Educating Ruby (13 page)

First, they need to be sure that the approaches adopted should be well-researched. (In the 1990s, an approach called Brain Gym was much touted as the key to successful learning. It isn't. Teachers were told that children had fixed learning styles which they had to attend to if they were to learn well. They don't. It also briefly became fashionable to think that children exposed to the music of Mozart, ideally as early as possible in their lives, would become better mathematicians. They won't, although some may end up liking or hating the music!) Some people believed that you had to make children sip water all the time or their brains would dry up and learning would stop. It doesn't.

Second, the focus of these learning habits needs to be embedded in the whole curriculum, and not administered as a stand alone module. It doesn't work to see learning to learn as a kind of occasional booster injection of learning to
learn capabilities. We know from various research that, when this happens, learning to learn does not transfer into the various subjects where it needs to be applied, nor to out-of-school life, and it often becomes marginalised as an activity.

KS3 should also build on the exposure to a wide range of occupations and ‘possible selves' begun at KS2. Once upon a time there used to be lots of people in schools called ‘careers officers' who were skilled in knowing which educational pathways might work for which child. These days such people are very thin on the ground. There are also so many courses on offer at college and university that it is nigh on impossible for any teacher to keep abreast of them.

Luckily there is a great website called
www.icould.com
which shows short film-clips of all kinds of people talking about the journeys that led them to the work (whether employed or self-employed) they now love doing. Just play the students one of these every morning, and who knows, maybe a seed of a possibility, a glimmer of an idea, might be sown. And maybe even start offering small ‘work experience' opportunities to the children that they can report back on, or make their own ‘icould' videos for the rest of the school to see.

We suggest that at this stage students bring their already well-developed reading, writing, collaborating and researching habits to bear on matters of national and global significance. In so doing they would be required to engage with the disciplined bodies of knowledge and research that inform these issues. The goal is for all young people to develop, as much as they can, a rigorous understanding of these issues, with all their complexities and controversies, which will enable them to play an informed part in public debates.

Key Stage 4 would thus provide a means to develop a kind of ‘intermediate literacy' – an ability to read good quality literature, and to convey it fluently – that sits between the superficial opinions of, for example, tabloid newspapers and the technical world of research journals. In every school subject there is a progression across the key stages, not just of vocabulary but also of the intricacy and abstraction of arguments and ideas, and it is this ‘literacy of thought' that students of this age are ready to focus on. (In KS2 you can set up a simple experiment and ask the children, “What do you think is going to happen?” You can't ask that about the periodic table.) Many pupils never become fluent in this more abstract-but-precise way of thinking and writing, and nor do they master the art of sliding between the language of concrete, personally felt experience and the abstract languages of academic research – but they could, and it would be socially highly useful for them to do so.
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For example, people tend to fall into two groups when you ask them about the causes of the global financial crisis of 2008. About 80% of people blame venal or stupid individuals (‘villains' or ‘idiots', basically). They take a rather moralistic and simplistic stance. The other 20% take a more systemic view; they talk about the nature of institutions, their cultures and fallibilities, and the way they interact.
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This one-fifth of the adult population turns out to be significantly better educated than the rest. They are able to take
a less emotive or self-righteous view of the situation, and thus arrive at more penetrating analyses, and potentially more effective solutions. They are better at what has come to be called ‘systems thinking'. Wouldn't it be good (for all of us except climate deniers and the oil industry) if thousands of 16-year-olds were flooding out of schools well-informed and eloquent about such matters? About climate change (or what James Lovelock now insists on calling ‘global heating')? About the relationship between the arbitrary carving up of areas of Central Europe, Africa and Asia by old colonial powers, and the resurgence of tribalism, whether ethnic, religious or geographical, in those areas once oppressive rule begins to crack? About the exposure of previously hidden experiences of war or abuse through literature, art and film? This is not a left-wing, anti-establishment agenda; it is a depth-of-understanding-of-complex-issues agenda. And if that is not a legitimate purpose of education, we don't know what is.

There are many high quality, well-written, contemporary non-fiction books that could serve as the basis for the discussion and development of this ability to bring good information, theory and argument into the arena of public debate. Kindle and paperback editions are not expensive. On the financial crisis, 15-year-olds could read John Lanchester's
Whoops! Why Everyone Owes Everyone and No One Can Pay
or John Coates' brilliant exposition of the neuroscience of risk-taking,
Between the Hour of Dog and Wolf
.
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On climate change, George Monbiot's
Heat: How to Stop the Planet Burning
or James Lovelock's
The Revenge of Gaia
would be
good.
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On the evolution and future of humankind, anything by Richard Dawkins is an exemplary piece of science writing, while Jared Diamond's
The Third Chimpanzee
is a great read
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– there is even a version adapted to the reading level of 10-year-olds now on the market, so such reading could start even earlier.

In understanding recent developments in psychology, David Brooks'
The Social Animal
, Daniel Kahneman's
Thinking Fast and Slow
and Jonathan Haidt's
The Righteous Mind
are highly accessible, well-researched and very thought-provoking.
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Alexander Diener and Joshua Hagen's
Borders: A Very Short Introduction
brings history and politics together in a way that illuminates many current post-colonial conflicts.
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Many works of fiction also address contemporary or historical issues of real importance in lively ways – for example, John le Carré's
The Constant Gardener
or Hilary Mantel's
Wolf Hall
and
Bring Up the Bodies
.
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Any would-be writer of fiction would learn hugely from John Yorke's
Into the Woods: How Stories Work and Why We Tell Them
.
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Olivia Fane's
The Conversations: 66 Reasons to Start Talking
would be a terrific
primer for debates about painful contemporary issues.
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Students could read these books as a kind of ‘book club', meeting weekly to discuss a chapter, and having regular ‘flipped' sessions with their teacher to ask questions and iron out misunderstandings and disagreements. As a group, having to read a whole book and master complex arguments would clearly stretch a host of valuable capabilities: reading, concentration, discussion, resilience and imagination, just for starters. And, of course, there are various online interpretations and e-versions of the books which could be explored.

Here we envisage two strands: one vocational and the other philosophical. Having explored a whole variety of vocational options and ‘possible selves' earlier in their school careers, the vocational strand could require a commitment to following one or two vocational pathways in more detail, in a mixture of disciplinary learning and internships or apprenticeships. By vocational here we mean to do with any likely future career, be it in medicine, web design, social work, catering, teaching or sport. We think that vocational should apply to the developing work identities of all young people, not just those who are not cut out for more disembodied kinds of study. And, by the same token, all young people should be developing a base of knowledge and
understanding that enables them to be thoughtful rather than mechanical practitioners. (As we all know, it is possible to be a well-informed, thoughtful and creative plumber, and a mediocre, mechanical lecturer, GP or solicitor. Creative intelligence is not the province of a small sector of the job market – and nor is absent-minded or sloppy thinking!)

We think that the more general and philosophical component of KS5 could well be derived from something like the International Baccalaureate (IB). It should really stretch students to think about complex issues of current relevance and concern. This is the core of the IB diploma:

We would like to add an
extended physical project
to balance the extended essay. Students would be required to make something beautiful and present it to an audience. It could be a piece of furniture or a bowl, a gymnastics display or a dance, a sculpture, painting or digital installation, a book of poetry or a storybook for younger children, a four-course meal or dozens of other technically accomplished outputs. Either separately or in conjunction with this, we would like to see a
collaborative project
too, in which the honours and responsibilities are shared – as indeed they are in much of ‘real life'.

The theory of knowledge course should provide an essential – and challenging – corrective to the preceding years of acquiring specific bundles of knowledge, skill, attitude and understanding.
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Its input should be composed solely of provocations to simplistic ideas about knowledge, learning and the composition of the mind. Any lingering attachment to ideas and beliefs, such as those below, could be challenged with visual illusions, moral dilemmas and paradoxes, and the classroom could resound with agonised discussion as students' minds get stretched and hitherto unquestioned certainties are put to the test.

The IB's own description of theory of knowledge speaks for itself: