New Statesman Scotland - Taking the flak at the chalk face
There was an interesting educational skirmish in England during the summer when David Almond, author of the Carnegie prize-winning novel Skellig, claimed that, "in this world of assessment, accreditation, targets, scores, grades, tests and profiles", the most creative teachers were frustrated and the inventiveness of children stifled.
Editorialists seemed briefly wrong-footed: Of course we don't want to lose creativity . . . Of course there are many hard-working and creative teachers . . . But soon the big guns, including His Ofstedness HimseIf, were wheeled out and another rational dissenting voice was silenced.
The virulence of the counter-attack was not unusual. In Scotland, also, teachers must defend their position constantly against attacks that seem unnecessarily and disturbingly venomous. Teachers are regularly caricatured or talked about, in print, in the tone once used to declare how "two years in the army would sort them out!" The results of the latest ballots from the teachers' unions were hardly a secret, nor were they a surprise. Having received an iceberg warning of such clarity, Scotland's teaching profession was hardly likely to respond with "full steam ahead". However, no one involved in education will relish the verbal war that will now follow, in which we will see in national newspapers more of the following: "Teaching is dominated by self-interested, self-pitying sentimentalists who think learning is too hard for the ones they teach, if not the ones they rear. . . "
It seems that often what such bitterly disillusioned, and misinformed, commentators are railing against is not simply teachers or the state of education as they perceive it, but a whole host of changes in British society that they find unpalatable. Constantly harking back to teaching in the fifties, for example, when education was broadly supported by parents and children who saw it as a way out of harsh environments and limited options, is not useful. Two years ago, idling away on Lake Malawi with a 12 year old called Henry, I asked him if he liked school. "Oh yes!" he said. "Education is the key." I defy anyone to imagine these words coming from a 12 year old here. Although, perhaps, they have never been more true.
It gives some idea of the source of David Almond's frustration that while society, or a section of it, wishes to cast teachers adrift from any respectful involvement with their future, writers - Scottish writers in particular - have maintained a keen interest in the position of the teacher. In a host of modern works, from Muriel Spark's The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie to Robin Jenkins' The Changeling, George Friel's Alfred MA, lain Crichton Smith's Mr Trill in Hades, Alan Spence's The Magic Flute and James Kelman's A Disaffection, a teacher is either the main character or one of significance.
Why should this be so? The answer is because writers recognise the complexity of the situation that a teacher is in, recognise that teachers are not simply purveyors of knowledge but are at the fulcrum of a whole range of social changes for which they are not responsible but to which they must respond and with which they must cope. Where once they represented the sureties of society and were respected for it, now teachers represent its fluidity and its shifting foundations and are reviled for it. It is a position of maximum exposure and, in most of these novels, the teachers suffer.
Writers appreciate complexity. For this reason, in recent years, literature has been used to give medical students a more rounded picture of the interchange between doctor and patient. A similar strategy could educate not only student teachers but also those who see a teacher's role as simply the imparting of knowledge: "Education is about knowledge not instinct, memory not spontaneity, intelligence not feelings," to borrow from the article (in the Scotsman) I quoted earlier. The psychoanalyst Adam Phillips, in The Beast in the Nursery, instances two kinds of learning. In the first, the child learns competence through imitation - it would fit any rote-learning model. In the second, "Each student, consciously and unconsciously, makes something of their own out of it all." It is not to denigrate the value of any kind of easily assessable learning to say that the second is the truly exciting outcome for both teacher and pupil. It is also true that arriving there is a complex and mysterious process, in which methodology plays a haphazard part. It may help if those who berate teachers tried to understand something of the complexity of this exchange. It is, after all, why most of the best teachers stay in the classroom.
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