My father used to tell us a story from when he supervised students training to be teachers. He was sitting in a school staffroom waiting for a student when a teacher came in, collapsed into a chair, breathed out loudly and said: “Well, I’ve taught it to them. Whether they know it or not is another matter.”
I was about 16 at the time, and I couldn’t see why my father found this even worth commenting on, let alone something to laugh about. He tried to explain himself, asking what would be the point of teaching something if the pupils weren’t learning it? No, I didn’t get what he was on about. After all, I had by then had about 11 years of school, and a lot of it had involved teachers talking at us, and if we didn’t “get” it, that was our fault.
So I was pleased to read that a range of scientific societies have banded together to recommend to the government more enlightened ways of teaching science to children aged three to 11. The chemists have suggested licking ice-lollies to understand how temperatures change and how heating and cooling works, while the physicists say that using more music in the classroom can “help teach basic concepts such as pitch and volume”.
I had my own experience of learning this way: Miss Pope, in particular, refused the method of simply dictating the curriculum to us. She taught us photosynthesis. We spent time putting dark pieces of paper on to pelargonium leaves, and coming back next week to see the bleached parts of the leaves. No light, no chlorophyll (the compound that gives leaves their colour). One of us suggested that we could use photo negatives and print pictures of ourselves on the leaves. Miss Pope had never heard of this. “Let’s do it,” she said. We did. I created a picture of myself on a pelargonium leaf.
In among all this, Miss Pope taught us the photosynthesis equation. She recited it out loud and when she had finished, asked us to write it down, checking whether it was right from the textbook. Then she said, “Cover it up,” and asked us to say the equation out loud to each other in pairs and again to the whole class.
It is, of course, quite possible to teach photosynthesis from a textbook. A teacher can stand at the front of a class and, in effect, recite the words from the page. The students can “take notes” and then for homework, write up these notes. At some point in this process, there might be a worksheet, which usually involves “gaps” – incomplete sentences that have to be filled in with the right word, or definitions that have to be provided, or the right choice made from multiple choice questions, and so on. These replicate what you get in the end-of-week, end-of-term, end-of-year or final national test or exam (GCSEs, A-levels and so on). It’s a circular process: you learn in a way that fits the kind of questions the exam asks you to answer. The exam shapes the kind of learning you do through the year. And it works.
Every year, hundreds of thousands of young people do courses and sit exams like this. The markers mark the papers. The papers go forward to be moderated and then, by means of a system that is largely opaque, the grades come out, distributed according to the “bell curve”, the graph that represents the number of fails, passes and distinctions – and indeed each grade has its own distribution pattern. Every year, newspapers clack and chatter about there being “more” passes or fails, seemingly unaware that the “more” is created by human beings – decisions made tacitly or otherwise between the Department for Education and the exam boards.
But what about the alternative method of teaching and learning? That of the Miss Pope variety, and the kind recommended by science boffs? Where does this method of learning come from? In essence, the idea is that “understanding” happens after a subject has been “sensed”. People familiar with the philosophy of John Locke will know that he espoused this view,as did John Amos Comenius (1592-1670), a philosopher better known across Europe.
In what is regarded as the first picture book for children, known as Orbis Pictus (1658), Comenius wrote in the introduction for parents and teachers: “Now there is nothing in the understanding which was not before in the sense. And therefore to exercise the senses well about the right perceiving [of] the differences of things, will be to lay the grounds for all wisdom, and all wise discourse, and all the discreet actions in one’s course of life.”
One way to view the history of education since then is to see it as a battleground over that paragraph – instruction v investigation, rote v discovery, knowledge v interpretation, learning v sensation … and so on. Come in, Miss Pope. Clearly, she wasn’t having any of that dichotomy. As an expert on photosynthesis, she knew a lot about synthesis – the synthesis of, on one hand, investigation, discovery, sensation, and on the other, instruction, rote and knowledge.
From what I know of the education of 15-year-olds in England 2024, the curriculum is so stuffed with the need to impart knowledge that there’s no time for putting black paper on pelargonium leaves. There wasn’t time for my now 19-year-old to see or handle a bit of ore before “learning” how to extract metal from rock.
Teachers and teacher associations have been sounding alarms about this ever since Michael Gove gave us the knowledge-rich curriculum and the preposterous idea that all pupils can raise their grades above average. Maybe with a new government and a new education secretary – armed with the handy advice of some wise scientists – things will finally change.
Michael Rosen is a writer and broadcaster
