The Holes of the Stephen King Mini Golf Course Which I Will One Day Own

The Holes of the Stephen King Mini Golf Course Which I Will One Day Own

1. Cujo (Par 3)

The car with the woman and the child stuck in it is a tricky ramp. The baying of a rabid St Bernard plays constantly whilst you try and make your shot.

2. Carrie (Par 5)

Knock your ball into a bucket of Pig's Blood to trigger the psychic death inferno.

3. It (Par 4)

A crooked dog leg with a large clown faced feature into whose mouth you putt. The ball is deposited in an ominous drain from which you retrieve it and the clown's mouth is full of knives.

4. Pet Cemetery (Par 3)

The putting green is shaped like the actual burial ground. Sink your ball in the wrong hole and it gets returned, covered in grey ooze and somehow...different.

5. The Shining (Par 4)

Takes place in a huge maze. To win, the ball must be shot through a smashed door panel behind which your alcoholic father intermittently appears, grinning horribly.

6. The Stand (Par 5)

Huge neon signs illuminate this Vegas themed fun-traction at night! Littered with corpses.

7. Misery (Par 3)

A huge typewriter dominates this impressive hole, which tradition dictates patrons attempt on their hands and knees whilst in the grips of cocaine psychosis. Watch out for the pig!

8. The Tommyknockers (Par 4)

Based on your own bedroom, painstakingly recreated by our designers to reflect a particularly bad summer when you were fourteen and nobody cared if you lived or fucking died, when the family just went away and left you and the pipes were making these weird sounds. Water Hazard.

9. Firestarter (Par 5)

This hole is really good. Shut up it is.

Assembly 3 - Miyamoto Musashi and the Science of Strategy

I have recently become interested in the character of Miyamoto Musashi.

This follows a friend of mine lending me his "Book or Five Rings" over the summer. The book is a sort of manual, written four hundred years ago, by Musashi. It is partly a book of philosophy and partly a manual to a young swordsman explaining to him how to win.

Miyamoto Musashi by eijiokabayashi (source: deviantart)

Now, there has always been an interest in this sort of thing. Sun Tzu's "Art of War" was very popular a few years ago. But Musashi is different, because he is interested in practicalities all the way.

Musashi became interesting to me just because of this passage,which grabbed me right away. In it he describes the battles he has won. It really is very impressive:

"I have trained in the way of strategy since my youth, and at the age of thirteen I fought a duel for the first time. My opponent was called Arima Kihei, a sword adept of the Shinto ryū, and I defeated him. At the age of sixteen I defeated a powerful adept by the name of Akiyama, who came from Tajima Province. At the age of twenty-one I went up to Kyōtō and fought duels with several adepts of the sword from famous schools, but I never lost."

Now you can say this sounds arrogant, but if it is true this is very impressive. I looked into what a duel meant at this time and it seems that in at least some cases these were to the death.

Still, what makes it even more impressive is that Musashi usually only fought duels with a Bokken, which is a kind of club.

So the question is how he did it. From my reading I have discovered two important ideas. He comes back to these ideas again and again in his "Book of Five Rings".

First, study the trades.

The first task he sets students is to pay attention to everything that is going on around you.

He describes watching master builders and carpenters and learning from their skill how to improve his own technique. The way they raise a roof can teach you to raise a defence, and so on.

So firstly, take an interest in everything.

Secondly, Musashi talks about being in the right place at the right time. According to one story, Musashi fought a duel with Sasaki Kojirō  who was called ""The Demon of the Western Provinces" and who wielded a "nodachi."

Now, a nodachi is a sword as tall as a man. Yet Musashi is meant to have defeated him with his Bokken.

The battle took place on an island in the middle of a lake. Musashi arrived by boat and, according to one legend, he had carved his Bokken out of an oar on his way across.

Yet he defeated this giant with his huge sword. How? Well, one theory has it that he had waited until the sun was in the right place in the sky to dazzle him.

This fits with what we know about Musashi, that he was a master of strategy. One key part of strategy was to wait for the right time.

So what can we learn from Musashi?

Firstly we can learn to take an interest in things. Interesting people are interested in everything. Not only that, we can learn from everyone. You don't need to restrict yourself, and you can never know where the missing piece of the puzzle will come from. Whatever you're working on, you should take the concerns of others seriously.

Secondly, pick your moment! So many problems students have come from not choosing their moment. They try and have a discussion with a teacher at the wrong moment. They want to explain themselves right now and so they get sent out of the detention because they make themselves a nuisance.

And so on.

We don't have to do everything now! Be like Musashi and wait for the right moment: you'll be surprised how much easier you find things if you ask yourself that question. Is this the moment, or is it not?

References

Musashi - The Book of Five Rings

Assembly: Maya Angelou and Courage

Sometimes students say, “I wasn’t doing 

Well, for evil to flourish, all it takes is for good people to do nothing.

Stonewall have a new campaign called “no bystanders”. If you go on their website you can keep up to date with it. 

What is a bystander? A bystander is someone who knows something is going on and doesn’t do anything.

It can feel very unfair. We might know somebody is being horrible to somebody else but feel like we can’t stop it.

Or we might get involved in the wrong way, by throwing insults back and make it worse.

To help us with this problem I like to look for people who have stood up for what was right in the past.

Today I am going to talk to you a little bit about Maya Angelou.

Who was Maya Angelou?

This was a remarkable woman, somebody who knew Dr Martin Luther King and knew Malcolm X. She spoke at the UN and at the inauguration of US President Clinton. 

She lived all over the world and every country she went to she would learn their language.

She was also a mother, a poet, a novelist, a teacher and a professor.

The journalist Gary Younge said, “When you look at Maya Angelou’s life you wonder what you have been doing with your own."

When she was your age, though, everyone thought she was stupid because she didn’t speak.

In fact, she was afraid, that if she spoke up what she had to say would kill people. So she knew a lot about the power of words.

Once she discovered how to use them properly though, she really went for it.

She writes a lot about the role of courage, and having the strength to speak up: that’s how she connects with what I am saying today.

Angelou thought courage was the beginning of goodness. Once you have the courage to stand your ground you can start to be good not just when the teacher is watching or when you’re in a group, but all the time.

So how does Angelou think we get there? Listen to this

“I will not sit in a group of black friends and hear racial pejoratives against whites. I will not hear "honky." I will not hear "Jap." I will not hear "kike." I will not hear "greaser." I will not hear "dago." I will not hear it. As soon as I hear it, I say, "Excuse me, I have to leave. Sorry." Or if it's in my home, I say, "You have to leave. I can't have that. That is poison, and I know it is poison, and you're smearing it on me. I will not have it." Now, it's not an easy thing. And one doesn't all of a sudden sort of blossom into somebody who's courageous enough to say that. But you do start little by little. And you sit in a room, and somebody says -- if you're all white, and somebody says, "Well, the niggers -- " You may not have the courage right then, but you say, "Whooh! My goodness! It's already eight o'clock. I have to go," and leave. Little by little, you develop courage. You sit in a room, and somebody says, "Well, you know what the Japs did then, and what they're doing now." Say, "Mm-hmm! I have to go. My goodness! It's already six o'clock." Leave. Continue to build the courage. Sooner or later, you'll be able to say out loud, "Just a minute. I defend that person. I will not have gay bashing, lesbian bashing. Not in my company. I will not do it." 

"Equal rights, fair play, justice, are all like the air; we all have it or none of us has it. That is the truth of it."

So this is what I am talking about: Maya Angelou didn’t think you start off doing the right thing, but she thought you can take a step. Real bravery for her isn’t about lashing out but about standing up.

So next time people start to say something unpleasant about someone else, maybe the bravest thing you can do will be to stand up and walk away. 

If it is, do it.

Assembly: Habits

abits

I once had a teacher who would say to us, in Latin (one of several languages he spoke), “Usus est Tyrannus”: Your routine is your master. That is the topic of my assembly today.

Aristotle said that what we repeatedly do, we become.

He explained this by saying:

“The things we have to learn before we can do them, we learn by doing them, e.g. men become builders by building, and lyreplayers by playing the lyre; so too we become just by doing just acts, temperate by doing temperate acts, brave by doing brave acts.”

Habit is stronger than wisdom!

So can we change our habits?

My morning routine:

shower, breakfast, tea, dress, tea, tie, hair

One thing out of order and I have a bad day. That’s not a joke.

Now, you might think that sounds boring, and it would be if someone else had invented that system. But because I invented it, I consent to it. That means I am only stood here right now because I choose to be. That’s not boring!  That’s freedom! 

So we started by saying our routine was our master, and indeed it is, but we have a choice. We can either decide on our habits, or let our habits decide for us.

You might have gotten in some good habits last year. Keep them up. Realise that they are probably the most valuable things you possess. More valuable than the phone in your pocket.

expectations about Uniform,Homework etc...you can probably imagine.)) expecting...((Here I seT

But as corny as it sounds, doing the right thing IS its own reward.

The person you are when nobody is looking, that's who you really are.

Last year, you might have gotten in some bad habits. It happens. But that doesn’t mean it can carry on. Don't think you can get away with that. If it does carry on, like Aristotle says, you will only be led further and further into bad habits and, ultimately, and this is neither joke nor exaggeration, you will become a bad person.

In fact, the Greek word "Ethike" from which we get Ethics refers to "Habits".

I leave you with a quote from Aristotle again.

“It makes no small difference, then, whether we form habits of one kind or another from our very youth; it makes a very great difference or, rather, all the difference.”

References

Aristotle - Nichomachean Ethics

Top Ten Tips To Help NQTs With Instilling Fundamental British Values

So you're an Newly Qualified Teacher and you're not sure whether you're really ready to whip a class into a frothing brew of jingoistic nationalism? Don't worry, you're not alone. Luckily the government has done all the difficult thinking about ethics so you don't have to. If you're still too poor, stupid or foreign to understand the difference between right and wrong, then just follow this easy to use guide and you'll have your pupils getting misty eyed over pints on the village green in no time.

1. Have a British Prime Ministers word search ready to go at all times. I remember a more experienced teacher telling me this in my first year and it has never failed me yet.

2. Remember that the best way to teach about Democracy is to give them no experience of it whatsoever.

3. Line them up for as long as it takes you to shriek the National Anthem before letting them in. If they can't manage this, do Jerusalem too.

4. Is your picture of David Cameron's massive face massive enough? One common mistake that NQTs make is not having a truly enormous picture of David Cameron's massive shiny face. Don't get caught out.

5. Establish expectations early by reading the Constitution in its entirety. Yes I know the constitution is uncodified, just read every British law since the Magna Carta. They will respect you for it.

6. Remember that children are basically tiny, X-Box obsessed terrorists: treat them accordingly.

7. DON'T MENTION GOD, EVER.

8. EVEN FOREIGN GODS. ESPECIALLY NOT THEM. WHAT ARE YOU, MENTAL?

9. Don't be afraid to ask from support from people who are more British than you if you're struggling. They will be understanding, after all, they were less British once. Joking.

10. Don't blow your top! just do what the British have always done: keep members of the underclass on standby ready to inflict maximum misery on your enemies whilst affecting surprise and dismay that it 'had to come to this'.

There you go, and best of luck!

Based on an original idea by Tait Coles.

Witness for the Prosecution: On Mary Midgley's "Are You An Illusion?"

In addition to anticipation of divine presence in everyday living, witnessing also involves an affirmation of understanding among Black women, as a collective group, that God had and would work in the lives of church women. On a community level in religious services, church members may take time to give a testimony of how God has moved in their lives. Then, after telling their story, the speaker engages the audience by stating, "Can I get a witness?" 

Within this context, the speaker is asking if anyone has experienced the move of divine intervention similar to her own experiences. In turn, members within the audience express affirmation through hand clapping and shout of "Amen!" 

(A Cultural Case Analysis of the Works of Nannie Helen Burroughs, emphasis mine)

The act of witnessing is not the same as the act of observing. An observer can be silent. A witness can 'be silent no longer'. An observer makes something an object of record. A witness makes something an object for discussion. Mary Midgley, it seems, can be silent no longer.

Her new book, "Are You An Illusion?" (Acumen 2014) is best read as a cry for someone to come forth and stand witness. What has moved in her life is not divine, but it is no less moral for that. What she wishes is to have it acknowledged that we are daily 'told we are mere peasants...:and we may well hear this dictum as a simple insult: "you are nothing"' (Midgley 2014 p.138). This is a message that might be, wrongly, ignored if it was coming from the people of Ferguson, a person with Downs syndrome, a Palestinian. It is interesting, however, to hear this coming from a widely published European thinker of Midgley's standing. Surely she, at least, enjoys the privilege of not needing a witness!? Yet she says not, and what prompts her to do so, in this book, is a philosophical "gap" which she perceives operating in unjust, bullying behaviour.

What this gap is is the "remarkable gap that has opened up between common sense and today's scientific orthodoxy" (ibid. p.1). This, she believes, is becoming a scientistic religious doctrine taken on absolute trust. Much as the wilder parts of Scientology's doctrine, like Xenu the alien overlord, are referred to as a "ring of fire" to separate true believers/zealots, so the "secret knowledge" of some rational materialists runs directly contra common sense and divides the merely intrigued from the high priests. Amongst those she puts in this latter camp are Crick, Greenfield and (of course) Dawkins. The most outlandish claim she identifies is that the self "is not really there", a statement which runs so roughshod over common sense it can surely be wrongfooted by the playground rejoinder, "Who says?"

Midgley's guiding metaphor is of a "garden of knowledge". Humanity, she claims, should be concerned like any gardener lest one "plant" overrun the rest. Science, she says, is a "subculture" which should be kept within bounds. In this she follows thinkers like Williams (1995) in saying "There is no physics but physics": a statement which empowers even as it limits. Meanwhile, Williams says, "morally unimaginative kind of evolutionary reductionists" are "the people I really do dislike." This is presumably because extreme cases like "Less Wrong" certainly seem to contain elements of fanaticism including end-of-the-world elements. Google "Lesswrong cult" if you're interested in this.

Midgley takes pains to defend her argument against the most predictable criticisms, which I will mention. Her target is not, she says, "science" but "scientism". The substance of this debate can be followed in this RSA discussion (Q and A follows a brief presentation). In a brief discussion, Carl Gardener (@carlgardener, well worth following) and I differed on whether she had in fact selected this target as precisely as she claims. Certainly there are criticisms that can and have been made of Midgley's understanding of science especially the old Left/Right brain distinction and her handling of natural scientific concepts (Everitt 2014) but it is in the innovative step she takes to address bullying and injustice that I believe this work becomes interesting. In identifying cyberbullies (p.22) and the specific bullying 'mood' which says or implies "You are nothing", something she conflates with the denial of selfhood, I believe she makes a hugely important point. In three areas she is especially sharp: Testimony, Misogyny and Shame. I'll briefly cover them

The Assault on Testimony

One of the main weapons used in the struggle for civil rights, as well as in the less reported everyday battles of humans to live with dignity, is testimony. However, this is endangered by the ideology which attacks testimony as such. As she puts it, ""Anecdote" is used to discredit any account of concrete events" (Midgley 2014 p.95). That the particular set of behaviours that involve someone who has been bullied opening up their heart are volatile, emotional and not always logically sequenced explicitly should not discredit it. Yet saying "they're just sounding off" is to attempt to do exactly that.

Saying "don't get upset", or recollecting Cameron's "Calm down dear" is not to be seen as harless 'banter', according to Midgley. Rather it is called part of a wider project where everything is "reducible to matter". This makes criticism of the intangible, the 'social' that much harder. This is what Midgley calls, "the assumption that the direct deliverances of our own experiences are worthless" (p.54).

Can I get a witness? No. You can get an observer, and they will watch you closely, and make notes which you will not be allowed to see.

Misogyny

The book is full of striking insights into women in science, and their struggles. Jane Goodall, for example, was apparently discouraged from naming the apes she was observing at first because it was considered to endanger her objectivity. This is now a common practice.

Yet this book does more than just cherry picking some "girls done good". Consider this statement from Joseph Glanvill:

"The Woman in us, still prosecutes a Deceit like that begun in the garden, and our understandings are wedded to an Eve, as fatal as the mother of our miseries. And while things are judged according to their suitableness, or disagreement to the gusto of the fond Feminine, we shall be as far from the tree of knowledge as from that guarded by the Cherubim" (quoted ibid. p.119)

This indifference to the "fond" feminine side of our nature, which seems to be a sort of "secondary" or subjective quality of the world, does two things. Firstly it genders experience in opposition to reason, and secondly imposes a hierarchy on it which denies that equality can ever be. In other words, it is the very substance of what feminism disputed. Even this, however, does not take the new and novel step which we now see taken of saying that experience is "mere nothing". The struggle, therefore, which we see in terms of the "objective" search for access to resources or jobs is not enough. If an essential part of your being, whatever gender you identify as is considered lesser or even "nothing", then we are all mutilated, damaged.

To respond to this, as per the "Testimony" discussion is to become "emotional" and therefore not to be regarded. But we actually can regard this bullying scientism and, perhaps, must.

Shame

The final infamous strategy which struck me on reading this book was the idea that we should be ashamed. Of what, precisely? Of our subjectivity. On this point  her call to arms to those who suspect the rot of bullying has penetrated deeper than we suspect is unequivocal:

"Subjectivity is not a shameful secret" (p.56)

That is to say, we need not feel that our "fond" natures make us weak, pitiful or pathetic. To make another person feel ashamed of what they feel themselves to be ought not have any place in our dealings with one another. What's more, shame becomes terror so easily: our careers, our social standings can feel in danger because we love, feel, dream, intend and fear. Besides which, she says, this is not even the case where people like Dawkins are concerned! For they enjoy a very strong right to command the voice of their own mad God:

"The universe contains, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference"

(Richard Dawkins, quoted Midgley 2014 p.82)

That this voice of "pitiless indifference" is precisely the rhetorical mood Dawkins adopts should give you some idea of who or what he thinks he speaks for.

Conclusion

I have gone on longer than I intended, and I intend to say one thing more. The scientist cause as Midgley paints it is surely lost before it has begun. After all, losing the ability to interact with a majority of people without causing them shame, loss of confidence, and disgust at one half of humanity is not just morally loathsome, it must surely fail a first test of the materialist philosophy that this book criticises, which is that of remaining in touch with the real world. For attitudes are real features of human subjects. If we cannot act in a way which interacts with these, then we're out of touch with a reality! Midgley is not, then, dealing with very thoughtful opponents. She is asking that we join her in witnessing a very particular kind of madness which has some people in its grip, rather than sounding a call to arms. What is needed is not, she seems to think, aggression but honesty.

When, late at night, I flicked through the responses to Dawkins amongst his supporters after his bizarre attack on people with Downs syndrome and saw in their fawning responses the words "sheeple", "idiots", "stupid" flickering on and on, I could not help hearing Midgley's words again: "a simple insult: You are nothing".

I am not. Now, can I get a witness?

The Early Reading "Debate": A False Controversy

In this post I hope to throw light on one way in which learners and instructors are turned against each other. I propose dialogue as a solution and use a disagreement with a colleague over teacher training to address that.

I asked Dr Andrew Davis in my previous post how he thought teachers could improve if there was no such thing as a "method" for them to "try out" by way of improving their practice. You can read his full response on my previous post. Davis' words are in italics throughout.

"Yes- some teachers are better than others, and yes, it’s perfectly reasonable say that some teachers’ approaches are ‘better’ or ‘more effective’ than others. It’s how this should be conceptualised that divides me from those opponents who appear to favour teacher-proof and pupil proof methods, and who appear to believe that such methods have been researched. "

Davis accepts subject knowledge as important, and says that to restate this is "unoriginal". His question regards how we teach anything at all. His contention that the putative "methods" which have come to light can solve the problem of teacher quality are nonsense (I may be overstating this) forms the crux of my question to him: if trainees believe they are improving through applying "methods", as well as state that that is how they are improving, do we not endanger the project of teacher development by undermining the concept? 

In Davis reply his conceptualisation of the question "what is the gap between good subject knowledge and good teaching?" calls to mind the famous "learning paradox". How do trainees get from the A of subject knowledge to the B of great teaching? The learning paradox asks a similar question of how we get from A to B. Plato describes an incident where Socrates leads a slave boy through a number of suppositions and deductions leading him to correctly deduce a geometrical rule. The problem is not what the rule is (subject knowledge) but rather how we arrive at it in a way that is independently understandable. This means the student conceiving of the rule not as something which makes sense "because Sir or Miss says so" but rather the student seeing that the rule stands independent of the situation of being, for example, someone else's inferior in learning, experience, time served etc. The right way of carrying on in, for example, geometry, must seem right to the student regardless of context if we are to regard the knowledge as "taught".

Take the example of grammar. A sentence, as it was taught to me, must contain a verb. To convince a student of this one way might be to give him or her a piece of writing and ask him to find the discrete sentences, and then find the discrete verbs. If this is done after giving the first principle, "sentences will contain verbs" then the student is able to deduce that the rule is indeed the case, independent of the teacher. However, in order for this to happen the student must accept that the page of writing is indeed writing. And how this happens is very mysterious, because it happens in the student's mind. What does it mean for the student to believe that the page of squiggles is indeed a page of writing. I don't mean by this "what is writing?" but rather what is it about writing, and students, that gives them this relationship to each other?

This is paradoxical because without trusting that it is writing the student cannot learn about writing, but without having learned about writing the basis for that trust is unclear. Similarly in Plato's example, the slave boy makes his own inferences, but in a way that is not visible in the situation. He ends up drawing the correct conclusion for himself, but at the beginning he "did not know". Plato concludes, controversially, that we all are born knowing everything, forget it and then subsequently "remember" it through learning.

This is not to say the teacher does nothing. Socrates compares himself to a midwife, "delivering" peoples' knowledge. The pupil, like the expectant mother, is the one who has to push!  How does this compare to Davis' view of what teachers do?

"The practical knowledge of teachers is a kind of practical wisdom or phronesis, in which experienced teachers over the years steadily extend a rich and complex repertoire of strategies from which they constantly select in different ways to suit the pupils with whom they are dealing at any one time. When teachers 'improve', they extend this repertoire, and improve the judgements behind their unceasing selection from their repertoire.

The ‘repertoire’ includes possible pupil tasks, ways in which the teacher might explain an idea – analogies, metaphors, stories, etc, knowledge of relevant resources and appropriate questions that might be put to pupils to advance their knowledge, understanding and thinking."

His response draws on an Aristotelian idea, that of phronesis. His full response then sketches a highly elaborated picture of the different skills a teacher may draw on,  the "differences", the variations which mean "sometimes a word is "read" by attending to context and sometimes not". I am interested in the word "sometimes". In Plato's account of the learning paradox the rule being deduced is not practical wisdom but "sophia" or absolute wisdom. Geometric rules are often conceived of in this form: as immutable, heavenly truths. They are not "sometimes" true. They "just are" true, something the Greeks called "sophia".

However, Plato is as so often using Socrates to hide the other side of the dialectic. Ask a midwife what the "best" way to deliver a baby is and you are likely to hear the kinds of language Davis uses. "Sometimes" it happens one way, women are "different". This is the language of practical wisdom or phronesis. Thus Socrates' characterisation of himself as a "midwife" puts the learning paradox into a new light. Whilst what is "delivered" out of the learner is immutable, it is not "delivered" to the learner in the sense that an industrialist "delivers" on a new order of parts to a customer.

So, if I have understood Davis correctly, we are supposed to conceive of the trainee teacher in the same way as Plato's slave or any other learner; that is to say, the "truths" that they arrive at will be formulated by unique moments of realisation, challenge, failure and frustration. This is because they, like all learners, are different from each other. I quote the final section in full:

"When novice teachers learn from expert teachers, this rarely, if ever, includes any kind of simple copying or mimicking the behaviour of the expert. It is rather a matter of being exposed to the subtle influence of someone with a high level of a particular form of phronesis. If an expert teacher watches a novice, with a view to helping the latter, the help would only rarely consist of the expert saying – ‘At time 'T' in the lesson you should have performed this specific action (said these words, set this specific task, etc)’. It is rather a matter of a dialogue in which the expert helps the novice to review the choices available to her at time T, and to think why alternative actions might have been ‘better’ than those she actually performed. The expert might also come up with more options than the novice was aware of." (my emphasis)

Do I feel my question has been addressed? Well, yes I do and no I do not: yes because I see how the idea of a comprehensive "method" which can meet the needs of all learners is opposed to the idea of a "repertoire" of different things to try as different situations arise. On the other hand, this account remains, quite understandably, oriented towards the view of the trainer rather than the trainee. In the spirit of the abovementioned dialogue, let me put the trainee's imagined view, based on my experience.

I trained more recently than Davis (although far be it from me to rub it in) and with the memories sort-of fresh in my mind let me say that firstly, I now see that a lot of the "techniques" I thought I was seeing I can recognise were far more ad hoc than I imagined. So far, so good: Davis and I appear to agree. Let's take the "technique" of chairs in a circle, full class debates. I once observed an excellent teacher orchestrate this, as I took it, daring 'method' with challenging students. The class were well prepared, contributing, referring to good resources etc. I took the experienced teacher's throwaway comment at the beginning "oh it won't be anything special, just sit and watch and join in if you like" as false modesty when I saw what they accomplished. I now realise that lessons like this in fact will just arise from planning in an experienced teacher's class without them thinking to themselves "today I shall deploy lesson pattern 234.5b Circular Discussion": but I thought that was what they did! In other words I couldn't conceive that the teacher's practical wisdom was creating the students scientific concepts, or that phronesis was creating sophia, OR (most significantly) that unlike was creating like. This is a hard lesson! As I wasn't ready to see this, I HAD to see it in a way it was, by Davis' lights, emphatically not, viz. as a method. So I did.

But seeing it in that way enabled me to get to this point, where I am able to see it differently. I can now see it from Davis' point of view, but very much remember seeing it from the opposite point of view. Was one right then, and the other right now?

This puts us at a pretty pass, and one I am not sure I can bridge. Do we put "teaching methods", then, under the category of "necessary falsehood"? Or do we, instead, confront trainees with the awful/wonderful truth early on: that there are no shortcuts, no hard and fast "solutions", just experience? What might we risk if we do the latter?

Faced with a student teacher doing what so many of them do end up doing, namely sobbing wretchedly, could *I* resist telling them that there was a "Magic Feather" they could carry into the next classroom? "Try this resource/method/programme...it's very good!" And if they do use it, and they have a sudden, dramatic breakthrough with a class, is it even as fictional as Davis is suggesting?

To a good midwife, it is just a question of getting the baby delivered. Nobody cares, when they hold their child in their arms, about whether they delivered it on their elbows, their hands, their knees or in a swimming pool. Similarly, when we know something we did not know before, we don't need anyone else to tell us it is beautiful, and we forget very quickly exactly how we got there. I am always struck by how vague everyone's recollections of school/training actually are, how few actual lessons they can remember, compared to how much wisdom it gave them. This is something teacher trainers must realise: once their students are teachers, none of this will matter to them very much.

My conclusion, then, is that the entire "controversy" over "who is right" begins to look on reflection like an odd curiosity which does not originate in the experience of learning. And if it does not, where then could this highly political, profitable, media-friendly opinion storm originate?

Diagnosing this might relieve us, as a profession, of a lot of anxiety.

Phonics, Snake Oil and Campsites

When you tell someone your area of study is "Philosophy of Education" they quite often ask if you study "Philosophy OR Education?" as if they've misheard. The relationship is not always easy to explain, and I probably do it quite badly very often. The late controversy about the contribution by some philosophers (notably Andrew Davis and Dave Aldridge) to the debate of Systematic Synthetic Phonics has been an extremely good example of how to do it rather well. In the responses to that debate a number of concepts have been deployed that need unpacking. 

One comes when Davis uses his idea that Philosophy can identify a commonly used concept such as "teaching methodology" as meaningless. Sometimes we use the expression "without content" to do this. This means that some concepts , often embarassingly pravalent ones, can be discovered to be like those sets in cowboy films.  These ideas, often rather grand-sounding, can on close examination turn out to be simply clapboard paintings held up by struts at the back.

Naturally enough this turns out to be a problem if you buy what you think is a perfectly serviceable Saloon, perhaps intending to branch out into barkeepin' or piano playin', but then discover you've been sold a clapboard frontage no more profitable than any other billboard. And this happens with ideas too. For a long time people were trained in the use of ideas which turned out to be nonsense such as Newton's concept of the "aether" or, as some now claim, String Theory. I am not a String THeorist myself, or even a physicist but it is quite possible that the idea will turn out to be wrong. Understanding that this is doubtable does not mean understanding it as doubtful. I do not feel under pressure to know everything, so on some matters I am free to say "I understand there are two sides to this."

This does raise the question of bad faith. Someone is in bad faith if they are deliberately misrepresenting a state of affairs even, according to Satre, to themselves. So we can imagine a pair of friends who find each other incredibly tiresome. But they tell themselves that their company is simply delightful! After all, they have been doing it for so long it seems rude not to.

In fact A thinks B a terrific bore and B finds A a rude misanthrope. They are both in bad faith because they

1. Don't make this clear to each other and
2. Don't make this clear to themselves.

Similarly we can imagine our string theorists, if their ideas do not (in fact) have content, pushing their doubts to the back of their minds in their own reflections and discussions because they have a big funding application which they are waiting to hear back on. Of course, string theory remains a field in good standing, and far be it from me to question that with my GCSE maths and reading a couple of New Scientist articles under my belt.

(An honourable counterexample is Frege, who responded to Russell's disproval of his Set Theory of Mathematics by rushing to the printers and insisting they include a chapter at the end of the book denouncing the entire thing for reasons of Russell's paradox.)

Here the objection that philosophers make a lot of fuss about nothing comes in. I obviously am not qualified to talk about String Theory, so what am I on about. I will characterise this complaint as the complaint that "Philosophy needs to be about something"

Of course it does. I here lean on a concept used by C W Joad, at one time the best known philosopher of his generation. Joad explains that the philosopher is like the general brought reports from the various fronts of battle. Necessarily separated from it all, she needs to trust the reports of the various subject specialists. This is so that the energy of enquiry can be deployed in different locations, appropriately. Perhaps Joad's obvious hubris in describing himself as a "General" can be mitigated if we describe the philosopher as a sort of tourist information centre. The philosopher has various leaflets about various attractions: he or she has not visited all of them, but it is obviously in everyone's interest to supply the best information possible so that their visitors are not misdirected. This they do, in their answers to the philosopher in my example. She puts the best picture together she can, and is on the side on the enquirer, always. This means that if one field of knowledge falls into disrepute they are supposed to be the last line of defence, as well as one's first port of call. However, to spend your whole holiday at the tourist information centre might be a mistake.

This is partly because of the history of the field. It is critical to understand that there have always been charlatans, and there still are. This makes the statement "A philosopher cannot dispute facts" highly uncomfortable. On one hand the philosopher has to trust the reports which arrive from the specialists in the field. On the other hand, they need to keep themselves open to all aspects of experience, not just the claims of the specialist. Staying critically active means retaining and working on an ability to consider not what it is for one phenomenon or another to be the case, but rather to consider Being As Such, to try and keep the larger picture in view. In other words, we are considering not only facts, but also the quality of being a fact.

A key part of philosophy, indeed what makes someone trusted as a philosopher at all is, then, their ability to detect snake oil. In my example this is the resort operator who is in bad faith, who has convinced himself, or seeks to convince others that his one star attraction is really a five star deluxe experience. Wittgenstein spoke about some philosophers being "slum landlords" who are horrible compromised by their status and seek to keep people in sub standard accommodation. I am seeking to make a similar point.

This is precisely what Socrates seems to have regarded himself as doing. Ancient Athens contained a number of wealthy people concerned to see their children educated well. If they lived today they would perhaps, in some cases, be setting up Free Schools. At the time what they did was pay men called sophists to teach their children how to debate, make a good impression and so on. Socrates thought all this was nonsense. The young people might have been getting on in the world, passing the trials that made you a man and so on, but they were not getting at the truth. He viewed his task as being the demolition of those sophists in public debate.

This seemed a pretty big risk. Socrates was a soldier, not a nobleman, and he did not seem to have the manners or the breeding to participate in the big public discussions where the sophists dominated. However, his conviction that they were selling snake oil, that theirs were ideas "without content" gave him the courage to take on the task. Ultimately he was sentenced to death for it, but not before claiming a number of scalps and laying the foundations for Plato's academy. It is not for nothing that all philosophy since has been called "footnotes to Plato".

Thus we can see that concern that, for instance, people with vested interests might be deploying an idea like "Systematic Synthetic Phonics" because it is profitable; that it might be a form of sophistry; and that the concepts deployed lack content are not idle fancies. Rather they are concerns, whatever else their foundation, that go to the heart of what the philosophical enterprise is.

To state this, as I have consistently, is not to call the case closed, or even side with Davis, particularly. I am, for example, concerned at how his conception of teaching might provide avenues for teachers to improve. I for one have have used "show me this method" as a shorthand for "help me to improve" in teaching, albeit not the only way of phrasing that question. If this is removed as a question "without content" then I do think his account lacks a way in which I can ask for help from better teachers, or teachers I admire, if I am struggling. It is manifestly the case that some teachers are better than others, that some are providing a better education, or that some embody an ideal of what we wanted to be when we started on this professional path. If Davis regards an idea which many claim helps them to improve their teaching as incoherent, then I  find myself wondering what his view of teacher improvement is. I don't doubt, however, that he has one, and I look forward to discovering it.

Vygotsky: Make Up Your Own Mind

First, this:



This is Brett Wigdortz. He runs Teach First. Teach First put trainee teachers in schools. 

I hope you're not reading this on a phone so you can see the powerpoint slide behind him. What, you are reading it on a phone? Okay, I'll blow it up:

"Vygotskian postmodern pedagogical philosophy of the psychosomatic effects of the in situ geographical elevations of elation and depressions of mortality associated with exceptional graduates addressing education disadvantage."

So the translation would be, I guess, "The clever people we get to be teachers in tough schools go through some ups and downs in their first year and it makes them a bit sadface." I dunno, maybe I got that wrong. 

Why is it written so funny? Well, I think it's a joke I am going to have to explain so explain it I shall. This is a "satire" of what some people call "Edu-Woo" or just "Woo". This is meant to be how philosophers and certain other academics talk. There are some words in it that might not make sense. Let's look at one of them:

Vygotskian: Vygotsky was this ultra badass teacher trainer and psychologist who literally won a lottery which let Jews go to University in Russia at a time when most couldn't, and then dedicated his life to studying the mind until he died of TB tragically young whilst still dictating to students so dedicated to him that they came and sat round the end of his bed and took notes whilst his life ebbed away.

Pretty good, eh?

I mean, if my students like me enough to get me something from the shop I think I'm doing pretty well. 

Lately it's become pretty fashionable to do down Vygotsky because people think he said you should let kids talk when teachers are talking. Now, I haven't read everything he wrote, but I did read "Thinking and Speech" cover to cover this one time and I'm pretty sure he never said that. I know he implies (ibid. p.203) that speech is inferior to writing, and believes social speech is not communication per se but rather an extension of inner monologues. It cannot, therefore, be scientific. That doesn't sound much like the cartoon "progressive" I've seen lampooned.

What else do people think Vygotsky said? Oh yeah, they think he said that kids learn more from each other than from a teacher. 

I never noticed that either - in fact he says their speech is usually "egocentric".

Vygotsky noticed that egocentric speech is very common in small children. He gave them some tasks to do involving blocks. What he did observe, though a series of experiments conducted under controlled, laboratory conditions was that

"The coefficient of egocentric speech nearly doubled when some difficulty or impediment was included in the test."

OR people talk to themselves when things get more difficult.

When I am trying to fix my computer I talk to myself quite a lot

"This fan came from...ugh the bloody thing...I need to...there"

You sound like a crazy person, like children sound most of the time. But that's fair enough, because I mostly only do things I can already do, but they can't do anything, they're gonna talk a lot of stream of consciousness oddness. Also they can't write yet. Mostly I write when my head hurts i.e. when my memory's full.  A lot of my notes are nonsense. So there's that.

Now that quote makes Vygotsky sound like he is very dense and jargon heavy. But he can be incredibly lyrical. At one point he writes

"In the child, there exists no form of thinking divorced from the earth, from needs, wishes and desires"

(Thinking and Speech p.77)

Reading that is the only time an academic text has made me cry. It also seems just right to me, that (as everyone knows) children tell it like it is, that they are straightforward in liking what they like and hating what they hate.

The story of how little human beings come to think scientifically is one Vygotsky calls "Ontogenesis". It's interesting because people will write a lot about the Zone of Proximal Development and all the supposed damage it does to the idea of classroom discipline but very few people want to talk about Ontogenesis. I think that might be because it's a strong rebuttal of the "lightbulb" picture of how knowledge is acquired, and tons of people are paid up card carrying superfans of that.

According to the "lightbulb" picture there is a moment when a child goes "ohhh, I see" and that really is the moment they see.

Vygotsky basically thinks that learning is continual, applied and omnipresent. The notion of a "moment" where the child "gets it" is rubbished in Chapter 4 of Thinking and Speech. There's no moment where you suddenly see, just a life of frustrating gambits and forays into the unknown which is is own reward, which just is learning.

So we come back to Wiggdortz and the "exceptional graduates" who are being invited to laugh at these fusty philosophers and their dead Russian. The language of Teach First, visible on their advertising is "Make a Difference". Very laudable but how you make a difference is, according to Vygotsky, not with "interventions" or "lightbulb" lessons but rather committing to a path and staying on it for the long haul. So the way to make a difference is to provide and progress continuity, to shape the course of things through additions and alterations to the environment over time

"Where the environment does not create the appropriate tasks, advance new demands, or stimulate the development of intellect through new goals."

Thinking and Speech p.132

Fine sentiments, reflected in the words of one of my students recently, "The best teachers never let up." 

I think we could all agree with that but, if that's so, then why make Vygotsky a figure of fun?

Partly it has to do with what Lacan once wrote was "How we all turn out...one line summaries in a book somewhere". I would hate to think that this exemplary teacher, who taught the teachers who taught the generation that built Sputnik, is fated for such treatment. But I do urge you, Teach First "exceptional graduate" or not, go to the source and make up your own mind, and don't be swept along on a tide of sneers.

Mr Toad, Middle Earth and Boris Johnson

This text was written originally for the programme for the London Nautical School production of A. A. Milne's "Toad of Toad Hall".

To say that “The Wind in the Willows” is a strange story is like calling Cambridge a small town with a disproportionate number of Nobel prize-winners in it: an understatement. The tale of a small Mole who finally leaves, like a certain Hobbit, his hole in the ground and discovers Rat, Badger and, of course, the unforgettable Toad has endured because it speaks to a point much greater than its fairytale appearances suggest. Alejandro Jodorowsky, when working on his film version of Frank Herbert's “Dune” confessed he had never actually read it. When it was put to him that that might be a good idea he replied that some stories live in the shared consciousness of mankind, too great and powerful for one version to be definitive. Of this sort, I shall suggest, is Grahame's tale.

It has been a source of inspiration for generations of eccentrics, whether they knew it or not. The original singer of Pink Floyd, Syd Barrett, was considerably under its spell, naming the first Floyd album "The Piper at the Gates of Dawn" after the book's first chapter. The Floyd, that most Cambridge of bands, drew attention to and considerable inspiration from the vision of benign, possibly aristocratic oddballs "larking about" by a river.

The link with Oxbridge and the sixties counterculture is not the only connection to "The Hobbit". Tolkien’s story, "The Willows" Oxford equivalent, reveals in its contrasts the different approaches to learning those institutions have historically affected. The Hobbit is serious, shot through with long poems and concern for the future of the state. Willows, like Cambridge, loves nonsense, the natural world, and replaces high aristocratic elves with faded tweed and stately homes in need of upkeep.

Yet the scenario is fundamentally the same: a small scrap of life, a grammar school boy from the provinces if you like, falls in with an experienced traveller and is embroiled in a conflict which takes in the local great and good as they turf out corruption. It is the amazement of Mole which sustains the story, just as it is Bilbo's wide eyed astonishment at what befalls him which sells The Shire to us in Tolkien's rather po-faced children's book. That Middle Earth has become a media juggernaut whilst Willows remains strictly for the cognoscenti only strengthens the essential contrast.

In the characters he created, Grahame has left on our literature the template of the upper middle classes and lower aristocracy as seen by a debutante. Mole is our eyes, literally blinking in the bright light as he meets the smooth talking young tyro (Rat, takes a third in divinity in the end we somewhat suspect, to no particular consequence), the erudite, brilliant Don (Badger, perhaps published extensively in his youth but lately content to trot out the same lectures from decades old notes) and most memorably, Toad.

Toad is everyone's rich mate. He's the guy you meet during Freshers and go and stay with in the summer. He's the ludicrously generous, immensely funny minor noble who awaits "something turning up" in "the foreign office or whatever". He has no idea what he is studying, but great granddad built the college so what?! In short, he is Boris Johnson in Bullingdon best, tossing a cheque to the proprietor of the restaurant he just smashed up before opening a bottomless bottle of champagne on the night bus and giving most of it away. And like the cat in Monty Python, Mole, who we cut back to, blinks, rubs his eyes, blinks again.

The light which is let in by this story, which penetrates deep into suburban holes, is the promise that life can be lived, that scholarship boys still get invited to the ball, that one can be the " great wheel as it rolls downhill": the same one which Lear's Fool warns us not to cling to. This might not be as bad an idea as the Fool suggests , witness BoJo himself, the master of the Hapless Oaf Gambit, dangled from a high wire during the Olympics, literally rising in everyone's estimations, Parp Parping and Toot Tooting his way to media victory, the master of his private revels.

To declaim that the story is dated, nostalgic and classist is to miss the point: it holds the promise of an endless idyll, where summer never ends and where the weasels never corrupt our institutions for long. So whilst Peter Jackson green screens another six hours of deadly aristo-elf tedium, sit back and enjoy the shambles, like inductees into a great secret: the Piper is still at the Gates, and Dawn just breaking

John Locke dishes out the schoolin'

Mental Hercules, John Locke, starts his Essay on Human Understanding by acknowledging that publishing it got some people pretty cross.

"I have been told that a short Epitome of this volume was condemned by some without reading"

he says, which is something Philosophers have to get used to I suppose. Then he gets into the good stuff, viz. the actual meat of his disagreement with some other Enlightenment dudes. And the meat is BEEF.

Here's how you throw down 18th century style:

"My meaning, I find, is often mistaken, and I have not the good luck to be every where rightly understood."

Absolute mayhem.

Locke is from the oratorical school of acting like a perfect gentleman without giving an inch. It works out pretty well for him because

A) He's John Locke
and
B) The other guy isn't.

Let's see how it plays out ESPN style: slow motion, crunching tackles, big scores.

"Of this the ingenious author of the Discourse Concerning the Nature of Man has given me a late instance, to mention no other. "

Oh no you better not have did!

"For the civility of his expressions, and the candour that belongs to his order, forbid me to think that he would have closed his Preface with an insinuation, "

Did John Locke just praise you in print? You're toast. It's like watching a cat play with a mouse. I can't watch.

"as if in what I had said, Book II. ch. xxvii, concerning the third rule which men refer their actions to, I went about to make virtue vice and vice virtue, unless he had mistaken my meaning;"

Translation: I am going to give you one chance to take that back and then it's CLOBBERIN' TIME!

" which he could not have done if he had given himself the trouble to consider what the argument was I was then upon, and what was the chief design of that chapter, plainly enough set down in the fourth section and those following."

LOCKE SMASH! DID YOU EVEN READ IT!? DID. YOU. EVEN. READ. IT???

So there's that. What I would like to say is look how polite he is. Did he even call him a liar or a retard?  He did not. He was just like "Surely I must have misunderstood, you can't actually mean what you said?"

Textbook Principle of Charity. Try and put the best spin on it you can, do anything possible to save the grace and civil standing of your opponent.

What a chieftain!

My Early Years Years

A few days ago I went back the the nursery where I worked for two years after I left university.

I was a dad at twenty, making me officially a teenage dad by Sure Start's standards. This was something I only discovered once I left the nursery and started working for Sure Start in 2010.

Up to that point I made ends meet at a small nursery in my small hometown, looking after small people. It worked out well because I got a discount rate on looking after my young daughter, who I got to be near to. They were difficult years.

When I went back to the nursery I was amazed at how quickly memories came back. It has changed hands but that's just cosmetics. The building, the path to the front door, the stairwell: walking towards these filled my chest with the burning memory of everything that happened there.

It was a Saturday, so the place was shut. I stopped at the front door and cried a bit.

Then I left, as you do. But the tears were for the struggles, the tantrums, the giggles. Calming down distraught children,  showing them how Lego blocks worked. I remember spending a lot of time showing kids how to play with farm animals and, for some reason, designing pyjamas. There were days when I would work with one extremely disabled boy who liked to run his hands under the water. Parents who spoke no English would be sent to us because people knew we turned nobody away. We would mind their children and navigate the difficulties when their child didn't know the word for "Toilet". I remember the after school club where we got well into Hama Beads and so every parent got about a zillion drinks coasters and those that didn't got smiley faces. Once we made a rocket ship. Another time we made a person size bird's nest and filled it with papier mache eggs.

So much more. A little girl who made a stage out of a drain cover and put on a show in  a language she invented. I remember a puppet theatre performing Noah's Ark and the Ramayana. There was a child who used tesselating blocks to create beautiful mosaics which she coloured in painstakingly.

Mostly there was hours and hours of care, small people wanting to be picked up and put down. My ankles swelled and my knees clicked. My boss had been doing it so long she needed half an hour's warning if I wanted her to get up from the play house. The girls invited me to karaoke and I did "My Old Man's a Dustman". They thought my taste in music was crap, and they really liked "The Script" in the under-ones room. We used to teach the kids to dance to ABBA.

People who make fun of Early Years workers people have never met them, they have never spent time with them. They have no idea what it means to throw yourself into the most critical stage of education, the one that takes your energy and breath away all at once. To belittle an Early Years practitioner is to belittle someone who, in the words of Adrienne Rich,

"Held out the crust of bread (and)
Warmed the liquid vein of life...
Who did what they could."

It was an honour to spend the first part of my life with Early Years workers. Whatever in my professional self is strong, and good, and loving, I learned it first from them.

So as I walked away from my second home, the one where I learned to be a human being in the world, I thought about all of those memories and how time has not tarnished or muddied it. There is a precious value, still, in the care of the young which politics belies. To get to it, you must speak to someone with snot on their trouser leg at toddler-nose height; someone who has changed twenty nappies today, on a rota, and who knows all the words to "Where the Wild Things Are" and "The Cat in the Hat".

When you find that person, tell them they are amazing. They need to hear it.

A Resource is not a Teaching Method

A few years ago I made a big laminated sheet of the sort that teachers sometimes make. It's meant to help with setting expectations around speech. Sometimes these things are useful. Sometimes they aren't. Mostly they aren't, in my case, and I scrap them after a couple of weeks.

This one was of the other kind. It came with me in a taxi from my old school to my new school. If it falls off the wall then looking for a new piece of blue tack becomes an emergency. If I lost it I would be sad. My phone got nicked recently. I would rather they got my phone.

Sometimes people see me teach and they point at this bit of paper and go "that's good". I am not boasting, this happens. The keenest go "Can I have a copy?"

And I say yes. Always.

However, I then usually launch into a big rant about Vygotsky and Michael Sandel, and how Constructivism is a bosh and how I think the Polis functioned in Ancient Greece. See, I want them to see not just the resource but how it came to be, all the teachers and thinkers I have admired, all the students who have challenged me and saved me from dogma. They should, I always think, understand the journey to this point.

Nobody ever does.

See, they want the resource. Why not? It's a good resource. But it will only be mine in my classroom. They may use it better, they may use it worse, but what it means to me in my space surrounded by my expectations and hopes and failings and dreams is Me. It isn't a method I can ever communicate, not unless I can carry them back in time with me whilst putting them behind my eyes.

That's why whenever people talk about Direct Instruction or Group Working or Cognitive Acceleration I sit, I listen , I think, and I wait for them to get their USB out.

You see, I just want your resources. But I love what you do. Big fan of your work.

The Man Who Was Period Five

A door creaked open. Deep inside its yawning mouth there was a soft, eerie fluttering. Old copies of The Morning Star tumbled to the floor, as Gabriel Shelley brushed past them and into the gloom. A narrow wooden shelf ran around the limits of the room and cardboard boxes full of leaflets announcing a rally in support of a Free Palestine littered the floor so that crossing it became a game of chequers where the winner was always Red. There was a soft click as Gabriel's guide eased the door behind them shut.

Without a word he raised his hand and beckoned through to the back of the office.

He knocked on a concealed door and Shelley wondered, for the first  time, if he had made the right decision accompanying him to tonight's meeting. He had heard the rumours. The Enemies of Promise met in complete secrecy, and that no outsider had ever been admitted to their meetings, but there were always rumours: some said that they kept a dungeon full of children who had not been told their level since 2003. Others spoke of an unspeakable ritual involving group discussion, musical plenaries and differentiation by (Shelley remembered how his informant had shuddered) outcome. It was said their leader had trained in the Seventies, that she had once eaten an OFSTED inspector's right arm and Required Improvement in all areas except for Having Something on the Head, it was said...

"Enter."

The voice boomed from the inside the door, and Gabriel Shelley, a young Inspector freshly plucked from the classroom (which he had loved, honest, and he still had lots of friends who he kept in touch with still "hard at it") wandered blinking like a young lamb into the gloom. Would his superiors be pleased that he had penetrated the secret heart of the determined conspiracy to deny the Education Secretary a better job and thousands of children a brighter future through testing? He could not say.

His first impression was one of the massiveness. As he stepped into the Temple of Failure his eyes adjusted and he made out a sixty-foot high ceiling on which was painted - well, he couldn't tell but it looked like it had been done with finger paints. He made out what he thought might be a house, and noticed that nobody had marked it.

Around the room was rack upon rack of "groovy" textbooks. Some he recognised as notorious texts with Ethnic protagonists and lefty morals...there were also sets of games for teaching maths through social construction and a complete set of Vygotsky. The stench of Failure hung in the air, and there were no Standards anywhere.

In the centre of the room a round table was laid out with some Pritt Sticks, a pot of board markers and some sugar paper in the middle. Around it sat four people, five with his guide joining them. He saw an empty seat and wondered for the first time why he had been brought here.

"Greetings" said a hooded figure, "I am Period 1. We have heard much about you"

Another spoke up. This was a cheerful looking man with a tweed jacket who looked like he had never in his life been near a randomised control trial. He bent back his knuckles until they cracked and peered down his nose at Shelley.

"We have heard that you deplore modernity and have expressed the belief that Entrepreneurship should not necessarily be taught at five. Good show, good show. Are you by any chance a Trotskyist?"

A woman with brightly coloured beads, a hemp skirt and zero professionalism Smiled broadly from the right hand side of the table,

"They call me Period 4: feel free to use this time to just emote about your experience of coming here today: and don't mind Period 3, he never wakes up unless it's to agitate for unnecessary strike action which will cost the economy millions, or do the crossword."

A large man with a Che Guevara badge and no drive to raise attainment whatsoever snored beside her.

Suddenly the one they called Period 1 banged a metre rule loudly on the table (though he made no move to enter the incident on SIMS).

"SILENCE!  In the name of Piaget, Marx, The Miners' Strike and Billy Bragg are you prepared to make a solemn oath this night to join The Enemies of Promise?"

Shelley gulped. "You mean..."

"I do. Are you prepared to become Period Five?"

Presenting at the "State of Education" conference, March 1st

I will be presenting at the one day "State of Education" conference on March 1st 2014 at Oxford House, Bethnal Green.

To Book: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/state-of-education-conference-1-march-2014-tickets-10238604943
Programme Details: http://stateofeducation2014.wordpress.com

I will be running an interactive session, The Trend Away from Freedom, on contrasting Enlightenment ideas of Liberty and how they relate to participants' practical experience. It will ask participants to consider what autonomy for teachers and students really amounts to today.

The rest of the programme looks great too, with workshops on alternatives to school, arts education and the place of trade unions in the sector. I am delighted to be involved.

See some of you there, perhaps.

The Empiricist and the Philosopher: a modern unromance

It has lately come to my notice that a lot of people are distinguished (if that is the right word) by an inability to differentiate between these two types of academic work: Philosophical and Empirical. I thought I would try and do everyone a favour by drawing some dividing lines here, before anyone else says anything embarrassing.

Before I start it is fairly axiomatic to me that the truly scientific outlook is indispensable if we are going to survive then next thousand year plus on this planet or indeed any other. If you at any point think you detect me neglecting the principles of repeatability of result, basis of belief in evidence, the separation of matters of faith from matters of knowledge then please, point out to me where I have misstepped and send me an email. I will be really happy to reply.

Secondly, and unhelpfully in my profession (education) as in every other there is the question of certain words acquiring meaning that they do not have outside if that field. One such example is "differentiation". Over time "to differentiate" has come to mean something we do with our plans, resources and delivery in order to make those with specific barriers to learning better able to access the work. Its non specialist meaning is simply to draw a line between, rather as I am doing with this piece of writing. This does not mean that either of these meanings is incorrect: rather it means that we are dependent on the context to work out what reading we are supposed to infer. Of course even then this is language, so nothing is foolproof. Write to me if you need anything clarified, please.

And so to the matter at hand:

The recent controversy sparked by the theoretical piece from Andrew Davis, written as a member of the Philosophy of Education Society of Great Britain (of which I may as well say I am a member) caused a great deal of confusion. I was struck in discussion with perfectly pleasant individuals by the great confusion about a number of points. Three main ones:

The claim the pamphlet was not peer reviewed
The claim the pamphlet did not contain empirical data
The (related) claim the pamphlet was mere speculation

All of these claims seem to me reruns of the same kind of claims which were made when Michael Hand (in fact the general editor of this series) ran his own pamphlet about patriotism and whether it should be taught in schools. Please do keep the word "should" in mind, it will be important.

In a piece in Philosophy Today, Professor Hand reflected on the fallout from writing that article and the fact that, for all the media hoo-ha thus caused he at no point found a newspaper willing to take the fact that a theoretical piece or work had been written seriously on its own merits. That, it was claimed, was mere Opinion. Did he not have some facts, some data, a graph? Something for the headline writers to latch on to.

Now you may sympathise! What right after all does this man have to put out (Profess) his opinion? And this is the situation that Davis found himself in with the publication of his own pamphlet "To read or not to read".  His central claim, to my mind, was that if we are teaching students to do something which has no meaning outside the educational context then we are not teaching them at all. This definition of the limits of the category called "teaching" seemed to some, however, ludicrous. Hence the claims made above.

To claim the pamphlet was not peer reviewed was objectively wrong. The editorial team connected to the publication comprised 11 academics with many years experience between them including eight Professors and advisors to governments past and present. What lies behind this claim is a deep suspicion of theoretical work which amounts to  a virulent anti intellectual positivism which currently blights the sciences.

The second claim, that the pamphlet does not contain substantially new empirical data is true. However, empirical and philosophical questions have important differences between them which are the subject of this essay. Andrew Davis is a philosopher. The type and scope of his research is defined by the limits of his discipline. This is also my response to the third objection: he is a philosopher, this work is theory. Therefore, it is not "speculative" to write what one thinks because in this field what one thinks is precisely the research itself. When Davis says what he has written is the result of three years' work we have no reason to doubt him unless we believe that mental work is not meaningful or real, and if we believe that then quite frankly we should never be anywhere near a classroom.

So, the distinction between the Empirical and the Theoretic then, finally is something like this.

To simplify greatly, scientists produce data based on studies which are repeatable. This data is based on the measure of what we know is measurable. It does not, of course, step into the field of unknown unknowns because nothing does, at least consciously. However, a tree that falls in the forest with no one around to hear it isn't even a Subject so somebody actually has to analyse that stuff. If you show me a bunch of numbers being spat out of an electron microscope or an FMRI scanner I am going to shrug and go "uh?" So it must be admitted that we need analysis.

Now, analysis of data cannot of course be done by laypersons. Various problems will prevail, such as lack of knowledge of terminology, prevalence of personal prejudice, lack of common Lexis to debate findings with and so on.

Partly what Davis was doing was trying to rework the definition of "teach" to prevent abuse of the term. Once the term is abused then it becomes easy misuse it to abuse people. We could think of the bullying cry of "I am just teaching him a lesson" here. One student tried to excuse slapping another in the back of the neck to me recently by saying "I do it every time he makes a mistake...I am helping him become the best version of himself." This appeal to the notion of teaching was supposed to get me on side, but precisely because I do not regard that as teaching or learning I was not vulnerable to the sophistry. This, in very practical terms, is one way to use philosophy in education.

When we discipline ourselves within institutions to improve our theoretical instruments we are doing Philosophy. We owe a debt to that discipline and its contribution to understanding not of what is but of terminology which is meaningful and conceptions of what is ethical, thinkable and non contradictory. These I would placr under the heading of Meaning. An example: I think the nihilism of any view which says that "Numbers go up" is synonymous with progress, not to mention the magical thinking that goes along with it, should be obvious. A philosopher wants to ask "Numbers of what? What's the distribution? What categories are you using? Is there reason to believe this source? What prejudices operate commonly in this area?" Their specialist training invites them to suspend judgement and pass the data through transformative steps so as to view all the currently thinkable possibilities (ideally). Yet people persist in asking philosophers to provide evidence or "prove it". Headline writers want things boiled down. Busy ministers want the "key points". But these are not statements which can be cramped and offered into inspirational quotes for your Facebook wall. Rather they are systems of thought which, once inducted into them, we have historically found to be useful when it comes to reading and making sense out of evidence. It is a dirty trick to try and ask someone to justify themselves with evidence when, for example, they are discussing ethics. If you are in Rwanda during a genocide and somebody asks you to show what evidence you can find that the genocide should stop you are going to be stumped. There is only evidence of genocide! As Hume observed though, no is implies an ought. Theoretical work continually asks what we should do, what we should say, how we should interpret the world. It is a naturalistic fallacy to expect the way of the world to always tell us everything we need to know.

Of course if theory never links up with data then that is a terrible shame, but it is a failure which damages both the facts and the ideas. "So much the worse for the facts", as Vygotsky writes.

In education right now test data is produced at a very impressive rate which computers only serve to speed up. There is an absence of high quality public analysis precisely because the production of data has become the objective, rather than the synthesis of the two disciplines of theory and practice: Philosophy and Evidence Gathering. Computers can't do theory, so it is impossible to expect analysis to keep pace with data. This means certain key areas of professional and public life need to slow down if we are going to make sense of what is happening. That very modern phenomenon, the "man in a hurry" is going to have to learn that some things don't come in ticker tape, news feed form.

And this must happen, if we believe in a future. We cannot expect progress in human knowledge and understanding without the proper marriage of evidence and analysis. It is to everyone's detriment if our suspicion of "mere" opinion is allowed to stifle public reason, the selfsame public reason the exercise of which has, for some*, been synonymous with Freedom

*Kant

Debts to: Jan Derry, Vygotsky, Hume, Kant, Michael Hand, Andrew Davis

The Child is the God of Capitalist Man

The Child is the God of Capitalist man.  What does this imply?

One consequence of ceasing to care for eternity is imprisonment in the present. This gives the busybody, the overworked go getter who can no longer enjoy their life and bustles frantically hither and yon,  a problem. They are of an instant vulnerable to a simple question, that being

"Why do you do it all?"

As they hurtle towards burnout these useful nodes in the corporate machine do not, of course, have the notion that they might want the whole beastly business over and done with. So they say, as Weber observed, not 'for the glory of God', which was the serf's answer, but "I am doing it for my kids".

Tricky situation for a six year old to find themselves in, sitting on the heavenly throne; is it any wonder that they get confused?

Of course it is hardly the case that we treat them as divinites all the time. There is nothing so disappointing as a failed God,and so the Child has scorn poured on it when it fails to act as the Almighty ought (and who decides how the Almighty ought to do anything? That's Capitalism, folks).

Thus just as the real God of the Feudal age was the Agricultural year, the Child is only a sacrificial Corn God of the Aztek year. The youth is worshipped and then consumed in fire and sacrifice. The whole cycle is played out on the symbolic plane within the ritual circle of celebrity. Pity the poor things and, for that matter, the adults who, their time of divinity long over, instead wander the plains of cultural desolation, worshipping what they used to be, unwilling to leave it behind.