Milestones

Last year was one of those 'milestones' in life in a number of ways. It was the fiftieth anniversary of my finishing my 'formal' schooling. It marked the point at which I found myself launched, unprepared and without a map or a compass into the world of 'work'. I don't think I was the only one to have that feeling as we walked out of the school gates for the last time as pupils. For myself, beyond some vague ideas about becoming a priest (I'd passed the selection process, but been told I had to first work for three years), doing - perhaps - military service (it was on a ballot system) or 'going to sea' somehow, I'd not the faintest idea of what sort of 'work' I could do, let alone look for. University was not an option, my parents couldn't afford it, and even had they been able to, I managed to NOT pass the key subject, Mathematics.

As I quickly discovered, that limited my options quite considerably. I got lucky, my father's boss arranged for me to be interviewed by Barclays Bank, and much to my surprise, they hired me. So last month saw me report for my first day at work in the Main Street Branch - which was a Regional Head Office - of Barclays Bank DCO. I worked for them for three years, and I think it is true to say that was long enough to know I didn't suit banking. A spell trying to explore my vocation at Theological College ended in my taking a post as a travel agent as I simply did not have the support necessary to survive three years with no income. I tried sales (my grandfather ran his own 'agency' business, but I wasn't working for him), I tried clerical, the civil service (Customs and Excise) and I tried the fire service.

Fifty years, three marriages and three children (all from the first) later I look back on a career that now spans two continents and covers a little over 36 years between South Africa and the UK. It has taken me to the Romania, Poland, Kazahkstan, the US, the Caribbean, West Africa, Thailand, Indonesia, Australia, New Zealand and the Philippines. It also led to my eventually meeting and marrying my wife.

As I sat on the benches at the Founder's Day Ceremony at Selborne College last October I could not help but marvel at how much I've experienced, and how much I've seen and done since that day in 1964 that I walked out of the Lukin Road gate for the last time. I was saddened to learn how many of my former school mates were no longer with us, astonished at the journey many more have made, and delighted to see around thirty of them at the reunion. Here are some photos ...

The School's War Memorial, installed in 1920 to commemorate the former Old Boys who died in 1914 - 18. They fell in France, Belgium, Turkey, East Africa and in various oceans as well. The list enlarged to include 1939 - 45 and the subsequent 'Bush Wars'.

The Ceremony of the Key. Each year a representative of the incoming Matriculation Class is selected by his fellow pupils as the next 'Custodian of the Key' and the Changing of the Guard on the Memorial is marked by the handing over of the Key. The Ceremony has been performed since 1921 and the boys parading for this are now entirely volunteers.

Probably the only mark of my passage through the school. I subscribed to a campaign to raise money for the future of the school, so my name appears beneath my father's and above that of a friend I made in 1957. My 'Old Friend', as he likes to remind me ... OK, OK, so he's six months my senior ...

Conflicts of Message

I cannot help wondering why there is so much “surprise” among liberals, the media, and the families of those who have gone off to indulge in a little ‘Holy War’ in Syria/Iraq. I am sure those who have been on TV and in the Press discussing the issues of how the children of immigrants, or the grandchildren in some cases, have turned their backs on Britain, or have become ‘disaffected’ by our society, are intelligent people. Unfortunately they seem to be totally blind to several, to my mind, very important points. 

First, let me be clear, I am an immigrant. I arrived in the UK at the age of 40 with a wife and three very young children. My wife and I were of British and European descent, but even so we were aware from the first of some very large cultural differences between what we had left and what we had now joined. We made a very definite decision to put aside everything we had known and embrace fully the ‘British’ way of doing things. It certainly wasn’t easy, and we had no safety net, no back-up of friends and relatives to lean on as we stumbled from one trip hazard to the next. But we survived. And our children are now adults, UK educated, UK integrated, and know no other ‘culture’. It hasn’t been easy for them either, but they have adapted and adjusted and that makes me very proud of them. 

This was why, when the cult of “Multi-Culty” first took off in the 1990s I wanted nothing to do with it. I predicted then, and I am now convinced I was right, that it would lead to division, conflict and tears. Consider this scenario; A family migrates from a non-European culture seeking better opportunities, better living standards, better education. They arrive, they find a home, employment and settle the children into schools - but they keep their own ‘culture’ at home. Immediately the children are isolated because they never have the chance to see how others live. Their parents continue to dress in the clothes they wore in the ‘old’ country, continue to speak the ‘old’ language (in some instances the mother is actively discouraged from learning English) and when they come home from school or work they eat the food of the ‘old’ country, speak the language and dress as they did there. Yet, as one young woman in this position candidly told the BBC, when she went ‘home’ on a visit to her parent’s family, she was treated as a stranger, a non-member of that community and told she was not of that ‘people’ any longer. 

But, back in the UK, she is told she is, or that though she lives in Britain, is British, has been educated and raised in Britain, she must keep her ‘cultural roots’ and practice her own culture, not the British one. As she remarked, she has a sense of no longer belonging anywhere, so why are we surprised when the children of immigrants feel they have no identity with the country that has educated, housed, fed and employed them? I assume the well intentioned injunction to ‘keep your own ethnicity, culture, etc.’, mantra was supposed to make them feel at home, but it has had the opposite effect in fact. How can I be British if I wear clothes more suited to the deserts of Arabia or the Indian sub-continent? How can I be British when I go home and have to speak a language from the Middle East or somewhere else because my parents haven’t learned to speak English?

Several commentators have in recent days held forth at some length on the subject of why these young men might have become ‘disillusioned’ with Western society. Some blame ‘British Culture’ for the alienation, one gave the excuse that ‘Britons have failed to understand the other cultures in our midst’. It seems the promoters of ‘Multi-culturalism’ simply cannot bring themselves to acknowledge that many of these recent immigrant cultures are at complete odds with our own, and the stress created by trying to maintain one which clashes on almost everything ‘British’ is bound to cause a problem. It is interesting that some of the parents involved appeared on television in the clothing of their homelands, not in what might be considered ‘Western’ dress. If, at home, the children have been encouraged to think of themselves as belonging to a different society to the one they are living in, why are their parents surprised that the children don’t respect the culture they live in?

Changing countries is not easy, and there is always a danger of handing down to the next generation an idyllic picture of ‘the Old Country’. The danger is that the next generation then develop that mythology - an example would be the idea that in a society ruled by Sharia Law would be a better regulated society, women would be in the home, behaving modestly, family honour would be protected, girls would do as they were told, and so on. Then they are faced with the reality of modern Britain. Morals are not those taught in the Quran, Sharia Law is not recognised, the majority of people either have no faith, or are Dhimmi’, women are allowed to do as they please and religion does not govern peoples’ lives. It certainly doesn’t take much persuasion to convince gullible young men to campaign for a ‘Religious State’ and the imposition of the idyllic society their parents have projected.

Add to this the officially promoted kowtow to every demand for these minority immigrant groups at ‘official’ level, which is resented and resisted at street level, and you have a youth which feels it does not belong. Their roots are not British, at home they do not experience ‘British’ home life, and they don’t fully experience what might be called ‘British life’ at all. Nor do they want to. They don’t go to Pubs with their ‘mates’, they don’t go ‘Clubbing’ with their girlfriends (officially at least), and tend to form friendships only with those from their own background and culture. So why do they stay?

A cynic might say that it is because they would find it difficult to survive if they went back to the ‘Old Country’. They might not get the Income Support, Housing Benefit or whatever, and they would certainly not enjoy the freedom they currently have, or the access to health care, education and leisure. Plus, they would find themselves to be strangers in a land not quite what they had been led to expect.

The lady commentator from a Pakistani background touched on a part of it when she said that when she visits Pakistan, she is definitely not regarded as anything other than someone from Britain, and not a Pakistani. If you were born in Britain, you are, at least in legal terms, British, and not whatever your parents ethnic background might be. But that also creates a conflict. 

The cultural conflict is not one we have had to face before this. I am frequently told that Britain is the ‘great melting pot’. That previous waves of immigrants have settled, retained their unique cultures and integrated. Oops, there’s the problem. Integrated. Those earlier waves of immigrants came from European cultures. The early Brythic peoples were followed by the Celts, the Gaels, the Romans, the Angles, Jutes, Saxons, Danes, Normans - and later the ‘quiet’ invasions, the Flemish, the French Huguenots, European Jews, Dutch, Polish, and others - all from Europe. They settled, they integrated, spoke English, dressed as we do, accepted British law, the authority of our courts, Parliament and so on. 

With Multi-culturalism, that is not happening. In fact it is being promoted as a bad thing to happen. So why are we surprised that we now have the children of immigrants who have a golden mythological vision of the society their parents left; a disaffection for the British culture and heritage (which they are constantly told isn’t theirs), and a burning desire to make it change to their vision of Utopia?

We reap what we sow. Unfortunately, those who sowed the seeds of “Multi-Culti” refuse to accept responsibility for the harvest we must all now reap. 

Science versus Dogma; The Teaching Methods versus Learning Dichotomy

Some days ago, my good friend Josephus, a man some may know, very well versed in the subject of 'teaching' and 'learning', sent me an article from The Spectator. Somewhat provocatively titled "Teacher Trainings War on Science", it discusses the conflict between what is taught in teacher training colleges and courses today, with what scientific studies of how children learn tells us about how best to teach. For at least the last fifty years, teachers have been taught, and curricula arranged, around the concept of 'facilitating learning' and 'encouraging' development by surrounding a child with tasks designed to expose them to information and knowledge which, so the theory goers, they will successfully 'absorb'.

My own experience at school rather inclines me toward the scientific results, which is that the best way to impart the basic knowledge is by 'rote' and 'lecture' or 'I tell; you listen and absorb' sessions. Once the key knowledge is in place, the wider skills of application, understanding, analysis and so on can be developed. Now I have to confess that I am in two minds about some, at least, of this. Again, my own experience suggests that MY learning style (and I stress it is individual) is that I learn best as part of a group. Certainly in my primary school days, a lot of this was learning by 'rote' with the whole class reciting the Multiplication Tables, or following the teacher's pointer as he or she had us read words from a blackboard, or do sums and so on. We learned to recognise certain relationships between numbers and sets of numbers or letters. Unconsciously, we were learning to apply the basic knowledge we'd acquired by 'rote'.

Josephus, in his note accompanying this wrote - 

I'd get boring if I tried this one, a result of being an BEd undergrad in the early 70s, two years of Masters research mid/late nineties into curriculum design and seven years of EdD post-grad research more recently.

The two ideas that have influenced me though are firstly, the words of a fellow student at Birmingham who, like me, focused on working professionals (Nurses) rather than children.  She told us one day that her faculty had just commissioned a series of six, new-build, tiered lecture theatres (I had told our group how the ones at the College were being used less and less as the government had told us that "lectures don't work.") for the first-year nursing undergrads.  Apparently, in the seminar and study group environment of the first of the then "new" nursing graduate courses, all the (mostly young girls) could contribute was a discussion about their mobile phones, so semester one of the course became didactic knowledge transfer in the lecture room, lecture wall to wall week after week; semester two could then have discussion groups developing understanding from the knowledge imparted in those lectures.

The second one is from my favourite educational psychologist, still not popular but more approachable in modern translations (He was a pre-Stalin era Russian.) 

"Practical experience also shows that direct teaching of concepts is impossible and fruitless.  A teacher who tries to do this usually accomplishes nothing but empty verbalism, a parrotlike repetition of words by the child, simulating a knowledge of the corresponding concepts but actually covering up a vacuum."
Vygotsky, L. (1986)  critical analysis of thought and language  MIT Press; Boston, Mass.
p.150 

The third question I often dwell upon relates to several photographs of "learning environments" that I used for some outline research in 2006,  most people I surveyed who could read, write and count, preferred the image of 1950s children sitting at attention, some with hands on their heads, to the brightly decorated, small group tables of the modern primary school room when asked to think about multiplication tables. 

Now, according to the scientific study, that acquisition of the base knowledge is not being efficiently acquired, and this impacts heavily on the performance of the students as they advance through their education. That would certainly seem to be in accordance with my experience again. Through contracting a rather nasty illness just at the start of my High School years, I missed the vital foundations as my contemporaries started to learn Algebra. I never managed to catch up, and, as anyone who has done Mathematics knows, Algebra is more or less the absolute 'key' to Trigonometry and almost all the rest of Mathematics. Ironically, Geometry I mastered - because I was able to learn a great deal of the underlying principles by 'rote', but Trigonometry remained a mystery as did Algebra. That has had a major influence on my career path, closing the door to my original ambition of 'going to sea', and even in my ultimate career as a firefighter/fire officer, I eventually had to (in my 30s) get lessons in the basic mathematics that had stumped me at school in order to pass the promotion exams, make sense of hydraulic formulae and eventually develop my knowledge in the 'engineering' required for fire safety enforcement.  

The Spectator article has the statement, from the thinking prevalent in Teacher Training - 

Schools and traditional subject boundaries are silos which stifle the natural creativity we all have within us. And this last fact especially: there is no point teaching a body of knowledge, because within a few years it will be outdated and useless. Don’t teach the what, teach the how. ‘Drill and kill’ and ‘chalk and talk’ will lead to passive and unhappy pupils.

This is where it does get rather interesting, since, as I've said above, I have found that the knowledge I did acquire in the 'old' methods of 'Drill and Kill' and 'Chalk and Talk' was what stuck most effectively, and has been absolutley vital in my later learning. Even as an adult, I needed and still need, the stimulus of listening to someone knowledgable to fire up what passes for my intellect and to give me the basic foundation on which I can build some new understanding or knowledge. Perhaps the 'educationists' do need to reconsider their position. The more we learn about how our brains work, and about how we learn, the more it appears the Educational Establishment needs to adjust their ideas. 

Something both Josephus and I have noted increasingly over our years in training and Adult education is that 'skills' and 'base knowledge' we took for granted in our generation, were simply not present in our students. Where we could stand in front of a class and do mental arithmetic on a white board, our students were frantically trying to find calculators and it came down to what we were carrying around in our heads from our days at school. As Josephus said at the tail of his letter - 

Funny how we of a "certain age" can still carry out mental arithmetic in our dotage when rote learning is so terribly ineffective...

As is said in another field - the science would seem to be 'settled' on this. The evidence is there, but I suspect there are a lot of careers now so vested in denouncing 'rote' learning and teaching, it will take an earth shattering event to get a change. And that could be on the horizon, since the 'League Tables' so beloved of Whitehall show that 'immigrant' students are outperforming their UK contemporaries. Whitehall refuses to break these down in a way that would permit anyone to identify the immigrant children's background or origins, but teachers themselves often remark on the fact that certain ethnic groups seem to have a better grasp of things that can be taught by 'rote' very efficiently, than the other children. One or two have made the connection - most of those immigrant children come from countries where 'teaching by rote' is still done, and, having learned the technique - that is how these kids study at home.

The final word from The Spectator - 

More and more teachers are realising the gap between the theory they are taught and their practical experience. More and more books are being published which explain the insights of cognitive science and the implications they have for classroom teachers. Instead of the warmed-through fads of the past century, I think the next few years will see evidence-based reforms that lead to genuine educational improvements.