Time for a bit of Gove and take

November 12, 2009 by matthewtaylor
Filed under: Politics, The RSA 

This morning, as I walked down St James Street reflecting on an excellent breakfast belatedly to mark the launch of the Times science supplement ‘Eureka’, who should I bump into but Michael Gove. Although he was engrossed in a phone conversation he put his interlocutor on hold, ‘Ah, Matthew’ said the chief intellectual architect of Cameron Conservativism ‘you are most definitely number two in my priority list’.

In this, I assume Michael was referring to the list of questions I publicly posed him after his lecture here last June. ‘Number two’ does sound hopeful as long as this list is both stable and fast moving. I fear however there have been many other top priorities over these last few months and yet more may still emerge.     

Indeed it has taken so long for him to reply that I find the ground shifting under my feet. Although my questions were based on Michael’s forthright speech here, I did fall into the trap of assuming that one’s opinions on education line up neatly under two headings: traditional or progressive.

Traditionalists emphasise the importance of core knowledge, the authority of teachers, the need for schools not to be distracted from the task of academic pedagogy, the dangers of mixed ability teaching. They also tend to be sceptical of claimed improvements in standards, alleging widespread dumbing down. Progressives put more focus on the wider development of the child, they think children need to acquire competencies as well as knowledge, they see learning more as a partnership between teacher and learner, they encourage schools to engage with other agencies concerned about children and the wider community. They are more likely to argue that mixed ability teaching can be just as successful in terms of results and is better in terms of children’s self esteem and sociability. 

But there are several problems with the dichotomous view:

Close up, the differences tend to become more elusive. For example, supporters of competence based curricula are not anti-knowledge; they think theirs is the best way for pupils to acquire knowledge. Traditionalists recognise the wider development of the child is important but they put more store by things like schools sport and clubs as the way to do this

Arguments about how best to teach cut across other arguments, particularly about how much of what schools do should be centrally prescribed. Is it better for progressives to have a centralising government that broadly supports their approach or a decentralising one which doesn’t?

And, of course, the killer problem with resolving this argument; good traditionalist teaching is better than bad progressive teaching and vice versa.

Almost every review of these arguments attaches the same caveat to its conclusions. Here for example is the last sentence of an article by Andrew Delbanco in the New York Review about books by arch traditionalist E.D. Hirsch (who is often quoted by Gove) and ultra progressive Mike Rose:

‘Whatever the merits of this or that testing regime or this or that curriculum, the only way to break up the impasse would be for governments and philanthropies to put in place real incentives and rewards for tenanted, well-educated, passionately committed teachers – on whom, as everyone knows, everything finally depends’.

If Michael does ever come back to me I hope his response will provide the basis not for a heated disagreement but to start to unpack a traditionalist-progressive dichotomy which, perhaps, both he and I have been guilty of exaggerating.

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Comments

11 Comments on Time for a bit of Gove and take

  1. Joe Nutt on Thu, 12th Nov 2009 5:16 pm

    2. You shouldn’t feel too guilty about the exaggeration Matthew, you are far from the only one. I attended a preview screening of a new film about education at the Guardian’s HQ earlier this week, where numerous “progressive” voices were raised in the subsequent discussion which displayed not only a profound ignorance about what excellent schools and teachers do, but a palpable contempt for them.

    One of the panel voiced their disappointment in the failure of the Building Schools for the Future programme to deliver anything like real innovation or transformation, the key buzz words of the programme. When a representative of the key quango responsible for delivering the programme was asked to provide an example that wasn’t about buildings…he couldn’t.

    The reason is (as everyone who has ever attended or taught in one knows) a good or great school is just a little bit more than a building. Something I stressed 5 years ago in a piece about BSF for the TES, and which does now finally seem to have started to sink in.

    If anything clearly demonstrates the problem created when political ideology stifles the experienced voice of good teachers, it is the BSF programme. No one with any serious experience of working in great schools would ever have argued that a building is transformational.

  2. Lewesbusker on Thu, 12th Nov 2009 8:01 pm

    3. Matthew,
    Will you be holding your breath now until Michael responds..? I’m not sure he needs a discussion since he knows he’s right.

  3. phil h on Thu, 12th Nov 2009 9:06 pm

    4. Joe – very good point. Some of my best education took place in a temporary, pre-fab building.

    I once did a tender for employment law work to do with the academy building programme, where typically two existing schools would shut down and a brand spanking new academy would open.

    In my tender I said it would defeat the purpose if all the teachers from the two closing schools were re-employed in the academy. Opening the academy should be used as an opportunity to get rid of bad teachers.

    Needless to say my tender was not progressed!

  4. oldandrew on Sat, 14th Nov 2009 7:39 am

    5. There is a real split, it’s just that the words “progressive” and “traditionalist” dosn’t describe it.

    Most progressive ideas in education are actually ideas implemented in America in the 1920s. They have gone in and out of fashion and every few decades they are shown not to work, but instead of dying out they are repackaged, with new jargon and usually with the claim that they are new and based on the latest science. Often pefectly sensible concepts are redefined to refer to “progressive” ideas. So for instance “outcome-based learning” and “formative assessment” have gone from terms to describe practice that would be seen as traditionalist if anything to being progressive buzzwords. The same also happens to concepts. The idea of multiple intelligences is a good justification for a curriculum divided into subject areas (something traditionalists support) but the idea has been misrepresented to be about “learning styles” and therefore individualised learning, something progressives champion. To describe an old idea repackaged as “progressive” is ludicrous. To describe a rejection of this tradition (which is the dominant tradition in the UK and the US) as “traditionalist” is similarly daft. The mistake is to confuse the propaganda around ideas (“this is new and scientific”; “this is how it has always been done”) with the actual ideology behind them.

    You are right to identify that the bigger arguments are about how the ideologies should be promoted. “Progressives” have always sought to capture institutions and use them to enforce their methods.. “Traditionalists” have always been split on the issue and, historically, have seen institutions they set up to raise standards (e.g.. the National Curriculum, OFSTED, even GM status in the case of Stantonbury School) being used to advance progressive ideas. Traditionalists have often expressed confidence in empirical methods to establish how children should be taught, however, this seems to have less to do with a belief in the scientific method, and more to do with the fact that most rigorous empirical research seems to favour their methods and nobody really doubts that people’s position on empirical education research depends largely on what the results show. I would go further and suggest that even some of the debates you mention as traditionalist/progressive areguments are actually proxy issues. Is mixed ability/setting truly a progressive/traditionalist argument or is it just that kids are virtually unteachable in most subjects when mixed ability and this favours the “progressives” who have always favoured activities over teaching?

    The sides also have varying ideological views as to who is to blame for how schools are run. Progressives love to blame politicians for imposing traditionalist ideas on teachers, but, in practice, teachers usually end up being forced to comply with what progressives want. There has also been an unfortunate right-wing version of traditionalism that blamed teachers and their unions for progressivism.

    In my view, these kinds of issues and the ones you mention don’t show that we have one debate progressive/traditionalist and we need to transcend it, but that the debate has never been properly defined. The ideologies have never been clearly identified. Therefore, it is never clear when the debate has been transcended, and when old ideas have just been repackaged or when we have just moved from aims to means. As a rule of thumb I tend to think of ideas that encourage teaching to be traditionalist and those that are against it to be progressive, but a progressive would simply redefine the word “teaching” to avoid being categorised.

    Anyway, the best critical description of what progressive teaching ideology is actually about is, in my view, contained in the essay “The Crisis in Education” by Hannah Arendt in the book “Between Past and Future”. Written during one of the earlier backlashes against progressivism, she identifies three core beliefs of progressives (which I won’t repeat here, please just read it) and accurately predicts that the clock cannot be permanently turned back:

    “Such a reversal will never bring us anywhere except to the same situation out of which the crisis has just arisen. The return would simply be a repeat performance- though perhaps different in form, since there are no limits to the possibilities of nonsense and capricious notions that can be decked out as the last word in science.”

  5. matthewtaylor on Tue, 17th Nov 2009 9:42 am

    6. Thanks Joe. Can we agree that all other things being equal a good school building is better than a bad school building.? My son spent his first five years of secondary education in the old Pimlico school which was freezing cold in the winter often had classroom closed due to leaks and impossibly hot in the summer. Difficult to see how this wouldn’t adversely affect education. Of course, the RSA is building its new school for a clear reason – we want spaces which enable us to do the kind of large and small group teaching that works with our Opening Minds curriculum

  6. matthewtaylor on Tue, 17th Nov 2009 9:43 am

    7. Every day I wake up and pray to hear from the great one. And every night I go to bed disappointed.

  7. matthewtaylor on Tue, 17th Nov 2009 9:44 am

    8. Ah, getting rid of bad teachers. A bug bear for every parent. It seems to em it is getting easier to do, especailly in Academies, but not much easier.

  8. matthewtaylor on Tue, 17th Nov 2009 9:55 am

    9. Thanks for this Andrew and for the time you have put into such a thoughtful response. As I said in the post to which you responded, the dichotomy isn’t helpful and neither is name calling and blame mongering. At the moment the debate is anyway overlaid by the Conservatives political need to show that virtually everything going in schools is disastrous. You may know that posed a series of questions to Michael G a few months ago which, it seemed to me, did try to disclose the real dividing lines. As I said in my recent annual lecture the aim of responsible policy debate is to try to agree about what it is we disagree about. Your comment is a very helpful contribution to doing this.

  9. phil h on Tue, 17th Nov 2009 8:15 pm

    10. I agree Matthew that a good building is better than a bad building. I accept also that a well designed building can make a marginal difference. The issue is a ROI one. Buildings built under PFI have not always been particularly good value see http://www.unison.org.uk/acrobat/13672.pdf and repair and maintenance of existing infrastructure may have been better value, freeing up resources to spend on other priorities.

    In terms of outcome, I am sure we can agree that what goes on inside the building is more important than the building.

    Traditionalist/progressive – not helpful labels – kids need the foundations of numeracy and literacy as a bare minimum and then need to develop their talents and enthusiasms – for some that may mean latin and classics, for others it may mean food technology, IT or textiles.

    Michael Gove – he really ought to engage. I know that I can come across as a bit abrasive (particularly over student fees and top up loans grr) but you, Matthew, can at least debate the points I make even though you don’t agree with them. What’s Michael afraid of? Surely testing your ideas against someone who may not agree with them is the best way of refining and testing those ideas. As I continually remind myself, no one has a monopoly on judgment.

  10. Martin Robinson on Wed, 18th Nov 2009 6:27 am

    11. The Progressive vs Traditionalist dichotomy has been very damaging, particularly because there are so many ‘falsehoods’ on either side which become common ’sense’. For example – the battle against mixed ability teaching as though it is anti-intellectual and anti excellence. On the other side the danger of ‘nonsense’ like brain gym becoming common currency.

    It seems to me, one of the most traditional forms of learning – the ‘liberal arts’ curriculum is all about developing competencies and introducing a challenging body of knowledge. Getting students to engage and ‘do learning’ through grammar, logic/dialectic and rhetoric is at the root of so much good practice in academic and in practical teaching and learning.

    However one dichotomy is all pervasive: are schools there to ‘discover’ clever kids or grow them? When a teacher believes the former they are unlikely to unlock the true potential of their charges, and this is one of the main reasons that many are held back by their schooling rather than liberated by their learning.

  11. Something’s got to Gove | Matthew Taylor's blog on Mon, 18th Jan 2010 7:27 pm

    12. [...] questions. Maybe now he has published his education manifesto I have finally, albeit momentarily, moved to the top of his priority list (joking and bad puns aside, I am genuinely flattered and grateful). And what a fascinating reply [...]

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