Tony Little, the headmaster of Eton, recently told me that he thought teacher training colleges tended to make people worse teachers rather than better. As the head of an independent school, Mr Little is allowed to appoint who he wants to his teaching staff, and regularly appoints those who have not been through the vacuous propaganda of the training colleges.
The same leeway is not afforded to the heads of state schools; their staff must have been subjected to a statutory period of brainwashing before they are allowed into the classrooms to teach our children all about Mary Seacole, the kindly black lady who helped out during the Crimean War. I met a lot of these state school teachers at the pensions march in London last week and understood immediately Mr Little’s reservations. They seemed an amenable and cheerful bunch, to be sure, but many also gave out the distinct impression that they had their brains sucked out of the top of their heads via a tube, by strange robotic alien lizard creatures from a distant and not terribly pleasant planet. Some of them did not know who Michael Gove was, for example, and were not sure why they were on the march at all. They behaved in the polite but slightly zombified manner of compromised humans from a John Wyndham novel.
There was more evidence for my alien robotic reptilian theory this week, when we received my young daughter’s end-of-term school report. Most of it was not written by her teachers, but by a centrally controlled computer (we were told) which spoke in an unearthly and mystifying language. For example, it said that our daughter was proud of her own culture and society and respectful of other people’s cultures and societies. This is errant nonsense on both counts. My daughter, although only five years old, has nothing but contempt for cultures and societies which differ from her own, considering them ‘stupid’ or ‘horrible’. At the same time, she considers her own society and culture deeply boring.
The computer proceeded to tell us that our child was very good at lots of things, but did not tell us that she was mediocre or useless at any. Perhaps this is because she is an extraordinarily gifted creature, but I suspect it is more likely that the alien lizards do not allow anything remotely negative to be said about any children in the school, not even the drooling window-lickers, in case it adversely affects the child’s self-esteem or maybe the parents’ self-esteem.
I do not give a monkey’s what my child thinks about her own society, or anyone else’s, but I would like her to do a bit more reading and arithmetic if the teachers have the time. At the moment, 90 per cent of her school day is spent manufacturing artefacts out of toilet roll tubes and sugar paper or ‘learning through play’, as it is called, a process which we were assured would continue next year during ‘the next stage of her educational journey’. There will be no spelling tests because these can serve to lower a pupil’s self-esteem, ditto learning the times tables, and so on. Perhaps it is just as well that there will be no spelling tests because a) our schools use the phonic method and therefore no child can spell anything and b) the teachers aren’t that good at it either — at a recent fundraising quiz night, the outgoing headmaster’s team came bottom of the spelling round.
And of course my child, like yours, will soon be subjected to a new national test assessing their ability to read, which takes no account whatsoever as to whether they can spell correctly or not. They will be given 40 words on paper and asked to ‘sound them out’; some of these words will not be words as you understand them at all, merely aggregations of certain sounds, which perhaps form the basis of a language on that lizard planet I was talking about. Almost all the pro-literacy organisations are appalled at this test, one of which told the Guardian that it was an ‘abomination’ and a ‘disaster’; 14 organisations have written to Michael Gove begging him to abandon the idea.
The problem is that phonic recognition is, as the United Kingdom Literacy Association has averred, only part of what constitutes learning to read and to eventually master a language. And phonics by itself can be extremely confusing for children. You will remember the old joke, popularly attributed to George Bernard Shaw, concerning the word ‘ghoti’ and how it should be pronounced — i.e. as ‘fish’ (the ‘gh’ from enough, the ‘o’ from women, the ‘ti’ from ration). This was a slight overstatement of the problem, perhaps, but it is nonetheless true that the letter ‘a’ in English can be pronounced in at least six different ways, and nor do the modifications of how it is to be pronounced follow easily assimilable rules.
You get the feeling that phonics has achieved its dominance partly because it is easier on the teachers, but perhaps more because it fits neatly in with the post-1960s educationalist mindset; it is an attempt to dispense with what is seen as an unnecessarily complex and fusty language and replace it with one which is altogether more democratic and forgiving, even if it is not a language which is used in the real world, but in the increasingly unreal world of the classroom where all negative comments are banned, in case they affect some kid’s self-esteem, for similarly delusional reasons. The problem, though, is that this ideology is so deeply ingrained — institutionalised, I suppose you could say — that even a Tory-led government will go along with it.
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