Education needs to be long

In order to flourish, some people need to continue in education beyond 18, but the education that group needs is often neither of the alternatives on offer in England: vocational, for trades or professions, and academic, for induction into university disciplines.

A case in point. In Canada I was able to take over and run for ten years an undergraduate course in which I had considerable freedom. It wasn’t a required element for qualifying in my department’s discipline of linguistics and it was taken by students from a variety of programmes, from second year to fourth. The course was called ‘Writing: Theory and Practice’. You could summarise it as Writing: What it is, how it’s done, what it does, how it’s learned.

Though elementary school teachers on day release from local schools had been the original intended clientele, they had (thankfully for me) stopped being released and no longer attended in any numbers; instead, regular undergraduates flocked in -- a far more appealing group to work with. Gearing the course primarily to the teaching of children in classrooms no longer seemed appropriate so while retaining the material on research into the writing process, together with theories of writing, I tried to make it relevant to students studying university disciplines and, above all, to enable students to understand and extend their own writing, and realise how writing can be a means of making ideas come and getting thoughts into order. That is, to experience the heuristic function of writing.

I devised occasions and tasks that would get the students writing in a variety of genres. Some students claimed at the end that this had resulted in their papers/essays in their other courses improving, while some discovered a talent for short stories. Most significant, I think, was my encouragement of the regular production of unspecialised informal writing on the content of the readings and lectures. Such productions are often called logs or journals but what I was after was something more intellectual and more intelligent than the familiar work that comes under those labels, having had a bellyful of the usual wordy and self-indulgently expressive gush in too many summer courses. I was after ideas and thought.

Some found this sort of writing liberating and claimed it was their first experience of doing writing into which their thoughts could flow. It seemed to accompany an intellectual awakening, a broadening of vision beyond disciplinary boundaries and a taking hold of education as something one was doing for oneself -- though I realise it’s easy to claim too much and there was no proper evaluation.

This relatively unregulated writing, while it had its moments of sparky perceptiveness and rhetorical brio, was not what anyone would call ‘good writing’. It was, however, good mental activity and educationally valid in that students began to learn to connect their writing to their minds. The experience started to make writing an intellectual resource -- with effects, too, I thought, on how the students read the prescribed texts.

As tends to happen with me, I found that I continued to have contact with students who’d proved particularly interesting or on a roll, the ones (by no means all) for which this sort of course was just right at this point in their education. It was right because of those features that made it not a conventional university course, though I’d claim it was just as intellectually demanding. What it didn’t do is teach people how to write the approved political science or English Literature or psychology essay.

One student for whom the course apparently worked went on to take one or two graduate courses, having time on his hands over the summer. One was taken by a professor (North American usage: = any sort of university teacher) for whom I had great liking and respect, as did his students who had a good time with him and learned a lot. Having flourished throughout the course with my colleague, this student did his final assignment which was predictably lively and personal -- along the lines I’d been hospitable to -- but got back, along with an appreciation of the thinking, an adverse comment on the writing: observance of conventions, referencing, marshalling of evidence and arguments. All absolutely valid points to pick up in a graduate course -- but baffling to the student who legitimately asked, though not to the teacher and perhaps not explicitly to himself: ‘Who but a specialist in a discipline, which I'm not trying to be, would care about such stuff? what matters is the ideas and the thinking I do around them. I'm not submitting an article to an academic journal.’

The prof did his job superbly, to teach a Masters level course in Applied Language Studies. The young man, though, was into getting a broad education, and developing as someone who could use writing to further his thinking and learning. As someone for whom the world of ideas with its vistas and excitements was just opening up, he was back with the sort of mismatch that had characterised his experience in all his academic courses: they simply weren’t what was needed by a mind developing as his was after emerging from a narrow high school curriculum and needed, above all, free play in the domain of ideas and knowledge. The suggestion that he conform to academic writing standards was simply irrelevant to someone who was a way off from even contemplating a higher degree of the sort the course was located in -- though he found the ideas and texts in the course stimulating and mind-enhancing.

There thus needs to be a way for young men and women who leave high school -- and indeed, in England, who leave year 9 or 10 (at 13 or 14) -- to do something that is not a disciplinary induction and socialisation but yet is rich in ideas and knowledge. Does such an education anywhere exist?

Developing teachers: theory or example?

These thoughts are occasioned by looking at a biography of Sir Alec Clegg, the last Chief Education Officer of the West Riding of Yorkshire which was abolished in 1974 (Peter Darvill, Sir Alec Clegg: A Biographical Study, 2000).

Clegg’s philosophy in the West Riding (primary schools, principally) was to promote the arts and expression, especially dance, PE and movement, even at the expense, some thought, of the 3R’s and the academic disciplines. The book’s writer is not a philosopher or deep thinker and if there was a philosophy in a worked-out sense behind Clegg’s ‘philosophy’ this isn’t the place to find it. One’s impression is that he went by what he saw to be engaging and changing children, and he shared that approach with his colleagues and advisers.

Clegg’s approach was clearly visible in the authority’s residential courses for teachers. One of his colleagues commented -- in the true West Riding spirit -- on the difference in value between course sessions run by arts practitioners and by university academics. (As an example of the former, the first course on ‘Poetry and Children’ involved Edith Sitwell, Robert Gittings, Edmund Blunden and Kathleen Raine -- big names in poetry in what seems to have been the late 1940s or early 50s.)

‘Diana Jordan’s confidential comments on a course run by Leeds University professors at Woolley Hall on the writing of English in spring 1958 were typical of those sent to Alec Clegg on courses of this type. She wrote-
“I cannot see that these University professors can do anything but make education more and more complex….Yet, when we listen to writers and poets, masters of the art of language, talking at other courses everyone understands, everyone goes with them and is lifted to higher realms of comprehension.”’ (106)

I suspect that what ‘theory’ lay behind this reliance on poets and artists was a mixture of T.S. Eliot (‘Notes Towards a Definition of Culture’) and Herbert Read (Education through Art). I.e. the theory was probably thin, but it’s doubtful whether any adequate theory was available at the time on the teaching of writing and better the intuitions and the ‘nose’ for a good classroom of experienced teachers like Clegg’s team than half-baked theory and mechanical procedures. Ditto for the arts, though I don’t know enough about this. What you’d need would be a good theory of semiotic (symbolic) mediations plus a good psychology so you could say how movement and sketching plants and writing poetry affected, well, let’s say the structure (affective and cognitive) of the mind or psyche.

Clegg was influenced above all by classrooms he saw in which children were engaged and creative and produced expressive work of high quality. While still at Birmingham during the war he visited Steward Street School, an elementary school in depressing industrial surroundings whose headteacher, Arthur Stone, had a rare appreciation of ‘the beauty that came from these children’ through art work. Stone wrote:

'The three "R's" I decided, should become a secondary consideration, for I believed that, if I could get that confidence, that interest, that concentration from each child which arise from creative art, I had the ground well prepared then for the three "R's". It must not be thought that I undervalue in any way the importance of the three "R's". I believe, however, that there are things of much greater importance, the development of the personality of a child, his growth as a whole, demand greater attention than the “R’s”.’ (13)

I think that if I were placing such weight on the arts I would rather emphasise the effects he regards as secondary and preparatory, getting confidence, interest and concentration, the last particularly being a prerequisite for all that intellectual advance that I’d want to put first in my educational aims. However that may be, Stone’s results were evidently impressive and quite unexpected in what would have been a poor and deprived population in 1940. Clegg’s team also observed other benefits from an arts-based approach adopted by schools in two villages as a result of a course in 1948: ‘“The awakened imagination and free expression is beginning to produce a flow of language that cannot be stopped”’ (45).

Further elaborating the distinction between teachers’ courses run by educationists and those by practitioners, Clegg -- and this seems absolutely characteristic of the West Riding approach to improving education -- comes down firmly in favour of the latter:

‘In October 1945 Alec Clegg had described the sort of refresher course he envisaged -
"One type is obvious, teachers must be acquainted with the latest methods in the teaching of their subjects, arithmetic or dancing, Latin or field games. More important, however, is the need for a direct attack on their general sensibilities and breadth of outlook. This can only be effected by bringing them into contact with the best minds in the country, either in industry or music, commerce or art, agriculture or theatre. These two aims can be combined in one course by the careful selection of speakers and lecturers.”’ (31)

You improve teaching by working on the teachers' ‘general sensibilities and breadth of outlook’ -- and by implication you do the same with children. But we note that the ‘best minds’ he wants teachers to encounter are, in each pair, from (a) a branch of the productive economy and (b) one of the arts. No mathematicians, scientists or scholars. Is his an approach which, relying as it does on learning from experts’ practice, is left with no way of learning from practices that aren’t practical but mental and symbolic (i.e. that work with symbolic forms like language and number)?

It’s hard to imagine what the equivalent experience might be in a maths or history or chemistry class that could have made an impression on Clegg like the one for which his art adviser, Basil Rocke, was responsible. (Rocke had studied children’s art in Vienna under Franz Cizak and was a founder member of the Euston Road School of Painters -- such was the calibre of the people Clegg surrounded himself with. Arthur Stone, too, joined him.)

"I so well remember the shock that I had when I went into a school in which he [Rocke] had done much work with a very gifted teacher and some thirty-eight paintings of flowers done by thirty-eight children, most of them children of South Yorkshire miners. They were sensitive individual paintings of a quality which I had never seen before and I remember my unspoken astonishment as for the first time I accepted Basil's conviction "that any thirty-eight children treated as these had been treated would become what they had become and would do as they had done." Alec Clegg described the paintings as " ... the instrument of my education." (47)

This is getting too long for a blog so let me draw this to a close with three observations:

(1) By all accounts what happened in the West Riding primary schools was an extraordinary flowering, above all of that ‘beauty’ that Stone had earlier made to occur at Steward Street, and of directed and purposeful curiosity (notably deployed in the local environment, especially as nature study). Nor can there be any doubt that for children to be creative, curious and purposeful is a fine thing in itself, regardless of other educational aims. The sense that Clegg and the teachers and advisers who worked with him had was that expression in words or art or movement was a release of the self, a liberation, an unlocking, and my feeling is that that was a theory with a good basis in experience and one on which a good primary education -- or a large part of it -- could indeed be based. I would, I think (based purely on reading descriptions and seeing some of the work) want all children to have the West Riding primary school experience.

(2) But not just because it’s not obvious how the transition is to be made -- the great divide to be crossed -- from experiential, expressive, curiosity- and sensual delight-led learning into the domain of abstraction, system, concepts, that of the academic disciplines as described by Michael Young (Bringing Knowledge Back In) and Jan Derry (various articles). However, it may be that the West Riding worked out ways of doing this too, though we know that Clegg found his secondary schools far more intractable. (Part of his answer, I don’t know how successful, was to break into them by extending primary education through middle schools to age 13). The problem is that Darvill doesn’t really understand the issue and his book isn’t a systematic or comprehensive inquiry. It’s time for a good history of Clegg and his West Riding schools.

(3) I'm in something we call the London English Research Group, the aim of which is to work towards an adequate theory for English. But in the group we know that amongst our PGCE students some who who are brilliant teachers are weak in and uninterested in the theory, and vice versa. West Riding teachers were ‘liberated’ into teaching better not by acquiring a better theory but by ‘broadening their sensibilities’; US teachers are ‘liberated’ in teaching writing better by being given the chance through local Writing Projects to experience being writers themselves. So, what exactly is the role of educational theory in producing better teachers? I don’t feel I can give a clear and confident answer to that.