John Locke dishes out the schoolin'

Mental Hercules, John Locke, starts his Essay on Human Understanding by acknowledging that publishing it got some people pretty cross.

"I have been told that a short Epitome of this volume was condemned by some without reading"

he says, which is something Philosophers have to get used to I suppose. Then he gets into the good stuff, viz. the actual meat of his disagreement with some other Enlightenment dudes. And the meat is BEEF.

Here's how you throw down 18th century style:

"My meaning, I find, is often mistaken, and I have not the good luck to be every where rightly understood."

Absolute mayhem.

Locke is from the oratorical school of acting like a perfect gentleman without giving an inch. It works out pretty well for him because

A) He's John Locke
and
B) The other guy isn't.

Let's see how it plays out ESPN style: slow motion, crunching tackles, big scores.

"Of this the ingenious author of the Discourse Concerning the Nature of Man has given me a late instance, to mention no other. "

Oh no you better not have did!

"For the civility of his expressions, and the candour that belongs to his order, forbid me to think that he would have closed his Preface with an insinuation, "

Did John Locke just praise you in print? You're toast. It's like watching a cat play with a mouse. I can't watch.

"as if in what I had said, Book II. ch. xxvii, concerning the third rule which men refer their actions to, I went about to make virtue vice and vice virtue, unless he had mistaken my meaning;"

Translation: I am going to give you one chance to take that back and then it's CLOBBERIN' TIME!

" which he could not have done if he had given himself the trouble to consider what the argument was I was then upon, and what was the chief design of that chapter, plainly enough set down in the fourth section and those following."

LOCKE SMASH! DID YOU EVEN READ IT!? DID. YOU. EVEN. READ. IT???

So there's that. What I would like to say is look how polite he is. Did he even call him a liar or a retard?  He did not. He was just like "Surely I must have misunderstood, you can't actually mean what you said?"

Textbook Principle of Charity. Try and put the best spin on it you can, do anything possible to save the grace and civil standing of your opponent.

What a chieftain!

My Early Years Years

A few days ago I went back the the nursery where I worked for two years after I left university.

I was a dad at twenty, making me officially a teenage dad by Sure Start's standards. This was something I only discovered once I left the nursery and started working for Sure Start in 2010.

Up to that point I made ends meet at a small nursery in my small hometown, looking after small people. It worked out well because I got a discount rate on looking after my young daughter, who I got to be near to. They were difficult years.

When I went back to the nursery I was amazed at how quickly memories came back. It has changed hands but that's just cosmetics. The building, the path to the front door, the stairwell: walking towards these filled my chest with the burning memory of everything that happened there.

It was a Saturday, so the place was shut. I stopped at the front door and cried a bit.

Then I left, as you do. But the tears were for the struggles, the tantrums, the giggles. Calming down distraught children,  showing them how Lego blocks worked. I remember spending a lot of time showing kids how to play with farm animals and, for some reason, designing pyjamas. There were days when I would work with one extremely disabled boy who liked to run his hands under the water. Parents who spoke no English would be sent to us because people knew we turned nobody away. We would mind their children and navigate the difficulties when their child didn't know the word for "Toilet". I remember the after school club where we got well into Hama Beads and so every parent got about a zillion drinks coasters and those that didn't got smiley faces. Once we made a rocket ship. Another time we made a person size bird's nest and filled it with papier mache eggs.

So much more. A little girl who made a stage out of a drain cover and put on a show in  a language she invented. I remember a puppet theatre performing Noah's Ark and the Ramayana. There was a child who used tesselating blocks to create beautiful mosaics which she coloured in painstakingly.

Mostly there was hours and hours of care, small people wanting to be picked up and put down. My ankles swelled and my knees clicked. My boss had been doing it so long she needed half an hour's warning if I wanted her to get up from the play house. The girls invited me to karaoke and I did "My Old Man's a Dustman". They thought my taste in music was crap, and they really liked "The Script" in the under-ones room. We used to teach the kids to dance to ABBA.

People who make fun of Early Years workers people have never met them, they have never spent time with them. They have no idea what it means to throw yourself into the most critical stage of education, the one that takes your energy and breath away all at once. To belittle an Early Years practitioner is to belittle someone who, in the words of Adrienne Rich,

"Held out the crust of bread (and)
Warmed the liquid vein of life...
Who did what they could."

It was an honour to spend the first part of my life with Early Years workers. Whatever in my professional self is strong, and good, and loving, I learned it first from them.

So as I walked away from my second home, the one where I learned to be a human being in the world, I thought about all of those memories and how time has not tarnished or muddied it. There is a precious value, still, in the care of the young which politics belies. To get to it, you must speak to someone with snot on their trouser leg at toddler-nose height; someone who has changed twenty nappies today, on a rota, and who knows all the words to "Where the Wild Things Are" and "The Cat in the Hat".

When you find that person, tell them they are amazing. They need to hear it.

A Resource is not a Teaching Method

A few years ago I made a big laminated sheet of the sort that teachers sometimes make. It's meant to help with setting expectations around speech. Sometimes these things are useful. Sometimes they aren't. Mostly they aren't, in my case, and I scrap them after a couple of weeks.

This one was of the other kind. It came with me in a taxi from my old school to my new school. If it falls off the wall then looking for a new piece of blue tack becomes an emergency. If I lost it I would be sad. My phone got nicked recently. I would rather they got my phone.

Sometimes people see me teach and they point at this bit of paper and go "that's good". I am not boasting, this happens. The keenest go "Can I have a copy?"

And I say yes. Always.

However, I then usually launch into a big rant about Vygotsky and Michael Sandel, and how Constructivism is a bosh and how I think the Polis functioned in Ancient Greece. See, I want them to see not just the resource but how it came to be, all the teachers and thinkers I have admired, all the students who have challenged me and saved me from dogma. They should, I always think, understand the journey to this point.

Nobody ever does.

See, they want the resource. Why not? It's a good resource. But it will only be mine in my classroom. They may use it better, they may use it worse, but what it means to me in my space surrounded by my expectations and hopes and failings and dreams is Me. It isn't a method I can ever communicate, not unless I can carry them back in time with me whilst putting them behind my eyes.

That's why whenever people talk about Direct Instruction or Group Working or Cognitive Acceleration I sit, I listen , I think, and I wait for them to get their USB out.

You see, I just want your resources. But I love what you do. Big fan of your work.

The Man Who Was Period Five

A door creaked open. Deep inside its yawning mouth there was a soft, eerie fluttering. Old copies of The Morning Star tumbled to the floor, as Gabriel Shelley brushed past them and into the gloom. A narrow wooden shelf ran around the limits of the room and cardboard boxes full of leaflets announcing a rally in support of a Free Palestine littered the floor so that crossing it became a game of chequers where the winner was always Red. There was a soft click as Gabriel's guide eased the door behind them shut.

Without a word he raised his hand and beckoned through to the back of the office.

He knocked on a concealed door and Shelley wondered, for the first  time, if he had made the right decision accompanying him to tonight's meeting. He had heard the rumours. The Enemies of Promise met in complete secrecy, and that no outsider had ever been admitted to their meetings, but there were always rumours: some said that they kept a dungeon full of children who had not been told their level since 2003. Others spoke of an unspeakable ritual involving group discussion, musical plenaries and differentiation by (Shelley remembered how his informant had shuddered) outcome. It was said their leader had trained in the Seventies, that she had once eaten an OFSTED inspector's right arm and Required Improvement in all areas except for Having Something on the Head, it was said...

"Enter."

The voice boomed from the inside the door, and Gabriel Shelley, a young Inspector freshly plucked from the classroom (which he had loved, honest, and he still had lots of friends who he kept in touch with still "hard at it") wandered blinking like a young lamb into the gloom. Would his superiors be pleased that he had penetrated the secret heart of the determined conspiracy to deny the Education Secretary a better job and thousands of children a brighter future through testing? He could not say.

His first impression was one of the massiveness. As he stepped into the Temple of Failure his eyes adjusted and he made out a sixty-foot high ceiling on which was painted - well, he couldn't tell but it looked like it had been done with finger paints. He made out what he thought might be a house, and noticed that nobody had marked it.

Around the room was rack upon rack of "groovy" textbooks. Some he recognised as notorious texts with Ethnic protagonists and lefty morals...there were also sets of games for teaching maths through social construction and a complete set of Vygotsky. The stench of Failure hung in the air, and there were no Standards anywhere.

In the centre of the room a round table was laid out with some Pritt Sticks, a pot of board markers and some sugar paper in the middle. Around it sat four people, five with his guide joining them. He saw an empty seat and wondered for the first time why he had been brought here.

"Greetings" said a hooded figure, "I am Period 1. We have heard much about you"

Another spoke up. This was a cheerful looking man with a tweed jacket who looked like he had never in his life been near a randomised control trial. He bent back his knuckles until they cracked and peered down his nose at Shelley.

"We have heard that you deplore modernity and have expressed the belief that Entrepreneurship should not necessarily be taught at five. Good show, good show. Are you by any chance a Trotskyist?"

A woman with brightly coloured beads, a hemp skirt and zero professionalism Smiled broadly from the right hand side of the table,

"They call me Period 4: feel free to use this time to just emote about your experience of coming here today: and don't mind Period 3, he never wakes up unless it's to agitate for unnecessary strike action which will cost the economy millions, or do the crossword."

A large man with a Che Guevara badge and no drive to raise attainment whatsoever snored beside her.

Suddenly the one they called Period 1 banged a metre rule loudly on the table (though he made no move to enter the incident on SIMS).

"SILENCE!  In the name of Piaget, Marx, The Miners' Strike and Billy Bragg are you prepared to make a solemn oath this night to join The Enemies of Promise?"

Shelley gulped. "You mean..."

"I do. Are you prepared to become Period Five?"

Presenting at the "State of Education" conference, March 1st

I will be presenting at the one day "State of Education" conference on March 1st 2014 at Oxford House, Bethnal Green.

To Book: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/state-of-education-conference-1-march-2014-tickets-10238604943
Programme Details: http://stateofeducation2014.wordpress.com

I will be running an interactive session, The Trend Away from Freedom, on contrasting Enlightenment ideas of Liberty and how they relate to participants' practical experience. It will ask participants to consider what autonomy for teachers and students really amounts to today.

The rest of the programme looks great too, with workshops on alternatives to school, arts education and the place of trade unions in the sector. I am delighted to be involved.

See some of you there, perhaps.

The Empiricist and the Philosopher: a modern unromance

It has lately come to my notice that a lot of people are distinguished (if that is the right word) by an inability to differentiate between these two types of academic work: Philosophical and Empirical. I thought I would try and do everyone a favour by drawing some dividing lines here, before anyone else says anything embarrassing.

Before I start it is fairly axiomatic to me that the truly scientific outlook is indispensable if we are going to survive then next thousand year plus on this planet or indeed any other. If you at any point think you detect me neglecting the principles of repeatability of result, basis of belief in evidence, the separation of matters of faith from matters of knowledge then please, point out to me where I have misstepped and send me an email. I will be really happy to reply.

Secondly, and unhelpfully in my profession (education) as in every other there is the question of certain words acquiring meaning that they do not have outside if that field. One such example is "differentiation". Over time "to differentiate" has come to mean something we do with our plans, resources and delivery in order to make those with specific barriers to learning better able to access the work. Its non specialist meaning is simply to draw a line between, rather as I am doing with this piece of writing. This does not mean that either of these meanings is incorrect: rather it means that we are dependent on the context to work out what reading we are supposed to infer. Of course even then this is language, so nothing is foolproof. Write to me if you need anything clarified, please.

And so to the matter at hand:

The recent controversy sparked by the theoretical piece from Andrew Davis, written as a member of the Philosophy of Education Society of Great Britain (of which I may as well say I am a member) caused a great deal of confusion. I was struck in discussion with perfectly pleasant individuals by the great confusion about a number of points. Three main ones:

The claim the pamphlet was not peer reviewed
The claim the pamphlet did not contain empirical data
The (related) claim the pamphlet was mere speculation

All of these claims seem to me reruns of the same kind of claims which were made when Michael Hand (in fact the general editor of this series) ran his own pamphlet about patriotism and whether it should be taught in schools. Please do keep the word "should" in mind, it will be important.

In a piece in Philosophy Today, Professor Hand reflected on the fallout from writing that article and the fact that, for all the media hoo-ha thus caused he at no point found a newspaper willing to take the fact that a theoretical piece or work had been written seriously on its own merits. That, it was claimed, was mere Opinion. Did he not have some facts, some data, a graph? Something for the headline writers to latch on to.

Now you may sympathise! What right after all does this man have to put out (Profess) his opinion? And this is the situation that Davis found himself in with the publication of his own pamphlet "To read or not to read".  His central claim, to my mind, was that if we are teaching students to do something which has no meaning outside the educational context then we are not teaching them at all. This definition of the limits of the category called "teaching" seemed to some, however, ludicrous. Hence the claims made above.

To claim the pamphlet was not peer reviewed was objectively wrong. The editorial team connected to the publication comprised 11 academics with many years experience between them including eight Professors and advisors to governments past and present. What lies behind this claim is a deep suspicion of theoretical work which amounts to  a virulent anti intellectual positivism which currently blights the sciences.

The second claim, that the pamphlet does not contain substantially new empirical data is true. However, empirical and philosophical questions have important differences between them which are the subject of this essay. Andrew Davis is a philosopher. The type and scope of his research is defined by the limits of his discipline. This is also my response to the third objection: he is a philosopher, this work is theory. Therefore, it is not "speculative" to write what one thinks because in this field what one thinks is precisely the research itself. When Davis says what he has written is the result of three years' work we have no reason to doubt him unless we believe that mental work is not meaningful or real, and if we believe that then quite frankly we should never be anywhere near a classroom.

So, the distinction between the Empirical and the Theoretic then, finally is something like this.

To simplify greatly, scientists produce data based on studies which are repeatable. This data is based on the measure of what we know is measurable. It does not, of course, step into the field of unknown unknowns because nothing does, at least consciously. However, a tree that falls in the forest with no one around to hear it isn't even a Subject so somebody actually has to analyse that stuff. If you show me a bunch of numbers being spat out of an electron microscope or an FMRI scanner I am going to shrug and go "uh?" So it must be admitted that we need analysis.

Now, analysis of data cannot of course be done by laypersons. Various problems will prevail, such as lack of knowledge of terminology, prevalence of personal prejudice, lack of common Lexis to debate findings with and so on.

Partly what Davis was doing was trying to rework the definition of "teach" to prevent abuse of the term. Once the term is abused then it becomes easy misuse it to abuse people. We could think of the bullying cry of "I am just teaching him a lesson" here. One student tried to excuse slapping another in the back of the neck to me recently by saying "I do it every time he makes a mistake...I am helping him become the best version of himself." This appeal to the notion of teaching was supposed to get me on side, but precisely because I do not regard that as teaching or learning I was not vulnerable to the sophistry. This, in very practical terms, is one way to use philosophy in education.

When we discipline ourselves within institutions to improve our theoretical instruments we are doing Philosophy. We owe a debt to that discipline and its contribution to understanding not of what is but of terminology which is meaningful and conceptions of what is ethical, thinkable and non contradictory. These I would placr under the heading of Meaning. An example: I think the nihilism of any view which says that "Numbers go up" is synonymous with progress, not to mention the magical thinking that goes along with it, should be obvious. A philosopher wants to ask "Numbers of what? What's the distribution? What categories are you using? Is there reason to believe this source? What prejudices operate commonly in this area?" Their specialist training invites them to suspend judgement and pass the data through transformative steps so as to view all the currently thinkable possibilities (ideally). Yet people persist in asking philosophers to provide evidence or "prove it". Headline writers want things boiled down. Busy ministers want the "key points". But these are not statements which can be cramped and offered into inspirational quotes for your Facebook wall. Rather they are systems of thought which, once inducted into them, we have historically found to be useful when it comes to reading and making sense out of evidence. It is a dirty trick to try and ask someone to justify themselves with evidence when, for example, they are discussing ethics. If you are in Rwanda during a genocide and somebody asks you to show what evidence you can find that the genocide should stop you are going to be stumped. There is only evidence of genocide! As Hume observed though, no is implies an ought. Theoretical work continually asks what we should do, what we should say, how we should interpret the world. It is a naturalistic fallacy to expect the way of the world to always tell us everything we need to know.

Of course if theory never links up with data then that is a terrible shame, but it is a failure which damages both the facts and the ideas. "So much the worse for the facts", as Vygotsky writes.

In education right now test data is produced at a very impressive rate which computers only serve to speed up. There is an absence of high quality public analysis precisely because the production of data has become the objective, rather than the synthesis of the two disciplines of theory and practice: Philosophy and Evidence Gathering. Computers can't do theory, so it is impossible to expect analysis to keep pace with data. This means certain key areas of professional and public life need to slow down if we are going to make sense of what is happening. That very modern phenomenon, the "man in a hurry" is going to have to learn that some things don't come in ticker tape, news feed form.

And this must happen, if we believe in a future. We cannot expect progress in human knowledge and understanding without the proper marriage of evidence and analysis. It is to everyone's detriment if our suspicion of "mere" opinion is allowed to stifle public reason, the selfsame public reason the exercise of which has, for some*, been synonymous with Freedom

*Kant

Debts to: Jan Derry, Vygotsky, Hume, Kant, Michael Hand, Andrew Davis

The Child is the God of Capitalist Man

The Child is the God of Capitalist man.  What does this imply?

One consequence of ceasing to care for eternity is imprisonment in the present. This gives the busybody, the overworked go getter who can no longer enjoy their life and bustles frantically hither and yon,  a problem. They are of an instant vulnerable to a simple question, that being

"Why do you do it all?"

As they hurtle towards burnout these useful nodes in the corporate machine do not, of course, have the notion that they might want the whole beastly business over and done with. So they say, as Weber observed, not 'for the glory of God', which was the serf's answer, but "I am doing it for my kids".

Tricky situation for a six year old to find themselves in, sitting on the heavenly throne; is it any wonder that they get confused?

Of course it is hardly the case that we treat them as divinites all the time. There is nothing so disappointing as a failed God,and so the Child has scorn poured on it when it fails to act as the Almighty ought (and who decides how the Almighty ought to do anything? That's Capitalism, folks).

Thus just as the real God of the Feudal age was the Agricultural year, the Child is only a sacrificial Corn God of the Aztek year. The youth is worshipped and then consumed in fire and sacrifice. The whole cycle is played out on the symbolic plane within the ritual circle of celebrity. Pity the poor things and, for that matter, the adults who, their time of divinity long over, instead wander the plains of cultural desolation, worshipping what they used to be, unwilling to leave it behind.