know about you but this is not a word that cropped up in my teacher training or my classroom teaching career. However, I was uneasy with a French GCSE curriculum that seemed to revolve around a white middle class camping trip to the Dordogne. I was also very concerned that although we didn’t set by postcode, if we had it would have made no difference to which children ended up in which set. Looking back, these were all tell-tale signs of hegemony in action, and I was promoting it as blindly as the next person.

Put simply, a cultural hegemony is what you get when the powers that be arrange the world in such a way that it would appear that there is no other way for that world to be so arranged.² And then work hard to keep it that way. In education, this is achieved both through what is taught and how it is taught. In the first instance, a national curriculum is a clearly labelled intellectual land grab that says, ‘This is what is important and you must know it’. The inference is, of course, if you know it but it is not in our curriculum, then it is not important.

The fact that in England, at the time of writing, there is a national curriculum, but it is only forced upon those schools which have not followed the yellow brick neo-liberal road to academy status, does not mean that the hegemonic grip is being loosened. Rather, ‘they’ are holding the dog they are wagging elsewhere – this time through interference in what exam boards put in their schemes of work. Wherever you hold the metaphorical dog – if you are the one deciding, for example, what and whose books are important, what and whose history is important and what constitutes ‘British values’ – then you control the hegemony and you are very much in the driving seat.³ No wonder the Secretary of State for Education, Nicky Morgan, rejected a call in 2015 for educators to have at least some say in setting the curriculum, claiming: ‘It’s my belief that what our children learn in schools must be something that is decided by democratically elected representatives.’⁴ We are the hegemon, we get to choose.

In the second instance, with regard to the way children are taught, turning children into uncritical consumers of knowledge (‘Because it’s in the exam’) can well be seen as a process by which we are turning them into uncritical consumers full stop. By definition, citizens do things for the common good and not just for financial or selfish reasons. They make choices, balance views, take responsibility, participate, activate, organise. They think for themselves. It is questionable that a ‘sit there and learn what I tell you or else’ approach to pedagogy will encourage this, regardless of how well it may prepare young people for passing exams – the only currency of educational success currently in use. Where education and business have become bedfellows, preparing a generation of uncritical consumers seems like a party donation well spent.

Of course, this is not the case in all schools. For the past five years I have spent much of my time as an educator and as a parent in the independent international school sector observing what is effectively the schooling of the children of the developing world’s elite. Encouraged by the highly skills-based International Baccalaureate programme, the majority of these schools have independent learning, creativity, leadership and service high on the list of what they promote. Many British nationals I have met working in these schools look with incredulity at the direction English education has taken in the last few years, and I include educators in the very countries that have been held up as great examples to justify this direction, such as Hong Kong, China and Singapore, in that.

So, why is it that some schools are functioning at a very high level by pursuing a progressive, skills-based, child-centred, discovery-driven approach to education whereas state schools in the UK, US and elsewhere are going in the opposite direction? Here is where academic and trenchant observer of the wicked witches of the Western world, Noam Chomsky, has something to say. His view is that education for hoi polloi has always been about ‘passivity and obedience’, ensuring they know their place, something that is designed to actively deskill them in order to prepare them for life in the factories and offices, to make them, and here he quotes Margaret Thatcher’s favourite historical economist Adam Smith, ‘as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human being to be’. Education for the elite has a very different purpose though: ‘It has to allow creativity and independence. Otherwise they won’t be able to do their job of making money.’⁵

This is cultural hegemony in action. The system set up by a certain group for a certain order to ensure that the system perpetuates that order. I witnessed this writ large during my time in Chile where a three-tier school system (in order of quality: state schools; subventioned, fee-paying, semi-private schools; fully private schools) both reflected and perpetuated this country’s colossal class divides.⁶

In the UK it could be argued that things are a little more subtle, but they are no less powerful for that and just as pervasive and self-perpetuating. And we, the grown-ups in the schools, can be just as much the victims of it as the perpetrators. If you work in a school where the teachers are all middle class and the dinner ladies and site staff aren’t, that’s the hegemony at work. If you teach in a school where the school leaders are, by majority, white, middle aged, middle class males and the rest of the staff aren’t, that’s the hegemony. And, as a student, if your school day consists of hearing stories that aren’t yours in voices that aren’t yours, then that’s the hegemony in action too. Which means we must address an important question – what are they learning while you’re teaching them?

Fortunately, although we can’t escape the hegemony, let alone beat it, we can at least confront it, and it is with the help of one word: conscientização.⁷ It’s a word promoted by the great Brazilian educator Paulo Freire and effectively describes the way in which education, genuine education and not the simple transmission of facts, leads the learner to become conscious of what is really going on. Conscious of cause and effect, of control, of coercion, of oppression, of elitism, of bias, of discrimination, of omission, of selection. Conscious, in a Brazilian nutshell, of hegemony.

The greatest tool in the arsenal of the teacher who wants to pursue Freire’s ideas, and to practice what has become known as ‘critical pedagogy’,⁸ is to simply encourage your students to ask one question – why? With this one question, you can encourage them to dig beneath the surface of the way the world works and begin to learn for themselves why it works that way and start to think about how else it could be run. There is even research that has found that encouraging ‘why’ questions leads to the subject expressing more moderate political and religious views which, in our current climate of extreme fear of extremism, would not be a bad thing.⁹

A few months ago I asked the question via Twitter whether teachers felt teaching was a political act. The consensus seemed to be that it was if you wanted it to be. Such a response shows a lack of understanding of what teaching really is, I fear. While the teaching of ‘party politics’ has little or no place in schools, this is not to be confused with the idea of ‘politics’ itself, with all that it stands for when it comes to government, law, order, control, persuasion, deception, spin, participation, citizenship, ideals, ethics and values. If you look at politics through this lens then everything a school does – and everything done by every adult in that school – is a political act. All I suggest is that we start to practise such politics with our eyes open.

Russell ends his piece for the New York Times with what he calls a ‘new decalogue’ for the liberal teacher. Over 50 years old, it is a set of commandments teachers today would do well to live by. After all, there is a great deal at stake.

1. Do not feel absolutely certain of anything.

2. Do not think it worth while to proceed by concealing evidence, for the evidence is sure to come to light.

3. Never try to discourage thinking for you are sure to succeed.

4. When you meet with opposition, even if it should be from your husband or your children, endeavour to overcome it by argument and not by authority, for a victory dependent upon authority is unreal and illusory.

5. Have no respect for the authority of others, for there are always contrary authorities to be found.

6. Do not use power to suppress opinions you think pernicious, for if you do the opinions will suppress you.

7. Do not fear to be eccentric in opinion, for every opinion now accepted was once eccentric.

8. Find more plea...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Contents
• There is Another Way
• List of Contributors
• Introduction
• 1. If You Want To Teach Children To Think: Politics, Hegemony and Holidays In the Dordogne
• 2. When Kids REVOLT: Creating the Right Conditions For Powerful Learning
• 3. School Libraries and Librarians: Why They Are More Necessary Now Than Ever
• 4. The Learning Line: What Goes Up Will Go Down First
• 5. Live Your Life: And 19 Other Things I Wish I’d Known When I Started Teaching
• 6. How To Paint a Better School: Why School Improvement Is Not a Numbers Game
• 7. Educational Research: The Eternal Search
• 8. Because It’s In the Exam: Why We Need To Teach Beyond the Test
• 9. The Values Seesaw: Or How To Balance Your Own View of What’s Right With the Demands of the System and the Pressures Placed On Us From ‘Above’
• 10. Rules For Mavericks: When Teachers Are Caught Thinking For Themselves
• 11. Knowing Your Students Beyond the Data: On Values, Valuing and Saying Hello
• 12. Grow Your Own Cabinet of Curiosities: An Inventory of Exhibits To Get You Started On the Road To Wonder
• 13. Complex Doesn’t Have To Be Complicated: How To Cope With Complexity Without Becoming a Simpleton
• 14. Planting Seeds of Aspiration In Schools: The Power Teachers Have To Change Lives
• 15. There Isn’t an App For That: Jazz, Flow and Thirsty Learners
• 16. Athena Versus the Machine: Values Led Leadership In a Time of Change
• 17. A Genuine Student Voice Is One That Is Heard: How Powerful Things Happen When Young People Speak Out
• 18. I See No Ships: Visibility and Invisibility In Educational Research
• 19. Tell It Through Story: A Giant Curriculum
• 20. Tiny Worlds: Dung Beetles, Cosmic Drama and the Educational Imperative
• 21. There Isn’t a Plaster For That! Emotional Health Is a Whole School Issue, So What Can You Do?
• 22. From Attention To Obsession: The Stuff, Strategies and Soul of Teaching and Learning
• 23. Is the Education System In This Country F#%ked? Education, Inequality and Economic Fodder
• 24. If You Change the Way You Look At Things, the Things You Look At Will Change: Taking a Restorative Approach Across School Communities
• 25. If Coaching Is the Answer – What Is the Question? How Professional Development Is All In the Mind
• 26. The Future Classroom Today: The Five Pillars of Digital Learning
• 27. The Monkey’s Nuts: Creating a Challenging Curriculum
• 28. Now Can You See What I’m Thinking? Schools, Behaviour and Art Therapy
• 29. The Aesthetic Moment: When What We Learn and How We Feel Turn Out To Be the Same Thing
• Copyright