An Open Letter to Australian Teachers

I returned relatively recently from my seventh trip to Australia. This time, after a ticketed event on positive behaviour management in Sydney, I returned to South Australia to work at a school in the Barossa Valley with its own winery (!) and a school in Adelaide I’d worked at previously that I have taken to calling ‘happy school’.

And happiness is the subject of this letter. There are probably many things that might be improved in the Australian education system; there are probably things that could be improved in any education system in the world. But one thing I have noticed having spent short periods teaching in seven separate schools down under is that – chiefly – the children in Australian schools are happy.

In Sydney, I warned the people kind enough to attend the event, who included several experienced and senior educators about what may be coming your way: evidence-led education. Their response was, “it’s already here, Phil.”

Theoretically, evidence-led education is an enormously seductive idea. All education systems are on the constant search for ‘what works’ and, once they think have located this, the silver bullet will be rigorously implemented in institutions by young and impassioned converts to the pale religion of barely understood and probably not even read research. The issue is that there is no real consensus whatsoever about what works, and the oft started sentence from people who find it easy to express quite vituperative opinions, “the research says”, is rarely, if ever, backed up by much depth of reading at all.

What sounds good in theory can have undesired results. The right-wing, ideological drive to find evidence that a specific method of didactic teaching in which the children’s voices are markedly absent is ‘proven’ to work has found its inspiration in decidedly non-normative places, not the least of which is a specific slice of the American charter schools’ movement and the holy text generated in Uncommon Schools.

This text, an odd choice of Bible for an ‘evidence-led’ movement since it features only 12 ‘academic’ references and these are mainly to business books with frightening titles the like of ‘Atomic Habits’, attempts the wildly ambitious undertaking of taking teaching, a complex multi-disciplinary relational art form which, at its best, should be dialogic, and breaking it down into its constituent parts. Once it has done this, it then seeks to find ways of making each element of what goes on in the classroom more “efficient.” 

Its arguably laudable ambition, I suppose, is to make lessons as perfect and as efficient as they might possibly be. However, there are acute moral blind-spots. If we take just one example from a very long book filled with techniques titled with bludgeoning imperatives, there is guidance that teachers should strive for students to have 100% focus in 100% of lessons 100% of the time. Even if one ignores the obvious tautology of the third 100% here, it is worth noting that any desire for perfection is, by nature, a manifestation of a totalitarian view. I wrote about this in a book that I could not publish for legal reasons: ‘Pedagogy of the Oppressor: Teach Like a Totalitarian’: “a desire for perfection and any understanding of the human condition cannot co-exist healthily or happily. Human beings are imperfect by nature. You cannot superimpose any desire for their perfection onto them without causing a great deal of pain.”

The evidence-led movement has indeed caused “a great deal of pain.” Two Instagram accounts ‘The Uncommon Truth’ and ‘Black at Uncommon’ were set up so that ex-students and teachers from Uncommon Schools might share “experiences of mismanagement, racism, prejudice, and cultural bias at Uncommon Schools.”[1] If I might, I’d like to share just a few of these with you.

“Uncommon has taught me that work is more valuable than my health. I would come to school and cry because I was so overworked. Now I’m in college and I don’t know how to take care of myself.”

“During my 8th grade year at ***, a teacher would often tell us, ‘whenever we give you guys any freedom, you run with it.’[2] I couldn’t help but think about a quote from Frederick Douglas’s memoir, ‘If you give a n***** an inch he will take an ell.’ They never stopped to consider that maybe if we did have more freedoms, we wouldn’t lose our minds over as something as simple as 8 minutes to talk during home room. Nothing about this system is normal for people of our age. We have everything taken away from us and even then they threaten to take the bare minimum. It has ruined my social well-being.”

“*** *** once told me in middle school that I was a waste of air. As a middle school student I was constantly belittled by him and other teachers within the *** *** *** school system. I’d pass tests, but due to my stressful home environment never did homework. This led to multiple retentions, being publicly used as an example child, and depression that drove me to a suicide attempt in the 6th or 7th grade.”

Back at *** Street where the kindergarten was first founded classrooms were small and separated by yellow curtain-like dividers. Whenever this student would get in trouble Ms *** would drag the student through the divider and throw him in front of my class so we could laugh at and bully the student. Ms *** would yell in the boy’s face saying “you don’t deserve the *** *** uniform” as if she paid for it. She began to strip him down literally.”

These are four among hundreds of such allegations. 

I would ask Australian teacher whether they would want to raise children in schools in which the version of ‘normality’ imposed is malignant, where the whole texture of students’ lives is altered, and they are forced into submission because submission is the only possible response to institutional abuse and there is no way out. Make humans into efficiencies and they cease to be properly human.

In an open letter from the CEO and president of Uncommon Schools they outlined the following wholesale changes 

“Students will not be asked to fold hands on the desk, and we will eliminate use of the student protocols for listening in class known as STAR and SLANT.

During hallway transitions, elementary schools will eliminate use of the student hallway passage protocol known as HALLS, and middle school students will be able to talk and move more freely.

Students will have more social time during lunch, and we will ensure all elementary school students have daily recess.”[3]

They acknowledged that one of the things they would do is remove the “undue focus on things like eye contact and seat posture”.[4]

Credit where credit is due. They took action.

The point here is that the pedagogic culture that has spawned hundreds of imitators had such a sickness at its core that its initial adherents dispensed with it. It is proven to make children deeply unhappy. In the United Kingdom, it has become a wave that crushes all resistance and, oddly for an ‘evidence-led’ movement, refuses to accept the evidence that such a pedagogic culture can and has led to allegations of abuse. Children under this level of control become deeply unhappy; their compliance becomes neutral; they vote with their feet.

It is enormously unlikely that the headteacher of ‘happy school’ in Adelaide would allow the importation of such pedagogic brutishness as she is steeped in education and knows that children learn better when they are happy and are not subject to Draconian control. But the evidence-led movement is seductive and superficially convincing. As anyone who has been subject to the false charm of narcissism and found themselves down the line subject to devaluation, reduction and abuse will tell you, be seduced by superficial charm and you’ll spend a long time regretting that you did not see through it.

 

 

 


[1] https://www.instagram.com/_theuncommontruth

[2] Your eyes do not deceive you here. You are seeing what you are seeing. Take a moment to consider this statement. This teacher appeared to believe that he was teaching another species: something worryingly like his own species that should not be like his own. He was living “in the midst of the incomprehensible, which is also detestable”: Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness (Penguin Popular Classics: London, 1902) p9.

[3] Brett Peiser & Julia A. Jackson, Open Letter, Our DEI Commitments for 2020-2021 and Beyond. https://uncommonschools.org/news/dei-commitments-2021-beyond/ 14 August 2020.

[4] Brett Peiser & Julia A. Jackson, Open Letter, Our DEI Commitments for 2020-2021 and Beyond. https://uncommonschools.org/news/dei-commitments-2021-beyond/ 14 August 2020.

Added Sat, 19 Oct 2024 17:48

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