The Trusty Servant

[This is the fourth article in a meandering sequence about education in the UK. Earlier articles: neglected geniuses; too many universities; and riches v talents. ]

My attention was caught by a blistering indictment by Will Orr-Ewing of a 2006 TED video by Ken Robinson:

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[A Feb 2006 talk at Monterey, CA. It is also available on the TED site, complete with subtitles and transcripts in fifty languages.]

Ken Robinson (61) worked for most of his career as an education academic at Warwick university, ending with twelve years as professor of arts education. He was also director of the Arts in Schools Project 1985-9, which was a major project to reshape arts education in England and Wales. He is now a popular speaker and high-level consultant, and has written a couple of books. “Out of our minds” (2001, 2nd ed 2011), promoting creativity and the need for education to foster it, and “The Element” (2008, similar, but focussing on the need for passion).

He is a working-class Liverpool kid made good, and an excellent speaker. For me, the most charming story was about Gillian Lynne, a well-known choreographer. Her school thought she had a learning disorder and got her mother to take her to a specialist.

she sat on her hands for 20 minutes while this man talked to her mother about all the problems Gillian was having at school. And at the end of it — because she was disturbing people; her homework was always late; and so on, little kid of eight — in the end, the doctor went and sat next to Gillian and said, “Gillian, I’ve listened to all these things that your mother’s told me, and I need to speak to her privately.” He said, “Wait here. We’ll be back; we won’t be very long,” and they went and left her. But as they went out the room, he turned on the radio that was sitting on his desk. And when they got out the room, he said to her mother, “Just stand and watch her.” And the minute they left the room, she said, she was on her feet, moving to the music. And they watched for a few minutes and he turned to her mother and said, “Mrs Lynne, Gillian isn’t sick; she’s a dancer. Take her to a dance school.”

Orr-Ewing is having none of it.

it’s not true. Most teachers you speak to will admit it – there are some children who do not have tremendous talents. The problem with the current system is not a pessimism about the potential of children, but the reverse: a crazed optimism, an “Educational Romanticism” in Charles Murray’s words, that refuses to discern between the varying abilities of children. As a result, those who do have tremendous talents are not allowed – whether it is through grammar schools or other selective means – to realize that talent; and those who have less academic talent are not given opportunities to learn the sorts of valuable skills at secondary schools that will enable them to lead valued lives.

Of course, Robinson lays himself wide open to this.

There isn’t an education system on the planet that teaches dance every day to children the way we teach them mathematics. Why? Why not? I think this is rather important. I think math is very important, but so is dance. Children dance all the time if they’re allowed to, we all do. We all have bodies, don’t we?

As, Orr-Ewing says, Robinson et al have had some success. Dance is now taken more seriously in schools. But just how much of it does he want? There is a time problem. You cannot teach everyone everything. Some things have to have higher priority. What exactly is he proposing? This extract is worse:

If you think of it, children starting school this year will be retiring in 2065. Nobody has a clue — despite all the expertise that’s been on parade for the past four days — what the world will look like in five years’ time. And yet we’re meant to be educating them for it.

The implication is that because we cannot predict in detail what the world will be like over the next 50 years, it is wrong to teach arithmetic. Children might not need it much in their future lives. This is just silly. Certain skills are fundamental to a vast number of other things. “Reading, writing and arithmetic” has served well for fifty years as a guide to the most fundamental things. I can see no reason why the 3Rs will suddenly become redundant.

Of course, by age 16 we should surely have taught all children far more than that. The bizarre thing is that we haven’t. In fact, I doubt if even a bare majority of 16 year olds have adequate competence in reading, writing and arithmetic. A significant minority clearly have grossly inadequate competence.

Just maybe four hours of dance a week would inspire them all so much that they would end up racing ahead in the 3Rs. But Robinson does not seem to be making that case. To be fair, he is not actually claiming that everyone has “tremendous talents” – that was Orr-Ewing’s straw man.

What is a tremendous talent? Presumably one that gets you widely noticed, so that you become a celebrity, or at least a leader in a recognized field. Maybe there are ten thousand fields, maybe each has a new leader every five years. That would mean 2,000 “tremendous talents” being recognised every year, compared with a birth rate of about 0.75 million/year. So by definition less than 0.3% can hope to be tremendous talents. Well, you can stretch the numbers a bit, but it is obvious that the vast majority of people will not have tremendous talents.

But saying that everyone has a unique talent is an entirely different proposition. The Catholic view is that God sees each of us as uniquely valuable and having an important, but often largely hidden, role to play in the great cosmic drama.

I notice Orr-Ewing because he featured in yesterday’s Sunday Times in an article about the new super-tutors. Rich parents are paying up to £1,000 an hour to tutors to get their children into Oxbridge. Reading beyond the headline showed that this was a classic salesman’s use of up to. The reporters had found one tutor, who claimed that on one occasion he had managed to sell 10 hours of his time at that hourly rate to a “rock star” in New York. Orr-Ewing is in the business of running an agency to supply such tutors’ services, so in blogging about Robinson he is also talking his own book.

Interestingly, he has been studying the tutoring firms in New York with a view to upping his game. His Evening Standard article on 5 Jan 12 was probably what led the Sunday Times to write about him:

The first person I met was Arun Alagappan, who founded and oversees Advantage Testing, New York’s most highly regarded tutoring group. Alagappan is passionate about tutoring’s capacity to transform lives. Even his competitors are quick to admit that he was a pioneer in instituting the scrupulous standards that have elevated tutoring to the respected profession it has become in New York City. By insisting upon long-term, academically substantive preparation for any standardised entrance exam, Alagappan has helped New York’s parents understand that tutoring provides far-reaching benefits and represents a worthwhile investment in their children’s future. Of course, professional standards bring professional prices. New York’s tutors charge eye-watering figures. Advantage Testing’s 250 tutors charge between $250 and $950 an hour, and typically meet students for roughly 30 hours a week.
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Another New York tutoring company, Prestige Prep, will not let its tutors teach until they have done 12 months of training. In one module of many, their director, Phil Cohen, hires young actors to imitate behaviour seen in the most unco-operative students – and coaches his tutors on how to help these students achieve academic success.

Tutoring is truly a profession in New York, and many of the tutors I met there drew analogies with the legal world. The Ivy Consulting Group, for instance, has modelled its corporate structure on that of a law firm so that consistently good tutors can “make partner” and share in the equity. Alagappan says that he borrowed more than 30 standard procedures from the Wall Street law firm for which he used to work after graduating from Harvard Law School.

Compare that with this clip by Guy Claxton explaining how he is not spouting politically correct nonsense, because he is a scientist:

Well, maybe that clip is entirely vacuous because he wants you to buy his book “What’s the point of school?” ISBN 1851686037. But he in other talks he explains in a little more detail how Building Learning Power (BLP) works:

We are now much more interested in what learning muscles are being exercised and stretched as you do your sums … In traditional education the learning muscles that got invited and exercised every day tended to be passivity, notetaking, accurate retention and regurgitation on demand …

This sounds like a variant on Tom Lehrer’s famous “New Math” song – “but in the new approach, as you know, the important thing is to understand what you’re doing rather than to get the right”. Except now the important thing is not to think straight but to exercise the right mental muscles whilst doing it.

I confess to finding modern educational theory so silly that I rarely listen to it. A diet of Claxton et al droning on about BLP would soon drive me screaming from the room. Maybe I should be more sympathetic to Orr-Ewings criticisms.