Rethinking Secondary Education

A Human-Centred Approach

Scherto Gill, Garrett Thomson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317860532
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

'This is a timely, accessible and engaging book of considerable intellectual stature, bold imagination and practical wisdom. Not only does it develop penetrating, elegant analyses of what is wrong with current state controlled and alternative approaches to contemporary education, it also offers imaginative, practical suggestions for a more fulfilling, human centred alternative.'

Professor Michael Fielding, Institute of Education, University of London, UK.

'With great sensitivity and force, and in wonderfully clear prose, Scherto Gill and Garrett Thomson explore some fundamental questions about what we want from our education system and what we can expect from it. [...] It is highly recommended for all who are interested in education, whether from a more theoretical point of view or from a more practical point of view'

Professor Adrian W. Moore, Faculty of Philosophy, University of Oxford, UK.

Could we have a system of secondary education that provides alternatives to the current mainstream schooling and its emphasis on exams, learning outcomes and the delivery of a fixed curriculum?

How could such a system focus on both human and educational values?

How could secondary education combine the personal development of students with good academic standards?

In response to these questions, Gill and Thomson have written a new, cutting-edge text aimed at all those involved in the study of education or teacher training. Rethinking Secondary Education explores, debates and critiques new and alternative approaches to teaching young people today.

The book discusses a 'human-centred' approach to curriculum, pedagogy, assessment and the culture of schools and colleges. It is grounded in theory and empirical research, discussing the need for a curriculum for the future, bridging a gap between mainstream and alternative education. It also offers practical guidance on how these ideas can be put into practice, making it an ideal resource for trainee teachers, experienced practitioners and students of education alike.

Key features of the text:

A balanced approach, comparing and contrasting both traditional and alternative approaches to education

Strong grounding in theory and research

The inclusion of young people's perspectives and 'voices' on their education and on being an adolescent

Links to practice - showing how the theory and research can actually be put into practice to bring about change

1

Towards human-centred education

Chapter 1 The aims of education

Chapter 2 The nature of learning

Chapter 3 Motivation and emotion

Chapter 4 The experience of being an adolescent

Chapter 5 Understanding adolescence

Chapter 6 Human-centred education

Much of this book is about what counts as good educational standards. Parents want the best education for their children; the public is worried that education standards are falling. Such concerns are clearly value-laden and mean little without some clarification of what is meant by those evaluations. For instance, there is little point in talking about how effective a course is without specifying what the relevant end results are and should be. Words such as ‘effective’, ‘better’, ‘falling’ and ‘failing’ presume ends, and these involve value judgements.

Furthermore, it is not sufficient to merely postulate some ends, and simply state that these are our goals. The fact that teachers have certain purposes in mind for their students, and the fact that the Government has a programme of outcomes established by law does not mean that educational theory should simply accept those ends as given. There must be some reason why some objectives are better or more appropriate than others, at least in a given context. We argue that what constitutes better and more appropriate objectives must take into consideration the development and flourishing of human beings.

Therefore, the core of this book is that educational standards can and should be more human-centred. Human-centred education treats all those involved in education equally as humans and helps individuals develop to the fullest as happy human beings. Throughout this book, we often employ the term ‘human’ because it has richer and wider connotations than ‘person’. As well as indicating autonomy, free thought and self-consciousness, which are usually associated with the Enlightenment idea of being a person, it also includes other qualities, such as being noble, humane, sensitive and inquisitive. It also carries the idea of an embodied being, who cannot sit for hours behind a desk passively listening and who needs to move, talk and laugh. The term is supposed to capture what are the best qualities of human beings in their fullness. This is one of the themes we are going to address in the first part of the book.

Human-centred education places the human being at the centre of the education process. In the words of A.S. Neill (1992), the idea is to make the educational processes and environment ‘fit the child’ rather than the other way around. What this simple but radical idea signifies in intellectual terms is the theme of the first part of the book, and what it might imply in practice is the main topic of the second part. In brief, though, a more human-centred education would require a new concept of learning and pedagogy within the state system, a thorough reappraisal of assessment methods (and connected concepts such as exams and grades), new principles for the construction of the curriculum, and revisioning of the educational environment. We argue that society needs to move further away from knowledge-based schooling that is exam-driven towards the full education of a human being.

This does not mean, however, rejecting wholesale the mainstream approach and embracing whole-heartedly the so-called alternative or progressive tradition in education, which includes the holistic and child-centred approaches referred to by Neill. We shall try to retain what is good in mainstream approaches, and examine the ideas of the alternative tradition critically, as well as sympathetically.

Our objective is to understand better what educational standards a society ought to have. This involves identifying the values that ought to underpin educational activities. To identify them, we will look at broad educational aims and argue that some should have a higher priority than others. In doing this, we shall argue that mainstream views of education are based on a misunderstanding of values that distorts much current thinking about educational aims.

Although it is a common complaint that educational processes have become overly instrumentalised, the point is not often dealt with in sufficiently fundamental terms. Since instrumental reason is an extraordinarily powerful and useful mode of thought, and since educational practices do serve certain purposes, it is important to clarify these points. People need instrumental rationality. There can be no question of avoiding or eliminating it. However, we need to understand what the boundaries of instrumental rationality are when applied to education. The problem is how to avoid misapplying it beyond its limits, and thereby avoid turning ourselves as human beings into tools or machines. What is the proper place for instrumental reasoning in educational activities?

Furthermore, we claim that the mainstream view has a faulty conception of learning and relies on a mistaken view of the nature of assessment and measurement. By pointing out these misunderstandings and false conceptions, we will build a positive view of education centred on each person’s flourishing as a human being. However, child-centred or holistic education is often associated with a romantic and radical tradition that tends to reject reason, dismiss knowledge, and disregard teaching and pedagogy. We will show how human-centred education does not need to be wedded to these assumptions.

Our aim in this part of the book is to build a theoretical framework for the recommendations about practice in the second part.

1

The aims of education

Introduction

This chapter is divided into two parts: the first will be devoted to a discussion about the aims of education. We draw on existing claims that education should have three aims: the social, the academic and the personal, and argue that only the development of the human being should have priority and the other two aims ultimately serve the flourishing of the person. Then we move on to explore why the social and academic ends are so powerfully influential in determining the aims of education. To investigate this question, in the second part, we discuss instrumental rationality, and point out the danger of it instrumentalising and dehumanising human beings when it confuses ends with intrinsic values and means with instrumental values. We propose that for education to move away from an instrumentalised view, it is necessary to perceive properly means and ends and their relationships with what is valuable. The clarification of such relationships can enable education to become a process for human flourishing.

The aims of education

What aims ought educational activities have? This is a core issue that parents, teachers and governments need to address systematically because many important questions regarding the nature of the curriculum, pedagogy, assessment and the structure of schooling depend on it. We cannot make progress in these other areas without first addressing the aims.

Fundamentally, there are two approaches to defining the aims of education: one that regards education as a means to an end; and one that sees education as an end in itself. We will examine these separately.

First, education as a means to an end. At the most general level, educational activities have three types of aims: the first regards education as a means to various social ends; the second as a means to academic goals, or initiation into ‘ways of knowing and understanding’; and the third as a means to the development of the individual (Standish, 1999: 35).

Education as a means to social ends

According to this view, the main aim of education is to enable individuals to serve some of the needs of the society in which they will live as adults. Broadly, education enables society to function. This general view is expressed in many forms. Of recent prominence is the idea that we must train the next generation to help the country compete well in the global marketplace. Tony Blair called education ‘the best economic policy we have’ (Beck, 2003: 24). This is a perennial view that has weathered many changes in the political climate. Education also serves other current economic needs. For example, through schooling, it serves as a giant child-minding institution that enables both parents to join the workforce.

This general social objective can also include more noble political aims such as promoting equality in society, which has been an important consideration for past Labour governments in providing equal access to education. The issue at hand now, however, is not whether good education should be available for all the people in a country irrespective of their class, race, sex or income levels. Instead the claim is that education itself is a way of promoting social equality – or, in other words, this is part of the social function of educational activities.¹

This broad category also encompasses the aim of fostering democracy (see, for example, Dewey, 1916; Neill, 1960; Giroux, 1989; Fielding and Moss, 2010). Many educational thinkers have noted that a democratic society needs to invest in its educational system because the quality of a democratic system depends crucially on who is elected and for what reasons (Barro and Lee, 2000; Glaeser et al., 2007; Castello-Climent, 2008). It depends on the majority of voters making the appropriate choices and so democracy requires an education that fosters, for example, critical thinking and a willingness to participate in social debate in a public spirited way.

The category of social objectives does not need to be confined to mainstream political aims, however. Education is often seen as integral to a long-term programme of social reform (Dewey, 1916; 1938; Freire, 1970; 1973). For instance, insofar as progressive education is concerned with nurturing good citizens, it comes into this category, and whereas a radical reading of this aim would indicate that educational activities should challenge and help overthrow the status quo, the neo-conservative view insists that education should promote cultural restoration, such as the values associated with one’s nationality or community and of family life (Beck, 2003: 21).

How this broad category of social aims ought to be made specific depends very much on the social and historical context. For example, in some countries, the education system arguably needs to foster multiculturalism and cultural integration; education should enable people to live and participate in a culturally diverse society (OECD, 1997).

Despite the wide variety of conflicting views that come under this umbrella, nevertheless, what they have is a very important common core, namely that educational activities should primarily serve certain ends of society. One might argue for this general claim as follows: education is a socio-political activity that is carried out by a society to ensure its continuation and to further its development. Society has a legitimate interest in such ends, and education is a sine qua non of these goals. Therefore, the primary aim of education ought to be to serve these objectives.

Education as a means to academic advancement

According to this claim, education is primarily about learning, which is narrowly defined as the acquisition of knowledge and the relevant academic skills. This view tends to be associated with the claim that there is a certain common cultural heritage that all students should study. However, the view does not need to be wedded to a particular programme of study or to a specific conception of the common heritage or even to the assertion that there is a clearly identifiable common heritage in any cultural tradition.

More generally, the idea is that education is a series of activities whose ultimate goal is learning. ‘Learning’ in this context is an achievement word; one has to succeed in order to be said to have learned; it is not sufficient to try. Therefore, the activities of learning inherently involve certain norms or standards that define what actually counts as learning, as opposed to failing to learn (Hirst, 1971). In other words, education involves norms that are defined primarily by the activity itself rather than by the external needs of the society or those of the student. These norms are broadly intellectual or academic, and vary from subject to subject.

Each subject area is defined by the knowledge that comprises it, and by the methods of investigation and research that are employed to gain such knowledge. Student learning should be directed towards this body of knowledge (or parts of it) and should be in line with the methodology specific to the subject area. As a consequence, the types of skills that students need to acquire are defined broadly by this knowledge. The skills needed are those dictated by the academic subject. Likewise, the structure of the curriculum is, to some extent, determined by the logical progressions of the subject matter. Calculus, for instance, requires prior understanding of gradients and algebra.

Education as a means to the development of the individual

Educational activities should be aimed at the development and needs of the individual – in our case, the young person. This view has its roots in the work of Rousseau, who has inspired a host of educators, such as Pestalozzi, Maria Montessori, Rudolf Steiner and Parker Palmer, to mention just a few, who interpret this third aim holistically.

As with the first category, however, this third category clearly cuts across traditions. For example, in the liberal tradition, this aim is regarded in terms of the development of individual autonomy (Hirst and Peters, 1970; Bailey, 1984). According to this view, by definition, a person has the capacity to make free choices, which is called ‘autonomy’. Therefore, as a defining feature of what it is to be a person and as the necessary condition for any choice, autonomy is the primary quality of individuals that education needs to promote. From this, it is claimed, much follows: for example, a person needs to be able to have rational thinking skills and good epistemological attitudes in order to be able to make informed choices for him- or herself.

In contrast, insofar as progressive education is concerned primarily with the development of individual persons, as opposed to that of democracy, then it also belongs to this third category. If the idea of progressive education is not so much to promote and enable a democratic society but, rather, to develop individuals who have the knowledge and critical skills for living within a democratic society, then progressive education belongs to this third camp. In a similar vein, insofar as radical educational philosophies are concerned primarily with the emancipation of individuals, rather than the transformation of society, they do too.

From the point of view of educational aims, there is a world of difference between ‘we need to educate young people to improve society’ and ‘we need to prepare individuals for living in society’. The difference is who or what has primacy and this has huge pedagogical and curricular implications. The former statement, which might come from a government agency, belongs to the first category, and the latter, which might be the statement of a teacher, belongs to the third. The basic idea of the third category is that education ought to be aimed primarily at the development of individuals – children and young people.

Priorities

Teachers and students daily experience the conflicts between these three aims. While much time in the classroom is spent on academic studies, schools themselves as institutions can often be seen as serving social ends, rather like a business which has economic goals but also serves social ends. Furthermore, many students need practical or vocational training in order to meet the demand from workplaces, but at the same time, schools want to maintain high academic standards. Whereas a pragmatic and economic-minded school principal might scorn the attitudes that once made students learn Latin and Euclid’s geometry, one can imagine an ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Towards human-centred education
• 2 Rethinking secondary education
• References
• Index