Tags
A Fair Start Final Report, Assessment for Learning, Belfast Boys' Model School, Claire Gadsby, Constructivism, Durham University, Greater Shankill Partnership, Hazelwood Integrated School, Hon. Professor Feyisa Demie, Jackie Redpath, Jean Chall, Joyce Logue, Kathleen O'Hare, Lev Vygotsky, Long Tower Primary School, Mark Rowlands, Mary Montgomery, Michael Devitt, New Decade New Approach, Noel Purdy, Queens University Belfast, Scotland Curriculum for Excellence, Sir Roger Scruton, The Academic Achievement Challenge, The Northern Ireland Curriculum, traditional teaching
A Fair Start, the report of the Expert Panel on Educational Underachievement in Northern Ireland, fails to identify a significant culprit behind the achievement gap: the Northern Ireland Curriculum (NIC), followed by all children in our schools. While Scotland’s “Curriculum for Excellence” (CFE) has many, many similarities to the NIC, the University of Edinburgh’s Professor Paterson’s analysis of the causes of Scottish underachievement has little in common with Dr Purdy’s. In a 2018 article – entitled “Scotland’s Curriculum for Excellence: the betrayal of a whole generation?” – Paterson traces underachievement in Scotland to that country’s 2004 decision to eschew traditional approaches to teaching and learning for a “constructivist” curriculum. Constructivism’s “child-centred” approach has strong links to underachievement in disadvantaged children, and Paterson is not surprised that “the curriculum has recently been the centre of widespread disquiet.”
Like the NIC, Scotland’s CFE was lauded on all sides. Paterson writes: “An outsider might notice the remarkable consensus that has accompanied its development at the heart of policy for school education. The report which launched it in 2004 is still endorsed by all five political parties in the Scottish Parliament. That report proclaimed a child-centred philosophy that ran counter to the educational ideas that have dominated in England since the 1980s.” According to Paterson, “The universities officially accepted the ideas uncritically, with their teacher-education faculties notably enthusiastic.” Dr Purdy teaches at Stranmillis College whose website strongly endorses the NIC.
Now we get to the nub of the problem. The NIC and the CFE have adopted an approach to learning – called constructivism – which has been demonstrated to damage the life chances of the disadvantaged. Paterson writes: “But the reason why the new curriculum is a plausible culprit for the [attainment] decline lies in what it gets children to learn. It belongs to that strand of curricular thinking known as constructivism.” The shortcomings of constructivism were well known when the NIC and the CFE were being launched. The philosopher Michael Devitt warned: “I have a candidate for the most dangerous contemporary intellectual tendency, it is … constructivism.”
In this departure from common sense, the child is construed as constructing meanings, intentions, understandings and so on, in his or her head. Mental attributes are hidden inside the child’s mind and have no external facets. Gadsby writes: “Constructivism [is] a view of teaching and learning predicated upon a simple but profound principle that learning is something which can only happen inside the heads of learners.” The NIC interprets this as shifting the responsibility for learning from teacher to child. On page 29 of CCEA’s Assessment for Learning: a practical guide appears the exhortation: “Crucially, they [pupils] need to take responsibility for their own learning and its improvement. We [teachers] can’t do it for them!” (It is difficult not to attach the following naive interpretation to CCEA’s words: since learning happens in the child’s head, it is “visible” only to the child. The teacher, on the other hand, has no direct access to what the child has “constructed” in the privacy of his or her mind.) Hey presto, the teacher’s responsibility for the child’s learning is much reduced.
It isn’t difficult to see why a philosopher like Devitt might be suspicious of any portrayal of understanding or meaning as exclusively inner “activities.” Wittgenstein has established that one gets complete incoherence when one omits the external world. Mark Rowlands writes: “According to Wittgenstein, to mean, intend or understand something by a sign … is to possess a capacity to adjust one’s use of the sign to bring it into line with custom or practice. And this connects meaning, intending and understanding with structures [viz. practices] that are external to the subject of this meaning, intending and understanding.” The late Sir Roger Scruton rejected “all attempts to understand the human mind in isolation from the social practices through which it finds expression,” and the great American mathematician and philosopher Hilary Putnam concluded that “meanings just ain’t in the head.”
In the traditional classroom, teacher and pupils are jointly responsible for learning. Moreover, the teacher needn’t have direct access to the child’s mind in order to establish if he or she understands long division, for example. What the child writes in a test (something external) serves as criteria for the ascription of understanding. In the common-sense world of the traditional classroom, the biology teacher need not peer into a child’s mind before concluding that he or she grasps the meaning of “gene.”
Finally, it is important to link the Northern Ireland Curriculum – with constructivism at its core – with underachievement. In her 1990 book “The Academic Achievement Challenge” the distinguished Harvard academic Jean Chall conducted a detailed study of a century of research on the effective teaching of disadvantaged children, finding no evidence for the efficacy of methods which depart from traditional principles. The Expert Panel make no mention of Chall’s wide-ranging review.
On page 171, Chall writes: “Whenever the students were identified as coming from families of low socioeconomic status, they achieved at higher levels when they received a more formal, traditional education. …The teacher-centred approach was also more effective for students with learning disabilities at all social levels. On the whole, the research found that at-risk students at all social levels achieved better academically when given a traditional education.” On page 182, Chall draws this conclusion from 100 years of peer-reviewed evidence: “The major conclusion of my study in this book is that a traditional teacher-centred approach to education generally results in higher academic achievement than a progressive student-centred approach. This is particularly so among students who are less well prepared for academic learning – poor children and those with learning difficulties at all social and economic levels.
The assignment of the NIC to the bin and a return to traditional approaches to teaching and learning could do much to offset the £180,000,000 figure quoted in the Expert Panel’s report.