Sunday 30 November 2014

A question I have asked many people over the years is: "How many good teachers did you have at school?"

The usual answer is 'One' or 'Two'.  This is not a good statistic, considering that most of us have about 30 to 40 teachers in our school-life.

So what makes a good teacher and why aren't there more?

The best teachers are not just passionate about their subject but are also vitally interested in their students, determined to inspire, inform and enrich them. They engage their students, not just talk at them as if they were an audience. Patience and a sense of humour, and the ability to draw out the best from the students are also virtues.  This is a perfect paradigm, and even the best teachers have their 'off' days.  They know that so much of class work is ploughing through a mostly tedious syllabus.

Too many people become teachers for the wrong reasons.  Nobody becomes a teacher to become rich.  It is entirely vocational, but even so, too many new teachers are unrealistic about the stresses and problems that schools entail, especially these days.  They naively hope that they can constantly inspire and convey their enthusiasm to all the students.  The present rate of young, new teachers leaving the profession is not just shocking, but also speaks volumes about what it's like to be a teacher in a school in the UK today.  Even the most dedicated are quitting.

Again, too many become teachers for instant power.  No other occupation places you immediately in charge of 30 or so people who must bend to your will.  A teacher's power should be used judiciously, not arbitrarily and not often.  Unfortunately, the abuse of teachers' power is frequent on a daily basis.

A few teachers have admitted that they joined the profession 'for the hours and the holidays'.  They soon learned that the hours of 9 to 4 are always extended - marking work, preparing lessons, meetings, report-writing etc.  As for the holidays - teachers need them in order to restore their energy supplies. 

While mere academic success opens the door to teaching, we will continue to produce teachers who are mostly average, and that, educationally, is simply not good enough.

Sunday 23 November 2014

Among the many illusions society clings to, 'school' is one of the most damaging.  So ingrained is the sado-masochistic concept of school in the human psyche that people laugh and smile when a parent says: "She hates school." As if that is supposed to be the normal, natural reaction to a place of learning.

"We all hate school!  School is boring!"  Yet society expects high academic results by the end of our experience at this contemptible place.

If school held any interest for children, they would willingly attend, as they do in some countries.  Unfortunately, the school systems in most countries are fiercely anti-educational, limiting learning to boxes called classrooms, instead of experiencing all aspects of life.

John Taylor Gatto identifies school years as a time when you 'grow older but never grow up'

Or as the great John Holt put it: "School is where you go to learn how to be stupid."

The basis of our schooling is militaristic, conformist and ludicrously academic, and even though it causes harm, we are so inured to the damage that we consider it all worthwhile.  Nothing much has changed for at least half a millennium, evidenced by two of the greatest minds England has produced, Shakespeare and Blake - both poorly schooled but highly educated.  They have given us a glimpse of how school has remained unaltered and unchallenged for 400 years:

In As You Like It, Jaques observes:

"The whining schoolboy with his satchel
And shining morning face, creeping like snail
Unwillingly to school"

William Blake's poem The School Boy is equally damning:

"...to go to school in a summer morn,
O! it drives all joy away;
Under a cruel eye outworn,
The little ones spend the day
In sighing and dismay.

Ah! then at times I drooping sit,
And spend many an anxious hour,
Nor in my book can I take delight,
Nor sit in learning's bower,
Worn thro' with the dreary shower."

Sunday 16 November 2014

Mass hysteria has broken out again over the issue of school uniform, school authorities hell bent on forcing parents and pupils to conform - the 'look alike, think alike' mentality.

Let's dispense with some of the usual myths peddled by non-thinkers on this subject:

1) It  provides a level playing field and therefore makes everyone equal

Children are not fools and they know very quickly what type of background their peers come from.  They are natural judges of how poor, rich, geeky, cool, trustworthy etc. someone is, regardless of clothing.  Besides, once outside school they wear what they like, at home and in public.

No two pupils look identical in uniform.  Pupils find ways of circumventing uniform, little ways of defying it, e.g. wearing earrings, jewellery, odd socks, hair colouring, ties ridiculously knotted so that the thin end is much more prominent than the wide end, etc., etc.

As Emma Jacobs pointed out in her splendid article in The Guardian on 7th November:  "Teachers spend time and energy policing uniform when they could presumably be teaching us."

It is human nature to defy stupid policies and each pupil, in their own way, makes a statement of individuality, something anathema to authority. It is almost an amusing irony that private schools are the strictest when it comes to uniform, when almost all the pupils are from the same socio-economic strata.  So who are they trying to fool?

2) Uniform fosters a pride in the school

If pupils are so proud of their school because of the uniform, why don't they wear their uniform outside school?  I would guess, no pupil does.  If you choose to join a club, you might be proud to be a member, but joining was your choice.  Pride in a school uniform is yet again an adult idea foistered on pupils and therefore meaningless to them.  If the road to Hell is paved with good intentions, then it runs parallel to the road of 'Adult ideas for children'. If pupils are proud of their school, it is always for reasons other than their uniform.

3) Pupils will compete to have the latest fashion if there is no uniform

They do anyway, outside school, which, after all, occupies most of their day.  And besides, so what? Quite often, in non-uniform schools, pupils compete to see who can look the scruffiest or weirdest. I couldn't care less what pupils look like or what they wear.  I was only ever interested in how interested they were in the lesson.

Teachers I have known who have worked in uniform and non-uniform schools have said the same thing - there is no real difference in behaviour between the two. When the last school I was in had non-uniform days, the general behaviour of the pupils was somewhat better than usual.

What you wear and learning have no connection.  If they were connected, most university students would fail all the time.  The notion that wearing a uniform is somehow related to academic success is illogical and therefore absurd.  As Emma Jacobs succinctly puts it:

"Finland's schools top international league tables and don't have a school uniform, while the UK has the uniforms without the stunning results."

The concept of uniform is authoritarian and conformist.  The message is clear - "Don't you dare behave as an individual!"

If a school is obsessed with uniformity, they have missed the point of education in a big way.  Schools should be focused on learning, knowledge, diversity and creativity, not bloody uniform.

Sunday 9 November 2014

Working in the Special Needs Department of a secondary school in London humbled me, until I met Henry.

Reading the case histories of many children registered as having 'special needs' shocked and saddened me in equal measure.  They ranged from congenital conditions, both mental and physical, to cases of children horribly brutalised, neglected, raped, and witness to atrocious violence at home.

This made me reflect on how I had spent so much time complaining about the negatives in my past, and brought to me a sense of shame and humility.  Compared to most cases I read, I have had a relatively happy, free, healthy life.  I was also amazed that so many kids with special needs behaved so well and were so resilient and optimistic.

Then a new pupil arrived at the school, a 12 year old named Henry.  He was a boy with Down's syndrome.  As the literacy instructor at the school, I was obliged, by law, to spend one hour a week with him, even though his condition meant that he would never read and write fluently.  With all the praise and encouragement I could muster in those years I taught him, he didn't get past the letter J when reciting the alphabet.  He adored Dr.Seuss books, mainly for their imaginative pictures.  He also loved watching certain movies over and over.

It took about a month before my sympathy for him was replaced with a feeling of envy.  I realised that Henry was the happiest person in the school, one of the happiest people I have ever met.  He would laugh out loud, sing heartily along with his favourite songs in films, often dancing in an uninhibited way, devoid of any self-consciousness.

He could be stubborn, and he hated changes to his routine.  He was no fool, he knew right from wrong, but his condition meant that he was untroubled by the anxieties of life that blight most people's lives.  He had and would have no concept of society, education, religion, or any of the philosophical questions that most of us ask of ourselves and life on this planet.  Ignorance can be a destructive thing, but for Henry it was truly a matter of bliss.

I envied Henry and loved watching his unbridled passion for things he not just loved, but got absorbed by completely.

Henry taught me a far more valuable lesson than I could ever teach him.

Sunday 2 November 2014

In 1957, when I was 9, I suffered, along with many others, at the hands of a sadistic teacher. This man, by name Ian Forbes, was the kind of man who should never have been allowed near children, let alone teach them.  All he really taught us was to fear authority and punishment.  However, he couldn't command respect and as a result got none.

He had a collection of about 10 bamboo canes and when he was feeling benevolent he would let us choose which stick we were to be thrashed with - always on the hands.  He would hold the boy's wrist, to keep the hand horizontal.  If you lowered your hand as the cane came down, in order to ride the blow, he would bring the cane up sharply under the hand, to raise it and to cane the knuckles.

He caned us almost all day, not for disobedience or insolence, but for maths' errors, spelling mistakes, and for literally blotting our copybooks.  He was never really satisfied until the pupil was howling in pain, or until the blood dripped from his hands.  On one occasion, he broke the skin on my right palm with a wooden stick.  I still bear the scar.

One morning, during breakfast at home, I broke down in tears and implored my mother not to send me to school anymore.  I poured out my terror and hatred for this man.  So my mother went to visit him -'to have words with him'.  That afternoon, he sat me down alone after school and quietly warned me that if my mother ever complained about him again, he would kill me - yes, 'kill' me.

Now my fear shifted - fear that if I showed my misery again at home, my mother would visit him again - and then he'd kill me.  So I put on a brave face and pretended that everything at school was fine.

Even more sickening than the canings, were his actions after a caning.  He would often sit next to a crying pupil, put his arm around him and say:

"Did I hurt you?  I'm sorry."

He went as far as phoning one Saturday morning and asking my mother if he could take me to the cinema that afternoon.  My mother was appalled and said "No!' of course".  So he was not just a sadist but also a closet paedophile.

A month before the school year ended, I burst into tears at home again and my mother just looked at me and said:
 "Mr.Forbes?"

I pleaded with her not to visit him again, convinced I would be dead by 6 o'clock.

I don't know what my mother said to him, but for the last weeks of school, he didn't touch me, he barely acknowledged my presence.

Years later, a story came through on the grapevine, that when Mr. Forbes was about to cane a boy on his infected hand, the lad snatched the cane out of Mr.Forbes's hand and slashed him over the face - before running off in sheer terror.  That might sound like poetic justice, but in those benighted days, instead of Mr.Forbes being investigated and imprisoned, the boy was probably beaten again and no doubt expelled from the school.

Incidentally, Mr.Forbes's hobby was to go into the outback on a weekend and shoot as many kangaroos as he could.  He would sometimes boast of his slaughter triumphantly to us.

To this day I can still see that bushy moustache, his grey smock, and those menacing, bloodshot eyes.

So searing was my experience all those years ago, that I could never humiliate and hurt the pupils I taught.  My subconscious attitude in teaching was always

Do everything Mr.Forbes didn't, and don't do what he did.

In the 1960s, the late, great Leila Berg, was guiding an American teacher around a school in London.

He asked her if corporal punishment was prevalent in UK prisons.  Her answer, calmly delivered, said it all:

"Oh no.  You should understand that in Britain you are only allowed to hit someone if they are much smaller than you".