Johnny Ball - “All education is theft”

Johnny Ball on his instaitiable appetite for homework, letting kids be kids, and why if you’re going to steal, you should steal from the best...

Teach Primary: Where did you go to primary school – and do you remember your first day?

Johnny Ball: It was in Kingswood, just outside Bristol – and yes, I do. I wouldn’t drink my little bottle of milk, because it smelt off, so I was kept in at playtime by a dragon of a teacher with a wart that had a hair on the end of it. It didn’t bode well… but things got better very quickly. I loved primary school, in fact. I don’t remember any animosity, or bullying. Nothing untoward.

This must have been towards the end of WWII; how did that affect your education?

Well, I was five in 1943, so the Blitz was over by then, although we still had to wear gas masks sometimes. I do remember one thing we used to do: shoes had to last, you see, because all the leather had gone to the forces. So everyone had hobnails attached to their soles. The playground was asphalt, but pretty smooth, and we used to form a chain and drag the other kids around. The one at the back had to hang on with both hands, and sparks would come off his studs as we slid, really fast, like we were on ice. The fun was in whizzing them into the toilet wall; you had to have the nous to let go at exactly the right time. It was quite dangerous; but we loved it. We made sledges out of the Anderson shelter, too – the galvanised steel would have cut our heads off if they’d turned over, but we weren’t worried about that as we slid them down the country roads. We were very adventurous.

How easy were you to teach as a small boy?

You don’t know, do you? But apart from never drinking my milk – I hated milk! - I was never in any trouble. I was top, or near the top, in most subjects – especially maths, which I found really exciting. When I was about seven or eight, a few of us started banging our fists on desks, shouting, “We want homework! We want homework!” We weren’t supposed to have homework for another two years, but our teacher gave us Xerox sheets with a hundred simple sums on. He said he’d be pleased if we did ten of them, but I finished the whole lot, sitting at the kitchen table with the radio playing comedy and variety shows in the background. It was a happy time.

Do you get into primary schools often these days?

Yes - but I only talk to kids from age nine and upwards. Because below that, although I love the children, I can’t really get enough pace to cover what I want to in the time I have. The structure of my lectures is always the same, but I turn the screw differently to make them age appropriate; and there’s a subtlety about that, which is that if you tell a child, “I’m teaching you this, but it’s really for children two years older than you”, then you’ll have him eating out of your hand. At the same time, though, you have to remember what age they really are, and not try and give them a maturity they haven’t yet achieved. You’ve got to let kids be kids; I hate it when I hear a teacher say, “no running!” Yes, they should probably walk in and out of the school gates, but otherwise, running is what children do, isn’t it? I ran everywhere as a child. And still I ski at 75, because my legs are strong enough. Our couch potato kids I doubt will be physically as strong, and I worry about that.

What do you think about the increasing use of technology in classrooms?

You start to love learning when you realise how powerful it makes you to pick up a new skill. Technology can help with that tremendously – it’s great when kids latch onto the fact that they can sit down in front of a screen, tap a few buttons, and do something they couldn’t do yesterday. So we need to find a way of using that, directing them in the right way to enhance their learning. Technology can’t replace a teacher. And, frankly, it can’t improve a bad teacher very much. But a good teacher will use it to enrich what he or she is already doing.

Do you use it?

I have to admit, I’m a luddite. But for me, it’s about finding and sharing great images that get children excited about what they’re learning, right from the start. My lectures always begin with pictures on a screen of things that are inspiring. For example, I show them Leonardo da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man, and explain that it’s an aid to measurement. The kids can work out that when they stand with their hands outstretched, it’s almost the same distance as their height – that’s why the man is in a square. And despite what most people think, halfway up your body is your hipbone, not your belly button. The naval is the centre of the circle, not the square.

But the really interesting point to make, is that when you ask, “Where did the great Leonardo da Vinci get this idea from?” the answer is the secret to all education: he nicked it. He stole it from a Roman called Vitruvius (who is the only person who ever told us that Archmedes ran down the road in the nude shouting ‘Eureka!’) All education is theft, and so, if you’re going to steal, it makes sense to steal from the best. That’s what you can do with technology – you can open up your kids to the thoughts and works of the very greatest minds in history. And if they grab that information, and absorb it, there’s no reason why the next step they take shouldn’t be beyond the genius that produced it so far. Leonardo da Vinci was unusual in his time. But technology gives us the possibility of thousands of geniuses, in every walk of life. It’s fabulous!

Have you been following the progress of the new curriculum that will be implemented from September?

In my opinion, the curriculum is not there to teach children. It’s there to explore, evaluate and examine teachers and teaching. It’s a yardstick and that’s all it is: “We can’t measure everything, so let’s assess a narrow slice in the middle”. I would say a good school should never spend more than two third of its teaching time on the curriculum. One third should be taking the kids wherever they want to go… and all of it should be enjoyable. You’re only teaching kids how to learn. If they leave your school knowing how to use maths, to understand literature, art and music, to read and look things up and do it themselves – then they’ve learnt how to learn; and that’s all you want from them.