Hidden gems - lessons from the past
Oxfam has a rather good second hand bookshop in Cardiff so whenever I am there for meetings at our curriculum and assessment centre in Peterson House I try to find time to call in. As well as the usual shelves of paperback fiction, there are many more unusual items if you care to search for them and there is also a small, locked glass cabinet in which I recently saw…but it was far too expensive.
Then I went back a month later and it was still there and, after all, it cost less than a few tanks full of petrol and, after all, it was Oxfam and not some seedy second hand book dealer and, after all, it was one of the first books I ever read in a serious study of education.
So I am now the proud owner of a first edition (1861) of Herbert Spencer’s classic collection of essays entitled Education.
Spencer (1820-1903) was a British philosopher and sociologist. Largely self-taught (turning down a place at Cambridge University) he was an ardent supporter of Charles Darwin and it was he, not Darwin, who first used the expression “survival of the fittest.” Not surprisingly, then, he applied evolutionary theory to philosophy, psychology and sociology, and to education. The four essays are entitled What knowledge is of most worth, Intellectual education, Moral education and Physical education, and the uncompromising tone is set at the outset by the question, “Of what use is it?”
Well, all this appeared nearly 150 years ago, but Spencer’s ideas have given me a helpful peg on which to hang some recent thoughts. In October, IBAEM organized a regional conference in Barcelona which, for the first time, challenged science teachers of the Middle Years Programme and the Diploma Programme to work together on issues of continuity. Not easy, and I know from bitter experience how high school teachers of linear subjects like science and mathematics tend to boss their junior colleagues about, telling them what and how they should teach.
The handed-down instructions tend to be of two different kinds. First the guilt-inducing: “If you don’t teach them this, followed by this, finishing up with that before they reach us, then please don’t expect us to sort out the mess before they sit their examinations”. Then there is the patronising: “If I were you, I wouldn’t bother to introduce that concept at all; much better to leave it so we can do it properly.” (I was once a curriculum deputy head of a 9-13 upper school in the UK which received its new students from six different 5-8 middle schools and the preceding quotations were the staple diet of our school liaison meetings.)
What does Spencer have to say about all this? His first thought (in the second essay) is to draw attention to the parallels between a system of education and the social state in which it exists. Thus he could see the growing impact of Protestantism, political liberty and free trade in nineteenth century Britain reflected in less harsh discipline, more recreation and a growing awareness of the unfolding mind of the school child. Today, our science education reflects its changing social status, which has moved from a sense of triumph (when I was at school) to speculation (when I started teaching it) to the current period of atonement. I wonder whether there is a shared perception of the role of science education amongst teachers of the different age ranges.
Looking now at the actual process of education, Spencer insists on the substitution of principles, built up from individual instances, for rules learned by rote. Now this is the pure Nuffield philosophy that I grew up with but I suspect Spencer is concerned with the process of induction whereas science makes progress through hypothesis and deduction: a scientific hypothesis is set up in order to be demolished. I wonder if all teachers convey to their students the provisional nature of scientific principles.
Finally, Spencer writes
In the mastering of every subject some course of increasingly complex ideas has to be gone through…which, in any true sense, is impossible without they are put into the mind in the normal order.
Today we might call it a spiral curriculum or scaffolding or constructionist theory but essentially it acknowledges the simple truth that learning requires clear signposts to indicate where it has come from and where it is going next. Otherwise, in Spencer’s words, it will be received with apathy or disgust…unless the pupil is intelligent enough eventually to fill up the gaps himself. Agreeing where and how to erect those signposts is perhaps the most important task of liaison between the Middle Years and the Diploma Programmes.
I’m glad I went back to the Oxfam shop!
George Walker
