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.