Education revolution anyone?

So here is a suggestion. Everyone recruited into teaching as a career, first, should have curriculum content mastery at an advanced level, and second, and equally important, should have at the least the potential to develop, or already be in possession of a degree of flamboyance to their personality, which is likely to catch and keep children’s attention. This, by the way, does not involve wielding a ruler or barking at them. It may well centre around the kinds of interactive teaching that Grover Whitehurst describes as the best way to read to (with) children - which he names as “dialogic reading”. But it is in no way child-centred. It assumes that the child wants to grow up, wants to learn everything that helpful, significant, admired and respected olders can teach them, show them, explain to them, or inspire them to research further for themselves.

Mr Chips and Miss Dove, along with Diane Ravitch and ED Hirsch, have been screened out of the reading lists of student teachers. They should be placed centre stage as “core readings” for student teachers. So, that’s a practical, and easily implemented idea!

As an idea, it raises the whole issue of authority, a much vexed question in modern western society. Let me say clearly, it is my view that any teacher must have authority to be in any way capable of teaching anybody anything. Students rarely develop an enthusiasm for independent study (the sine qua non of the portfolio/project/assignment system) unless an obviously well-informed teacher has a cultivated mind that both provokes emulation and generates teasing questions that get under a student’s intellectual skin.

There are two sides to authority - positive and negative. The negative exercise of authority is usually perceived as (an abuse of) “power”. Sociologists (and historians and philosophers) are accustomed to distinguishing between power and authority, preferencing authority as superior in every respect to raw (brute) power. Sometimes they go together. Alexander the Great and Napoleon possibly possessed power AND authority. But authority is best sourced in respected knowledge and experience, as well as the power to achieve identified and substantive goals other than beating up on lesser mortals. (However, it is necessary to admit that one small degree of raw power is essential for any teacher in any classroom, and that is the power to remove disruptive students. This should not be punitive. But the student who doesn’t want to be there shouldn’t be there. This means abandoning compulsory schooling …)

Let’s therefore remove compulsion from schooling, but make sure the returns on getting an education are commensurate with the effort involved. (The returns, by the way, need not necessarily be monetary. the returns could be in the arena of intellectual satisfaction and the sheer pleasure of skills acquisition.)

The current panic over falling enrolments in the higher reaches of tertiary education where compulsion no longer holds students in thrall, could well be an indication that our current education system no longer offers adequate returns for effort involved.

In South Australia Premier Rann has been staving off similar data emerging on secondary schooling by supporting ever longer years of compulsory attendance. Is he in hock to the teacher unions? Is he avoiding the need to deal with school leavers joining a highly under-performing labour market? Whatever - the results for education cannot help but be negative to start with, and increasingly negative as time passes.

So, in response to the question about how to organise a revolution in education, here is a good part of the answer - get highly trained well-resourced teachers in half-way decent classrooms in front of students who want to be there, and stop the nonsense that education should be child-centred with a forthright assertion of the high value of teacher-centredness.

As well, it is time, for reasons too numerous to discuss here, to re-introduce exams as a regular feature of completing a given segment of study.

So far, these are all ideas that have a long history, with proponents and so-called “reformers” clearly at logger-heads for decades, at least.

So I’d like to nominate a revolutionary strategy that is fairly universal in its appeal, once its virtues have been explained. The chief virtue of this strategy is to maximise the effectiveness of the lines of attack outlined above for the school years.

It does derive heavily from my personal endeavors over the last decade and a half. So it is disclosure time. I have a strong personal interest in teaching small children to read. It is in the light of this that you should assess my judgment that the best way to ensure you have eager students racing their way through the school years with bounding enthusiasm and manifest intellectual growth, is to teach them to read before they get to enter the precincts of any school. More precisely, you should teach them to read using the very old-fashioned (and now new again) techniques of synthetic phonics. (NB - this does not need wielding a ruler and barking either. The Aunt Sallies that the current establishment use to protect themselves from criticism are near legendary and almost entirely false.)