Elections and what it is all about.

Elections and what it is all about.

Every four years or so junkies get their hit. There’s the World Cup in South Africa for the football junkies and the Olympics to look forward to in two years time. Driving passed the site yesterday reminds me once more of the reality of this forthcoming event and it is fascinating to see the growth stage by stage, piece by piece.

Of course at the moment, it is the turn of the political junkies with the General Election looming ever nearer. Even those who feel disenfranchised by the lack of choice, there is still the need to read and consider and fume and reflect and hope, even if that hope is somewhat limited.

I have spent the morning browsing through the Labour party manifesto. I’ve only scanned it because I’ve read the summaries in the paper and, quite frankly, I have other things that I need to do. There is nothing very new in there. Anything that was allegedly contentious or innovative was leaked to the press prior to the launch of the manifesto, and I am currently trying to wrack my brains to remember anything that I have read in the last hour that has made me sit up and take interest in a positive way.

The predictable election call came at a time when I was out of the country. From the distant sun of Spain, I had to endure (and I do mean endure) the press coverage of the event via Sky News. There was a helicopter hovering over Downing Street to watch Gordy’s car drive the short distance from Whitehall to Buckingham Palace where he had to ask Brenda’s permission to dissolve parliament. It still amazes and riles me that we have this mockery of a monarchical constitution where Queenie has the nominal legality to override anything that the elected chamber and the non-elected one put through.
The fact that the Labour Party has a considerable chunk of the new manifesto committing themselves to the kind of electoral reform that some of us had anticipated in 1997 is yet another indication of what we had hoped for not coming to fruition thus far.

I still find it incredible that the Prime Minister of the moment has to spend over an hour of his (or her) valuable time talking to one woman who cannot have, for all her advisers, any clue what it is like living in the real world. The woman is as institutionalised as someone who was sectioned fifty years ago. It’s not necessarily her fault but the system makes her role certifiable!

My brother spent yesterday morning in the company of the great and good in Birmingham; all gathered together for the launch of the Manifesto. He had a decent chat with the author, Ed Miliband, before moving on to talk to Mandy and Gordon. It was all very positive, apparently; plenty of back-patting, eager hopefulness and a determination to succeed. Mandy said that the election was winnable and he wasn’t giving up yet, which in itself is a pretty ‘giving up’ statement. Obviously, from the last decade we know that Mandy doesn’t give up. Ever.

It’s going to be a long month.

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A year ago, or possibly longer, I took my son down to his school in order that he could make his choices for GCSE. We talked to various teachers who suggested, by and large, that he had the potential to “succeed” in his chosen subjects but possibly needed more willingness. His Spanish teacher told him that he would not succeed and that it would require more effort to do so than he felt my son was capable of giving.

The teacher in question is a decent bloke. Some would say that he is an excellent teacher. When he goes for his TLR mark one, two or three, he will tick all the correct boxes. He can demonstrate his ability to increase the attainment of his pupils. His style is rigid and determined. He teaches instructionally from a text book. Grammatical construction is vital and taught before anything else. Even a child who did not like his teaching style still improved his grades, and it clearly bewildered Mr C as to why my child still managed to get these grades despite not doing his homework or cooperating with his formal methodology. I actually think it riled him that this child kept coming top in his tests in spite of his lack of conformity.

The Labour Party has said in its manifesto and as part of the Primary Curriculum changes that are either on hold or redundant, that it is committed to ensuring that every primary school child has an opportunity to learn a foreign language. It is even trying to increase the number of Mandarin teachers that can be available to teach peripatetically. (Now there’s a career – learn mandarin anyway and it should further any career you choose. Learn mandarin and teach in schools – a rare commodity indeed).

So after three years of formal Spanish teaching, my child goes to Spain for the first time. Could he hold a conversation with any Spaniard he met? Could he hell as like. Could he go into a shop or a restaurant and order anything other than “zumo de naranja por favor?” Nope. Could he use any of the sentence structuring that Mr C had painstakingly taught him? Afraid not.
The three years of Spanish teaching, high quality teaching at that, if you look at the criteria for quality, gave him no ability whatsoever to actually use the language in the country of its origin for any purpose whatsoever. My flawed and redundant knowledge of French was more useful in Spain than his recent lessons in Spanish, so I have to beg the question, what is the point?

On the same evening, we sat with another teacher; his history teacher who was also head of year. She looked at his CAT scores and his SAT predictions and his GCSE potential, full of A stars and brilliance. My complacent son sat there assuming that all he has to do is turn up for the exams and he will magically achieve these results. Both the teacher and I had to remind him that these were only predictions and dependent upon a certain amount of work on his part.
He looked at the scores and surmised that he was in the top 1% in his school and certainly within the top 5% in the country, reiterated by his teacher. This kid has potential.
However, she rightly pointed out that the top 5% in this country is going to have to compete with the top 5% in other countries and the top 5% in China outweighs the top 50% of this country.
Okay, maths was never my strongest point but the teacher was quite rightly stating that even the brightest child in this country cannot be complacent. For the brightest child in the UK there are hundreds and thousands of brighter children in China, and then there are other eastern countries too; Japan and India for starters.

This school is not the best school in the country. It has recently been classified as a good school with outstanding features, much to the disappointment of the head teacher who wanted to have the “outstanding” affirmation that he had received from the previous inspection.
I admire some of the things that the school is doing. The head teacher has been determined to resist pressure to teach in a certain way and apart from the delectable Mr C and his formalised approach to the teaching of Spanish, there is a more commendable methodology for teaching and learning apparent in the school, where the needs of the child are at the core, and the curriculum is innovative and challenging.

However, I have to return to this issue about China and the squillions of young people who are getting a form of education that will, in the future, set them aside from our children in UK schools.
This isn’t about knowledge. This isn’t about gaining points in an aggregated world.
What China appears to have done is to properly consider the individual need of every child. The education, as suggested in “The New Learning Revolution” advocates individual learning where the teacher acts as enabler and facilitator rather than director. The learning is in the 21st century with full access to high speed broadband where children and young people can direct their own learning. They are driven by their passion and hunger to learn. They can divert their thoughts and interest into studying things that are relevant to them. I assume they can learn languages, for instance, by talking to a computer generated pal, who will respond in the real language of the land, not necessarily grammatically correct polished construction.

The reason that Chinese children have a ‘leg-up’ has nothing to do with the amount of knowledge that they have amassed. It has everything to do with the way that they are enabled to learn and are enabled to want to learn.
Those who accuse the Chinese of being autocratic should have a look at this system. It’s very clever and very insightful.

The Chinese have recognised what businesses in this country and throughout the world are crying out for; a workforce that is enthusiastic, informed, innovative, capable of independent working and thought, creative and inspired. Whilst these things come naturally to a few, sometimes, this freedom has to be taught. Sometimes you have to learn to making learning instinctual, even though that sounds contradictory.
The Chinese seem to be doing this. They are concentrating as much on the pedagogy as the content, possibly more. They are not losing sight of the vitality of learning the basics of maths, reading and writing. That is done too. In order to access the world, they need that. Anyone who suggests anything contrary to this is clearly wrong.

It is actually rather socialist as well. Everyone starts on an even keel, possibly. Everyone has equal opportunity. There is recognition of the need of a range of skills and there is a commitment to enabling young people to be lifelong learners.

I am not completely naive. Obviously, there are constraints. The recent arguments over Google and the restrictions that we saw during the 2008 Olympics suggest that there is still an emphatic doctrine and lack of freedom within the country.
There are also possible ulterior motives to this new learning revolution. It could be that the Chinese are determined to have world domination but even if this is the case, they seem to have adopted an approach that means that this is feasible.

Here’s another quick anecdote. The aforementioned child, incapable of conversing in Spanish, is also a bit of a geek when it comes to history and European battles of centuries gone by. Whilst his friends are constantly on Facebook or mindless computer games, he is currently devouring history fiction in the form of Sharpe books about the Napoleonic wars. He plays computer games; almost too much but these days they tend not to be the Grand Theft Auto or Fifa football variety but ones associated with history and wars. He has recently invested in some complicated game about the Romans, where he has to set up communities and conquer new lands. His learning leads him back to his books and back to the computer to research what actually happened. This, in turn, helps him to dominate in the game and therefore succeed in his chosen path.

I am not suggesting that this is all positive. His commitment to these games keeps him away from other things that I deem to be important to him but I am impressed by his willingness to learn and his propensity to research around the subjects. His learning is apparent. He has a vast knowledge of Roman civilisation that has not been learned in the classroom nor ever could. The days are too short. He has used his knowledge of Roman civilisation to recognise the development of towns both here and in Spain, where he demonstrated his understanding of trade and rivers and natural geography to explain why certain towns had emerged in the places that they had.
His learning is vast, is self-directed and interesting for him. The fact that he can bore the rest of us to tears with accounts of his mastery is almost commendable.
What is clearly commendable is that he is doing this learning of his own volition and that he has control of what he wants to learn and how he does it. Not only that, because of other influences in his life, he has the ability to talk about this learning and direct it into the now, into appreciating what he can see for himself that is relevant to his world and his future.

If he was in a school in China where the New Learning Revolution has been adopted, this type of learning would be seen as a success. In this country, this learning, whilst recognised as important and interesting, is soon going to be seen as a diversion the things that he needs to do in order to attain the GCSEs both required and predicted.

I am grossly reluctant to “play the game”. I have been far from responsible regarding his homework or lack of it. I wanted him to want to do his homework rather than be dictatorial about it. I know that there is a certain amount of discipline that he has to learn. In life, one has to do some things that seem neither important nor interesting but I resent the fact that his learning is not always in tune with his interest and it is certainly not directed by him.

There was an interesting comment on “Start the Week” yesterday, where the contributors were talking about the English versus Maths debate. One person said that he was good at English but also good at maths. Because he was more interested in maths than English, he chose to continue those studies, eventually gaining a degree in mathematics but what he had wanted to do was to continue his English studies too. It had not been allowed. If he was in school today, it would probably not be allowed either. You either take a humanities or arts path, or you take and science and mathematics path and never the twain shall meet.
Isn’t that abhorrent? Isn’t this bizarre restrictive policy ultimately going to restrict our young people for the rest of their lives, especially when one considers what is happening in other more enlightened countries?

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So I return to the election, and I eagerly (naively) read through the Education section of the manifesto to see if I could see a glimmer of light.

Unsurprisingly, there is no mention of pedagogy. There is no mention of creativity or emotional intelligence. There is no mention of anything other than attainment and raising standards. This is the absolute. All children will have a workable command of the 3Rs before leaving primary school and although they don’t mention the actual words “Level Four”, that is what they mean. All pupils in secondary school will have a personal tutor to drive them to attain in the contrived and dictatorial way we have come to know over the last thirty years or more. Individualised education is not mentioned. Freedom for schools to teach in the way that they want to teach is not apparent.

Schools are to be federated, as many as possible. According to the newspaper today, there is clear circumstantial evidence that federations are a success. The ‘failing’ schools have raised their standards by being propped up by a local success story – allegedly. Has there been any research into the wellbeing of the pupils in these schools? Has there been any accountability other than the test scores? Has there been any probing into precisely whether these “failing” schools were actually failing?

Gordon Brown actually gave the game away yesterday. In his speech to the great and good in Birmingham yesterday, he said it. He wants everyone to be middle class. One way of being middle class is for all to achieve Level Four in maths and English by the time that they leave primary school.
The whole of the education policy is driven by this alleged middle class aspiration to attain. This is done without thought as to whether this aspiration is a valid and viable one in a world where China may sit thousands of miles away yet is reachable by the click of a button on your laptop.

Nobody seems to be asking the question as to whether this whole issue of attainment is deeply flawed in today’s world, despite the UNICEF surveys, despite what we know about emerging education systems in other more thoughtful countries.

The Chinese are not stupid and underestimating them is something that we do at our peril.
It is about economics. Education and this thoughtful approach to learning may sound exciting and revolutionary to those of us who have always committed ourselves to the education and development of each individual young person but that may not be what is driving the Chinese authorities. Their motive may purely be economical.
By giving a certain amount of freedom in developing learning and learning styles, the Chinese are placing themselves at the forefront of economic development. The free minded will want to move forward. With gratitude to their government and a healthy dose of Newspeak, the young people may want to give something back to those that have so well provided for them.
There is absolute logic in this way of developing education. Restricting young people to the study of three or four subjects at the age of 16 is anachronistic. Filling their minds with facts and figures without any thought been given to how they are actually going to use this knowledge and the skills involved in knowledge acquisition is short sighted.

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Despite everything, I remain a political junkie. Despite years of despondency that has driven me out of the classroom, I am still committed to encouraging change and working for the rest of my days until we adopt a fairer, more meaningful education system in this country.

What I want for the children that I bore, I want for the children of the children that I taught.
I challenge the restrictions of the system as it stands. I challenge each and every teacher to ask whether what they are actually teaching is a) relevant to their children b) enabling young people to have an interest in learning that will last them a life time.
I challenge the entire “middle class” ideology that attainment is the only way to measure success and that measures are the only way of identifying whether a school is successful or not.
I challenge this notion that everybody should want and have a university degree.

As I wander on through life, I want to be with people who are knowledgeable but are passionate about what they know. I want people to be able to talk about their passion. I want to feel that passion taking hold of me so that I too may become as passionate about their subject as they are. I want that passion to drive my own learning. I want people to have the ability to think out of the box, to be able to sit at a computer as I am today and jot their ideas down, however disjointed and dysfunctional they may be.
I want people to be interested in the outcome of a general election to the point that they feel there is injustice if we do not try and tackle the clear unjust and uncivil elements of our society.

But then, there have been plenty of times when I have been accused of idealism that is apparently well beyond the potential of those with whom I share a world.

So what am I going to do? How am I going to vote? Luckily, living where I do, under the current stupid electoral system, my little vote is meaningless. I can vote tactically and have my conscience cleared. It is a cop out. I am, to all extents, disenfranchised not once but twice. The ideology that I pertain to is not evident in any manifesto. My vote is null and void because I will not be voting for the party that gets elected in my constituency and my vote against is going to be a mere fraction in the final statistics. Essentially, my vote is meaningless which angers me beyond belief, exacerbated by the fact that the party I have always voted for have had thirteen years to right this very clear wrong.

As for the need to change education, I will continue to do my bit. I will, as I said, hold onto my aspiration and hope and let’s just see what happens.

As for the Labour Party, well, let’s just see what happens there too. Polly Toynbee yesterday said that there was still only one way to vote. However bad they have been, however dejected the party faithful may be, the alternative is apparently more frightening. But is that really enough to make you vote? It probably is, if you are in a constituency that means your vote is meaningful in preventing a Tory landslide but even then, can you really be happy to vote for more of the same? In doing so, doesn’t that give them the mandate to adopt the laissez faire attitude of keeping the Daily Mail readers as happy as possible? Hopes of hung parliaments are there in the hope that the left can re-emerge and barter for some of the key things that need to be done in this country.

Elections: what are they all about?
Well, they should be about everything and certainly about some of the things that I have mentioned in this blog. Ultimately though, I fight for politics in the same way that I fight for education, in the hope that there will be a fairer and more equitable society. The changes in education that I want are for a fairer, calmer and more contented society. The fact that they could potentially bring economic stability and viability is also something that I probably need to explore and demonstrate more carefully but that isn’t necessarily the driving force for me.
However, when one is voting, despite what the Thatcher woman says, it should absolutely be about the good of society and thinking past the end of your nose. Doing good for others will ultimately have its timely benefit for all, including the I’m alright Jack’s of this world.