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The
New Europe: Old Education
Listen to the programme
"I
only took the regular course", said the Mock Turtle. "What
was that?" inquired Alice. "Reeling and Writhing, of course,
to begin with", the Mock Turtle replied; "and then the different
branches of Arithmetic - Ambition, Distraction, Uglification,
and Derision".
Lewis
Carrol, in his celebrated 19th century fantasy, "Alice in
Wonderland", lampooning the contemporary obsession with self-improvement
- but also the tediously mechanical teaching practices of
his day. As an academic mathematician, Lewis Carrol had a
personal interest in the subject.
Universal,
compulsory education is a relatively recent phenomenon - closely
linked to the rise of the modern state, with its unparalleled
ability to mobilise resources and impose its will. In 1947,
in the immediate aftermath of World War II, Britain's then
education minister, George Tomlinson, announced the raising
of the minimum school leaving age to 15 in visionary terms:
"It
makes possible the development of a system under which all
children will have an equal chance to become the best sort
of men and women that they have in them to become".
The British philosopher Bertrand Russel wasn't so sure. "Education",
he opined, "has become one of the chief obstacles to intelligence
and freedom of thought". Aristocrats like Russel had traditionally
been educated privately. They had well-stocked libraries at
home and an expectation, from childhood, of a prominent role
in public life, if they wanted it. But what of the "lower-orders"
- the main intended beneficiaries of state education? Professor
Alan Smithers, a leading British educationalist, takes a slightly
cynical view of the motives of some of his 19th century predecessors:
"One
interpretation of the growth of compulsory education in Britain
was that there were a lot of youths on street corners. Laws
had been passed bringing the sweeping of chimneys to an end.
There were a lot of unemployed children making a nuisance
of themselves. Compulsory education began to grow from those
roots in this country."
But
there was also a growing realisation that Britain was falling
behind countries like Germany - in the number of scientists,
engineers, managers - as well as literate and numerate workers
capable of operating a modern industrial economy. From its
inception, schooling was a priority for the Soviet Union.
"Education, education, education", intoned its founder, Vladimir
Lenin - a slogan repeated 80 years later by Britain's Prime
Minister, Tony Blair. Whatever its failings, the Soviet Union
did turn a largely illiterate society into a literate one
- though what it could read was strictly controlled. Steve
Webber is a British academic specialising in Russian education:
"In
terms of the content of education and how it was delivered
- definitely it was a teacher-led, teacher-centred type of
school education. On the whole, the system was geared up more
for overall achievement - getting the curriculum done - than
rather than looking after the needs of the individual".
Boris
Maximov, a Russian journalist, went to school in a working
class area of Moscow:
"There
were those clean little boys and girls sitting stiffly at
their little desks, two by two. And there was not one, but
many, quite horrible, rather fat women with little buns, who
spent their time shouting."
Then, at 11-years of age, came secondary school:
"Soviet
ideology was in every subject. Every textbook you opened said,
"According to Lenin..." It doesn't matter which subject -
chemistry, physics. On the other hand, nobody really cared
that much about that business. The side effect was that we
did not learn either the history of the place, or the social
fabric. The history of the Soviet Union mentioned Stalin once.
There were two kids in the class who studied. The rest passed
the time because they had to. There was an awful lot of drugs,
alcohol. There was prostitution, fights - that kind of thing."
In the final years, came military education:
"You
had to learn to assemble and disassemble an AK-47. We had
to study everything there is to know about tanks, anti-personnel
mines, different grenades, how to dig a trench. Basically
education was geared to the needs of the army. There was great
emphasis on physics, chemistry, mathematics. And you were
not really supposed to think, unless you were part of that
very small elite that went to those specialised schools. There
you were encouraged to think - but only in technical subjects.
By the way, Mr Putin is reintroducing military education into
the curriculum now."
In
a UN-sponsored study of maths and science teaching conducted
in the mid 1990s, Russia scored better than America and Germany.
The problem often lies with applying what has been learned
to real life. Poland - another ex-Communist country - claims
a 99 per cent literacy rate. But a study commissioned by the
OECD found nearly half the population could not make sense
of the information on a medicine bottle. In once heavily ideologised
subjects like history the situation is especially bad. We
tried this out on some Hungarian students:
These
girls don't know who Cardinal Mindszenty - Hungary's most
prominent Communist-era political prisoner - was. They can't
remember the name of Hungary's first post-Communist prime
minister. But dates of medieval battles trip off the tongue
- 1240, 1526...All the students knew the Austro-Hungarian
Empire was established in 1867 - but none could accurately
describe what it was or its status in Europe. Zdenek Kavan,
a British-based Czech academic, attaches some of the blame
to the "Austro-German tradition":
"Knowledge
flows less from debate - as you might expect in liberal Anglo-Saxon
countries - and much more from established institutions and
people who hold positions in those institutions. So, Herr
Professor is the person who knows the truth - and his statements,
his propositions, are not really open to debate by anybody
else, apart from his equals."
Pranvera
Shema, a young Albanian from Kosovo, now studying in London,
is very struck by her British contemporaries' ability reason
for themselves:
"People
my age, they will seem younger. Because of the way we grew
up. We grew up slightly differently, with other things that
made us more mature. But what I like is: they don't have a
fear of not knowing and a fear of asking, as sometimes I do.
They will know how to debate. We don't know how to debate.
We never had debates at schools. We don't learn how to present
arguments properly and to back up the arguments. Too often
it happens in London - you're in a conversation with somebody,
and as soon as they're older than you, you say, "OK" - because
you're taught you have to be quiet, you have to listen, because
he knows better."
An Albanian lesson under way in a private house in Kosovo
in the late 1990s, shortly before NATO's bombing campaign.
It was part of a parallel system of education, set up by local
Albanians after the Serbian authorities established direct
control of schools. Pranvera Shema:
"We
came to school, and we found that the whole school was separated
with a wooden partition. We would be Albanians on this side
and the Serbs on that side. And we would have two exits. Later,
the Serbs would go in the morning and Albanians would go in
the afternoon. And then I came to high-school. It was an old
prison or something. But it was the only building that we,
as a high-school, had access to. You would be in a room with
a sofa, with a chair, and the teacher would start dictating,
and you would be writing in a very uncomfortable way for three
hours. During 1998 I was studying architecture - similar building,
just a cellar. Most of the classes, we would just have lectures,
theory. And then you would go home and try to draw something.
We continued until a day before the bombing started."
Such
commitment might be difficult to sustain in normal circumstances.
British educationalists used to claim that while others might
be better at rote-learning, British children were taught how
to think. Parents from Continental Europe found the British
educational system a source of wonder and despair. In place
of a structured national curriculum, there was an apparent
free-for-all. British children seemed to spend too much time
playing; didn't seem to know much; and had awful handwriting.
Governments
set a legislative framework - but its interpretation depended
on the local authority and the views of the local teaching
staff. The French, by contrast, saw the school as the place
where children were trained to think logically and to absorb
a centrally determined corpus of knowledge. Character-building
was largely left to parents or the priest. In England, the
emphasis, since the 1960s at least, was on personal development.
Professor Alan Smithers:
"Some
aspects of our education were really very good. But I think
we interpreted the liberal education too broadly. We took
a wildly optimistic view of what children could do and would
do. During the ' 80s we were shocked when the performance
of our young people was compared with that of young people
in other countries. We found our young people had less grasp
of mathematics and were less fluent in the mother-tongue.
And so during the ' 80s, the Thatcher government fought very
hard to establish a national curriculum. That was the first
time we'd agreed in this country what actually should be taught
in our schools. The Blair government has really rather gone
beyond that - and is now trying to regulate what goes on in
schools through qualifications. The country has a target for
performance in various tests and exams. So schools, in the
recent past, have almost become qualification factories."
Professor Smithers believes a "core curriculum" serves pupils
well - but is worried about the way its practical implementation;
and the lack, as he sees it, of adequate vocational training
for the less academically inclined:
"The
point of the national curriculum now is to give them the basic
skills to make more sense of their life - to enable them to
handle numbers and words. And building on that we introduce
them to the main ways of making sense of the word, which we
call the subjects. The Blair government has taken the view
that more education means better. That it will make for a
more prosperous economy and a happier society. But it probably
hasn't thought that through sufficiently carefully. It's true
that more young people are taking examinations and more are
going to university. But it does put all young people on a
scale. Young people who come through the system with not very
good qualifications will find it difficult to find employment
and become increasingly an underclass."
The "post-industrial underclass" has become a familiar topic
of discussion. Why go to school if there's no job for you
anyway? In post-Soviet Russia, the ideal of education for
all is even more problematic. Steve Webber:
"To
some extent this is now based on privilege and how well a
family can afford to pay for a child's education. So you've
got a rash of private schools developing. But even within
the state sector there's been quite a widespread practice
of charging for certain services. Quite a lot of schools have
taken to calling themselves elite schools. And there was a
problem especially in the early to mid ' 90s of children of
average or below average ability finding themselves excluded
from the school system. Although I guess the super-elite in
the new Russia often tend to send heir children abroad for
education, as in the case of Boris Yeltsin's grandson, who
was educated in the UK."
Ambition,
distraction, uglification and derision: how would Lewis Carrol
summarise these children's schooldays?
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