Is it Possible To Stay Loyal to our Progressive Predecessors?

The ancients enjoying life are unlikely to have been entirely or even partially mistaken

-Aristotle

 It has been a bad week for Progressivism.  In a stunning loss of ground in the public discourse, progressive teachers and teacher educators are taking an unceremonious kicking from all sides.  

 Progressive or "child centred" education and its shibboleths of group work, mixed ability classrooms and learning by doing, looks like a Caesar bleeding out on the steps of the Forum.  "Et Tu, Brute"?  Aye, and brutal it is to watch.  I find myself increasingly full of pathos for what the current Education Secretary characterises as "The Blob" as it bleeds out with a pitiful moan, scarcely aware of what has happened to it.  Whether it making uncomfortable viewing makes it wrong, is an open question.

D'awww

Twitter has a collective multiple climax over Joe Kirby's quote-heavy assassination of Sir Ken Robinson's  educational philosophy.  Cuddly Sir Ken is the TED Talk favourite with the snazzy RSA animate which makes some school leaders well up and remember the good old days when they actually used to teach a child sometimes.  This is done through cozy pink lenses. His agenda of child-centred creativity and "Discovery" can cause by turns ire and awe.  In this case ire.

Kirby, meanwhile, is a "top graduate", recruited through Teach First, the pathway into teaching which skips the traditional bastions of progressive thought, the university training route, in favour of a managerial approach to the craft. His rejection of the progressive tradition, itself the dominant view of what teaching could be from the mid-50s until more recently, is telling.  

Here is somebody who is in place precisely to invigorate the profession pointing to the existing "dead flesh" and calling shenanigans.  It is the equivalent of a recent med school graduate claiming that the consultant heart surgeon he is observing is drunk.  And it is not an isolated setback.

The second PISA-shock of England's young people proving to have flunked life, as measured by literacy and numeracy, seems to confirm years of criticism over "dumbing down".

"The minister for skills and enterprise, Matthew Hancock, said: "This shocking report shows England has some of the least literate and numerate young adults in the developed world. These are Labour's children, educated under a Labour government and force-fed a diet of dumbing down and low expectations."

Dumbing down, irresistibly, is linked to the type of curriculum which emphasises the intrests of the child.  This can mean following "their interests" at the expense of "what is in their interests".  In paraphrasing R.S. Peters here, who wrote words to that effect in the 1960s I am hoping to show that this particular silver bullet was locked and loaded quite a long ago.

Finally, reliable barometer of the nightmare side of any debate, The Guardian's "Secret Teacher" is outspoken about the "Conspiracy" against older teachers.  I myself recently interviewed a colleague who told me how, as an Advanced Skills Teacher she watched a mentee she trained, and who was teaching lessons she had written with her resources, was appointed to her old job whilst she was encouraged to leave. A cynical mind might point to the vast savings which could be made if such a policy became widespread.  The World Bank, meanwhile, has been floating alterations to pay structures and tenure of staff for some time;

Contract teachers may accept lower salaries and insecure tenure because they are queuing for regular positions

- Making School Work page 227 

In the midst of this, and as someone trained and mentored by those within the progressive tradition, I begin to feel increasingly like the Boy in Hemingway's Old Man and the Sea.  In Hemingway's Story, the titular Old Man finds himself having gone eighty five days without catching a fish.  The Boy's parents demand he go "with another boat" as the Old Man is now finally "Salano, the worst kind of unlucky".  The Boy is instructed to go with another, luckier boat.  The young men in the bar laugh at the Old Man.  The older fishermen meanwhile view him with understandable concern.

Debra Kidd does her best to defend Sir Ken and what he represents here.  Her argument, that tradition and wisdom have their place is strong, but ideologically it is hard for progressives to hide behind this. Aristotle might have been right about the Ancients knowing their business , but the brave new world of the sixties had no time for that.  The proponents of post-Empire Britain have spent so long challenging arguments from authority as such, that "we have a lot of experience of " stinks from their very lips.  

However, the paradox is not one sided.  The shock troops of Neo-Traditionalism , like Mr Kirby, are not fighting back a rebellion, they ARE the rebellion. Progressivism has been so widespread, especially in Primary Schools, for so long that it is the de-facto establishment.  For the warriors of the evidence-based, Excel spreadsheet generation to claim they can even imagine what education prewar was like is just as hilarious.  They are in as much of a tangle about what they believe as we all are.  But this is not a simple case of a plague on both their houses.

From America, which is about 2 years down the Academy/Teacher First road (there they are called Charter Schools and Teach For America respectively), there is growing dissent.  It is even coming from ex-acolytes of what some of its UK intake freely call "the Teach First cult".

Catherine Michna, an academic and former TFA-er has revealed she "Does not write references" for students to join TFA because they do not know how to teach.  Her defence of the "lifers", unionized members of staff she encountered before getting out of school teaching for good, hinges on a belief that she would not have survived the process without borrowing their resources, ideas and, if I may presume to extend the point, their authority.  It is surely significant that the operation which moves us closest in the developed world to the World Bank "dog eat dog" employment model cannot control its own alumni.

Unlike the newspapers I use a picture of her school and not her face

Then we have the Strange Case of Annaliese Briggs.  When NUT conference heard from the podium this year that a PGCE teacher trainee had needed to be excused from her lectures to meet with Boris Johnson about the school she was opening up there were hoots of derision.  Not even six months later, Miss Briggs, the 27 year old Headteacher with no formal qualifications, has quit 5 weeks into the term, unable to cope. This is a major blow for the notion that new-old trumps old-new. That ideology which requires that such a person to be able to cope because she trumpets the notions of 'rigorous', 'knowledge based' learning cannot will such things into existence.

In short, it's a damn mess. But worst of all is the profound disloyalty to the older generation.  What we do with them, the Baby Boomers as they age and retire would be a constant psychic disturbance to any culture.  To one as narcissistic and obsessed with physical perfection as ours, it is a perfect storm of vanity and horror. The knowledge of how many of them there are, and of the enormous changes they have seen, haunts us in our inexperience and naivety.
  

In education, it is entirely possible that there will never be time for the experiment in child-centred learning to return to the mainstream.  At the same time, its techniques are now a permanent part of every teacher's repertoire.  The ability to split a class into groups, to mind-map and to have a student deliver a plenary in the form of a rap battle are now, for better or worse, part of the job.  Whether we use them or not is up to us, but there they are.

It might be easy, like Mr Kirby, to tear into everything that has been done for the last fifty years, and call for a return to an age which may or may not have ever existed.  I prefer, however, to think of Hemingway's old man, and his words to the boy when he asks if he will ever catch the big fish again,

"It is difficult," he says, "and I am not as strong as I was...but I am a strange old man, and there are many tricks."