Scottish Union for Education – Newsletter No46
Newsletter Themes: poor PISA results again, the whole-child approach to education, and the limits of neuroscience
Over the past few days the Scottish press has been full of stories about the PISA results. The OECD’s PISA research is a means for comparing education systems in different countries. The OECD’s latest report shows a long-term decline in Scotland’s performance in reading, maths and science. Scottish government ministers have tried to blame COVID for the decline, but academics and others recognise that education standards have been declining for decades. In the Mail, Professor Lindsay Paterson of Edinburgh University attributed the poor performance to ‘16 years of botched SNP reform’, which he said had ‘ruined [an] education system that was [the] envy of the world’. In the wake of the poor PISA results, there are likely to be plenty of articles trying to excuse Scotland’s poor performance. It’s vital that we confront these arguments and focus attention on government, local authorities, school managers, and in some cases, teaching unions. To try to understand one source of the decline in standards, Rachael Hobbs looks at the idea of the whole-child approach that underpins much of contemporary education initiatives. Meanwhile, Linda Murdoch looks at how the failure of children to learn is increasingly blamed on brain chemistry or neuroscience, thus avoiding scrutiny of education policy, content and teaching methods.
In last week’s Substack, we talked about parents with ‘pointy elbows’. It’s a label often used by high-handed headteachers and educationalists to dismiss parents who raise questions about educational standards. SUE thinks it’s time to brush off the ‘pushy parent’ accusation and to assert our rights as parents and citizens.
Over the next few months, SUE’s writers and researchers are going to use their elbows to scrutinise the Scottish Schools (Parental Involvement) Act 2006 and the inadequate review of the law undertaken by the zombie organisation known as the National Parent Forum of Scotland. If you would like to get involved in this project, please get in touch.
Penny Lewis, Editor
Everything but the child
Rachael Hobbs, a teaching assistant and a parent, looks at the role of the idea of the whole-child approach (WCA) to education and how it is now used to underpin the social justice agenda in schools.
The prevailing narcissism and identity politics that permeate all aspects of current affairs has little regard for its impact on the young, children fast becoming the last consideration within their own education. A serious decline in quality of education in Scotland is taking place alongside the promotion of ‘rights’ agendas. Looking at the SNP’s priorities, a clear mission emerges: a perpetual offensive of ghastly rights themes, akin to social programming, is replacing whole sections of the curriculum.
This diverts young learners from acquiring knowledge to undergoing training in an increasingly threatening moral code. The proposals to make teachers record ‘hate crimes’ will frighten the life out of children and create schools in which compelled speech is the norm. A narrative of ‘rights’ also normalises modern identity fixations, with its insistent emphasis on ‘who you really are’ seeping into all aspects of school life. Children are being coached to think repeatedly in terms of feeling and identity, as well as given the demand to become ‘active’ agents in combatting entirely absent ‘prejudice’, as part of a general ideological tutoring. Meanwhile, government-funded quangos and ‘consultancies’ with a clear ‘social justice’ activism agenda are given free rein in schools to run campaigns promoting LGBTQ+ ‘gender identity’ and to promote racial division via the ideology of critical race theory (e.g. by the teaching of ‘white privilege’ as an incontestable fact).[1] We can only hope that kids haven’t a clue what they are going on about.
The SNP is committed to the notion of ‘educating’ the right kind of ‘global citizen’ with its new moral charter plus a dose of alarmist environmentalism. The government says it is ‘encouraging critical thinking’, but it might be better to describe its actions as administering prescribed beliefs. A desire to create compliance in children and to control the direction of their ideas, and to mould them into individuals who will endorse an authoritarian worldview centred on entitlement, seems to be driving policy.
One of the ways in which conventional approaches to education are being transformed is through a new pedagogy based on the idea of the ‘whole-child approach’ (WCA). This invited with it an erosion of educational boundaries, which outside interests have taken full advantage of.
The WCA, which is linked to ‘child-centred’ or ‘trauma-based’ education, began life several decades ago with the aim to extend education as an academic endeavour into one also focused on ‘holistic learning’. This had numerous roots but essentially marked a shift from ‘teacher-centred’ education to ‘child-led’ learning. There is a lack of evidence over its successes because so much is based on interpersonal subjectivity (self-esteem, wellbeing...) instead of academic outcomes and relies on the conviction of its pioneers.[2] What we do know is that standards are declining.
The WCA derives in part from developmental psychology, of which ‘social and emotional learning’ (SEL) is a core component, arguably improving students’ abilities to learn. This did not take long to turn into amateur psychology, because teachers are not qualified psychologists and average classes have about 30 kids. The willowy altruism behind WCA speaks to a middle-class audience whose children might still do well despite it, rather than poorer children, boys in particular, who are faring worse.[2] It usually assumes that the home is a satellite secondary place of learning, which impacts on marginalised families. ‘Holistic’ classrooms can only be created when there are smaller sizes. However, this approach has been fully endorsed without an evidence base. The premise of WCA, which the majority of schools in America and Europe signed up to in the past few decades, has created a serious weakness in education.
Historically, the WCA didn’t talk about ‘inclusion’ and ‘rights’ as it does today. During the 1970s in the USA, the needs of the ‘whole child’ took root as targeted support to reach, and raise, attainment levels of struggling pupils within areas of deprivation. These were small-scale projects and included grant-funded healthcare for families with no insurance, thereby improving sickness levels and school attendance. Following district-wide expansion, schools were used to provide better access to health and support services for disadvantaged families. Around the same time, the term ‘inclusion’ appeared in reference to those with additional needs. This followed civil rights breakthroughs, and the term was used to call for change to a segregated and substandard educational system for children with disabilities.[3] However, measures to tackle disadvantage started to extend to become a pedagogical blueprint. A decade on, and WCA was a growing group of disciplines – unsurprisingly, because it has no core.
The ideas of ‘wellbeing’ and SEL became key drivers following the 2007 Commission on the Whole Child, leading to the Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning (CASEL), which advises organisations.[4] CASEL describes WCA as:
An integral part of education and human development. SEL is the process through which all young people and adults acquire and apply the knowledge, skills, and attitudes to develop healthy identities, manage emotions and achieve personal and collective goals, feel and show empathy for others, establish and maintain supportive relationships, and make responsible and caring decisions.[5]
Through these non-academic common themes, we have seen the extension of the teaching remit into a therapeutic role that steps into the family, which was seen as responsible for guiding children in their personal values. Ill-defined subjects organised around emotions, identities and relationships found a way into teaching. One of the most common principles of WCA is the importance of the provision of ‘safe and supportive environments’. It’s an idea that is usually regurgitated by corporate educational suppliers. The use of child-friendly language tends to mean the antithesis; for example, children of all ‘identities’ (an adult projection) must feel ‘safe’, which often translates as teach adult transgender ideology instead of protecting children.
There are thousands of educational providers that have sprung up in recent years, as most mutations of WCA they have adopted are recognisable for their empty evangelism. The Zuckerberg Foundation, not one to miss out, takes WCA to a spiritual plane: ‘A whole child approach to education is one that honours the humanity of each teacher and student.’[6] It’s not hard to see why the WCA is now a corporate monstrosity. Its ethos forgot a most basic need (and right) of children: decent education. Quality subject teaching is diverted into pseudo psychology, with children learning, for example, about ‘how we learn’, which flies over their heads because, actually, they just want to learn.
The WCA should have remained within a remit of removing barriers to education. Its application to all children also subliminally infers that families are dysfunctional impediments to their lives, and that it is schools, instead, that need to address children’s needs – a falsehood that, in reality, serves vast commercial interest. Helping children become better learners and monitoring wellbeing is something any good teacher does – an entire industry around this was never needed. The inward focus of society operating under a limiting, therapeutic culture has projected its own mindset onto children’s educations. The WCA moved too quickly from tackling obstacles to education and evolved into that which deviated from it.
It has become an almost anti-educational project in the hands of corporations who naturally saw an opportunity when we started harping on about feelings. Children do not want deep, undefined, insular learning or introspection. They thrive with external focus, goals, and the pursuit of knowledge, not ‘values’ – and certainly not those engineered by lobbies. Modern ‘rights’ propaganda in Scotland does not have children’s best interests at heart, and seeks only to sign them up to adult, self-induced complexes; the idea of the ‘whole child’ has been used as justification for this flawed approach.
References
1. https://scottishunionforeducation.substack.com/p/scottish-union-for-education-newsletter-42a
2. https://excludedlives.education.ox.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/Child-Centred-Education.pdf
3. Restore Ottawa
4. https://www.badlawproject.com/reclaim-education
5. https://casel.org/fundamentals-of-sel/
6. https://chanzuckerberg.com/education/whole-child-approach-to-education/#:~:text=A%20whole%20child%20approach%20to,adults%20to%20engage%20and%20thrive
Debunking neuromyths
Dr Linda Murdoch looks at the way in which neuroscience is being used to change the way we think about the purpose of education.
Neuro-educational approaches to learning are yet another in a long line of excuses that seek to undermine the transformative power of knowledge in the classroom. A friend of mine recently related how on returning from school, her 6-year-old had instructed her on the importance of being kind. The daughter explained in no uncertain terms that kindness releases endorphins in your brain that not only make us feel better but also improve our ability to learn. This is what is known as a ‘neuromyth’, one of a whole number of falsehoods about the power of the brain that are used to justify children’s failure to engage in class or excuse poor teaching approaches. In other words, if pupils are failing to learn, it is put down to some limits on how their individual brains work rather than anything to do with the child’s effort or teachers themselves.
The term ‘neuromyth’ was first coined by an OECD report that referred to it as both a commonly held false belief about how the mind and brain function and the translation of scientific findings into misinformation regarding education.
Studies have shown that teachers tend to buy into some - or all- of these neuromyths. One of these, by Howard-Jones (2014),[1] of just under 1000 teachers in five countries, including the UK and China, revealed that an average of a massive 81% of teachers agreed with the statement that differences in hemispheric dominance (left brain or right brain) can help to explain individual differences among learners. The figure for UK teachers was 91%. This account is false, as the left and right hemispheres of the brain work together. There is no evidence that people’s learning differs in important ways based on one hemisphere being dominant in relation to the other.
In the same study, an average of 95% of teachers – 93% in the UK – concurred with the view that individuals learn better when they receive information in their preferred learning style (e.g. visual, auditory or kinaesthetic). This is untrue, as although many have preferences for the way in which they like to learn, there is no evidence that matching a teaching technique to a preferred style will improve learning, despite this hypothesis being tested multiple times.
But these myths are also dangerous for a more important reason: they hold that the neural activity in the physical brain is primary to educational success. Put another way, what happens to us has nothing to do with our will to learn and rational thought but are explained by our brains’ chemical reactions. However, there is no such causal relationship between the brain and the mind, as they are separate entities. One, the brain, is a physical entity that is the location of electrochemical activity that can be scanned and viewed by machines. The other, the mind, is invisible, but its power far outstrips that of the brain. Although humans need brains to have a mind, so to speak, the latter does not consist of neural correlations but contains its owner’s version of the current totality of society’s ideas, values and practices. That the contents of the mind long outlive the life of a person’s brain – they are bequeathed to the next generation – attests to its independence from the brain itself. If the human mind were determined by the physical activity in the brain, as some neuro-educationalists assume, humankind would not have advanced as far as it has.
The popularity of these neuromyths in education reveals our culture’s current despondency about the potential of human agency. They are often used in the classroom not only to make excuses for pupils who are not thriving educationally but also because it lends itself to the prevailing sense that all pupils are different and have unique individualised ways of learning. In other words, for education to work, it has to fit the particularities of how each student learns.
The link with feelings
In many ways, the popularity of neuromyths has much in common with the prevalence of ideas in education that give primacy to feelings rather than thoughts. They are similarly limiting, as they both put a brake on the scope for human agency. During the 1990s, our understanding of intelligence moved away from one that favoured rationality of thought as the basis of human intelligence, to another that countered that it was our ability to manage our emotions that accounted for our educational success or lack of it. In other words, it is how we manage our emotional selves that determines whether we do well in school and life, instead of human logic and understanding. Of course, emotions are important to us, but they should not be taught as something that determines how we think and relate to our world. According to these accounts, it is how we feel that matters; it is our feelings that determine what we are capable of, not the power of our mind, which represents our agency, free will and volition; and if we feel sad, unhappy, anxious or worried, then we cannot learn.
These notions of the power of feelings are as deterministic as those of the influence of neural reactions, as they both suggest that pupils themselves cannot improve educationally because of influences outside their control. Neuromyths excuse pupils who say, ‘I can’t master this subject because of the way my brain works’. Therapeutic education does the same thing, by depicting pupils as at the mercy of their feelings, fragile from the challenges of thinking and understanding. Both neuromyths and therapeutic-based education enable the lowering of educational standards so that pupils are not allowed to fail as this might result in them feeling bad about themselves. A prime example of these outcomes came from the testimony of an anonymous teacher in this very newsletter last month:
I mark the National 5 and Higher English papers for the Scottish Qualifications Authority and writing, we are instructed, should not be marked down so long as it ‘makes sense at first reading’. Incorrect spelling, missing punctuation (including full stops) and flawed grammar should not detract from the mark.
For this year’s National 5 English course, a mark of 37% secured you a D grade (now considered a pass). Given that there are approximately 20–25 marks (each mark being equivalent to one percent, so 20–25%) available for quoting from the texts you are given, you can get yourself almost to a pass just by copying correctly from the paper.
George Orwell said, ‘Myths which are believed in tend to become true’. In other words, if you believe something is true, your behaviour changes to coincide with what you believe. What you believe becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. If teachers peddle to kids these myths about the primacy of feelings and the brain, then children may refuse to believe they can learn unless they feel right or are being taught in their chosen learning style.
Teaching kids that their educational progress depends on them safeguarding their emotions is patent nonsense and is nowhere evidenced. However, stating it has become as uncontroversial as believing that the little sparks our brains make determine how successful we will be. Both these fairy tales represent our educational establishment’s flight from what is today the most controversial of ideas: that of the transformative power of knowledge, pure and simple.
Reference
1. Howard-Jones PA. 2014. Neuroscience and education: myths and messages. Nat Rev Neurosci 15:817–824. https://doi.org/10.1038/nrn3817.
News round-up
A selection of the main stories with relevance to Scottish education in the press in recent weeks by Simon Knight
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2023/11/27/britain-faces-un-blacklist-over-trans-rights-lobby-ehrc/ Hayley Dixon, Britain faces UN blacklist after lobbying by trans rights groups. UK’s human rights body could be stripped of status after campaigners including Stonewall successfully push for special review. 27/11/23
Joanna Williams, Why won’t the Tories ban pupils from transitioning? 23/11/23
https://www.heraldscotland.com/news/23943549.eis-teacher-report-reveals-scale-violence-scottish-schools/ James McEnaney, EIS teacher report reveals scale of violence in Scottish schools. 24/11/23
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2023/11/28/bbc-admits-concept-white-privilege-contested/ India McTaggart, BBC admits concept of ‘white privilege’ is contested. Broadcaster received complaint about a ‘divisive and controversial’ article directed at children about the term. 28/11/23
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2023/11/28/the-common-sense-majority-is-being-cowed-into-silence/ Philip Johnston, The common sense majority is being cowed into silence by activist zealots. Small groups are being allowed to impose their views on green policy and identity politics on all of us. 28/11/23
Norman Lewis, The quest to fly and the Promethean Moon landing of 1969. While time, nature and life are transient, human consciousness and imagination are limitless. 30/11/23
Norman Lewis, Part II: Reading and writing and the elasticity of cognitive development. Overcoming the brain’s limited memory capacity led to the invention of writing and reading – the unexpected outcome that liberated humanity’s intellectual powers like never before. 05/10/23
https://www.heraldscotland.com/news/23961616.violence-schools-caused-mental-health-emergency/ Gabriel McKay, Violence in schools caused by ‘mental health emergency’. 02/12/23
Claire Fox, Are the culture wars a distraction? 04/12/23
https://www.spiked-online.com/2023/12/04/i-was-sacked-as-a-school-chaplain-for-my-christian-beliefs/ Bernard Randall, I was sacked as a school chaplain for my Christian beliefs. When I delivered a sermon criticising wokeness, I was dismissed from my job and reported to Prevent. 04/12/23
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