Stupid clever people

Public enemy of promise number one, Guy Claxton, believes Michael Gove would rather schools produce thousands of lawyers and no powerful learners...

A lot of water has flowed under the bridge since I and 99 other muddle-headed academics signed the letter in The Independent, protesting about Mr Gove’s new curricula, that led him to dub us the ‘enemies of promise’.

We were those who wanted to ‘hold children back’, remember? Well, who is right, I wonder?

I suggested in the first article in this series that Mr Gove’s powers of reasoning might not be all he thinks they are. It’s becoming clear to me that he is in fact a paid-up member of a small but influential club that we might call Stupid Clever Important People, or SCIPs. They are people who do not actually think about things, they just decide what’s right and then use all the clever rhetorical wiles they can muster – like calling people names if they don’t agree with you – to promote and defend the leapt-to conclusion. Members of the SCIPs Club share a delusion: they think they are successes of the education system but actually they are failures, because they have learned to be barristers, good at winning cases, rather than explorers, good at working their way towards the truth. The novelist Dorothy L.

Sayers once said that ‘Most people would die sooner than think – and most people do’ – and a lot of them end up in high places, it seems.

You may recall the report in the Times Ed a year or so ago of the army of clever 17-year-olds who were berating their teachers for not having prepared them properly for their Oxbridge interviews. Why? Because they found, to their horror, that those tricky admissions tutors were asking them questions which their teachers had not anticipated, and so they had to try to think on their feet. And they didn’t know how to do that, and they didn’t like it. They had plenty of readymade answers which those tricky dons side-stepped – precisely because they wanted to find out if the youngsters could think and explore a question, rather than regurgitate what they had mugged up. They were going to go on and get those 4 As at Alevel, but they had not been prepared to be powerful learners. And that’s what Mr Gove seems to want schools to produce – thousands of lawyers, and no powerful learners. And he is a SCIP because he doesn’t seem able to tell the difference.

How many times do we have to say it? Approaches like BLP are not against acquiring knowledge and helping youngsters get good grades. We are against teaching methods that dull their ability to think and learn in the process. We want you to understand ‘and’, Mr Gove – literacy and learning power; knowledge and the confidence to do more with it than knock out approved and bite-sized little essays. That’s why, in a BLP school, you are unlikely to find Year 6s anxiously mugging up right answers to past SATs papers. They are much more likely to be designing SATs questions for each other – and critiquing them and making them harder and more interesting (as I saw them doing in Sarah Jackson’s Year 6 class at Christchurch Primary School in Bradford-on-Avon a good many years ago now). BLP kids grow to like difficulty because it stretches them to learn and makes them think; and they know that out in the big wide world, learning and thinking are what they will need – not the ability to recite the Kings and Queens of England.

In one of the pioneering BLP primary schools that we evaluated carefully in The Learning Powered School, the researcher asked little Daneisha, aged 6, what she thoughts of BLP. She said it had helped her become more ‘resilient’. “What do you mean?” asked the researcher.

“Well,” she said, “it’s like, if something’s hard you don’t want to say, ‘Oh this is hard, this is hard. I’ll just skip it’. You try because if you don’t try, what’s the point? Because when you grow up you might come to some answer you’ll still not know, and you can’t skip it then.”

Daniesha is going to do well on the tests because she is discovering how to bring resilience and resourcefulness to whatever she does. She is learning to be brave, rather than just correct. The irony is that by becoming braver, she will master things faster, dig deeper and understand better – and so do better on the tests. And that, sadly, is what the self-congratulatory members of the SCIPs Club don’t seem able to understand.