Progressively Worse Progressively Worse The burden of bad ideas in British schools Robert Peal CIVITAS INSTITUTE FOR THE STUDY OF CIVIL SOCIETY · LONDON First Published May 2014 © Civitas 2014 55 Tufton Street London SW1P 3QL email: [email protected] All rights reserved ISBN 978-1-906837-62-4 Independence: Civitas: Institute for the Study of Civil Society is a registered educational charity (No. 1085494) and a company limited by guarantee (No. 04023541). Civitas is financed from a variety of private sources to avoid over-reliance on any single or small group of donors. All publications are independently refereed. All the Institute’s publications seek to further its objective of promoting the advancement of learning. The views expressed are those of the authors, not of the Institute. Designed and typeset by Richard Kelly Printed in Great Britain by Berforts Group Ltd Stevenage, SG1 2BH Upon the education of the people of this country the fate of this country depends. Benjamin Disraeli, 1874 Dare any call Permissiveness An educational success? Saner those class-rooms which I sat in, Compelled to study Greek and Latin. W. H. Auden, 1972 I would label myself a political liberal and an educational conservative, or perhaps more accurately, an educational pragmatist. Political liberals really ought to oppose progressive educational ideas because they have led to practical failure and greater social inequity. E. D. Hirsch, 1999 Contents Author viii Acknowledgements ix Foreword by Andrew Old xi Introduction 1 Part I: History 1. Radicalism: 1960-1969 15 2. Riot: 1969-1979 45 3. Reform: 1979-1986 74 4. Reform: 1986-1997 108 5. Reform: 1997-2010 134 Part II: Pedagogy 6. The Child-centred Orthodoxy 179 7. Empty Vessels and the Neglect of Knowledge 197 8. Discipline, Character and Moral Education 217 9. The Soft Bigotry of Low Expectations 242 Conclusion: How Freedom to Learn Became Freedom to Fail 260 Bibliography 268 Notes 275 Index 296 Author Robert Peal is a history teacher and education research fellow at the think-tank Civitas. He taught for two years at an inner-city secondary school in Birmingham through Teach First and will be returning to the classroom in September 2014 to teach at a free school. He is a regular contributor to Standpoint magazine and keeps a blog on education. Until recently, he wrote under the pseudonym Matthew Hunter, described by Michael Gove as ‘one of the brightest young voices in the education debate’. Robert graduated in 2010 with a starred first in history from Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge and gained a Thouron Scholarship to the University of Pennsylvania. He lived in West Philadelphia for a year, before moving to the West Midlands. He now lives in London. · viii · Acknowledgements This book benefited from emerging at a time when a community of teachers has been challenging the dominant ideas in British schools. I am indebted to Katharine Birbalsingh, Daisy Christodoulou and Joe Kirby for their knowledge of the education debate, and to Katie Ashford, Kristopher Boulton and Bodil Isaken for some spirited conversations. In particular, thank you to Andrew Old, the titan of teacher-bloggers, who took time from his blog ‘Scenes from the Battleground’ to write the foreword for this book. Another observer of the education scene, Toby Young, introduced me to Standpoint magazine, where the editor, Daniel Johnson, published my first stabs at education commentary. My old friend Laura Freeman kindly thought to put me in touch with Civitas. Thank you to all three for making this book a possibility. At Civitas, thank you to David Green for guiding me through the project, to Daniel Bentley for his thoughtful advice during its later stages and to the referees whose comments on an earlier version of this book were so helpful. Thank you to all my friends and family who have kept me company through the lonely business of writing a book, in particular Rob Orme – almost all the arguments in this book have originated in our conversations. Thank you to the Bakers for their hospitality, and to Georgie for being wonderful throughout. Lastly, thank you to my parents for their continual guidance and support, and also for their proofing: had it not been for this, my first draft would have been an embarrassing verification of declining education standards in Britain. · ix · Foreword Few publications can claim to be subversive, but that is a fitting description for what Robert Peal has written here. He has related a piece of educational history and described a debate that many educationalists, managers and inspectors will not want teachers to be aware of. It is not simply that his arguments against the influence that progressive education has on our education system will challenge many of those in a position of undeserved power and authority; he also provides the context that is lacking for so many of those who are, or soon will be, a part of our education system. While academics and journalists (or even bloggers like myself) might talk of an ongoing and established debate over education methods between progressives and traditionalists, it is not something that one can expect to hear much of when one becomes a teacher. It is entirely possible to be trained as a teacher in a university and in schools and teach for several years without ever hearing that there is any doubt over whether teacher talk is harmful; discovery learning is effective; or knowledge is less important than skills. To inform teachers that these disputes exist is to cast doubt on the expertise of most of those who train teachers; many of those who run schools; and also those with the greatest power in education: the schools inspectorate – Ofsted. For at least some readers, this will be the first time they have heard that certain orthodoxies have been, or can be, challenged. Of course, for the informed reader this may not be the first time such challenges to the progressive consensus · xi · progressively Worse have been encountered in print. The last few years have seen the publication of titles such as Daisy Christodoulou’s Seven Myths About Education, Tom Bennett’s Teacher Proof and Katharine Birbalsingh’s To Miss With Love, which have demonstrated the existence of influential voices in education expressing views many teachers have never heard before. This has been supplemented further by many, many bloggers who have been hostile to the ideological status quo. Additionally, it has also been informed by influential books from the United States by individuals such as Daniel Willingham, Doug Lemov and E.D. Hirsch. These writers, while not necessarily writing polemical or ideological tracts, have nevertheless confidently explored ideas about the curriculum, teaching methods and the psychology of learning that fell far outside the comfort zone of the English education system. However, I believe Robert Peal is now making a unique and essential contribution to this debate by providing the political and historical context of the arguments. Neither progressives nor traditionalists can claim to represent a new development in education. With the possible exception of some of the latest evidence from cognitive psychology for the effectiveness of traditional teaching, almost all the arguments described here have been part of the history of our education system for more than five decades. Generations have fought these battles, proved their points and bucked the system, only to be airbrushed from history by an educational establishment only too keen to recycle ideas from 1967’s Plowden Report as the latest innovation. The historical chapters here analyse and present the history of those arguments in a way which perhaps most closely resembles Left Back, Diane Ravitch’s magisterial recounting of the ‘education wars’ in the United States. If this causes teachers to realise that they can find ideas and inspiration, not just in the contemporary critics of progressive education, but in the writings of Michael Oakshott or R.S. Peters, then the · xii · FOREWORD educational discussion will be thoroughly enriched. The debate on education is not one limited to the present generation; it is not a scrap between, for example, Sir Ken Robinson and Michael Gove. It is a conversation that dates back, at least to the nineteenth century, in which figures such as Matthew Arnold, Charles Dickens, G.K. Chesterton, D.H. Lawrence, George Orwell, Dorothy L. Sayers and C.S. Lewis have had something to say on one side or the other. We should not let the latest iteration of the disagreement, with its talk of ‘21st Century Skills’ and ‘flipped classrooms’, blind us to that wider perspective. A historical perspective should also save us from being convinced that this row is one conducted along narrow party political lines. While their efforts to stem the tide of progressivism may have faltered in office, it is impossible to miss the extent to which some of the voices speaking out against the education establishment were those of Labour politicians such as Callaghan, Blunkett and Blair. While the influence of progressive education seems to have been greater on the left than the right, the case against it can be made on egalitarian grounds as easily as conservative ones. Robert Tressell, the undoubtedly working-class political activist and author, wrote in The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists: What we call civilisation – the accumulation of knowledge which has come down to us from our forefathers – is the fruit of thousands of years of human thought and toil. It is not the result of the labour of the ancestors of any separate class of people who exist today, and therefore it is by right the common heritage of all. Every little child that is born into the world, no matter whether he is clever or dull, whether he is physically perfect or lame, or blind; no matter how much he may excel or fall short of his fellows in other respects, in one thing at least he is their equal – he is one of the heirs of all the ages that have gone before.