Why is school so excrutiating? (and I'm the Head...)

Perhaps I ran away with the strength of my own feeling in the last blog.  But I don’t think so.  I picked up The Observer from a couple of weeks ago, and was reading the Review, when I came across a spirited interview with the zesty and gutsy Joanna Lumley.  What balls that woman has!  Her encounter with the pathetic Labour politician Phil Woolas a year ago is now legendary – she virtually established government policy, live on TV, by facing down the craven Woolas with the conviction and rightness of her cause: justice for the Gurkhas who fought for Britain, for heaven’s sake.  My own outrage pales beside hers – and I quote: “ ... when things come up out of the blue, when some cruelty or abominable act like the bankers giving themselves bonuses ... I can’t believe it!  I can’t believe you boys.  You!  Boys!  You!  You are accepting money that we gave you.  And look at her.  She can’t even afford heating.  She’s bailed you out.  And you’re giving yourselves a prize?  Where’s your fucking shame? ” God, she’s good.

But, it’s schooling that’s vexing me now.  This scandal with the exam boards amazes me.  It’s not the fact that it happened, and so publicly, that takes your breath away but the fact that nobody seems to have woken up to this before.  To recap, an examiner from the Welsh Joint exam board was filmed by a hidden camera giving a workshop to teachers – a paying audience – in which the question-setting strategy was laid out and teachers were effectively told what topics would come up in what exam sessions.  Why does nobody see the bigger picture here?  This has been going on for years in one form or another – that is, teaching to the test, and practising tests for their own sake.  The US has been doing it for years: the drudgery of standardized testing: the only thing it tests is the ability to take and pass tests.  It’s nothing to do with performance, less still of aptitude and it certainly isn’t predictive.  Baron’s plethora of SAT primers are supposed to be indispensible for helping kids pass the SAT.  So what happened to school?  I thought good teaching was supposed to help kids pass the SAT.  How has the book become primordial?  And now, the Brits are at it with their (completely different) SATs, their GCSEs and their A-levels.  Can’t anyone see that we are doing nothing more than training seals to jump through hoops?  So much political power lies in educational systems and of course commercial interests too – Baron’s publishing for a start, along with the now privatised exam boards in the UK.  Of course it’s in their interests to make their tests ‘easier’ and sell them to gullible schools who want a high pass rate to satisfy paymasters and customers.  Hard to believe the officer from Edexcel – the old London University Board – who calmly admits to the hidden camera that their programmes are so devoid of content that and are a cinch to pass, that they can’t believe that the national qualification authority actually gave them the go-ahead.

I get so depressed when I see these stories.  I used to think that one day, the educational world, particular its leaders, would begin to see the light about what learning really means: goodness knows, the research has been out there for ages; the neurological evidence about learning, the action research on intelligence and testing, the desperate pleas from the likes of Sir Ken Robinson, talking to the RSA, for example and his TED Talks, calling for creativity, more emphasis on the arts and more recognition that kids are not commodities to be processed according to date-of-manufacture (www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDZFcDGpL4U)  The passing of these exams demonstrates nothing more than an ability to take tests.  After all, the curriculum has been transparent: learn what is on the test, because it’s on the test, and you’ll pass it if you do!  But that skill has little to do with real life, nor with earning a living, nor with creative problem-solving, demonstrably the skills needed today and more so in the future.  Exams are exclusively tests of individuals (and of their knowledge retention) rather than of their abilities to solve problems.  As everyone in the workplace knows, real issues are solved in teams, collaboratively.  This is how the workplace works.  But in schools it rarely if ever is allowed to happen: - it’s called cheating when people work together in schools, and it’s discouraged as if it were a moral defect.  In fact, it’s punished as a moral defect, as it might have been 100 years ago.  For people to work collaboratively in teams they need at least to be able to reason, argue, criticize, listen and discuss – skills rarely if ever presented as valuable at school.   Creativity and innovation are stifled – not allowed because it can’t easily be tested in a standardised way.  Kids older than around 7 years old are not curious because curiosity is not on the school agenda.  The Robinson Report into Creativity in Schools was published by the DfEE (in the UK) in 1999.  Did anyone read it?  They said it was revolutionary in 1999.  What changed as a result? Nothing.

And where does the blame lie?  It’s easy to say Society, though it’s one way to describe it.  It’s the political class – spineless, leaderless, vacuous, devoid of moral compass, blind, venal and self-interested.  That’s why we never have change.  So deeply wedded to short-term political gains that secure them re-election (only to repeat the same short-term goals).  Its the same syndrome that has infected all modern capitalism – the desire for short-term returns, self-gratification and to hell with the future and our children.  The same as climate-change deniers?  I should say so.  Care nothing for the future; care only for the present, care only for oneself.  Listen to no counsel but one’s own.  Greed, wilful blindness, is what it is, not Society.

Indignados? Count me in!

It seems to me that the more I listen to the news, read the papers and watch TV news programmes, the more I feel vindicated, and the more I feel the warmth of the company of countless thousands of like-minded people the world-over, whose lips noiselessly repeat ‘I told you so’.  I say “warmth of the company” but it’s cold comfort to experience it.  The ‘I told you so’ response is painfully uncathartic.  And what I really want to feel is the same sense of outrage that the indignados express.  Actually, the índignados are a fascinating phenomenon, but I fear it will lead nowhere.  As many commentators in the press have observed, what is so surprising about the uprisings of spontaneous outrage, pillage, occupations and demonstrations is that it took them so long to hit the streets.  And that their protests have, in the main, been mild and inoffensive.  Well, apart from the quite evidently non-pacific lootings in London and anarchy in Athens.  Indignant?  I should co-co.  I’d be righteously outraged, incandescent, incensed.  Since we’re talking Thesaurus, a synonym that Roget offers is up-in-arms.  And that, of course, is what they haven’t been.  What on earth took them so long?  But we haven’t seen the last of this. Watching on the TV news householders cast out into the streets by bailiffs – no, not by bailiffs alone but by police; and violently, too: I saw the blood.  Those that angrily intervened, that got into fights with the police, that willingly entered the fray, were, to me, the indignados who had passed through outrage and were fully-on to incandescence.  I felt for them, cheered them on (pathetically, from the other side of the TV screen), incensed from the armchair so-to-speak.  It seems scarcely credible that a government of the left (for that is what it was, then) acted as bailiffs for the bankers.  Those fat-cats basking in multi-million bonuses and payoffs-for-failure, still gloating after the orgasm of public money ejaculated over them, saving their company’s margins whilst those that American politicians refer to as ‘decent, hard-working folk’ now join the thickening ranks of the homeless.  To lose one’s job is par for the course these days; but that loss invokes the eventual loss of benefits along with dignity, not to mention the inability to meet the monthly mortgage.  Why do we stand idly by? – well, most of us anyway.  Is it because we are powerless, or that we feel impotent against the great political forces taking to the stage each night on the news? Or is it that we’ve lost a social conscience?  Or perhaps we never have let one develop: reared on consumerism and bloated with plenty, these last 30 years or so, we neither recognise the venal corruption in our midst nor see the poor, the halt and the lame as victims of the system.  We’ve forgotten to look where we’re going – the classic car-crash analogy – and all have assumed that someone responsible must be at the wheel. 

Of course, some people have been quietly harping on about this theme for years: the creeping globalisation, the deregulated capitalism, the short-termism of the markets that look only at quick returns, the growth of private equity (whose raison d’être is precisely quick returns), the sale of national assets – companies like Boots and Cadbury’s to name just two – to foreign buyers whose interests are not ours, not national and not in the product: only in the profit.  Yes, we’ve seen the signs for years, and the eruptions of anger manifest in anti-globalisation protests at nearly every G20 these last years.  But they’ve been portrayed by the press as cranks (along with climate-change protesters), anarchists and looters.  We should have listened.  Tony Benn was whistling this tune 40 years ago, as were Eric Hobsbawm and others, but over the years we’ve lost the music and what’s more, lost interest in singing together.  Was it inevitable? Is it really the end of capitalism or just a blip?  What are the Chinese really thinking right now, as they wallow in trillions of credit dollars? Could this be Marx’s I-told-you-so moment?