Jamie's Dream School part 2

The most recent episode I viewed was particularly telling in the way that it concentrated on the students rather more. Two issues stood out particularly.

1) Alvin Hall turned up to teach some maths. He has an amazing work ethic and burns with intelligent energy and charm. Having spent a long night trying to come up with a lesson plan that would work, it did and it was great to see the enthusiasm he managed to provoke in some students. What was far more interesting was his blunt honesty. In an address to camera he said that he was a bit surprised to hear Jamie and the others refer to the students as 'bright', and that there must be a difference in definition between the US and the UK. He acknowledged that they might be wily and have some emotional intelligence, but that they were certainly not academically able. Which was a refreshing light to cast on this programme. In education and the politics of education it seems that it is no longer acceptable to say that kids aren't bright (in the US sense). Rather, that they have been denied the right to be bright (there's a campaign slogan in the making).

It takes me back to my teaching days at a union conference where one delegate demanded that teachers abandon the concept of failure in favour of 'deferred success'. That bizarrely wonderful idea has no useful application in education as the system stands. Schools are largely geared up to, and measured by, one standard - academic success. By that measure these kids have undeniably failed. And rather than admit that the current system is outdated successive governments have poured money in to try and make it work. The consequences of this are twofold.

Firstly, the academic bar has to be lowered in order to generate success, or even the potential of success. The implication is that you just have to find the right trigger to release a student’s innate ‘brightness’. This takes the burden of responsibility off the shoulders of the student and places it onto the education system and the teachers who are tasked with making it ‘work’. The first casualty of this approach is the need for failing students, and their apologists, to recognise the need to meet the system half way by being prepared to work hard at getting results, and by applying the ‘self-discipline’ that Alvin Hall cited as the root of his success, and rise out of poverty.

Secondly, because of the refusal to embrace the notion that intelligence is the product of self-discipline, effort and a degree of opportunity, educators are forced to allocate disproportionate resources to underachievers at the inevitable expense of those who are willing to work to get results. Even with the fortune that is being thrown at the students of Jamie Oliver’s Dream School, the outcome so far has been less than impressive. Certainly to lavish such resources on a national scale would bankrupt a country far more quickly than any amount of city financier shysters could.

So, what is the answer? Well, that depends on whether we can shift the present educational paradigm away from simply validating academic intelligence. We need an education system that is fit for purpose; i.e. recognising which intelligence traits a student possesses and then tailoring their education to develop their strengths (assuming they do have some – only a small minority of people don’t have some ability in the range of intelligences that have been identified). This means completely reorganising the education system. But that need not cost the earth. Indeed, given the present willingness to spend billions on making tiny increments of improvement at the bottom end of the scale, one can’t help wondering if it would be cheaper as well as more productive to simply scrap the education system and start afresh.

The alternative is to stick with the existing education system, that was constructed to serve the needs of the nation nearly two hundred years ago. We stick with the failing formula of kids being bundled together purely by virtue of their age (thereby refusing to acknowledge their manifold differences of ability, maturity, gender, temperament etc). We thrust a curriculum down their throats that has increasingly little relevance to the rapidly changing world. We insist that there is only one form of success that is meaningful in the education system – academic achievement. Accordingly we dedicate resources to those that can and want to achieve and accept that the remainder will be casualties of the system.

I know this has considerable appeal to the Darwinist right in politics, but it is a bit of a skewed view of the ‘survival of the fittest’ principle. It’s a bit like saying the only successful species are those that can run fast, and that, perforce, rules out a whole host of alternatives: what about those who can fly fast, or swim fast? What about those species that can climb higher or burrow deeper? What about those who live longest or propagate on the greatest scale? The beauty of the human species is that it is far more adaptable than others, and that it has the adaptive intelligence to do all those things: run, fly, swim, climb, tunnel, prolong life and reproduce with alacrity. In order to flourish we need to find ways to exploit the diversity of skills we have. The tragedy at present is that we seem wed to the notion of a very limited definition of achievement. If you aren’t intelligent, rich, famous, or a sports star then you are a failure – whatever other skills you may possess in abundance. But because we don’t want to think like that we’ve come up with the face-saver that everyone has the potential to be a success within that limited definition. Leaving aside the dishonesty of the situation, the more worrying issue is that it undermines any efforts to develop or validate wider skill sets. Why work hard and apply self-discipline when you can just wait for the megastar inside you to emerge?

2) The second issue relates to student behaviour. One of the reasons why the Dream School is doomed to failure is the soft-pedalling around the issues of self-discipline and respect. This problem was thrown into sharp relief by a confrontation between the headteacher and an unbelievably stroppy, arrogant and egotistical female student. Why should she respect him, just because he’s the head teacher, she screeched? Well, duh, because he is the head teacher, that’s why. I know there are exceptions to the rule, but generally, those in positions of authority have had to work hard to get there and they respect the authority which they then have responsibility for. And that’s why the default position is that we should respect them. That’s one of the first lessons that should be drummed into kids. The second is that they must, must, must, be self-disciplined. They must be taught to defer gratification in order to do what is necessary. Starkey came up with a wonderful phrase last night when he referred to the students’ ‘emotional incontinence’. That was bang on the money. What needs to be done is a bit of emotional potty training. That’s what Jamie’s students really need, far more than lessons in Latin, Shakespeare, politics, poetry, science and so on. Only when they have learned to control themselves will they master the skills they need to live successfully. (Sorry to sound like Yoda there, but it’s true, young padawans).

It’s an fascinating and thought-provoking series. Get stuck in.