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Whole Books vs. Pot Noodles
No one would raise a child on Pot Noodles. So when will we realise that young people need real nutrition for mind as well as body?
by Gisela Hoyle
Every child matters! Every lesson counts! No child left behind! Rousing words to make one believe that education in Britain is about pupils fulfilling their potential in a caring environment and that this mission is in safe hands with the national curriculum authorities and the exam boards.
But beneath these PC slogans is another reality. Education systems often do not exist for the benefit of children, and definitely not for the benefit of the individual child, but for the benefit of society. When that society has become materialistic, education exists for the benefit of the economy – its purpose is to generate a well-trained, quiescent workforce. If one examines the policies and strategies current in education, it is difficult not to conclude that despite the slogans, British kids are being ruthlessly trained for the quick fix, just add water world of a digital economy.
Of course it would be foolish and impractical not to prepare them for the demands of a digital world, and of course all children should now be computer literate and use technology rather than learn dates and facts, which can easily be accessed via search engines on the internet.
But alongside these practical changes to the curriculum are changes which actively discourage a childs thinking or holistic growth. The kind of material which would encourage such growth is kept in the curriculum for the appearance of caring about the whole child, but actually is distorted and fragmented beyond all recognition. Thus, exam boards at GCSE are gradually eliminating the need to read whole books from their course requirements.
Ever since they discovered the use of anthologies for their qualifications, it has been possible to get GCSEs in both English Language and English Literature, without reading a single book in its entirety. Teachers are encouraged to offer their pupils fragments. For example for coursework children can write an essay on the opening of Great Expectations and do not need read the rest of the book. Or an essay on the banquet scene of Macbeth, without reading the rest of the play. It is not necessary – not even for an A* grade. Because you can match all the requirements without it. And it happens all the time, it happens because there is enormous time pressure on teachers to get through the syllabus, it happens because too many of the pupils still really struggle with the mechanics of reading. And it happens, because imagination is not a requirement in a plugged-in, pot noodle world.
What place is there for Scout’s realisation that she does after all want to be lady, or Lear’s storm in such a world? Whole books and plays, like whole human beings are no longer a requirement, for all the lip service educationalists (not to be confused with teachers) pay either of them. Because they cannot be regulated, measured or targeted, but are part of the slow unlikely process of becoming human.
The welter of AOs and LOs (assessment and learning objectives) the rigid lesson structures, we are told, exist to ensure standards, both academic and humane. But they are so ubiquitous and invasive, so bogged down in the measurable and so persistent in their apparent assessment of teachers, pupils as well as schools that there is bitter little room left for learning – and none whatsoever for books!
This insistence on standards, on assessment, on grades is very familiar to someone who grew up and was educated in Apartheid South Africa. There was a government with everything invested in a non-thinking, unquestioning population. Are we to conclude that it is also an aim of this target and exam driven curriculum? Or is it merely the result of trying to combine examinations with a non-failure policy in an economy which requires certain skills but not thinking? Whatever the reasoning, the result remains the same: reading is discouraged. In South Africa it was deemed dangerous – here it has merely become unnecessary – and I am not sure which is more frightening!
Because we become, all of us, the stories we tell about ourselves, the best way to understand that story is to read others, widely and often. Yet there is no chance in the modern school to learn with Pip what matters in the becoming of a gentleman, or to feel the pity and horror evoked by Stella; no realisation of Macbeth’s doomed emptiness which he knows as soon as he has killed Duncan, or his brief grandeur in the final scene.
In the fiction of a system in which ‘every child counts’, children have become cogs being pushed towards near-meaningless targets, in a fragmented narrative, because we have lost the best tool for the flourishing of humanity: stories, with beginnings, middles and endings!
Gisela Hoyle grew up in South Africa where she worked as a teacher of English. She has been teaching in the UK for 6 years at both independent and state schools. She also writes and has a novel coming out in July.
May 8, 2009 by Damien
Filed under Featured, News and Features
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