I've been pretty swayed by a lot of the arguments concerning a more "traditional" approach to pedagogy however what comes next is a defence of wellbeing that will have all traditional educators changing their Twitter bios to: "Passionate educator of little humans #mindfulness #love #whole-child #wellbeingmatters" and making a beeline to enrol their children in the local Montessori. Maybe.
Yes, that's right, it's a defense of progressive education. Progressive education? Aren't they those guys who believe in endless group work, Edu-tainment, Googling everything and getting rid of subjects in favor of some notion of authentic, problem-solving, projects? Generic skills depend on knowledge, man! Read the research, people.
More power to you if you were one of those who stood on an upturned apple crate at a Google-sponsored inset day and shouted, "you can see the Emperor's privates!" Without such brave souls, I'd still be telling my teachers to hide student tasks around the room, dress up as peasants and landowners to teach the feudal system or make the first five minutes of class "super engaging" if they want kids to turn up on time. But where does all this leave progressive education? Surely we don't just give up on the idea of progress completely? Boo, down with progress. That's a bit silly, isn't it?
All the Edu-consultant, jargon-mongerers who told me that the most intuitively appealing way of teaching, aka standing there, explaining stuff you understand well, asking questions, getting them to practice and then giving them a test on it, was, in fact, the sure sign of a RUBBISH teacher, need to apologize. Stop pretending that you never attacked knowledge! You sure did. The whole, "you can Google it" thing was definitely a thing. It actually still is a thing. If you don't believe me just check out US Edu-twitter where passionate educators are going around saying that knowledge is definitely not important and that "sit and get" (people being taught stuff) is responsible for mental health problems, educational inequality, prison populations, teenage pregnancy, obesity, and smallpox. The word memory doesn't appear on any US thought-leader-ted-talk type's Twitter profile without some pejorative modifier; "mere" memorizing, "rote" memorizing, "just" memorizing, they proselytize.
Memory is juxtaposed with all that is good and valuable in human flourishing. Is this because memory is about the past? Traditions are to do with the past, aren't they? So memory = past = traditional = bad. Press further they will say that the best way to remember something is through "authentic" experience but that it doesn't matter because memory is *just* memory. This ignores the fact that the future is also completely and utterly about memory. You cannot think your way into the future without new ideas and notions bubbling up into your conscious mind in unexpected ways. These ideas don't come from nothing. The more knowledge you have, the more vocab you know, the more interesting, varied and challenging your future will be.
Having said all this, there is room in education for a whole-child approach; we all agree that schools cannot, even if they wanted to, just teach academics. Schools involve a process of socialization, learning the rules of society, and developing a sense of identity in that context. It can't be all about the academics, can it? Gotta have pastoral programs. This is the part where I convince you that there are some progressive ideas that are needed now more than ever but that they are perfectly compatible with other more traditional approaches to pedagogy if that's your thing.
Having said all this, there is room in education for a whole-child approach; we all agree that schools cannot, even if they wanted to, just teach academics. Schools involve a process of socialization, learning the rules of society, and developing a sense of identity in that context. It can't be all about the academics, can it? Gotta have pastoral programs. This is the part where I convince you that there are some progressive ideas that are needed now more than ever but that they are perfectly compatible with other more traditional approaches to pedagogy if that's your thing.
Traditionalists are currently in a bit of a bind on mental health. They will talk about a behavior crisis but refuse to acknowledge a mental health crisis. They do recognize a mental health crisis for teachers caused by unnecessary workload and poor behavior and rightly point to more sensible policies to reduce workload and improve behavior. I get the feeling that to acknowledge a mental health crisis for students is to remove student agency and gets too close to "behavior is communication" which is an unhelpful platitude. If the behavior is not a choice then it doesn't matter how strict you are 'cause well, the kid's psyche or background or emotions made them do it. I once told my A-Level philosophy group to try using, "my mind made me do it" as an excuse for turning up late to school. Unsurprisingly it didn't work, and this philosophy teacher had to traipse to the Head of Year to explain that in fact, it was my fault that the two kids were late.
The trap of agency leads some traditionalists to say that most behavior is kids choosing to be naughty and so we can treat as exceptions the few cases of genuine mental health problems. No crisis, nothing to see here. Some unthinking commentators jump in at this point and start pointing out that this isn't good enough and begin frantically linking the "crisis" to industrial-era factory schools and exams. Of course, it doesn't make sense for there to be a mental health crisis now because of teaching methods that go back nearly a century. We've always had schools and tests but we haven't always had a mental health crisis. Instead, the argument is either 1) there is no mental health crisis (increasingly difficult to support given the evidence) or 2) there is no causal link between schools and the mental health crisis so there must be another cause.
The chances are we cannot diagnose the cause but traditionalists and progressives alike can recognize that there is a mental health crisis and make a huge effort as a community of educators and a country to teach kids coping mechanisms. Mindfulness, journaling, selfless action, and gratitude are not educational fads, don't require huge amounts of investment, are backed by research and have a long history. To be fair, I think that Michaela is incredibly progressive on this issue although they haven't apparently seen the light when it comes to meditation, yet!
If there is a crisis, it is probably because the world that has changed a bit when it comes to who we relate to and communicate with others, most notably through mobile phones and technology. If this is the case then maybe we do need to know some things now that we didn't have to know in the past such as how to deal with a new hyper-connected reality. Learning how to be healthy is already a part of the school curriculum in the form of healthy eating, avoiding booze and drugs and all those often quite cliched and meaningless PSHE or "life-skills" classes. Let's increase their quality by basing our interventions on research.
Disconnecting is definitely one option and I applaud those who encourage that but there are things other than restrictions we can teach. Parents often don't have access to the scientific knowledge that exists around mental health and wellbeing such as the benefits of compassionate service, gratitude, and mindfulness. Traditional education has very strong arguments on pedagogy (don't be fancy) and behavior (be toughly consistent and kind) but doesn't have an answer to the psychic disconnect that many young people are apparently experiencing.
The chances are we cannot diagnose the cause but traditionalists and progressives alike can recognize that there is a mental health crisis and make a huge effort as a community of educators and a country to teach kids coping mechanisms. Mindfulness, journaling, selfless action, and gratitude are not educational fads, don't require huge amounts of investment, are backed by research and have a long history. To be fair, I think that Michaela is incredibly progressive on this issue although they haven't apparently seen the light when it comes to meditation, yet!
If there is a crisis, it is probably because the world that has changed a bit when it comes to who we relate to and communicate with others, most notably through mobile phones and technology. If this is the case then maybe we do need to know some things now that we didn't have to know in the past such as how to deal with a new hyper-connected reality. Learning how to be healthy is already a part of the school curriculum in the form of healthy eating, avoiding booze and drugs and all those often quite cliched and meaningless PSHE or "life-skills" classes. Let's increase their quality by basing our interventions on research.
Disconnecting is definitely one option and I applaud those who encourage that but there are things other than restrictions we can teach. Parents often don't have access to the scientific knowledge that exists around mental health and wellbeing such as the benefits of compassionate service, gratitude, and mindfulness. Traditional education has very strong arguments on pedagogy (don't be fancy) and behavior (be toughly consistent and kind) but doesn't have an answer to the psychic disconnect that many young people are apparently experiencing.
Human flourishing is just as much about wellbeing as it is about academic success and schools should concern themselves with human flourishing. Yes, academic success can lead to well-being, achievement leads to motivation and not the other way around. That's a useful finding. However, it begs the question of what happens to those who don't have success at school or who are successful yet also have issues with mental health? In order to counter the silliness of the "stress is caused by exams" argument proposed by those who oppose all aspects of traditional education, more moderate progressives need to offer a positive story about the techniques, knowledge, and understanding we can teach students to help them manage stress better.
You cannot learn how to overcome rocks if everyone is always moving the rocks out of your path but don't be fooled by the rocks that I've put in this sentence. This is not a return to the coddling "self-esteem" era where everyone gets a prize. Kids need to suffer a bit now to suffer less later. Part of that is seeing how much better many people are than you at almost everything. This is absolutely normal and trying to pretend individual differences don't exist is a recipe for repression of the most heinous kind. This doesn't mean "make them compete". Quite the opposite, realizing individual differences exist and that sorry, he's better at Maths than you, is absolutely okay. The self-esteem movement that has shielded children from their own weaknesses has meant these weaknesses go unacknowledged and tough feedback ungiven. The message that happiness depends on how everyone does compare to you is a recipe for disaster as kids quickly realize that whatever their parents might say, some people just are better at them at some stuff. Parents hide the differences like it's a secret, yet kids realize it because they are not stupid. Why are they hiding this thing? It must be because being worse is bad. Fears spring from unacknowledged truisms. We need them to know that it is okay to be worse or better sometimes; that doesn't mean making them compete. It does mean your sense of self-worth cannot depend on how other people are doing compared to you.
A certain amount of stress is the only way to learn how to cope with stress. This is the logic of vaccines and is explained in Antifragile by Nassim Taleb. A little bit of suffering in the form of a virus your body can cope with is necessary to avoid the greater future suffering of a virus your body can't cope with. We go to the gym sacrificing short-term comfort for long-term gains. Recognizing stress as normal and it's absence as unhealthy doesn't mean we toss kids into the wind and tell them to straighten up and toughen up. We need to teach them the knowledge around happiness to help them cope with an increasingly disassociated and psychically distanced present. Twitter is a good example of a system that encourages our minds and thoughts to be in another place. It takes out the internal monologue and makes it public, this can be not only distracting but de-centering. There are straightforward enough ways to cope with these things most obviously to be found in the science of meditation.
Snowflakes don't become rocks if you toss them into the fire; just saying "Hey, bunch of snowflakes, toughen up" is unhelpful. If there is nobody there telling you about the studies showing your attitude to stress can alleviate the negative impact or telling you about healthy eating, a healthy lifestyle and how your brain works, then you won't know and will continue to suffer. There is new science we should be teaching and more time should be dedicated to it. This is pretty radical and progressive. If it makes you feel better, call meditation "emptying out your working memory" or "developing awareness in silence" as that's basically what it is. It's free, only takes four minutes a day and is very easy to learn. Oh, it also requires a lot of discipline for those of you who are into that.
Snowflakes don't become rocks if you toss them into the fire; just saying "Hey, bunch of snowflakes, toughen up" is unhelpful. If there is nobody there telling you about the studies showing your attitude to stress can alleviate the negative impact or telling you about healthy eating, a healthy lifestyle and how your brain works, then you won't know and will continue to suffer. There is new science we should be teaching and more time should be dedicated to it. This is pretty radical and progressive. If it makes you feel better, call meditation "emptying out your working memory" or "developing awareness in silence" as that's basically what it is. It's free, only takes four minutes a day and is very easy to learn. Oh, it also requires a lot of discipline for those of you who are into that.
Often traditionalists don't have a lot to say about pastoral care other than "discipline", or "it's something parents should do at home" or "a good set of GCSEs is the best pastoral care going". They argue, correctly in my opinion, that we need strong boundaries in order to foster good relationships. Children need structure and rules in order to free themselves from their own proclivities towards mischief however sometimes the baby of well-being is thrown out with the bathwater of no-rules and complicated pedagogy. Don't despair, we can cook our wellbeing cake with the flour of discipline AND shove it into our own greedy faces.
Most people care as much about their child's wellbeing at school as they do about the education that is being offered. Ask any school leader and they will confirm that the number of arguments against "my son/daughter is really unhappy at school" are few. Bullying cannot be easily dealt with in a no-excuses way although no school would ever tell you they tolerate it. Bullying is a complex phenomenon that ranges from full-on physical assault and harassment to social exclusion. The former is a discipline issue the latter is one about teaching human development and awareness. Why can't the science of wellbeing and social awareness be taught and practiced with the same rigor as the rest of the curriculum?
Traditional teaching has a whole load to offer and blows alternatives which focus on discovery out of the water when it comes to academic learning. However, saying that "exams don't cause mental ill-health" doesn't get us any closer to understanding what IS causing mental ill health and what we can do about it. This seems like something important enough for both sides of the argument to work closely together on.
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