http://www.spiked-online.com/Articles/0000000CAAD6.htm
by
Michele
Ledda 28
April 2005
Three
new books by teachers in
Marc
Le Bris, Et Vos Enfants Ne Sauront Pas
Lire...Ni Compter! (And Your Children Will Not Be
Able To Read ... Nor Count!)
Rachel
Boutonnet, Journal D'une Institutrice
Clandestine (Diary Of An Illegal
Teacher) Paris: Ramsay, 2003
Fanny
Capel, Qui a eu Cette Idee Folle un Jour
De Casser L'ecole?, (Whoever Had This Crazy Idea
One Day Of Destroying Education?)
'Modern pedagogy's only use is
to justify the abandonment of the ambitions we once had for our children. We are
facing a real cultural catastrophe', writes Marc Le Bris, a 50-year-old head
teacher at a primary school in
A
schoolchild in the riots of May 1968, the author of this passionate book started
his teaching career as a moderniser. When he left teacher training in 1977, he
had learnt 'one thing above all': that 'old-fashioned teachers were almost
incompetent; they were ridiculous...unthinking labourers working the wrong way
round'. 'Yet', he writes, 'the pupils of the older teachers...obtained the best
results. At the start of secondary school, their pupils were better prepared. My
pupils, pampered by modern methods, were subjected to an academic handicap of
which I am ashamed today.'
Along
with Rachel Boutonnet and Fanny Capel, Le Bris is a member of Sauver les Lettres (Save Literature) a
collective founded by teachers in the year 2000, during the protests that forced
education minister Claude Allegre's resignation. The organisation campaigns
against child-centred education through its website, numerous books and other
public initiatives. At the beginning of February 2005, one of the group's
surveys showing the decline in French pupils' spelling ability received wide
publicity in the French and the British press (1).
Child-centred
education is based on the constructivist theory of learning, according to which
learners construct their own knowledge by analysing experience. For Marc Le
Bris, this is a false theory, because the whole of humanity, not the
individual child, constructs knowledge. The dominance of constructivism
means that pupils will be, at best, autodidacts lacking the solidity of
systematic learning.
In
Rachel
Boutonnet
could have answered that question. A French primary school teacher with a master
in philosophy, she kept a diary throughout her teacher training and her first
year as a teacher, which she published in 2003. She rejects the idea that
traditional teaching methods make pupils passive: 'I think it is impossible to
learn in a passive way. If you have learnt something, you must have been
active;...in order to listen, you must concentrate. What the speaker is saying,
you must make your own. This often requires effort and will
power.'
She
also questions the belief that so-called active methods lead to pupils'
autonomy: 'the fact that pupils are "in research mode" doesn't mean that they
are active. Often...they just ape an activity. They go through the motions that
the teacher has scripted for them. Intellectually speaking, they are
passive.'
The
constructivist method is not so much an alternative to previous teaching methods
as an anti-method.
Boutonnet captures well the destructive impulse behind it: 'by refusing to transmit
knowledge, the teacher trainers nevertheless transmitted something. They could
not avoid this, since they were in the position of teachers.... This something
was the rejection of knowledge. In this, they were the
experts.'
The
limitations of the child-centred model become clear in the way in which children
are taught to read. The choice of reading methods splits the educational
community into traditionalists and modernisers. Child-centred methods, such as
Whole Language, are based on the idea that children should learn to read in a
'natural' way, just as they learn to speak, working out the rules for
themselves. These start by using whole texts, with the help of pictures, and
expect children to recognise whole words from their shape and from the context
before they can decode each letter. Children are asked to guess at first, and
only at the end of the process do they learn to break down words into their
component sounds and letters.
Research
shows that the most fundamental part of teaching should be
subject-centred
Subject-centred
methods, on the other hand, lead the child, step by step, from the simple to the
complex. Explicit or synthetic phonics teaches the alphabet, starting with the
most regular associations between letter and sound - eg, the letter 'a' sounds
[a] as in apple, not [ei] as in gate. It simplifies reality, even distorts it
for pedagogic purposes, in order to break up the process of learning into
gradual steps. For example, to read the word 'cat', it teaches that the letters
'c' and 'a', put together, sound [ca] even though the syllable 'ca' has no
meaning in the English language. Because this method
synthesises single letter sounds into syllables, it is called synthetic phonics
in English and syllabique in
French.
Despite
overwhelming evidence over the years that synthetic phonics is by far the best
method (2), educationalists in
Given
the importance of the
In
France, Le Bris and Boutonnet note that the Whole Language method is effectively
compulsory. It's not that the French government officially endorses la globale, it's just that la syllabyque is a subject-centred,
teacher-led method and as such it is considered bad practice. Boutonnet's
encounter with the inspector shows how child-centred teaching is enforced. After
being strongly criticised by the inspector and told that she must use the new
reading methods, she asks if synthetic phonics is forbidden. 'Of course not',
replies the inspector. 'What a way of putting it. We do not want to make people
change their ways in an authoritarian fashion - we'd rather they thought about
it....'
In
his book's appendix, Marc Le Bris presents a number of inspection reports
criticising excellent teachers who refuse to adopt the teaching methods
suggested by the state. He believes that, although it is an unpleasant
experience, school inspection is an indispensable means of protecting children's
education. But he deplores the fact that inspections have changed from checking
what children have learnt, to enforcing the adoption of particular teaching
methods.
The
British education system becomes more and more child-centred with every
successive reform - but research overwhelmingly shows that the most fundamental
part of teaching, the beginning on which subsequent learning depends, should be
subject-centred. Adopting synthetic phonics
would mean accepting that the transmission of knowledge is the main purpose of
education, and that the child-centred model is
wrong.
Modernisers
present themselves as democratic and attack anyone who defends academic
standards as elitist. The model based on the transmission of knowledge is often
attacked as inappropriate for children from a 'disadvantaged background', or for
lower-ability pupils. Traditional methods might be very good for academic
pupils, goes the argument, but in a comprehensive, mixed-ability environment the
teacher should address the learning needs of different types of pupils. Yet the
use of child-centred reading methods could [? GS it is]
itself be the cause of some of the intractable problems of today's
schools.
Despite claims as to the educational importance of other media, children's
access to knowledge happens almost exclusively through reading books. Even most
of the information now available on the internet is only accessible through
reading. If
children are not taught to read properly and promptly, they soon fall behind in
most subjects and their intellectual development is impaired. We can then blame
their genetic make-up or the socioeconomic conditions of their parents for what
is essentially a failure to teach them.
The school system
creates inequalities and then naturalises them. Can this really be what
happens?
Dr Kerry Hempenstall, senior lecturer in psychology and disability studies at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, Australia, suggests as much: 'such erroneous practices have been especially damaging to vulnerable students - those who aren't self-sustaining, who can't afford ineffective strategies, who rely on teachers rather than their parents to educate them.' (4) A former teacher who has worked with children with low reading abilities all his life, the Australian psychologist blames constructivist reading methods for what appear to be genetic or socioeconomic deficiencies: 'it often takes until Year 4...before teachers acknowledge the validity of parental concern. Then it is tempting to blame genetic inheritance, or a lack of home-based reading (a supreme irony) for this suddenly urgent problem.'
Here
in Britain, it would be ironic if
a school system that purports to be centred on the needs of the individual child
were actually creating, or at least increasing, inequality in the abilities of
its pupils from the first year of primary school, then naturalising it with
concepts such as aptitude, gifted and talented pupils, dyslexia, disadvantaged
background, or disaffected pupils.
To add insult to injury, our education system could then be shifting the blame
on to parents, and sending them to parenting classes.
French secondary teacher Fanny Capel certainly thinks that the school system creates problems: 'When I meet the parents, who are usually at a great loss, they brandish the most predictable alibis, the most reassuring: "My daughter is dyslexic"; "He's had a bad French teacher in his first three years"; "She has never liked reading". They medicalise, they particularise, they personalise the problem. They are completely and utterly wrong, and one can understand why: how could one admit that it is the whole institution that, from primary school, and usually despite the efforts of its teachers, organises the deprivation of knowledge perpetrated against their children?'
The
only way out of this situation is for teachers to reclaim their professional
autonomy
Her
book focuses in particular on the reforms proposed by former education minister
Luc Ferry, exposing the child-centred focus behind the back-to-basics rhetoric.
She also explains how the
target of 80 per cent of pupils obtaining the baccalaureate is being pursued
through lowering academic standards.
In the last section of her book she attempts to provide an alternative vision
for a school system that offers good academic education to the majority of
children.
She
quotes the belief of the Enlightenment thinker Marquis de Condorcet, that 'it is
possible to educate the entire mass of a people, in everything that each man
needs to know for...the free development of his practical skills and mental
abilities,...so that he will not rely blindly on those to whom he is obliged to
entrust his private affairs or the exercise of his rights;...in order to defend
himself against prejudice with the sole force of reason'
(5).
Although
Capel accepts Condorcet's principles, she is aware that they have never been
realised. She makes it clear that she doesn't want to go back to a 'mythical
golden age' and she is aware that 'the majority of pupils of the Third Republic
[1871-1940] did not go beyond the certificat d'études [primary
school]'.
Between
the school of the past, which offered knowledge to a minority of children, and
the school of the present, which increasingly refuses to transmit knowledge,
Capel chooses neither: 'we
must invent a school that has never existed: a school that really has the
means...to emancipate intellectually the whole of a generation.'
Those
who criticise the modernisers are accused of being either conservative, or
utopian. To the former Capel responds, quoting Hannah Arendt (6), that
'conservatism...is the essence of educational activity', adding that 'to conserve a school that gives children
the means of changing the world is
the only revolutionary project worth pursuing'. As for the charge of utopianism,
she just shrugs it off: 'the only challenge that matters to us, every time we
enter our classroom is this one: can we, for the time of a lesson, share with
our pupils the idea that there is nothing more important in the world than
Baudelaire's moving struggle to reach the sky?'
That
this respect of the teacher for her subject can not only be construed as
utopian, but is also considered bad practice, gives a measure of the bankruptcy
of today's education.
Yet while convincing pupils that studying literature is a worthwhile enterprise
may sometimes be difficult, it is not as utopian as trying to enthuse them with
the National Literacy Strategy.
The only way out of this situation, however difficult, is
for teachers to reclaim their professional autonomy and expose the ridiculous
teaching methods imposed by the government. 'This book is not a cry for help',
writes Fanny Capel, 'it is a call to arms'. It might even be time, yet again, to
join the French.
Michele
Ledda
is an English teacher in the north of England.
(1) 'When Not Learning Your Spelling Is A
National Emergency', Charles Bremner, The
Times (London), 3 February 2005
(2)
See, for example, the recently published seven-year study by Rhona Johnston of
University of Hull and Joyce Watson of University of St Andrews, The
effects of synthetic phonics teaching on reading and spelling
attainment
(3)
'When
words fail them',
Geraldine Bedell, Observer, 20
February 2005
(4)
Reading
Problems: The Causal Role Of The Education System, Kerry Hempenstall, 1999
(5)
Condorcet, Esquisse d'un tabaleau
historique des progres de l'esprit humain, (Sketch for a historical picture
of the progress of the human mind, London, 1955)
(6) Hannah Arendt, 'The Crisis In Education', in Between Past And Future, London, 1961