On the State of Education

Prescriptivism, constructivism, and the impotence of both

One of the benefits of being the least successful member of a family is that the other members are obliged to take care of you. My great grandmother, I am told, was so destitute that she had no residence of her own, but rather drifted from one relative’s house to another, staying for a period of several months, or until they could no longer tolerate her, before being shoved onto the next relative that would put up with her. 

I have achieved this rent-free existence at the tender age of twenty-six, outperforming my great grandmother by some fifty years. It is an excellent way to see a large amount of the country at no expense, and I recommend it to anyone to whom it is available. I am currently in East Norwich, under the patronage of my elder brother, where I find the coastal air lends a lightness to my step and to my pen.

My brother has run into not only greater economic success than I, but has pleased Mother even further by also producing a couple of children. While he could certainly afford to do the decent thing and send both of his children to a public school, a certain vulgar lower-middle-class envy disguised as pride forbids him from allowing his children to receive the education that he and I were deprived of. He has chosen instead to send them to a state comprehensive, albeit one with a distinctly public school ethos. 

Flicking through their post one afternoon, I came across the following letter from the director of this school, which read as follows: 

To the parents / carers of Ronald and Germaine Guppy,

I am delighted to inform you that, following the recent directive from Sir Gavin Williamson, Secretary of Education for Her Majesty’s Government, [redacted] School has been selected to receive funding for the teaching of Latin, which will begin in the school term commencing next Monday.

We require that the parent or carer of each child purchase them the following books in preparation for the course, which have been selected by both myself and our Head of Languages, Señora Micomicona:

Latin for Beginner’s by Angela Wilkes

Latin Phrase Book - C. Meissner

The Illustrated Latin-English Parallel Text - David Krus

We are extremely pleased to be following this directive. Señora Micomicona and I have been poring over each of these books over the last few days and have every confidence that we will be able to teach them to an excellent standard.

The teaching of Latin will give us a fresh opportunity to exercise the traditional, knowledge-rich educational style which we have developed here at [redacted] school, and we are tremendously excited to watch the results unfold. 

Cura ut valeas,

Director of [redacted]

Robert Crumb

I am told that Crumb is a young, blue-minded man of some thirty years, whose transformative effect on the school has been to dispense with the more fashionable naturalistic educational approach of “discovery learning” for the rote-call and memorisation of the old prescriptivist school of thought. I am also told that he received a lower-second in English Language from Birkbeck, and has spoken favourably of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s new production of Cinderella on no less than four occasions.

This trend toward traditional, prescriptivist education is one encouraged by the current Conservative government. For intellectuals, on the other hand, prescriptivism is a dirty word. In the last half-a-decade the intellectual fashion in education has been constructivist, with the Romantics, Transcendentalists and thinkers like Piaget providing the intellectual bulwark for its defence and justification. The theory goes like this: Children learn not from instruction, nor from repetition or recall, but from constructing meaning themselves through experiences and problem solving. The whole philosophy is summarised quite neatly by Emerson:

Education! . . . We are shut up in schools and college recitation rooms for ten or fifteen years & come out at last with a bellyfull of words & do not know a thing. We cannot use our heads or our legs or our eyes or our arms. We do not know an edible root in the woods. We cannot tell our course by the stars nor the hour of the day by the sun. It is well if we can swim and skate. We are afraid of a horse, of a cow, of a dog, of a cat, of a spider. Far better was the Roman rule to teach a bot nothing that he could not learn standing … The farm, the farm is the right school. The reason of my deep respect for the farmer is that he is a realist and not a dictionary. The farm is a piece of the world, the School house is not.

It is unsurprising that educators have leapt upon this theory, given that it relieves them from the responsibility of possessing or imparting any knowledge. You need only throw raw information at young minds and expect them to figure it out for themselves. Those of us who experienced this kind of education can remember building a volcano with sodium bicarbonate, picking some plant or other out of the school grounds, or dressing up as a historical figure, but we can scarcely recall why we did so, or what any of it really meant. 

Even the ex Eton Headmaster, Tony Little, who himself benefited from a traditional education, lists the following, student-led criteria for building young minds:

1. Encourage them to aim high

2. Celebrate their diverse, individual achievements

3. Give them genuine responsibility to take the lead

4. Allow them to fail and learn from the experience

5. Don't treat them all the same way, and show them understanding

This is quite alright for Etonian children, who come from households rich in cultural capital, musical ability, books and duck à l'orange for dinner, because they begin their education with a greater deal of intellectual and cultural capital with which to build upon. They are already prepared to digest information and construct something meaningful out of it. 

But what about the children of state schools? Here, poorly educated students from poorly educated families are being taught by teachers who, having received a constructivist education in their own childhood, are poorly educated themselves. There is no wellspring of knowledge for any party to drink from. As much as the Conservative government might try to reverse the damage done by constructivist education, it is far too late. The knowledge, at least amongst the state educated and those willing to go anyway near them, has disappeared, and Alexandria is ashes. Education is like a fire that needs to be constantly kindled, but what good is it to throw kindling on the pit if the flame went out fifty years ago?

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