Educating Ruby (6 page)

It follows that schools which understand the power of a growth mindset will, paradoxically, see making mistakes (interesting, not just slipshod) as something to be encouraged. If you visit such schools, as we do, you will see some subtle differences. For example, in assemblies, as well as celebrating the successes of the First XI, groups of students who have gone the extra mile and really put in effort are routinely acknowledged. In classrooms it is common to have work in progress – warts and all – on display, as well as beautifully mounted examples of final ‘products'. If you are a designer, engineer, musician or actor reading this you will perhaps recognise these as the prototypes or drafts which are essential to eventual success in the real world. The willingness to venture and tinker are as vital to real-world achievement as any innate talent or intelligence you might possess. And these attitudes of tinkering and trying are learned. Schools either strengthen or weaken them.

Some traditionalists are very strongly attached to the fixed mindset view. They are likely to think the previous paragraphs are so much ‘wishy-washy liberal nonsense' and sneer at the research – because it is inconvenient for their world view. They like the idea that intelligence is fixed because it justifies a segregated education system, traditionally based on IQ. They will say that we need to sort out the sheep from the goats, those who have what it takes from those who don't. Schooling is expensive so, of course, there needs to be a separate stream for ‘the brightest and the best' – thus defined – that runs from grammar and independent schools through to Oxford and Cambridge. But the static, fixed view of intelligence or ‘ability' on which this reasoning rests is wrong. Children's
apparent
intelligence varies hugely from context to context, and depends on all kinds of factors
– like their
beliefs
about intelligence – which have nothing to do with any innate ability.
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To get to where schools need to go, we have to question the importance of standardised tests and the numbers they generate. Although they give the appearance of objectivity and reliability, these kinds of tests can hold back innovation if important things that cannot easily be quantified are discounted. One set of figures, produced by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) is especially influential at the moment. Let's have a look at them.

The OECD was set up in 1948 to run the Marshall Plan which was designed to rebuild a Europe ravaged by war. Today, more than 60 years later, it promotes policies to improve the economic and social well-being of people around the world. In terms of education, it is perhaps best known for its PISA (Programme for International Student Assessment) tests. Every three years it tests 15-year-olds across a range of subjects to see what they know and what they can do. (Remember the ‘what they can do' part of this sentence because we will be returning to it, and it's very important.)

Politicians across the world are scared of PISA results because they operate as a very public examination of every country's education ministry. Countries are ranked according to their performances. Here are the top three countries/cities in each test followed by the highest ranking European country followed by the UK's position using the 2012 results:

Newspapers love these league tables too because it makes for easy journalism to print numerical rankings such as these. Journalists from countries whose students appear in the top 10 write pages of copy praising their country's education
system and schools. Those who feature much lower down the list like the UK (and the USA) scratch their heads and criticise teachers and schools and incumbent politicians. Employers use the PISA results as a chance to make statements about their country's respective global competitiveness. You can see why politicians are scared of PISA!

But what about parents? What do they think? Most of them are downright confused. How can the UK be so far down the list when we have so many world-class engineers, scientists, architects and writers? How is it that we have so many Nobel Prize winners in science and medicine? How come we have so many wonderful universities? At a local level, parents may draw comfort (or concern) from the performance of their own child's school which seems to be better/worse than the UK's showing in PISA. For many parents, high-stakes test results like these can contribute to a sense of unease about what their child's school is or is not teaching.

A few determined parents go online, look at the OECD's website and find out more about the tests. They quickly discover that the rankings are based on the results of two-hour paper and pencil tests. Some begin to wonder how reliable such tests can possibly be as a judgement on an individual's subject knowledge, let alone as an indicator of ‘what they can do'. Those parents who keep searching quickly discover that the OECD is itself concerned about such limitations. To counter them it introduced a new creative problem-solving test in 2012 (the UK came eleventh in this new test). The creative problem-solving test is “an assessment of student performance in creative problem solving, which measures students' capacity to respond to non-routine
situations in order to achieve their potential as constructive and reflective citizens.”
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Sounds interesting, you may be thinking. But read on and you discover that this test is entirely computer-based. You are left with a slight niggle that, useful as computers are, screen-based performance may not always be a reliable indicator of real-world problem-solving.

But you've got the OECD bit between your teeth by now and you keep searching. Surely, you think, such an important organisation as the OECD must have done some more nuanced thinking about what it is that children need to learn today? You type ‘OECD' and ‘what children need to learn today' into your search engine and, lo and behold, you discover some discussions about the purpose and future of education (much more interesting than those simplistic league tables) which have left you wanting to know more. You happen upon a fascinating blog by Charles Fadel on an OECD site promoting discussion about what students should learn in the 21st century. His questions really make you think:

At the weekend, you find yourself having dinner with friends and conversation turns to the schools your friends' kids go to. As it happens – for the convenience of this imaginary example – one couple sends theirs to a private school, another to the local state one and a third to the latest example of a new kind of school in England. Let's call it a free school.

Questions breed more questions as the wine flows. How much history do you need to learn? Are you stupid if you can't recall the date of the Great Fire of London? Is Google dumbing us down? Is Google opening up a brave new world? Should all children be taught how to spot bias online? When do you need to know Newton's laws of motion? Do you need to know Newton's laws of motion at all? How is your daughter taught to do long multiplication or long division? Is it better or worse than the way you remember learning how to do it? And so on.

Later, you go back to your internet search and find out some more about the author of that OECD blog. Charles Fadel, it turns out, is also at Harvard, where he is thinking about how we can change the way we design the curriculum of schools. You light upon a helpful paragraph of his (which seems to be reflecting our experience with the Trads):

These kinds of tensions, and the questions they generate, are exactly the kinds of issues we need to be grappling with. We'll be adding some more of our own to this list as we go through the book. But it isn't easy.

But before we go any further let's deal with a question that seems to us to be one of the most important of all:

And related to this:

Let's approach these questions via a story from the earliest beginnings of education. In 1939, an American scholar called J. Abner Peddiwell published an article about the earliest known form of education. He traced it back to the Chellean period, about half a million years ago, and specifically to an innovative individual called New-Fist-Hammer-Maker, or New-Fist for short. New-Fist thought children's play should be directed more purposefully towards the acquisition of useful skills. These included grabbing fish from the nearby pools, clubbing the little woolly horses that grazed on the edge of the forest for their meat and leather, and using firebrands to scare off the sabre-tooth tigers that
came sniffing around at night. The village agreed, and so the first curriculum was born.

All went well with the Sabre-Tooth Curriculum until, gradually, over hundreds of years, the climate became wetter and colder. The ponds became cloudy so it was no longer possible to see the fish to grab them; they had to be caught using a net. The land became marshy, and the slow-footed woolly horses migrated east, to be replaced by much fleeter antelopes that could not be crept up on, but could only be shot with bows and arrows. Sabre-tooth tigers too moved away and instead came fierce grizzly bears that were not at all afraid of fire, but had to be trapped in camouflaged bear-pits dug on their trails.

One of New-Fist's descendants, Shoe-Stitcher, took stock of the situation and realised that the children's curriculum needed to change. Instead of grabbing fish with their bare hands, they should learn net-making. Instead of horse-clubbing, they needed to learn how to make bows and arrows and shoot straight. Instead of making flaming torches, children needed to learn how to dig the right size pits, and how to disguise them with branches and leaves. But the Board of Education strongly disagreed. The minutes of the critical meeting record the chairman as explaining that these new abilities were mere technical skills, whereas the traditional curriculum developed properly educated bodies and minds. In rather patronising language, he explains:

But Shoe-Stitcher was not to be shut up so easily. “Can't you see that times have changed?” he said in exasperation. “Why could we not develop those generalised qualities by teaching the children something really useful?” At this the chairman became even more pompous and hectoring: