Gradgrind

If you don’t know who Gradgrind is/was, he’s an educationalist in one of Charles Dickens’ novels who thinks the only way to educate children is to get them to recite fact after fact.  He’s famous for being the very antithesis of what a teacher should be.

I have been a primary school teacher for the majority of my career but have never been a Gradgrind, until I started thinking a bit more.  The duties expected of teachers has changed over the past  120 years because of changes in the pedagogical approach that was fashionable at the time.  Pedagogy is a wide and developing ‘science’ and one that attracts criticism as well as praise depending upon the political persuasion of the said commentators.

We all know why state-wide education was introduced back in the days of the world being devoid of colour and only available in black and white.  Incidentally, should you tell students of a younger age that colour was only invented in the 1950’s, some will actually take you seriously.  Do not do this.  It leads to trouble. 

Anyway, factories were dealing with more complex operations and their owners realised that the uneducated workforce was not able to drive this.  They needed a minimum level of learning – Just Enough Education to Perform as the idea goes.  But, by the end of the Victorian Era and post World War One, life had changed for many workers.  They needed more from school than the Gradgrind type of reciting of facts. 

That Gradgrind was written so well by Charles Dickens is obviously down to the author’s own experiences of school.  These characters existed!  They were real.  Don’t teach context.  Don’t teach nuance.  Don’t teach learning, just teach the facts. 

By the 1930’s, people started to question this facts-only approach and so we had the various Hadow Reports that were the precursor to the change of education of the 1960’s culminating in, in so many ways, the report of Lady Plowden in 1967.

It was quietly revolutionary, basing many of its observations upon the work of Vygotsky and Piaget who implored a way of teaching that was student-led rather than simple fact-led.   It confirmed what many teachers felt, that students should be encouraged to find their way of learning and choosing what to learn. 

Now the trouble with child-centred learning is that it is hard to quantify for any given student.  Those of a certain political persuasion do not like this because they crave something that can be levelled or graded.  They argued that it was impossible to ascertain how a school or a teacher was performing because this approach meant there was no way to measure it against some kind of norm. 

And so, a couple of decades later and after much wrangling, we had the introduction of a certain Margaret Thatcher, of whom there has been much written.  She enabled the sceptics of the child-centred approach to the point of making it an election issue.  She deliberately employed Ministers for Education who were very much against education and against teachers. 

In other words, political meddling.

Now, we as teachers and head teachers know that the very last people who should be involved in education are politicians.  But, they seem to like getting involved so…

Anyway,  years later and we had the Three Wise Men report, written in a month and without any involvement of people who actually know how children learn, that paved the way for league tables, SATS tests and OFSTED and deliberately designed to be the reference point for the changes to education in the UK. 

There now exist multiple ways that schools can be judged and made accountable to those who only see the world in black and white.  It does not make for happy schools nor happy teachers.  Nor happy pupils if absenteeism rates are anything to go by.

As a year 6 teacher in the UK, it was my job to get good grades in our SATS tests.  And I did, I did it very well because what I ended up doing was teaching to the test.  It made me look good.  It made me have value. 

What can I say?  I had a mortgage to pay and debts to try to get rid of and my performance reviews were always linked to my results.

But, looking back, I can see that I started to turn into a Gradgrind.  We did no art.  No music (not that I can actually teach music).  No DT (and I love DT).  No IT.   No geography.  No History.  No local topic work. We did PE because Healthy bodies, healthy minds and all that.   Everything was geared to getting good grades for my students. 

How crap was that for my kids?  Seriously, what on Earth was I doing?  Yes, I was caught up in this pernicious system that seems to think making people miserable and bored is what education is about.   Did I betray the pedagogy espoused by Piaget and others?  Without a doubt. 

I do thank the stars that Science was a SATs requirement or else I dread what I would have done in those years.  Of course, I tried to make it interesting and fun and not just the recitation of facts but what I had done was to narrow down the curriculum simply to get results in tests.

With the ‘reforms’ of the curriculum pushed through by Gove, I fear we have returned full tilt to the times of Gradgrind where your school’s funding was linked to the capacity to recite facts and pass tests.    Just as one example from the National Curriculum, we are expected to teach primary school students to recognise, name and use fronted adverbials.

Fronted adverbials!  Who cares what a fronted adverbial is or looks like, is this what we want our kids to be concerned about when it comes to the English language?  Why?  Well, that’s easy.  Politicians like saying “traditional” when it comes to schooling and there is nothing more traditional than pointless grammar exercises designed to suck the joy from learning.

I worry that history is repeating itself and I worry even more that we are not teaching our students to question this. 

And I worry that we all, as educators, are fully aware of the peer-reviewed research into how children learn but we are powerless to enact these ways because we are so bound by the rules set by the totally inappropriate and which demands results of tests.

I have taught GCSE and I’ve taught my students how to pass the test.  They had two years of me teaching them how to pass an exam.  I look back at it now and wonder what on Earth these kids make of their education.  For them, in every subject, it was two years of learning how to pass a test.  Not learning how to explore, how to develop their learning, how to feel enthusiasm about a new area of learning, how to think critically. 

I don’t teach the IB but my wife does and she is a real advocate for it because it tries to get away from the Gradgrind approach to learning and asks students to think for themselves.  The trouble is, after having a diet of Gradgrind many students find it extremely difficult to change from the GCSE to the IB.

I find myself deploring what I did all those years ago and what I have ended up doing with GCSE but at the same time recognising that it was, and definitely still is, the prevailing culture within my time as a teacher.  It just saddens me to think that this is what education has been reduced to – a kind of lowest common denominator.  Perhaps I am just being stupidly naïve but I genuinely think there needs to be more to being a teacher than helping students pass a test.