"All Praise is Due to the Child" or "The Art of Manipulation"

It's been three and a half months since I last posted. I had a lot to get off my chest and the pure relief of getting back to the UK (from a job point of view) meant that there wasn't an awful lot more I needed to say after that last one, except ALHAMDULILLAH!!! In fact, I've spent the last few months trying (gradually less) hard not to think about my work experience in the Middle East. I can't look back and trick myself into thinking the job wasn't so bad, because it was, and if you suffered reading my blog posts before, you'll know how much I hated it. That said, it did give me the opportunity to meet some great people and experience a different way of life.

Since my return, I applied for and, praise be to God, got a job working peripatetically in the UK, in a number of schools. So far the job is so much fun (albeit busy) that I thank God as often as I catch myself noticing how much I like it. The peripatetic nature of it means that I avoid all of the add-ons that go with a class teacher. Some of that is not necessarily a good thing, since getting to really know a class as a collective, and being an integral part of school dynamics, are parts of the job I used to really enjoy.

As you may already know though, teaching changed for me the day a colleague at my previous school, where I was already disenchanted (oh dear! Notice a theme?!) lent me the book Dumbing us Down by John Taylor Gatto. I read it in a couple of days, gave it back to him and asked him how he expected me to carry on teaching having agreed with pretty much everything in it. My friend implored me, "At least read it critically!" and I realised he hadn't meant for me to swallow the whole thing unquestioningly, as he now presumed I had. The thing is, I hadn't. It all made sense to me, and above all the (now far removed) society Gatto advocated, in which the community cared for each other in a broad welfare sense, and took a collective responsibility for educating its people, seeing no need to restrict this process to schools, was entirely Islamic. Although I didn't immediately notice that connection at the time, it felt happily appropriate to me.

So, in what ways is the UK education set-up incompatible with Gatto's societal system? I suppose firstly because the society we live in has not developed in a way that lends itself to people being encouraged to take an altruistic approach. The philosopher Stove wrote that mankind loves to teach one another what they know - but this can only happen in a framework in which parents support such a principle of ubiquitous teaching. Like it or not, that necessarily has to include teaching behaviour, safe in the knowledge that the parents of the potentially 'corrected' will not vengefully seek out the teacher to in turn correct his or her ideas about just whose children he or she thinks he's entitled to start on... Furthermore, how does one enforce a behaviour code when society's morals have become so weakly upheld, even disputed, and when members of society behave in ways that totally contradict anything that might be written on tablets of stone or other such records.

Of course, my final hint at the decline and/or factionalism of organised religion is deliberate, since morals without religion are man-made, and man in his imperfection cannot be guaranteed to advocate behaviour codes grounded in honesty, humility, altruism and mutual respect. Thus so many of our morals are temporal, which is why some religious bodies will legalise the formerly impermissible, and why the interest (financially speaking) that ultimately lies behind our Credit Crunch has been deemed perfectly OK for modern society, even though the Bible and the Qur'an both outlaw its use.

Not wanting to digress too much, I shall attempt to make my connections to the title and main purpose of this post.

Simply put, how does an educator successfully educate in the modern UK classroom?

Well, the teacher can't command respect. Those times are gone, mainly because of the huge shift away from the old-fashioned concept of a predisposition to respect ones elders, and towards the confused and totally excessive products of the (ethically sound) rights of children movements.
The more interested of parents will be very keen to know whether or not their child's teacher is any good (and, from my experience, a lot of this judgment may be based on important features such as "How well do they appear to know my child when I see them at parents' evening?" through to totally stupid aspects such as "How much homework are they giving my child?" - certainly I have been judged on both, faring undeservingly well on one and unfairly poorly on the other).
However, the number of parents who are predisposed to supporting the teacher, for example when their child has been found wanting in terms of effort, behaviour, etc., is certainly less than it was in bygone days. In more extreme cases, the teacher has to be exceedingly careful in his/her dealings with parents, who often seem to consider any negative inference relating to their child as a slight on their own character. Hence the message from home is no longer an emphatic call to respect ones teacher.

This leaves the teacher in a sticky predicament. In front of him (I'll run with the male of the species for the purpose of brevity) is a room full of children. Some of them want to believe that their teacher is a great person worth listening to. (Whether he is or not, is for now irrelevant, although it is worth remembering that a good teacher will usually get respect even in a society where it cannot be commanded). Others will give him a chance before deciding whether or not to behave in a manner that conveys respect, and still others will set out from the off to put themselves at the forefront of their own agenda, ahead of the rights (of respect, for one) of their teacher and other classmates.

Of course, this means the potential for, and in many cases the inevitability of, behaviour problems. This may be negated by the inspiring teacher or where the dynamics between teacher and particular students just happens to be of the "Goldilocks Enigma" type (to steal the title of Paul Davies' entirely non-pedagogical book!) - i.e. it is somehow just right.

The days of corporal punishment are long gone and anyway, my preferred tool (figuratively speaking) for more challenging behaviour problems has always been discussion with child, and parent. I say, preferred, insofar as this is only possible if the parent agrees with the teacher, and sees the responsibility for educating the child as lying, at least, with all three parties, and at best, as lying with the child and his/her parents.

Personally, I would prefer to see the onus for educating the child placed on society in a (sadly, almost Utopian) Gatto-style framework as I outlined briefly above. However, given the apparent impossibility of this in our modern society, I believe that this responsibility for education belongs to child and parent. And my view is compounded by personal experiences of classroom practice that I have seen since returning to UK schools.

It is precisely because of the unreasonable expectation placed upon teachers to educate all-comers, and the steady erosion of their classroom management apparatus through society's moral uncertainty and lack of shared goals for the mutual betterment of one another, that you can now find the following phenomena in your local school:

Praise for Par
"Good sitting!" says one teacher...
"Well done James, you've closed your book..." says another...
Do the rights of the child now include the right to copious amounts of praise and stickers for doing very, very little? Or the right to be patronised? I mean, do we really believe that children are stupid and that you can trick them into thinking they're doing something special when they close a book, or write the short date in the top right-hand corner?
No, we are training them, but not with understanding and the ability to cultivate common sense and discern from their own blossoming reason why some actions may be better than some others; nor even to tell them why we believe this may be the case. Instead, we are rewarding them for low-effort obedience, and training them to be unquestioning.

Race for Recognition
I was actually asked the other day which of the two children, on the table at which I was seated, was the first to write the date. Embarrassed, I answered that they had tied for that honour. Next thing I knew, I was very popular with both; stickers all round!
In another class, a teacher inspected her carpeted troops, and commented with a glare that bordered on annoyance,
"I love the way Freddie's sitting."
Deeply moved, I thought of equivalent ways of mixing insincere words with actions, perhaps screwing up my face at dinner and groaning, "This looks delicious, Darling."
Of course, the sun always shines on the shiniest, and in the classroom the light of the teacher's praise is brightened only by the brightness dial on the control...
Don't get me wrong, it makes more sense to aspire to a higher standard (Freddie's sitting quietly and not interfering with his neighbour's personal space, both physically and aurally) than a lower one ("I love the way Toby's standing on the table") - but are the children really learning anything other than
(a) If I sit like Freddie, the teacher might praise me too;
(b) When the teacher says something, most of her language (i.e. tone, body) doesn't match what she claims to think?

Verbal Diarrhoea
"It's not what you say, it's the way that you say it."
Well, I'm sure Bananarama would agree with me that the way that some teachers seem to say 'it' in the primary schools I've been going into, is in an utterly bizarre and annoying tone.
Try to imagine, if you can, the wide eyed yet monotonous eulogising of Father Dougal (Ardal O'Hanlon in Father Ted) when he's trying to convey the magnitude of something truly impressive. Now strip the voice of its Irish accent (since none of the teachers in question have been Irish) and bring it down an octave.
Keep the wide eyed, mock impressed-on-an-unprecedented-scale look, and use your freshly derived voice to say things like,
"Oh, I was looking at the sticker chart today and I noticed that we only need three more stickers to complete the chart, and I was thinking, wouldn't it be amazing if we got those today, by working amazingly hard in Literacy, Numeracy, and P.E...."
(for full effect, draw out the length of the words in bold)

What's strange is that it's spreading - I heard the same voice, in a different person, in a different place, teaching a different lesson, but nonetheless trying in vain to convey the impression that if the particle collider in Europe didn't lead to the end of the world today, then something equally important was going to happen in that particular classroom.
Of course, it's good to be motivated. But after a while, the only way to beat sensationalism is through supermegasensationalism.


Ignorance is Bliss (unless you're being assaulted, that is)

Not much to say on this one except that teachers seem to be following very odd behaviour management strategies that I can only assume are the result of laissez-faire policy design, and/or the total resignation of staff to an education system that preaches "Inclusion, inclusion, inclusion... (...and a bruising)"
Two examples: one, a Key Stage 1 class in which three boys have no desire to be involved in lessons which, given the requirements of the Year 1 curriculum, are necessarily more structured than they've been used to. The boys disrupt all lessons unless supervised on a one-to-one basis, making it very difficult for the other children to learn anything. That these boys may be entirely unready for formal schooling will just have to be marked down and put in the cylindrical open-top filing cabinet in the corner of the room, marked 'Diagnosis incompatible with education system';
secondly, a Year 4 class in which a boy twice walks across the room to kick a girl. The teacher responds to the girl's complaints by telling her to "ignore him". Perhaps a more frank and honest response might be, "You ignore him, I'll ignore you."

It is hard not to be concerned at the phenomena I've described above. I don't believe it's confined to the area in which I'm working, since a lot of it was in place to some extent in the schools I worked in whilst teaching in London, and I used to peddle as much manipulation as the next guy before my Gatto-inspired disillusionment in the education system set in. (Let me qualify this by reiterating that I'm not disillusioned by the idea of a system of education - you can capitalise the first letters of 'education system' in the last sentence if you wish, because I'm referring only to those systems that are currently in favour).

As with so many developments in education and pedagogy - many of them for the better - praise, and less punitive, more restorative, sanctions have been on the increase as modern era tools, underpinned by the belief that they are what is needed to improve the education system, not just in terms of creating order in the classroom, but in terms of raising the personal, social and moral education of children. Indeed, PSHE now has an extra letter in it (it's a C; I'm not sure where it goes or what it stands for) and new schemes of work and resources are issuing forth from all orifices in an attempt to patch up our increasingly frail societal values.

If I've presented myself as harsh and judgmental in this piece of writing, I wish now to say that I admire the ingenuity and determination of classroom teachers, whose jobs I no longer wish for myself, but who have every right to disagree with what I've written here. It is only in recognising my own class teacher conduct, and wriggling with embarrassment at some of my recollections, that I feel able to unpick the various facets of classroom dynamics I have mentioned.
No-one outside of the education system could truly appreciate what you do every day.