The Little Ed Book

Guy Claxton

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781136662263
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Writing principally for teachers-in-training and for new teachers, Guy Claxton offers a fresh approach to what is often a stuffy and polemical area. New teachers today are being bombarded from all sides with advice, prescriptions and demands about what they ought to be, and about personal and professional standards they ought to attain. The person they are gets to feel more and more ignored, unvalued and inadequate. The message of The Little Ed Book is that the answers to all the questions a teacher must confront – both practical and ideological – are already within him or her, and that, whatever they are, they are worthy of respect. Just as a map of a city is useless unless you can locate yourself, so you must find and value the teacher that you are, before you can become the teacher you can be.

Part 1

Some Basic Questions

What are My Ideals for Education?

You may well feel it is important to have an idea about what you believe about education, as well as about what other people think. Do you think it’s important (a) to induct children into established bodies of knowledge/modes of thinking (and what does this mean?); (b) to provide them with useful facts (how banks work) and skills (car maintenance); (c) to introduce them to the delights of art, literature and music; (d) to train their minds (what does this mean?); (e) to socialize them (i.e. teach them accepted ways of behaving and getting on with people); (f) to help them to grow in their abilities to be autonomous, responsible and make decisions; etc.

We might divide rationales for education into three: giving children what they want, need and ought to know. Some people would argue for each of these, but there isn’t a single, obvious answer. If your 10-year-old wanted to learn about oral sex or torture, would you tell her? If you believed she ought to go to Sunday school, but she hated it, would you make her? Do all children need to read at 6 years old? (Most people would say ‘yes’, but if a child really needed to know something, wouldn’t he want to learn it automatically?)

What are the Relative Needs of Individual and State?

The aims of education may be either individual- or society-directed. Critics of education say it serves the ends of society far too much; the individual gets lost in the demand of society for people who will do what they’re told, when they’re told, willingly, for material reward. Education, they say, doesn’t foster creativity and individual responsibility – it tries to eliminate them. Even if there is some truth in this, should we swing entirely to the opposite extreme? An island full of anarchists would probably be worse even than an island full of automata. It may be that the priorities need shifting back towards the individual, but how far?

The whole question of the relationship between education and the State is very complicated. If you are politically/sociologically inclined this is an issue that may interest and inflame you; on the other hand it may bore you to tears. Is it necessary to think about it if it doesn’t interest you? Should you have views about everything? If not, do you expect children to have views about things that don’t interest them? If yes, is it fair? What makes them different?

How Hard Can I Push?

Suppose a child – your child, let’s say – didn’t want to learn something that you genuinely believed he ought to know. How much persuasion can you allow yourself to use? I imagine a scale of ‘force’ running from presentation through introduction, suggestion, persuasion and seduction to coercion. How far will your conscience allow you to go before you’re prepared to take ‘No’ for an answer? Do you give a different answer for different things? Would you make the child do anything you thought worthwhile/important/a matter of life and death? Would his age matter?

Can I Allow him to say ‘No’?

Are you capable of allowing people not to be interested in what you’re interested in? Suppose you’re in the middle of explaining something you care deeply about to someone whose opinion you respect, and he says ‘I’m bored’, do you feel hurt or put down? (I do.) Most people say you teach better if you’re interested in what you’re teaching; but it may be more difficult to accept other people’s right to be bored. It feels as if it’s not just your subject but a bit of you that’s being turned down.

I may suggest to you that you learn X: if you look like declining, I can easily slip into persuading, seducing or even coercing you – not because you need X, but because I can’t bear to feel a bit of me being rejected. It’s very often difficult to know when this is operating – the needs are buried pretty deep – but you may find it salutary to be aware of the possibility.

Nothing is really explained by its cause or motivation, for we find only causes behind causes until we can pursue them no longer. It is like a child asking ‘Why? Why? Why? …’ until its father, like a Zen master, says ‘O shut up and suck your lollipop!’

Alan Watts

Chemists at least can use analysis; patients suffering from a malady whose cause is unknown to them can call in a doctor; criminal cases are more or less cleared up by the examining magistrate. But for the disconcerting actions of our fellow men, we rarely discover the motive.

Marcel Proust

Why do I Want to be a Teacher?

Questions about motives are always dubious, since they are exercises in rendering actions intelligible to our reason which may have no rational cause. To attribute motives to ourselves is only a slightly less risky business than attributing them to other people. But the attempt may be fruitful if we allow any ‘thought’ hypotheses that we have to be checked against our intuitive feelings. There is no way of knowing whether we acted for this motive or that – but we can tell when a suggestion feels right.

Your motives might include:

because I enjoy teaching;

because I feel children ought to know X;

because I couldn’t think of anything else to do after university;

God knows, I’ve always wanted to be a teacher;

because my father’s a teacher;

because I have a need to be effective in other people’s lives;

I like the power;

I like being with children;

I have strong ideas about education that I want to try out;

I’m rapidly coming to the conclusion that I don’t, etc.

It’s important that you take this question seriously: you may discover that you really don’t want to teach, or, if you’re honest, that being with children makes you anxious and uneasy You may decide, in abstract, that it’s better not to be a teacher at all than to teach for the wrong motives – and then find this applying to yourself.

Maybe the fundamental question is not ‘Why do I want to teach?’ but ‘Do I want to teach at all?’ It may be rather frightening to take this question seriously – but it’s better to find out now than later. There is no dishonour in deciding you don’t want to teach. You can’t know for sure whether it suits you until you’ve tried it, and found out a bit about what it is. Not everyone is capable of doing or enjoying everything. That’s a fact of life; and if you don’t want to teach, that’s not a failure in you, it’s a bit of information about you – you’re not yet committed to becoming a teacher, if you are currently doing a course in teacher training.

Should there be Schools?

As you think about what you would like education to be, an idea of your ideal educational system will gradually form in your head. But you may find yourself questioning whether there should be an educational system, in the sense of institutions-called-schools-run-by-the-State, at all. You’re bound to have heard of the deschoolers – Illich, Goodman, Reimer, Holt – who between them have posed questions about what schools are, and what they are up to, that I for one find difficult to ignore. You may not agree that doing away with schools completely is the answer, in which case you are free to fantasize about how you would like them to be. But if you are inclined to agree that schools should go, that obviously puts you in a sticky position job-wise! It doesn’t necessarily mean that you drop out there and then – you may want to finish your training and then work in some kind of ‘alternative’ set-up. But if there is a conflict between your beliefs (e.g. ‘schools must go’) and your actions (being on a teacher training course), you can’t ignore it.

You may find it interesting and enlightening to crystallize your ideas about schools by actually designing one from scratch. Considering questions like what shape the classrooms would be, would you have compulsory games, or school uniform, how to involve parents, what the timetable would be, etc. makes abstract issues like ‘equality’, ‘responsibility’, ‘discipline’ and ‘curriculum’ very real. It might also make you more sympathetic to the problems of administration (or you might decide to do away with the administrators altogether and let the children make the decisions!).

What is a Teacher?

Pondering on ideals will inevitably raise questions about what exactly the teacher’s role should be. There are lots of possible analogies for the role of teacher. Which ones do you accept, and which are incompatible? Resource: the teacher as a ministerer to the children’s needs. A provider of books, arranger of visits, changer of plugs, etc. Entertainer: the teacher as a music hall turn, keeping the children entertained, occupied and perhaps helping them to learn a little bit too. Friend: does the role of teacher include being friends with the children? Is it dangerous? Will you lose respect? Doctor: the teacher as a diagnoser of various needs of individual children and prescriber of suitable learning treatment. Cop: a policeman in the society of school, enforcing the rules of the society, arresting people and sending them for trial. Judge: arbitrator of disputes and disher-out of punishments. Fisherman: Someone who baits his hook with an appetizing bit of knowledge, and waits patiently for the students to nibble. Counsellor: is it part of the teacher’s job to deal with the emotional as well as intellectual needs of his pupils? Or does this interfere with his ‘teaching’ function: should he rather be a Referral Agency: distributing children to ‘specialists’ like the educational psychologist, sanctuary, remedial reading teacher, psychiatrist? Clerk: marker of registers, collector of dinner money, orderer of books, guardian of the staff-room coffee fund. How much of a clerk would your ideal teacher be? Public Relations Officer: chatting up parents, presenting a suitably rosy picture of a child’s progress, and the school’s part in it. Learner: we don’t hear very much about teachers being learners once they’ve qualified – except when they manage to be seconded on a course. Do you think you have anything to learn by being a teacher? Do you think the children have anything to teach you?

The truth was of course that it is one thing – an easy thing – to give what Cardinal Newman called ‘notional’ assent to a proposition such as ‘There is no justice’: quite another and more difficult matter to give it ‘real’ assent, to learn it stingingly, to the heart, through involvement.

John Barth

Can I be My Ideal Teacher?

Almost certainly not. Herbert Kohl in The Open Classroom says ‘My beliefs in a free, non-authoritarian classroom always ran ahead of my personal ability to teach in one’, and my experience is the same. It’s much easier to change one’s mental knowledge (attitudes, beliefs, opinions) than one’s ‘physical’ knowledge – the knowledge that controls how we act spontaneously, and how we feel. Kohl goes on, ‘A crucial thing to realize is that changing the nature of life in the classroom is no less difficult than changing one’s own personality, and every bit as dangerous and time-consuming. It is also as rewarding.’ If your ideal classroom matches exactly the one you happen to find yourself in … you’re very lucky. If not, and if the disparity between ideal and actual troubles you, you’re in for a hard time.

A classroom will only work – certainly you will only be happy in it – if you are comfortable with the way you are behaving. It is no use trying to be something you believe in if you can’t do it. You will only get frustrated and disillusioned. You may well end up blaming your problems on the children rather than on your own incongruence. You must accept that changing either you or the classroom takes time; it can only happen bit by bit. The function of having an ‘ideal you’, or an ‘ideal classroom’, in your mind, it seems to me, ought to be to provide a direction to your activities. John Lennon says ‘how can I go forward when I don’t know which way I’m facing?’ Your ideals are landmarks that tell you which way ‘forward’ is. But if you are impatient, your ideals will simply upset you. I don’t have any magic cure for impatience; if you are the sort of person who gets angry when he sees injustice, stupidity and waste, you may decide it’s better not to be too idealistic.

We know ourselves so little that we can only find out what feels comfortable by experimenting. You will probably find yourself trying out things that you’re not sure about. When you do, bear two things in mind. The first is that experiments never fail. They are things we do to find out what we can’t work out; whichever way the result goes is equally valuable. If you find out that you feel uncomfortable acting in a certain way, that’s as useful as if you had felt comfortable. We are all unique, we all have our own way of doing things, and we all fall far short of what we would like to be. If one is really capable of accepting that, one will never feel a ‘failure’. As Carl Rogers says, ‘the facts are friendly’. It’s difficult to believe sometimes, but I believe it’s true.

The second thing is: experiment gradually. If you find you can’t handle a little experiment nothing is lost. But if you bound into your class one morning and say ‘I’ve decided you can do exactly what you want today – no holds barred,’ you’ll quickly regret it. When chaos ensues, you will almost certainly feel uncomfortable and clamp down again. The children’s suspicion that you didn’t really mean it will rapidly be confirmed, and they will be less inclined to trust you next time.

There are some things which cannot be learned quickly, and time, which is all we have, must be paid heavily, for their acquiring. They are the very simplest things and because it takes a man’s life to know them the little new that each man gets from life is very costly, and the only heritage he has to leave.

Ernest Hemingway

What about Pressures from Outside?

There are two kinds of things that stop you being your ideal teacher. One is the kind of person you are now, which I’ve talked about already. The other is other people. The demands that are made on you by the school, by the curriculum, by exams, even by the children, may be irreconcilable not only with the ideal you, but with the actual you as well. Very likely you will find yourself having to do things that seem senseless or even vicious, and your self-respect will be in jeopardy. When that happens, people resort to some well-known strategies – they rationalize, they distort the evidence, they deny things, they become dogmatic, they make exceptions. All these reactions effectively prevent you from facing up to the situation, and buy short-term relief at a heavy price in long-term wear-and-tear. If you accept the facts for what they are, you may be able to do something about them – even if it means changing jobs, or leaving teaching altogether. If you don’t, not only y...

Table of contents

• Cover
• HalfTitle
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Dedication
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part 1: Some Basic Questions
• Part 2: Some Practical Matters
• Part 3: Learning to be in School: A First-Hand Account
• Part 4: Teachers and the Law
• Part 5: Books