(Primary) Schools need to be forever evolving but never changing
(Primary) Schools need to be forever evolving but never changing
Do schools need to keep up with the times?
People often think that the aims and processes of education need to change to adapt to ‘the times’. This makes some instinctive sense. We can all understand that children in a mostly illiterate agricultural society need to learn different things than children in developed highly-technological societies. Societies use education to prepare new generations to enter their ranks in an able and positive way. As our societies change therefore, education changes also.
The view that education needs to be agile and evolve to meet the changing needs of society is often based on the idea that education is primarily concerned with preparing people for the economy. As the economy shifts, the needs for workers also shifts. It is a very widespread view both in theory and in policy. The World Economic Forum for example has published a paper saying that the changing demands on education are in fact so large that education as we know it cannot possibly keep up. The crisis (of learning aims) is so intense that we need to reinvent education altogether. I quote: ‘…it's clear that following the traditional path of transferring skills by means of education isn’t working anymore. The skills needed to work today change so fast that no education system can keep up with the constant need to reinvent how we work and live together.’ (Bandelli, A. 2017: URL)
In this essay I am going to suggest that this is a wrong way to look at education and that it distracts us from our proper focus as educators. First, I am going to make the case that education does not change essentially over time. Our tail is not on fire. Concentrating on following the ‘traditional path’ as well as we can is precisely what we should be doing. Then I am going to say something about the ways in which societal shifts do change the role of education, where we are today, and what social needs we ought to be taking into account. Notice that I will only be discussing primary level schooling - what north Americans call elementary school. Some of these claims may be true regarding adult learning but they should not have much influence in the education of children. I will say that this is because children are still ‘developing their humanity’ and that therefore, they have some ‘fixed needs’ which are true for all humans across time.
Humans are more than merely economic actors
Education stands between individual people, communities, societies and the world at large. Humanity passes on its knowledge, tradition and culture to the younger generations through education. It prepares them to ‘enter the world of adults’. It gives them the tools that they need to understand the world so that they can become active participants in it.
To a large extend this ‘world’ is made up of economic interactions and therefore it is fair to say that: one of the roles of education is to prepare children for the economy so that they can enter it productively when they grow. A few hundred years ago children would have learnt the practical skills of work and money-earning inside their household. The children of farmers learnt agricultural skills by participating in chores from a very young age. Before the industrial revolution, when Britain had a ‘cottage industry’, children learnt to participate in the economy by watching and helping their parents weave, spin and so on. With industrialization economic activity became more complex, new work was created and economic mobility became necessary, and more parents worked outside the home. So, it fell on schools to teach children the necessary skills for joining the workforce.
The relationship between education and vocational training is an important one, however, it is not the only purpose that education serves. Societies are not merely economic spheres of activity; humans are not merely workers. Societies have a lot more that they want to pass down to future generations, participating in society involves much more than just being an able worker.
So what are we?
Let us put this differently. The ideal purpose of education is to contribute towards our wellbeing. It stands there between the person and their society and it serves a twin role. On the one hand it works on the person to bring them into the wider society in a desirable way that will benefit society; and on the other hand it aims to serve the person by enabling them to bring out the best in themselves; to become ‘all that they can be’; and to participate in their society in a way that will be fulfilling to them.
Notice here that an important assumption is being made. Namely, that individuals flourish and their societies flourish with them. Both society (a complex collection of humans) and people (individually) are being pulled upwards by the same truth (if you like). Very few pedagogues will tell you that our society needs the people to fit into this or that mould which is bad for the people but good for some general whole, and so education should squeeze its newcomers into these roles that are harmful for them. In fact, I might dare a generalization and say that most times when an educational system is being criticised and accused of being inappropriate it is precisely if it has been deemed to do this.
By and large in education we believe that we will bring about what is best for the learners and simultaneously bring about what is best for their community. This is an axiom that is assumed by (I dare say) all pedagogical theories. It is not often made explicit but I want to draw your attention to it plainly, because, when we disagree about the merits of a pedagogical system what we are really disagreeing about in the first place is: what is human wellbeing. This brings a subsequent question of: what is human flourishing therefore? And it also raises the more latent underlying issue of: what does it mean to be human and what is the aim of our life?
To achieve our wellbeing – both as persons and as groups – education makes axiomatic assumptions about who we are and what our wellbeing consists of. Every pedagogy is rooted in an anthropology and an ontology. It needs an anthropology because it must answer the question of what is the person. And it needs an ontology because people do not exist in a void. The ontological question completes the anthropological one by asking: what is the reality to which the child must relate to? Answering this question leads to understanding what demands are made on the person of the student that their education needs to help them to respond to.
It is the case that even educational theories that see schooling primarily as vocational training are making such axiomatic assumptions. They do not escape these questions, they just answer them in a particular way. So for example, they tend to assume that being able to be a flexible worker that is agile in the economy is the best thing that can be given to the learner. They become able to participate economically and make money and set themselves up to have as profitable a life as possible, or as interesting a career as possible. Another possibility is that they have a deeply ‘free-market’ way of thinking where they assume that the only thing people need is enablement to act in the economy but otherwise be left entirely to their own devices. There is this idealism amongst those who see education as vocation, even if others like to criticise them as being overly reductionist and pragmatic.
The truth is though that by and large these overly vocational approaches to education do not come from pedagogical thinkers. They come mostly from policy makers or market actors who are speaking about an aspect of our life that they know most about, but who are not thinking holistically about education. On the whole, those thinkers whose focus on education proper see schooling as serving the person and society in more ways than one. It is understood generally that human wellbeing has several aspects and that education aims to serve the person in a fuller sort of way.
Therefore, education doesn’t need to be changing
‘we have these two sons here….We have made up our mind to take as good care of them as we possibly can and not to behave like most parents, who when their children start to grow up, permit them to do whatever they wish.…we thought that you, if anyone, would have been concerned about the sort of training that would make the best men of them…’
- Lysimachus c.a 300 BC[1] -
The ‘human as a whole’ does not change as drastically as economies do. Education serves the humans and not the economies. It only serves the economies in so far as the economies serve the humans. Therefore, education does not need to be ‘evolving with the times’ whenever there is a notable shift in economic activity. Some elements of the educational process (those directly concerned with preparing pupils for work) need to be relevant to ‘the times’, but for the most part, education needs to be settled in the basic needs of persons.
If human nature has a fixed element, then the ways in which we mature are more fixed, and what we desire to mature into is more fixed, and for this reason education has a permanent character. And so, the questions we need to ask is the anthropological one (which includes reference to the ontological one). What is a person, what is our relationship to reality, and what is human flourishing? These are age long questions. Pedagogues have been thinking about them for millennia, and several answers have been attempted and tested by time.
I contend that looking at our tradition for educational practices that have served us well over time is a most reasonable way to research educational practices. If a tree has been around long enough, then you can judge it by its fruit.
‘For the wise men of old the cardinal problem had been how to conform the soul to reality, and the solution had been knowledge, self-discipline, and virtue.’
- C.S. Lewis -
Education has undergone many evolutions over time, and yet, if we look back at what approaches were used in the most educated societies across time we can see a continuity of practice. The approach that we can fathom, used successfully from the days of ancient Greek civilization, across the height of the Roman Empire, through the middle-ages and into the start of our own era – is an educational approach that is being called ‘Classical Education’.
Many of us have not heard that term before and are wondering what Classical Education is. Some of you may know a little about the classical model and be wondering: ‘do I really need to learn Latin to become fully human’? These questions are so big and yet so important to our days (of rapid educational change) that I have started this substack in order to answer them in a way that is full enough to be both interesting and useful. In large part my essays here will aim to draw a schema of Classical Education and at the same time show that – being the best educational model for serving human nature – it is the educational approach that we need to be re-introducing into our schools.
But societies have changed in significant ways and education needs to respond
I have said that education is not equatable with vocational training and that therefore it does not need to sacrifice the many ways in which it serves human communities in some attempt to serve the labour markets. However, it is the case that our human communities change. Precisely, I would say, because human needs and wellbeing do not shift drastically, when societies change what they offer to their members, then what is left wanting changes with the times.
Classical education is an excellent model for formal learning. Yet, education today needs to be both formal and informal. In other words, society today is failing to provide its children with vital informal learning (which used to occur out with organised schooling) and schools have an obligation to pick this up.
Schools need to provide children with (what we are terming) informal learning because they have taken the place of much of a child’s ‘real life’. Many of the skills (and developmental achievements) that children of the past would have learnt either in community life, family life, by participating in work life, roaming free, or by interacting naturally with their peers (and people of all ages), are not sufficiently learnt today. Societies have become individualistic enough, and people are growing up in isolation to the extent that much ‘natural learning’ is not taking place.
In the past schools would have offered instruction in particular subjects such as literacy and numeracy, Latin or mathematics. The total of the person’s childhood development did not depend on the school setting. Upbringing happened as a combination between family, society, nature and school. Today we see two changes to this. The first is that children spend much more of their time in formal educational settings. Children start attending institutions at much younger ages. It is not uncommon to see children too young to walk spending their days in full-time daycares. The school day has also become longer to accommodate for both parents’ working schedules. Notice that even in the days when many children left home to attend boarding schools, this did not occur until between the ages of 12 and 15.
The second is that sadly for many children the ‘rest of their life’ is overly limited and digitalised. The current generation of children has experienced a major shrink in the number of people they have any significant personal interaction with. Upbringing and lifestyle has become increasingly isolated, but humans are extremely social beings, and a child cannot raise themselves without severe psychopathologies occurring.
These two factors together increase the responsibility of the school settings. They need to provide more holistic experiences to children. For many, schools have now become the only opportunity for kids to develop in the various complex ways that they need to develop in in order to be healthy, and to mature through the developmental stages properly. If not the only opportunity, schools have certainly become a more major element in amidst generally decreasing opportunities for the activities and socialization necessary for healthy human development.
Little humans are complex creatures with multi-faceted needs. Learning maths is very important but it does not equal human development. In fact, as schools are quickly learning, children who have not been properly socialised in all of the important senses that traditionally happened outside schools, are not mentally or emotionally well enough to participate in formal learning. Children are often seen to underperform in scholastic study when they have been deprived of other developmentally significant experiences.
Therefore, where our societies have dropped the ball on raising children, schools cannot refuse to pick it up. They cannot ignore the problem because (a) children spend their days in formal learning settings and so therefore these settings are the ones who have the opportunity to provide children with what is needed; and (b) schools cannot sufficiently accomplish their formal aim of inculcating subject competence unless these other ‘lower-level’ needs of children are also met.
Education is aware of the issue but its response is problematic
Educational establishments, coming into regular contact with children of course notice the changing needs of the children and have realised the need to respond to these. Many of the developments put forward by educators and relevant researchers are ‘discoveries’ of the various ways that the learning we provide needs to be more ‘holistic’ and considerate of the many emotional, social and developmental needs of children. This response has taken various forms.
A close study of the Montessori method leaves one feeling that the methodology is an institutionalised imitation of the natural learning that occurred inside a home when a housewife would have had a young child about her heels. Modern state schools, as we see them in Scotland at least, have become increasingly focused on teaching life skills like brushing your teeth, healthy eating and washing your hands, behavioural skills, and emotional regulation.
The emphasis to teach children to recognise and regulate emotions (something that occurs naturally when children have regular relationships with other people with whom they interact frequently) has become widespread from nursery settings and through all of schooling. Outdoor learning has also become an important part of schooling. To a great extent it is an imitation of the vital[2] free play that children in the past would have had in their neighbourhoods. Notice how Beams, Higgins, Nicol and Smith (2024: 2) justify their work:
‘…learning outdoors helps to redress deficits brought about by disproportionately high levels of online and solitary learning, and helps to redress some kind of educational balance in the ways people learn about the world they inhabit.’
Play-based learning is another trend that has become standard practice in nurseries and early primary stages. This is basically just an organised attempt to incorporate pre-concept exploration into institutionalised environments. Children now come into institutions so early (and often from such limited family environments), that teaching staff need to provide them with opportunities to develop their fine motor skills, their finger muscles, and the basic understanding of the world that comes from throwing a ball around or digging holes and filling them with water in your back yard.
When our grandmothers went to primary school, many of them were already experienced and able to keep their family homes tidy and bake bread. Children today often enter a form of institutionalised care before they can sit up unaided, or come from a home where they had little more to do than play on an ipad. Naturally this has led to the necessity to include the basic skill development that precedes more complex learning. Skills which in the past we may have taken for granted, it has become clear, need to be taught (or allowed to develop) somewhere by someone.
The point we are making is that the role of formal educational settings is expanding. The aims and goals are growing. So much so that it often reaches a point of confusion. A problem that has occurred alongside these adaptations of schooling is that these innovations have too often replaced formal learning. Formal subject learning is also important, as much as these ‘informal skills’ are necessary. The balance between the two has not always been achieved, and the detrimental effect on academic standards can now be observed widely. In Scotland in particular where I am based, in the past 15 years or so since a new school curriculum has been introduced that de-emphasises academic attainment and replaces it with softer skills, we have seen what can only be called a tragic drop is actual attainment. For an easy introduction to this problem see Paterson (2023: URL)
Education needs to think seriously about how it will address these ‘new concerns’ whilst at the same time preserve its boundaries and maintain its ability to develop formal subject learning and competence. My purpose in setting up this series of essays is to engage with this question.
In this substack I will explain what the Classical model is and argue that it is the best form of formal schooling available to us, but that at the same time it needs to be expanded and adapted to the needs of our modern western societies. The role of the school has changed. Schools need to offer ‘more’ to their students. Formal learning needs to be artfully blended with informal learning. Achieving the balance between the two requires care and thought. Let us not fall out of the other side of the wagon as we have been doing of recent. Informal learning, vital as it is, cannot replace formal learning, since both are important. We need to find ways to integrate both forms without destroying either.
This substack wants to develop some key ideas that are needed for us to think deeply about the questions that concern us today. How we can improve the educational systems of our society in general to raise the standard which have been plummeting. How can we do this within the modern context where most pupils do not come to school ‘ready to learn’?
These questions concern us all. However, notice that as a Christian myself I will attempt to answer these questions, always from within a faith-based narrative. I am also interested in: what is the best way for Christian communities to educate their children today? Many parishes and communities are realising that there is a need to re-establish Christian schools, but there is currently very little understanding about how to achieve this in the most profitable way. It is with this lens therefore that I am studying these issues.
In order to develop these key ideas we will need to take a deep dive into the philosophical and pedagogical concepts that underpin educational practices. I feel that it is necessary to go to the core of concepts, just as you need to dive deep into the ocean if you want to bring up pearls. Let me end then with giving you an outline of what this substack will include.
1. Lay out first what the person is and what it means for them to flourish. What is well-being? What does it mean to be free, productive, happy? What do we want as economic actors? How nature/nurture work together to bring human flourishing about (what role does education play in this)? My emphasis is on what do Christians in particular think about these issues, and hence, what would Christian education in particular look like?
2. What is Classical Education? Is it intrinsically ‘the best model’? Which of its characteristics are basic and need to be kept as it is adapted to the needs of each society/community?
2.b Here we will also look at what Plato/Socrates had to say about education. Who is the Socratic teacher really? What constitutes a Socratic school? I will make the case that Socratic teaching is often overly-reduced and that we miss its point and loose its poignancy. It has a good reputation but in fact there is very little understanding of what it means. I will argue that Socratic education properly speaking is at the heart of the classical model and that, if we want to achieve what Socratic education is capable of we need to re-establish it in its proper form. So watch this space if you are interested in Socratic learning. Somewhere around here I will also write something about the role of technology in schools.
3. Having set out a thorough exposition of Classical Education we can then address: What are the criticisms of Classical Education and what can we learn from them? I will look at feminist theory, liberation theology and its pedagogies and atheist-political philosophical precepts that cast the classical model as ‘oppressive’. Specifically, I will look at the analysis of power and its relation to knowledge popularised by Foucault and communist thought.
4. Having offered some apology for Classical Education I will: argue that the classical model in a pure form is not sufficient to serve the multi-faceted needs of students today. What more should schools do? What more is needed? What is Forest Schooling and what can it bring to the mix? What is the role of play and what can it bring? How compatible are these pedagogies with the classical model? What is the most profitable way to blend these models?
5. This will complete the first phase of the substack and I will turn the attention to what all this looks like in secondary schooling
As you can see you can expect some history of education, some of its politics and sociology, much by way of practical methodology and a lot of philosophy of education. Personally I find these issues fascinating and I look forward to discussing them in more depth in company with you. I hope that you will find them exciting also.
The list you find here is my basic plan. However, the joy of writing these essays online rather than in book or journal form and hiding them behind the paywalls of the academic industry, is that a substack can be a conversation. As you read please get in touch with me with any question, objections, or concepts that you want me to discuss in more detail.
References:
Bandelli, A. (2007) Education can't keep up with our fast-moving world. Here's what needs to change, World Economic Forum, URL: https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2017/06/new-approaches-education-changing-society/
Beams, S., Higgins, P., Nicol, R. and Smith, H. (2024) Outdoor Learning Across the Curriculum, Theory and Guidelines for Practice, Routledge, London
Hooley, J., Butcher, J.N., Nock, M.K. and Mineka, S. (2017) Abnormal Psychology (7th ed.), Pearson, London
Paterson, L. (2023) ‘PISA 2022 in Scotland: declining attainment and growing social inequality’, published 5th December 2023 on Reform Scotland, URL: https://www.reformscotland.com/2023/12/pisa-2022-in-scotland-declining-attainment-and-growing-social-inequality-lindsay-paterson/
Plato, ‘Laches’ in Plato Complete Works, Cooper, M.J. (ed), Hackett Publishing Company, Cambridge
[1] Taken from Plato’s Laches (179)
[2] Most of the research around outdoor learning is about identifying the multiple developmental (physical, mental and emotional) benefits of risky independent play and contact with nature. Beames, Higgins, Nicol and Smith (2024: 6) say: ‘The peer-reviewed literature on the relationship between health and wellbeing and time spent in nature is very robust.’ They quote Hooley, Butcher, Nock and Mineka (2017) to say: ‘Teaching and learning outdoors thus has an important role to play in addressing decreasing levels of mental wellbeing in children and youth. Educators can draw on psychological literature that explains how programmes that help to boost levels of optimism, self-awareness, mastery, self-esteem, and social support, help individuals to better handle life stressors.’