Thursday 3 December 2009

Explaining the mystery

As a regular churchgoer, I am every Sunday exposed to a great mystery. A priest waves his hands over a piece of bread and mumbles some incantation and miraculously the host is transformed into something altogether more wonderful than mere flour and water. It has in some sense become the body of Christ. This matter is too deep for a simple man like me and I have at various times asked to have this strange process explained to me. Ultimately, I am told; it is a mystery. One must simply accept that the thing happens and just be jolly glad that it does. Most unsatisfactory for the man of reason!

I am irresistibly reminded of this when trying to get believers to explain to me the essential mystery of autonomous education. The closest that we seem able to get is; "It works and you just have to take people's word for it. If it is measured or observed, then you are apt to destroy the spontaneity of the thing and thus change it!" Now as I say, I am a simple man who is quite prepared to believe improbable things. (After all, if I am able to swallow virgin births and men who come back from the dead, you would think I would have no trouble believing in a little matter like autonomous education. I am like the man in the Bible who swallowed a camel and yet strained at a gnat!)

Almost fifty years ago, Paul Goodman had this to say in Compulsory Miseducation;

"the puzzle is not how to teach reading, but why some children fail to learn to read. Given the amount of exposure that any urban child gets, any normal animal should spontaneously catch on to the code. What prevents? It is almost demonstrable that, for many children, it is precisely going to school that prevents - because of the school's alien style, banning of spontaneous interest, extrinsic rewards and punishments."

Alan Thomas in his books says much the same thing, that the teaching of even so basic a subject as literacy is unnecessary. Children will just pick it up by themselves. Some authors have gone even further. According to John Holt, not only is school not needed for the acquisition of literacy, it can be positively harmful! Both he and Goodman apparently believe that reading problems are actually caused by schools. In other words, they are the disease and not the cure.

For some inexplicable reason, either sheer, bloody minded stubborness or perhaps because they are in thrall to the hidebound orthodoxy of mainstream educationists, almost every teacher, local authority officer and member of staff at the Department of Children, Schools and Families disagree with this perspective. They persist in the belief that it is necessary and desirable that small children are taught how to read. For myself, I remain unconvinced, but open to persuasion. I am unlikely to be persuaded though because Mrs. Smith's son did not go to school and now he reads just fine. Nor am I likely to be swayed by the horror stories of parents whose children have suffered untold misfortunes in maintained schools only to blossom when once they are deregistered. Nor, I'll warrant are those hard headed types at the DCSF likely to change their minds on purely anecdotal evidence of this sort.. They stand there like Mr. Gradgrind, saying, as he did;

" Now what I want are facts. Facts alone are wanted in life. Plant nothing else and root out everything else."

(Hard Times, by I am confident enough of my readers' erudition to believe it unnecessary to mention the fact)

Every time somebody offers to examine or measure or look closely at autonomous education, there is a panic. The standard tests are inadequate to do justice to the activity and can even harm it. The local authority are the quite the wrong crowd to be dealing with it. Ofsted are no good, who knows what their motives are? (Of course, strictly speaking it should not matter a damn what the motives are of those doing the testing. I can administer Schonell's reading test to any child and my motives will not affect the outcome.) Essentially, we are told that the thing must be taken on faith and that many parents just know that it works without a lot of tiresome testing. This may be enough for me; as I say I am able to believe a good number of strange and improbable things, but I have a very strong feeling that it will not for much longer be enough for those charged with the monitoring of elective home education. Unless autonomous educators come up with either some solid evidence that this practice is actually educating children, along with some way of assessing the process, then there will soon be much wailing and gnashing of teeth in many home educating families when the provisions of the Children, Schools and Families Bill become law.

13 comments:

  1. I wouldn't personally call it panic. Seems more like resignation to me. It's not provable: if they want proof or else they'll ban it, then they'll have to ban it. C'est la vie. It was a nice way to live while we could and the end results were ideal, thanks. Seems like we'll have to get coercive with our kids instead in future though, if what you say is right, which won't kill them or us.

    Shame though: it was an exciting new idea. Pity it has to be quashed like that.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Well, I can find a straightforward way of resolving your first mystery
    see http://www.epc.org/about-the-epc/beliefs/westminster-confession/#ch29
    Evangelicalism (is that a word?) is a great deal simpler than a belief in transubstantiation.

    As for the second -to be fair to AE's proponents - I do think that some of them have tried to explain it, you just don't believe them. Now I am certainly no advocate of autonomous education -- teaching something seems a perfectly good way of conveying information and learning skills to me, but I am not closed to the idea that it (AE) works perfectly well for some. I do actually know some families where I can observe that is the case. I also know families where it seems apparent to me that either AE hasn't "worked" or more likely AE is a name used by them to cover up the fact that their children show no interest in learning anything and they have no interest in teaching them either - the result is then inevitable.

    What will happen in the future? Who knows? - we are still at the speculation stage - since we still don't know whether the legislation will get passed. If it does, then I expect that some families, whatever their views on submitting to "inspection" will do so and whatever their educational philosophy all will be well; others may face difficulties. I would like to think that the system will be able to discriminate between AE and "no attempt to educate" -but ......?

    ReplyDelete
  3. Thank you Julie, if our priest could only become a Calvinist then I would have no more of these doctrinal difficulties!

    ReplyDelete
  4. >>>>>>>Both he and Goodman apparently believe that reading problems are actually caused by schools. In other words, they are the disease and not the cure.<<<<<<<<

    That certainly was the case for many pupils of mine who came into my SN Dept, from primary schools, unable to read (about 10% of the yearly intake). I referred to it as School Induced Dyslexia. Once taught properly, they all read fluently. (This is not to deny the existence of actual Dyslexia, a trickier problem to resolve, but still able to be helped.) So, yes, in my experience, schools could and did fail children in the way they taught reading.

    >>>>>>>>>For some inexplicable reason, either sheer, bloody minded stubborness or perhaps because they are in thrall to the hidebound orthodoxy of mainstream educationists, almost every teacher, local authority officer and member of staff at the Department of Children, Schools and Families disagree with this perspective.<<<<<<<<<<<

    Not all, though, as you've said. Some are still teachable. ;-)

    Of course, parents are just as capable of failing their children in the area of reading as schools are, but they have a much more keenly felt sense of self-interest in their children achieving and so usually do better.

    Of course, I'm only talking about my experience which is limited. 10 years SN teaching in London, 14 years of HE'ing, knowing 100's of HE'd kids in 3 distict groups. It's not research, but it's not prejudice either.

    Mrs Anon

    ReplyDelete
  5. >>>>>>>>Of course, strictly speaking it should not matter a damn what the motives are of those doing the testing.<<<<<<<

    Never heard of Cyril Burt?

    Mrs Anon

    ReplyDelete
  6. Well, of course Cyril Burt actually faked his results. In was assuming that Ofsted would gather information adn recoed it honestly. They may put the wrong construction upon some of the data, I am sure that they will be intending to prove something, but it would be hard for them to falsify the orginal data. When one lone individual like Burt is working on some project, this can easily be done. In his case it was a few pen strokes to alter figures; I'm sure you know the story. With a big organisation like Ofsted, I wouldn't think it so likely.

    ReplyDelete
  7. Then there's all the research I learned about in the 80's though can't be bothered to go an search for now, that showed that the ethnicity and gender of the tester has effects on psychometic testing results.

    It is very easy to skew, consciously and unconsciously, test reslts. Having administered 1,000's of reading tests in my time I can attest to how easy that is.

    You said motives didn't matter. I'm saying that they do. As I understood it, that's your beef with the Rothermel study.

    Mrs Anon

    ReplyDelete
  8. All quite true. However the latest piece of research which seems to be on the go is that questionnaire from Ofsted. The questions are straightforward and I think that they would yield useful information about how home eduation is actually being conducted, at least in fifteen local authority areas. I don't for a momnet doubt that both parents and Ofsted will draw different conclusions from the information, but the information actually being asked seems innocuous enough. Of course it will be open to abuse. For instance there will be nothing to stop parents claiming that their children are working 10 hours a day! But at the very least it might give asnapshot of how things are going and what methods are being used. I can see no harm in it.

    ReplyDelete
  9. OFSTED needs to know how much *Pottery* HE'd kids do?

    And if all the parents do claim their kids are learning Maths 'all the time', or 14 hours a day, how useful will it be?

    It's not really research, is it?

    I didn't claim it was harmful, but I can see how those who are considering the context and the source might think it could be.

    Mrs Anon

    ReplyDelete
  10. The problem is, as I said above, that any attempt to look very closely at autonomous education causes people to get upset. Of course, this questonnaire is far from ideal. The best way of going about it would be to enter people's homes and gather evidence by interviwing family members separately, stuff like that. I do not recall any great enthusiasm being displayed for this scheme....
    As for asking about pottery, I think this is because the sort of things one would ask schoolchildren would be pretty ludicrous in a home education context. For example you might enquire how much time the children spent in the gymnasium or on the playing field. For many home educated children, the answer would perhaps be none at all. Ask about ballet and riding though and you might get some idea about their physical activity.

    ReplyDelete
  11. >>>>>>>any attempt to look very closely at autonomous education causes people to get upset<<<<<<<<

    Do you think that's what this is? An attempt to look closely at AE? It seems to me that it was a belated attempt to get SOME info about how home educators in general go about the business of HE. They were probably embarrassed that they didn't actually have any before they made their pronouncements.

    >>>>>>>>>The best way of going about it would be to enter people's homes and gather evidence by interviwing family members separately, stuff like that. <<<<<<

    Hang on a minute, isn't that what Alan Thomas did?

    I've just been teaching poetry analysis to my 15 year old, so your choice of language here leaps out at me: 'enter people's homes', 'interview', 'gather evidence'. It sounds so hostile, you can almost hear (underlying themes, you know?) the sound of the jackboots. You could have said, 'engage with the HE community', 'get alongside', 'observe' etc.

    I suppose I'm just beginning to wonder if an anthropologist's approach might be better than a rats'n'stats, scientific research method of analysing HE, as HE is so embedded in family life for so many of us. (Even us 'structured' types.)

    Mrs Anon

    ReplyDelete
  12. It isn't research into AE per se that parents 'panic' about - it's who is doing the research and why. Given the approbation heaped on Rothermel, Thomas and Pattison referred to by yourself (as I pointed out in a previous comment) I suspect that if a bunch of academics were doing it, people would be queuing up to participate.

    It's rather a different proposition if the bodies 'researching' have a clear agenda and remit that is as different from AE as chalk is from cheese and have already publicly demonstrated that their research capabilities are at about the level of the average teenager.

    ReplyDelete
  13. Apologies to the average teenager. No offence was intended.

    ReplyDelete