Part 1: Hypocrite

You all heard it on the Today programme earlier; we have Libertarian Gove (“you can teach whatever you want”) and then we have Stalinist Gove (“but you must teach Churchill on Tuesday mornings”)… Once again this government hasn’t worked out how Localism is supposed to work.

In the first place you need to give people freedom to run a local service however they like (within a minimalist regulatory framework). You need to give them enough money to make that a real freedom, with choices about what to provide, not what to save in the avalanche of cuts.

Then, once you have run “an iteration” (at least a year, probably more in many fields, long enough to collect meaningful success/failure data,) you update the regulations to stop people repeating any dramatic failures, and you publish best practise resources for all the participants, so they can read about the top 15 solutions in detail and emulate the one that is right for their area. There is also scope for peer review of the next years strategic level plans; to have mediocre practitioners forced to justify their choice to continue their own scheme rather than adopt a similar, more successful one.

This is a method for using a population to search a parameter space for innovative ideas to solve a problem. It is not suitable for all problems because some already have loads of success/failure data; so you can provide serious amounts of best practise data off the bat. Education is probably a good example of one of these.

Gove’s interpretation of localism is a strange mixture of opening education up to crazy people (who want to teach that god put the dinosaur skeletons their to tempt us, or something) with imprinting his own prejudice and prescription on the curriculum (the Pope/Shelly, Dickens/Hardy literary sausage-fest.)

Part 2: Idiot

The other problem I have with the Department of Education’s current direction is the emphasis on facts. Spot checking students’ general knowledge is no measure of an education system. If you were to ask me a set of general knowledge questions I would undoubtedly fail dismally, where in contrast to Gove and Gibb’s underlying assumption, I am not a worthless failure according to three of their underlying prejudices (which I’m not going to name, because unlike them I don’t hold those prejudices.)

Feynman was once talking to a bunch of students in South America*. They were discussing the formation of deltas / estuaries and the evolution of rivers, and Feynman asked them for an example of one of these things. They were stumped; and it was up to Feynman to point out to them that they lived next door to the example from which the contents of their text books had been deduced; the Amazon.

This was not, as Gove might argue, a lack of facts. The problem in fact, was too many! The students had been encouraged to memorise large numbers of facts about the geological evolution of rivers and estuaries from a text book, without being examined on their understanding of those facts; the really valuable quantity in education, which enables students form their own arguments and contradict their parents (which is the point of education, obviously**).

There is no way that anyone could know everything anymore; the sum of collective human understanding is too great. Thus, Feynman (and I) argue, you don’t strictly speaking need to remember the longest river in the world or the name of the prime ministers of the nineteenth century (both of which, I am proud to say, I am ignorant of, unless Earl Grey was one of the prime ministers. And that I only know from the packet of tea.) If you need specific situational knowledge, you can look these things up (and we’ve got quite good at making that fast, these days).

No, we need knowledge and skills, in particular the analytical skills to understand and argue with facts. You do not learn maths and science by memorising a list of facts; you learn techniques to practise the theory of maths and science (i.e. logical investigation,) whether that’s the techniques of calculus or how to light a bunsen burner and retain your eyebrows. And where do you learn about argument, rebuttal and refining your language to make your points more effectively? Oh, that’s right in the arts and humanities (whether you are arguing with convincing force that the death of modernism has been greatly exaggerated, or sifting through the facts to prove that JFK was actually killed by aliens***.)

Sadly, in spite of the tories claiming (falsely) that maths and sciences are the most important subjects, which degrees do they have at the DoE? hmm, Gove (English, Oxford) Gibb (Law, Durham) and Loughton (Classical Civilisation, Warwick). The only scientist minister in the department is Sarah Teather (Natural Sciences, Cambridge,) and notice that she isn’t the one calling for a narrowing of the curriculum, and a misplaced emphasis on facts alone.

* sorry, this anecdote is very very vague, but I’ve lost my copy of “Surely you’re joking…” – he may have been talking to or examining the students, and they may not have been asked for an example but rather something technical about sediments. In any case, his point (that facts mean nothing without understanding) is accurate.

** You think I’m joking? The whole of humanity’s progress comes down to people doing things better than their parents did. Being sarcastic at your parents’ prejudices and craziness as a teenager is a solemn and vital duty, just as your childrens’ duty will be too.

*** both noble, but ultimately futile endeavours, alas.