by Pete Field
I. In which I grumble about the Americans’ use of English in the education system – lack of trust at work
Interesting factoid: apparently the USA has, overall, the same level of educational achievement as Mongolia, so why do we keep copying them? Does one Harvard or Yale compensate for millions of people not knowing which side Hitler was on in World War Two? And don’t ask about which side the Russians were on! Underachievement is a hallmark of the US education system.
Moaning 1: I wish someone would tell my employer and the Americans that faculties means the places where students study e.g. The Faculty of Arts, the Faculties of History and Science etc. The plural of teacher is teachers not faculties. ‘He lost the use of his faculties.’ would then be a rather interesting and ambivalent sentence.
Moaning 2: I can’t believe they [managers] asked for proof we did this [reminded students to do the Student-Faculty Assessment Survey]. It used to be that a gentleman gave his word… I am such a dinosaur.
II. The Tyranny of Metrics or How to get Rid of Your Skilled Workforce – the Perversity of Teachers
Haha! I could go on and on! Of course I am a Brit, so I naturally favour (sic) our way of writing and using English. While I recognize the fact that the Americans have coined many wonderful new expressions and also kept alive some of our older words and language forms as well as producing amazing music and literature, when it comes to teaching I find that the American Way leaves a lot to be desired.
The obsession with measuring – the dreaded metrics – counting, assessing and continually insisting on achievement of preset objectives has led to a situation where about half of all the people who train to be teachers in the USA leave the job in the first three or four years and the figures are similar for the UK (which slavishly creeps behind the Yanks, though nobody knows why). The English have the vice of small c conservatism and don’t like their thinkers to appear to be too smart. Not surprisingly almost none of them have heard of Noam Chomsky and as a nation they do not study philosophy at school. Teachers may have heard of Finland, but have they learned from its education system – or from any part of it?
Judging by Boris Johnson’s landslide victory in the last election the English are not planning on creating a more egalitarian society any time soon. They still think capitalism is kind, which is odd for people who invented the industrial revolution. Average age of death in Manchester in the 1830s was 32: result!
Why do teachers leave the job they want to love? The neoliberal view is that teachers are a bunch of woolly-brained lefties who, if left uncontrolled, will fill the students’ heads with dangerous inflammatory nonsense. Teachers have to be kept in check, and the best way to do this is to remove any chance of them using an individualistic approach: we will give them tightly controlled objectives every step of the way and measure compliance using frequent tests and ultra-detailed lesson plans (the preparation of which will keep them busy late into the night). Deviation will not just be difficult: it will be impossible and, finally, unthinkable. They will all march in lockstep. Millions of teachers round the world are now working far beyond their contract hours on lesson planning, endless marking, exam setting and countless admin tasks which leave them exhausted, burned out, and with little or no time for reading or even for their families.
Do the results justify all this micromanagement? Not at all. In countries which follow this route results are unimpressive, despite students’ and teachers’ ever-increasing ability to teach to the test. Employers complain that graduates are not original or creative thinkers – and how could they be when they have had their creativity thumped out of them on the endless conveyor belt of the (so-called) education system?
Computerization has increased opportunities for surveillance
Before Henry Ford brought in the production line it was necessary to break down the process of car manufacture into easy steps so that one man could do one job, deskilling the process and speeding it up. This led to people working fast at repetitive jobs under inhuman working conditions. Breaking jobs down in order to deskill them has now become common and when we combine that with robotisation and computerization, many jobs have been lost. The workers who did them are seldom offered training for new jobs; they simply become unemployed and very poor. Teaching is now facing that problem. Increasing the precision and uniformity of the specifications will allow classroom assistants on low pay to stand in for teachers and might even allow the system to dispense with teachers for part or all of the job. We simply need to tick the box to show that the objective has been met. The old-fashioned teachers were prone to rambling on, getting sidetracked, telling stories and making jokes. When they were not hurling board dusters and chalk at miscreants on the back row they lived in an impenetrable fug of smoke in their Staffroom den which was strictly off limits to children. They knew nothing of digital so they could control their paperwork – paperwork was minimal before digital because storage presented a problem and many operations were impossible. Clearly, the existence of the teacher as ‘character’ might stand in the way of the chance to control the system more efficiently, deskill the job and have the product delivered by people who were less critical and, perhaps, less cynical and certainly cheaper. The holy grail of control is to make it impossible to object or, better still, unthinkable.
The computerization of admin and delivery in teaching has enormously increased opportunities for surveillance of students by teachers and teachers by managers. This is a microcosm of what is happening in the rest of society. Interestingly, science fiction suggests that surveillance is a feature of a dystopian rather than a utopian society and we all know why. Yet we push on with it. I regard that as a sign of stupidity. We are micro-managing and yet we are not producing people who are happier, freer, more creative or more intelligent and kinder than the people who came before. There is some evidence that each generation is smarter at doing certain types of logical task than the previous generation, but whether this translates into the kind of mindset we need to face the terrifying future we have created for ourselves is anyone’s guess.
Problems, we hear, are not solved using the kind of thinking that created them in the first place. My experience of alternative teaching methods has been that when we change the dynamics of the situation and get to know the people better, things work. Could we do that on a broader scale? Who knows! I am retiring in two months so teaching will go back to being my hobby. How delightful! In the meantime, I will ramble on.
III. The lure of Finland – impossibility of copying it without copying the principles that underlie it – trust and lack of trust
I have taken an interest in the Finland situation and it is very impressive. One thing strikes me which is that they actually addressed the issues they had with their system in a thorough and radical way, whereas in the UK, for example, the government treats education as a political matter, interferes considerably and has brought about a very stressful situation of frequent change and poor funding. The Thatcherite attitude of treating everyone as a ‘customer’ and every organization as a ‘business’ has led to the commodification of education (and other areas such as transport, healthcare etc.) with several fascinating results. The Finns avoided this trap by having a different aim: making the children happy so they could be good, contented citizens.
Why be happy when we could all be miserable together?
One result of the commodification of education is standardized testing for national measurement and comparison. One of the big things you notice in the UK education system is the government efforts to copy the US by bringing in the infamous SATS tests which have made everyone’s lives a misery. Schools are constantly inspected by Ofsted the inspection body and they live in terror of a poor inspection. Stress is the name of the game all along the line. In Michael Moore’s film about education in Finland (snippets on YouTube) he asks the Minister how to pick a good school. The Finnish Minister for Education smiles and says, ‘All our schools are as good as each other.’ You cannot gain an advantage by going private or by picking a ‘good’ school. That is a stunning claim. It reminds us that inequality is founded on educational privilege.
In the UK, schools, universities and even nurseries are pitted one against the other in competition, offering advantages real or imagined, for which people will pay extra. The UK is the most unequal country in Europe, according to the academic authors of The Spirit Level, their first bestselling book on inequality and its consequences for society. Rather than trying to minimize inequality the education system has tamely gone along with it, encouraging inequality to grow in places where it is least welcome. I find it depressing that the government actually promotes inequality, given the appalling consequences for every aspect of life, but it is even more shocking that educators, academics, people who are themselves supposed to be educated and thoughtful and be able to exercise their critical faculties, have gone right along with the whole thing. Maybe they are so busy doing admin that they no longer have time or inclination to read or think, except perhaps in the service of the system.
Having seen the mess they have made at home I am not a fan of the system and I see the Brits have pumped out plenty of this stuff of their own so we can’t just blame the Americans. I am sorry that other countries have bought into this kind of thing instead of developing something unique for themselves. I am also sorry that the US and the UK, the two most unequal countries in the developed world have, despite their ineptitude at producing a good society, become top global exporters of the educational ideas that both spring from and promote the divisive and unhealthy values which characterize those two societies.
Why trust might be important and why we will never understand the people who are smarter than we are
Interestingly, a key feature of the Finnish setup is trust. Levels of trust are, not surprisingly, higher in more equal societies such as Finland. Trust allows teachers to be independent in how they work in Finland. Trust allows teachers to develop a different type of relationship with students and their parents. Finnish parents place great trust in teachers. In the UK and the USA the government often presents teachers as either lazy or untrustworthy and, not surprisingly, levels of parental trust in teachers have declined. The Dunning-Krueger phenomenon reminds us that people who cannot understand something are likely to undervalue it. People from societies with low levels of trust are often quite unable to appreciate how beneficial high levels of trust can be and what they can allow people to achieve. It requires considerable imagination and a certain amount of research to appreciate the implications of trust or lack of it in the development of any human endeavor. High and low trust societies find it hard to imagine and understand each other.
I feel sure that the ridiculously high levels of admin work which are now characteristic of many if not most teaching jobs are a direct result of a lack of trust on the part of the authorities. In the UK education is much more centrally run than it used to be. The system has been standardized along an American model, so it is now less diverse than it once was. Local authorities have less say, as is the case in many other areas of life such as Covid planning and testing.
The production of detailed lesson plans outlining and justifying numerous objectives takes up a vast amount of teacher time. I know of one school in the UAE which cherry picks objectives from four separate curricula. Testing is constant, to the point that in many cases, students do not have enough time to cover the material because tests are so frequent. When it comes to marking the goalposts can be moved, which is why in many institutions in the Middle East the lowest grade is 70%, a grade that would probably get A or B+ in most western universities. There are good reasons to think that the ‘tyranny of metrics’ is actually producing what one might call spurious accuracy – sets of figures, which are in fact either totally fake or at least seriously misleading. Why? Because people cover themselves to protect their jobs. In any situation where the ethos is to drive for success expressed in numerical terms and there is also no or little job security, then people will game the system.
The implications for planning and policy are interesting because if one cannot trust the figures one cannot rely on using them to plan and the figures then become useful only as a sort of display badge for students. One can no longer plan effectively because one is not aware of reality. Reality has become inaccessible behind a wall of lies. And even that display of a good grade will ultimately become meaningless if everyone has A and the grades are widely known to be fake. The greater the pressure on students, the more likely that they will opt to simply purchase their work, and this has now spawned a vast illegal industry supplying academic work to students of all ages, across the globe. If grades are becoming worthless, where are we? This takes us back to the eighteenth century, before anyone started giving grades at all. The education system is already eating itself because the profit-seeking and inequality which lie behind the testing and grading system and which support the provision of ‘better’ and worse’ schools and universities must ultimately, by encouraging desperation in a marketised context of social and financial inequality, mean that the system contains the seeds of its own destruction in the form of cheating (from plagiarism to outright purchase of academic work) and gaming the system by staff unwilling to cause conflict by giving low grades. In the UK and the States the overblown pay packets of university vice-chancellors busy sacking whole departments of lecturers and the sight of Covid lockdowns for on-campus students have hammered home the message that the education people will do anything for money. Monetised universities lose their credibility as independent arbiters of academic truth, sources of knowledge and perhaps wisdom, too.
Maybe the reasons that the US and the UK can sell (key word!) their turnkey education systems abroad is that their systems do NOT depend on or ask for or inculcate a more egalitarian attitude in society, one that builds and requires trust or seeks to truly promote self-knowledge or wisdom. That would indeed be a hard sell because it would confront established power structures. A critical approach, a questioning approach is unwelcome in many places so who better than the countries with educational prestige but high inequality to ‘sell’ an ‘efficient’ system to any kind of regime, no questions asked. A bit like the weapons industry, really. Who was it who referred to ESL teachers as ‘the stormtroopers of capitalism’?
The Finnish minister and teachers say their aim is for the children to be happy. Interestingly, the Dalai Lama also suggests that our birthright is to be happy. To achieve happiness, the Buddhist worldview is to deconstruct the ego, removing its power. In any case the idea of the right to be happy is a very radical and exciting view, a trusting view, and a project without metrics or surveillance, one that asks for injustice and oppression to be addressed and countered, removed. No wonder the Brits and the Yanks never mention it. American citizens are said to be guaranteed the right to the pursuit of happiness. The existence of world-beating levels of inequality will certainly do much to prevent them from actually getting anywhere near it. In survey after survey British children are found to be the unhappiest in Europe. Educators as well as parents and government have played their part in achieving that ignoble result.
Pete Field graduated from Oxford University with a passion for all things French. He began his peripatetic life working as the assistant to a lumberjack in the Pyrenees. He is a translator a teacher and an artist. He has lived and worked in Italy, Germany, Spain, France, The UK, Saudi Arabia and the UAE. The author doesn’t live in Sussex
Discover more from Ars Notoria
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.