Chris Woodhead is to be congratulated on an honest and courageous lecture. The Dearing Review split differences and bought time, but addressed no fundamental issues. Teachers have been suffering from innovatory exhaustion since the 1960s. The time gained should now be used for the searching educational debate Mr Woodhead calls for.
Like the United States before us, we are in the midst of unparalleled uncertainty. It is not only methods of achieving agreed ends that are criticised, but ideals and aims come under fire. Discussion is healthy, but not if it leads to further confusion. Contributions which make sweeping claims, unsupported by evidence, have been a feature of recent discussions. It is time to recognise the disservice they have done.
Mr Woodhead is right in identifying a struggle between competing ideologies. The literature is full of the attempts by self-styled progressives to use education to transform society. They try to break the chain between past and future by decrying the initiation of the young into accumulated wisdom, consisting of systematic knowledge and a moral order. Woodhead expresses this in terms employed by US psychologist Carl Rogers stressing the contrast between a “teacher” (“traditional education”) and a “facilitator” (person-centred education).
He also implies that progressives are most guilty of allowing hypotheses to harden into unexamined orthodoxy. My experience as a progressive makes me think he is right. Buoyed up by a belief that there is a natural law which ensures that every state of society is better than what preceded it, and fired by zeal, the progressive is loathe to admit “stubborn facts”, and prone to arrogance.
“Progressive” is such a fine-sounding name that it never crosses its bearers’ minds that things can get progressively worse. John Dewey expressed it well when he attributed the failure of the new education to its assumption that it sufficed to reject the ideas and practices of the old education and then go to the opposite extreme.
Fear of “teaching” and “instructing” is widespread. Although Carl Rogers’ “facilitator” had not gained currency in the UK when I joined the Schools Council in the late 1960s, I knew not to write “teach” when “arrange learning situations” would do. A subsequent spell in teacher training showed that this philosophy was spreading.
But it is in the less tangible field of values that the “facilitator” has thrived. The non-judgmentalism that Rogers introduced into education from psychotherapy has taken root. All the influential Schools Council projects on religious, moral and social education were based on “values clarification” - a method devised by Rogers’ followers to free the child from the time-honoured dependence on adults for the transference of values.
The Church of England gave it its blessing in 1970, when the Durham Report urged teachers in county schools not to press for the acceptance of any belief system. “Initiation into agnosticism” became the creed of the new educational Establishment. Commitment is frowned on, unless it be the commitment of the open-minded to an open-ended search for the unknowable.
It has taken strong teachers to stand up to this new orthodoxy; to shrug off charges of “indoctrination” for teaching right and wrong. Some are still battling, but others either gave up or got out. The majority, I suspect, are simply confused. As an energetic and enterprising primary head put it recently: “What worries me is that Hitler thought he was right and he transferred his values to millions of people.”
The person-centred movement has wreaked havoc in the US. Dr Spock is the latest to recant, “near despair” at what is happening to children when the fundamental beliefs of society are lost. Reports of the expulsion of our own five-year-olds for biting teachers must steel us to resist the facile notion that setting standards for children might damage their self-esteem. All this does is help to create a Me Generation.
If a sufficient number want their children to regard fundamental values as prejudices, a free society must provide the appropriate schools. A well-informed public would never allow the main system to be used for the destruction of virtue. The castigation of the “facilitator” by such a senior figure as Chris Woodhead promises to be the much-needed watershed in British education. He deserves full support.
Fred Naylor is an education consultant
