[This text was originally publishes in CASEnotes #100]
In March of this year, the shadow education secretary Bridget Phillipson said that school pupils must “learn to challenge” media narratives. Speaking at the annual conference of the Association of School and College Leaders (ASCL), Phillipson said, “Our young people need, more than ever before, to be questioning, critical, discerning.” Besides cultivating a mature citizenry, critical thinking skills become even more important in the modern economy, one which continues to shift away from manufacturing and manual labour and towards services and tech. Indeed, it is a familiar truism that schools must educate their learners for jobs that do not yet exist. Still, I cannot fathom many teachers today would claim that they are teaching critical thinking skills effectively. How could they, when teachers themselves are no longer active agents in the content that they are “delivering”?
With the expansion of academisation and the centralisation of educational resources away from individual schools and towards corporatist “independent public bodies,” such as the Oak National Academy, the answer to the question, “what should today’s lesson be?” is likely to be decided by a “Curriculum Lead” rather than an individual teacher. In Multi-Academy Trusts (MATs) especially, the trend is towards “curriculum packs” that structure the short, middle, and long-term teaching across “units of learning,” with pre-prepared classroom content, as well as homework, revision sheets, and end-of-term assessments.
The rationale for these developments is certainly well-intentioned. Given that teachers in England work longer hours than their European counterparts, any opportunity to reduce workload is warmly welcomed. However, this becomes problematic when educational resources become educational prescriptions. Many teachers today are not, I believe, active agents in what they teach. They cannot choose either what they are delivering, or how to deliver it. The consensus in academic research is that the schoolteacher today is less “educator” and more “craftsperson.” Teachers are “deliverers,” “technicians,” of education, not public-facing intellectuals.
It seems that the ideal teacher, at least in the current paradigm, is a classroom manager. They passively take the “content” - discrete objects of “knowledge” - and regurgitate it to likewise 4 passive students. Along with being boring and patronising, the problem of having the what and how withheld from teachers, is that the why is lost along with them. This way, you are prone to find a scene that I have witnessed many times in my short teaching career:
Student: “Why are we learning this?”
Teacher: “Because it’s on the syllabus.”
This is very far from Ms Phillipson's “questioning, critical and discerning.”
Besides failing our learners, I would wager that this teaching model is more implicated in the present staffing crisis than is generally recognised. Together with inadequate pay, the gradual erosion of teacher autonomy is deeply associated with the overall de-valuation and deprofessionalisation of what once was a respected career. After all, what aspiring teacher, propelled by a sincere desire to inspire young people and “make a difference,” looks forward to nothing more than doing what they are told?
Certainly, I am not proposing a world in which each teacher is a king and each classroom their kingdom. This has already been settled by the “Great Debate,” launched all the way in 1976, partly in response to the William Tyndale affair where a radical child-centred ethos hindered children’s learning and resulted in serious disciplinary problems. But the present “I say, you do” chain of command running from Executive Head Teachers and Senior Leadership Teams, down to teachers, then subsequently hammered into students cannot be “delivering” critical learners. Surely if we want students who think, their teachers must have the freedom to do so first.