For some time now, I have admired and respected Jamie Oliver. He is a man with a genuine passion who felt a need to do something about what he deemed to be a serious problem in this country, i.e. getting young people to think about the food they ate, where it had come from, what it was doing for them and how a healthier diet could have a significant impact on their lives.
What I particularly like about Jamie is that he is eager and prepared to learn. He tries something that, in his own experience, he feels should work. When things don’t go according to plan he doesn’t stride on, resolutely sticking to his original ideas. He considers what is happening and tries to rethink his approach according to what he can see happening in front of him.
He did this in his first television programme about school meals. He had created these brilliant new menus that were healthy and well-planned but he had not taken into consideration the will of the children to actually eat these things. He had not considered how brainwashed our young people have become in their eating habits (oh yes, there is irony here for those who know the writer), and thought that by simply providing healthy options, they would all want to choose this new way of living.
But some of these children had never seen let alone eaten some of the fruit and vegetables he put in front of them. Some of them didn’t realise precisely what they were eating when they tucked into turkey twizzlers with their reconstituted meat from the carcasses of animals.
So, he planned a week of education around food. Maths lessons counted lemons instead of red circles. Literacy lessons looked at books on healthy eating. In the secondary school, he decided to make some turkey twizzlers so that the young people could see precisely what they were eating and how it was manufactured.
Surprise, surprise, once children and young people had experienced all of this, they happily tucked into his new healthy meals. Levels of concentration in the afternoon sessions of school increased, dinner times were calmer and the playground supervisers even suggested that the children were using their asthma inhalers less after a week of the healthy meals.
Now, all of this was a great success. Oliver went to meet the incumbent secretary of state for education and talked about what he felt was needed. The larger than life Charles Clarke listened and eventually gave a substantial amount of money to schools to improve the quality of their meals, and finally new standards for school meals were introduced. Whether they are being fully adhered to is a different matter but at least there was now a guideline for people to consider.
And still is.
Much of this development is down to Jamie and his determination to do something.
People like Oliver, however, get criticised. How can he be truly philanthropic if, for example, he is earning thousands of pounds by working for Sainsbury’s? Surely, his health rant was more to do with getting people into this particular supermarket so that the Sainsbury’s bosses could increase his pay for the after effects of more people flocking to their shops?
So be it. We live in a capitalist society. Jamie has become an iconic figure that people listen to. If Sainsbury’s are savvy enough to cash in on that, well – that is the system we have. I’m not sure that Jamie Oliver should be personally liable for the criticism of a corrupt system.
So, he had his meals under his belt but Jamie Oliver was not prepared to stop there. Even after the cameras had gone, he continued to campaign for healthy meals both in and out of school. He continued to endeavour to get people to consider what they were eating, how they were cooking and why it would benefit many to turn their backs on processed food and start making meals from scratch once more.
He moved on to “Fifteen” where he found some disaffected young people and began training them to be chefs. He is still committed to this cause, partly because he did not feel as though he had the schooling that he deserved. He felt that if he had been given the opportunities in school at an earlier age, he may have had a different start in life, and he acknowledges that he was one of the lucky ones.
And so to this new venture: Jamie’s Dream School.
Jamie Oliver left school with two GCSE’s. If my memory serves me correctly, he started cooking in the family run pub and it was here that he made his breakthrough into television cookery.
But that school experience did not leave Jamie. He was possibly haunted by this experience and was soon realising that our current system does not do much for the masses or even the majority who are not academically inclined in the traditional and sometimes archaic use of the term.
School does not work for some people. In certain instances, school does not work for some people to the point where they are completely disaffected.
So Jamie decided to look at a different approach.
Instinctively, he believed that if a young person was going to be successful and interested in a subject, they needed to be engaged. They needed their passions to be ignited.
Jamie said, “We’re not doing enough for those who fail; they need a more physical, tactile approach, involving people skills, team building, problem-solving, building things. These skills need to be taken as seriously as the sciences”
Too damn right Jamie, and although he is merely scratching the surface of what is endemically wrong with our education system, it’s a start.
He then decided to gather together twenty young people who had “failed” or rather that the system had failed them. He decided that he would look at educating them in a different way with the allegedly best practitioners in their field. He employed a so-called “super-head” to oversee all the teaching and thought about all the people he would like to employ. So politics was taught by the spin doctor Alistair Campbell, English by the actor Simon Callow and heaven forbid, History by David Starkey.
Enough has already been said about Professor Starkey this week in some ways. There has been criticism of the way he handled the class. He came in, all authoritarian, all chalk and talk and then went on to rant over the heads of the young people he was allegedly ‘employed’ to teach. He then furthered his brilliance by ploughing into one kid and calling him “fat”.
Now, as a piece of television, this was quite fascinating, albeit hugely distressing. Starkey was playing out the old school idea of education. He had been brought in because he was a genius – an intellect. But could he teach?
Jamie, I tell you, it is not only the non-academics who need to learn a bit of team-building, problem-solving and a more tactile and empathetic mode of teaching and learning.
Jamie probably didn’t set out to do this, but in employing the services of Starkey he has starkly (!) portrayed the problem with some of the teaching profession who cannot veer away from their out-dated methodology and have this horrendous assumption that they are there to hold power over young people rather than empower them.
Jamie says in an interview that anyone can teach.
I disagree and I think this programme is delightfully showing this to be the case. Not everyone can teach because teaching is not just about conveying knowledge. Teaching is about relationships. It is about respect, something that the young people in this programme constantly mention. It is about teachers facilitating learning, enabling, encouraging, accepting that they do not know everything. Teaching is about recognising the individual and adapting your methods and content according to the extreme individual needs of every child in a class.
I am beginning to think that the best teachers are born teachers, in that it is instinctively within them to be this person who enables, who cares, who understands, who values young people and their need to be supported in their learning lives.
Ok, some of the best teaching colleges may help these people to refine their methodology and everyone can improve. As I have said before, the person who thinks that they are a brilliant teacher should get the hell out of the classroom – did you hear that Starkey?
But I fundamentally believe that teaching is about relationships and an ability to communicate and relate to people rather than the content itself. Furthermore, in the days when all sorts of knowledge is at the tip of a finger on a keyboard once reading and writing has been learned, then the teaching profession really ought to consider the effects of this technology on their changing and evolving roles.
One commentator on the Guardian website defended Starkey. They said “Dr. Starkey is a true example of pure education and inspiration”.
Well if that is the case, why could he not inspire these children? Possibly because he abused them and put them down as soon as he walked in the room. “You’re here because you have failed” he said to the young people.
Starkey is not an example of pure education. He is an example of everything that is wrong about education; a total reliance on intellect at the expense of social, personal, spiritual intelligence.
Pure education is about embracing all the intelligences. Pure education is about recognising the many components of teaching and not just fact giving. Inspiration, true inspiration comes from the people who understand that they have to empower young people through igniting their passion. That is something that I think Jamie does instinctively.
I am going to stop here but I want to return to this later.
Jamie, as ever, got many things wrong here. He stuck the children in uniform because he thought that would help even though it clearly didn’t help a jot for him. He gathered people together who were often so preoccupied with their particular field that they didn’t think outside it – ever, in some cases. He could have done with the advice of some people who could really get the best out of young people but I do believe Jamie is willing to adapt and learn. He is half way there as some of the following quotes suggest, and these are things that I would like to return to later.
Good on Jamie. Good on him for seeing a problem, doing something about it and uncovering all sorts of other issues in the process.
Oh and Jamie, if you read this and want to discuss it further, I can help you, I am sure.
We hadn't bargained on keeping the class active, productive, putting up with the disturbances going on left, right and centre. At first, we looked weak and pathetic, then there was a middle stage where we didn't want to be at Dream School, but then we had to be a bit more humble and more dynamic in our approach; then you start to feel relationships and fall in love and start to run classes that are achieving stuff.
People tend to teach the way in which they were taught, and tend to parent how they were parented, which is probably part of the problem.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/tv-and-radio/2011/mar/02/tv-review-jamies-dream-school?INTCMP=SRCH
http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2011/feb/13/jamie-oliver-dream-school-interview
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