For the Forum of the Carnegie Foundation:
An Open Reply to: A different way to think about Professional Education.
WHY KIDS KILL PEOPLE
I
am very happy to respond to President Shulman's invitation to engage
in dialogue with the Carnegie Perspectives, and in particular with William's
Sullivan's recent contribution on Professional Education, although I
do so from Biarritz, in France. Biarritz is a splendidly old-fashioned
kind of place, a magnet for surfers in spring and summer because of
the magnificent waves funnelled into the shore by the Bay of Biscay
but now, in December, only the hardiest will brave the vast cold Atlantic
breakers. Many of the shops are closed for much of the day and the municipal
library is being rebuilt - on a magnificent scale let me add: but to
find a copy of Dr Sullivan's Work and Integrity would probably take
weeks, even if it was open. Yet there is a free internet service at
the Hotel de Ville, the town hall, which I am allowed to use for 30
minutes every day, so long as I remember to write my name in the book
provided the day before; in Germany last month my computer packed up
completely and has now been reset with the German instructions for Windows.
All this makes life just a little bit more interesting.
I agree with Dr Sullivan that there is a growing
'cancerous cynicism' in public life concerning the honesty, integrity,
and even the purpose, of many professions. I agree with him that it
is no longer possible to regard these as only anomalous defects exhibited
by just a few irresponsible mavericks or dedicated criminals. Mendacity
appears to have become virtually endemic in all professions. But I disagree
with him that to remedy this condition 'the strategies of intervention
employed by professionals must engage with, and if possible strengthen,
the social networks of meaning and connection in people's lives - or
their efforts will continue to misfire and fail.'
I agree with him that the source of these problems
lies 'within human social contexts', but I disagree that they only appear
when (now to quote from President Shulman's invitation) 'in today's
environment of unrelenting economic and social pressure, professional
models of good work come under increasing strain'.
This, it appears to me, mistakes moral and social
symptoms for their moral and social cause. Their cause is much deeper.
The truth - a very ugly truth that many will not wish or may even be
unable to confront - is that long before they enter any professional
schools we train young people to produce precisely these strategies
of dishonesty, selfishness, evasion, greed, lack of compassion for others.
We do this in our schools: and when we then reward those who practise
such actions most successfully; when we offer them the knowing complicity
of their teachers; and when we allow them to be supported by their equally
dishonest peers, it is here that we show them how to continue to win
the 'public trust' on which their later 'success' will depend.
Of course I may be wrong: it may all happen
later; yet it appears to me that adequate discussion of these problems
should provide insight not only into what Dr Sullivan rightly calls
the 'breakdowns in institutional reliability and professional self-policing.'
It must reach further back. We need to understand why young children
in schools get to hate their peers, and their teachers, so much that
they want to kill them or themselves - and sometimes, when they are
just a little older, why they do precisely that. This is also a general
problem. Such events occur, even unto their tragic and ghastly denouement,
in many 'developed' countries. Why?
At this point, perhaps I should reveal something
of my experience at this level of education. After thirteen years of
Army service, I have taught mathematics for twenty-seven years at two
of the academically most successful schools in Britain - at Magdalen
College School in Oxford, recently acclaimed (but long after my time)
as the best private school in Britain, and then for the past twenty-five
years I have taught mathematics and also ethics at the British European
School near Oxford, one of the twelve official schools of the European
Union.
This August I was in Germany, where I was given
an elegant English tea throughout a long conversation in an elegant
office in an historic building overlooking the Pergamun Museum in the
centre of Berlin. My host was a government official of the highest rank.
Descendent of a French-German aristocratic family, he is of impeccable
personal and professional integrity. We talked only a little of international
affairs. His more pressing concern was domestic - even personal. The
eldest of his three children is already adult. He was worried that the
moral manners and habits of thought that his children had learnt and
that he wished them to preserve would not defend them - and here I think
we are moving into the territory Dr Sullivan describes - in a society
where increasing they saw rewarded, not the personal and professional
moral values able to support a decent society, but advancement being
gained instead through dishonesty, greed, aggression, lack of respect
and lack of care for others, and this at every level. "But, Herr
A", I replied, "these are all the qualities we reward with
success in schools." He was astonished.
In my last week in England I was invited as
an observer to a conference of school philosophy teachers from 13 different
countries. They were worrying about the moral deterioration of their
societies, and what they might do about it. At the conclusion of their
plenary meeting I was asked if I had made any general observation that
might be useful. I said that I believe I had. If they believed they
could undo the social and moral damage being done continually in schools
by the intensive and frequently examined instruction of mathematics
- which happens to be my subject, and therefore one I know best; but,
far more importantly, is the subject taught universally with these effects
- I could only offer the observation that their situation is hopeless.
They cannot undo this amount of damage. It can be avoided, however,
by teaching mathematics - as well as some related subjects - not only
differently, but far more effectively. To explain this, the next morning
I produced for the conference the paper I have attached at Appendix
A.
In my first few days in France, I read a full-page
analysis in the national newspaper Le Monde declaring virtually the
same anxieties concerning young French people. Once again it seems to
appear obvious to no one that schools may not be suffering from these
problems but are actually creating them. The chief education correspondent
of Le Monde has by now received the French translation of the same paper,
which I also attach as Appendix B. I imagine some of your readers may
prefer this.
Although I thought it most useful for this multi-national
conference to have a simple table of comparisons, it is also easy to
summarise the argument discursively. I did this recently at the request
of Örebro University in Sweden, which will publish it as part of
a longer argument early next year. I began by borrowing this quotation
from one of the most important scientists in history.
Unlimited competition leads to a huge waste of labour and to a crippling of the social conscience of individuals. Our whole education system suffers from this evil. An exaggerated competitive attitude is inculcated into the student, who is trained to worship acquisitive success as a preparation for his future career. I am convinced there is only one way to eliminate these grave evils, namely.. an education system ..orientated towards social goals. (Einstein 1949)
The
crippling of the social conscience of individuals is precisely what
Dr Sullivan describes in his paper. For the reasons that I have already
given: that mathematics is the subject that no-one can escape, that
it is most used to define intellectual range and therefore that it is
in every sense the most abused, mathematics education has inescapable
moral, social, and political effects on the widest social scale. It
is so powerful in technically advanced societies for several reasons.
It has immense intellectual prestige. It is used at virtually every
level of society. But ability in mathematics has also become the most
common instrument to measure technical intelligence. Conversely, it
is used to decide who lack this intelligence, who may not achieve it,
and who therefore - unless they have or find other means of social preferment
- may be treated as having lower social value.
The method decides the outcome. When mathematics
is taught almost entirely through a teacher's instruction, its success
being measured by testing individuals privately, the outcome will be
a small number who may already know or learn to understand the language
of instruction and who are most likely to find this approach entirely
satisfactory; usually a considerably larger number who find that their
obedience to this instruction, even without their understanding, is
almost equally rewarded; and the rest who can neither understand, nor
obey, nor reproduce results sufficiently well to be allowed to continue.
The moral effect of this, very generally, is to persuade the first group
that their ability is of the highest order and that they need not concern
themselves with the others' unhappiness or lack of equal success; the
second that their obedience to instruction is also highly valued, but
not their honesty, nor their respect for their teachers, nor their care
for others who are either more or less successful than themselves; and,
finally, there will be those whom the system has systematically humiliated
and terrorised, and whom it now discards. At first the members of this
last group tend to be only bewildered - but soon they learn then to
dislike, and finally to despise and reject, authority in all its forms.
They are also likely to be socially withdrawn or continually and angrily
disruptive.
The social consequences of this destruction
of innocence, dignity, and value are all around us. This method of education
by instruction will very largely preserve the stratification of society
that it finds: a stratification in mutually uncomprehending classes,
each with a different morality, social structure, language, all inimical
to each other.
There is, however, an alternative. The alternative
can promote a kinder, more compassionate, cohesive society. It can encourage
young people to work and to think together with common goals, to share
a common morality, structure, and language, and to accept each other's
natural differences with patience, understanding and compassion. The
latter, I suggest, is naturally conducive to a healthy diverse democracy,
the former cements in place social distinctions and structure which
an older, cruder emphasis on personal position, influence, and power
has created, and which those who benefit from them will work to sustain.
This alternative was first developed by the
first Greek democracies over two thousand years ago. It has been the
basis of mathematical and scientific inquiry ever since.. I have used
it as a successful and most enjoyable pedagogy in my own classroom for
over ten years. Increasingly it is being used elsewhere in Europe. In
Hungary, entirely independently, it is has been shown by research conducted
by the Department of Mathematical Didactics of Eötvös Lorand
university to be markedly more effective in teaching mathematical understanding
in all schools at every level.
The alternative to learning from instruction
is learning through discussion. Discussion depends on understanding
knowledge as a network of associations built up over time in every individual
mind through critical discussion of ideas. The source of these ideas
is not the teacher. It is the textbook, which they can take home every
day. Everything the pupils need to know is read by them one after the
other, line by line, out of their own textbook, always aloud.
"And what do you think that means?"
The teacher should ask this deliberately of different pupils of every
sentence, and every answer offered - and this is of course the essence
of this approach - must be in a pupil's own words. Unpredictably, but
repeatedly, real mental effort is required of everyone. In this way
the meaning of the text is discussed and defined by the class together.
It is never monopolised by the cleverest pupils. Everyone has his or
her chance. When their understanding finally satisfies them - and, of
course, their teacher - they choose the exercises to test themselves,
do them, and mark or correct them.
Working together like this, connecting ideas
slowly together, children learn to enjoy the effort of co-operation,
to be patient with each other, to be respectful of the difficulty of
formulating and of combining their understanding. And this is how both
the sciences and democracy works.
I recommend it.
Appendix:
A.
Sapere paper.
B. Le
Monde
Colin
Hannaford
From Biarritz, France; 8-10 December 2004
