Teachers.

A personal view. I began school in 1948, O Levels in 1959, A Levels in 1961. When I visited a local private school in ~1995 it surprised me how similar it was to my old Secondary Modern back then. In the fifties there was hardly any TV, our only visual entertainment was kids Saturday morning cinema for 2 hours. The rest of the week out of school I went fishing, made balsa wood aeroplanes, raced my bike through the trees of the local parkland, practiced with our skiffle group and went to the local youth club. In lessons we accepted the authority of the teacher because ‘that’s how it was.’ We pushed the boundaries but they were there clearly defined but largely unspoken. Every year our reports showed subject marks and position in class, and in the final year were given responsibility and more freedom. Though we never thought about it we implicitly considered ourselves embryonic compared with the adult teachers and magisterial headmaster. We knew we were there as learners.

There have been many changes since then and my generation caused most of them. There has been a new reverence for youth and concomitant scorn for ‘past it’ adults. There has been the rise of vacuous celebrity and an enormous rise in visual entertainment from our two hours a week to around thirty with TV and even more with computers. There has been a rise in a ‘be yourself’ philosophy and ‘don’t care what people think.’ There has been a rise in centralised government testing and teacher bashing with the inference that poor student learning is solely the result of poor teaching. All these things militate against teachers and the classroom situation. The teacher is a pathetic has-been who isn’t even good entertainment and if students don’t learn it’s not their fault, and if anyone says anything they can say, “I don’t care what you think, I’m just being myself.”  Teachers are caught between government bashing, brainwashed students, self-involved parents and their own need for income to take on the responsibility for ‘learning’ when their responsibility is to teach. The responsibility ‘to learn’ which I encountered at around the age of eight now seems to begin at fifteen or later. The result is stressed over-worked teachers trying to do the impossible and poor learning outcomes. And perhaps even more importantly a generation that have missed out on the fun, satisfaction and rewards of learning and being skilful. The government’s response to the recent report to begin formal lesson at six or seven as ‘misguided’ is lamentable. Those two or three pre formal school years are absolutely necessary to lay the rules of engagement, that learning is play, it’s ‘what I want to do’, it’s my task and the teachers will help me achieve it. Gove must have had a terrible education that only taught him to respond, not think!