Thursday 14 August 2014

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.

1 comment:

Unknown said...

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.

Here are one or two thoughts, though I know that, at best they are no more than a few faltering steps towards an answer.

How should we conceptualise teacher expertise? It’s scarcely original to claim that part of this is definitely knowledge, and subject knowledge in particular. A good maths teacher has rich, ‘connected’ understanding of her subject. Equally unoriginal is the reminder that subject knowledge is necessary but not sufficient for good teaching.

One of my many problems in coming up with the rest of the story is that it defies simple codification, or so I believe. It is a million miles away from a set of rules or injunctions of the form – whenever children need to learn X, you, the teacher, do Y (say the following, set such and such a task, etc.)

What, then, can be said? 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. Some years ago someone, I forget who, called this 'vernacular pedagogy'.

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.

For instance, the expert teacher of early reading will be in possession of a comprehensive knowledge of English orthography, together with acquaintance with at least some of the excellent phonics schemes currently on the market and the ways these might be used with young children. The teacher will also appreciate the differences between decoding and reading for meaning, and the subtle interactions that frequently exist between operating at the level of meaning and working out how to say a word. She will grasp the fact that sometimes a word is ‘read’ by attending to its context, and may well be read and understood before the reader knows how to pronounce it.
She will be alert to the differences between the children in her care, and to the fact that although phonics, whether ‘synthetic’, ‘analytic’, ‘linguistic’ or some other version is helpful to many children, the timing of phonics-informed approaches, and the extent to which such approaches are used may need to vary from one child to another.

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.