Scottish Union for Education – Newsletter No72
Newsletter themes: The General election, Artificial intelligence
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This week’s Substack looks at two areas where there is a tendency to put our heads in the sand. The first article is a basic argument for an election manifesto or platform, and the second, by Rex Last, highlights the challenges generated by artificial intelligence and the importance of embracing the new technology and thinking about how it can contribute to learning rather than detract from it.
We need to talk about education
Elections are unpredictable, but according to the pundits and the pollsters there will be a Labour government in Westminster and a batch of new Labour MPs in Scotland before the start of the new school year. If they are right, it’ll be good to see an end to the stranglehold that the Scottish National Party has had on public life, but what will it mean for pupils, parents and teachers?
Sadly, it’s likely to be more of the same. Labour, like the current Scottish government, tend to see education as a form of social engineering (a tool to produce good citizens). And the conservatives’ manifesto fails to address the politicisation of schools, instead opting to reduce education to preparation for work.
Labour’s reckless flagship education policy is to tax fee-funded private schools regardless of the consequences. As Julie Sandilands has reported, the Scottish Council of Independent Schools (SCIS) believe that the new tax will disrupt the learning of around 6000 pupils in Scotland, many of whom have additional support needs. If the independent sector shrinks by more than 13 per cent, the policy will ultimately be a cost to the taxpayer.
Scotland’s education system, once the envy of the world, is in freefall, and yet most political parties seem to ignore the decline in standards, expectations and discipline.
Very few political parties value education for its own sake, and we’ve yet to see a serious candidate who is prepared to talk about the problems in education. Judging by their manifestos, none of the mainstream parties seems to have bothered to imagine how schools might be improved, or how universities might thrive, beyond the easy options of promising more money or more staff.
SUE’s founding demand – education not indoctrination – was coined in response to Scottish government’s policies promoting transgender ideology and critical race theory in schools. We want to see politics taken out of the classroom, but we’ve not given up on the adult world of politics. We want to see education back on the political agenda.
There is a real danger that, as education is a devolved question, our future MPs may not comment on it at all. If we don’t make an issue of education, the crisis in our schools and universities might fall off the political agenda and the media’s attention might be focused elsewhere.
A general election is an opportunity, or should be an opportunity, to determine local and national priorities and discuss the kind of government we want and need. Instructing the young is one of the most ancient concerns of mankind. Education is not just another policy at the bottom of a long list – it’s a foundational concern, and critical to any society that wants to move forward economically, socially and culturally.
The recently published Final Report of the Cass Review is a terrible reminder of the dangers of not taking education, and the responsibility of teachers, seriously. Cass recorded the serious escalation over the past decade in the numbers of referrals to children’s gender identity development services and argued that the increase in numbers was out of proportion for the field. The fact that the Scottish government guidance to schools was that they should affirm social transitioning, often without the knowledge of the parents, must have contributed to this problem. That the majority of Scottish schools, including some primaries, have signed up to LGBT Youth Scotland’s charter scheme, and that in some cases pupils have been taught that people can be ‘born in the wrong body’, is disturbing. A commitment to implementing Cass’s recommendations should be in every candidate’s manifesto.
Both Labour and the Conservatives want to increase teacher numbers and to see Scotland monitored by international bodies, but they have nothing to say about the decline in literacy and numeracy. Most importantly, they buy into the idea that the role of the school is to ensure a child’s wellbeing.
We have a curriculum that doesn’t provide a useful framework for teaching and assessment but has instead cultivated a tendency to ‘teach to the test’. We are reforming the assessment process in what appears to be an attempt to institutionalise low expectations. The Curriculum for Excellence was dreamt up by Labour in the early 2000s as a way of personalising education to meet individual student needs. It has morphed into a therapeutic framework in which wellbeing is promoted at the expense of self-discipline and intellectual rigour. Engaging with the accumulated knowledge and history of your country, and of humanity generally, takes energy and commitment. Increasingly, Scotland’s children see school as either entertaining or boring.
As Joanna Williams has noted, although the UK government have recently moved towards removing gender ideology from the English curriculum, they have replaced it with greater emphasis on friendship, managing emotions, and recognising mental health problems. ‘These new recommendations comprise a significant therapeutic intervention’, argues Williams. She describes the proposals as a form of ‘group therapy’ delivered by teaching staff with no experience in psychotherapy. Teachers ‘playing shrink’ with their pupils is a worrying development, and yet it and other therapeutic activity remain central to Labour’s education manifesto. There are growing concerns that raising awareness of mental health issues may have unintended consequences, such as larger numbers of students experiencing everyday challenges and sadness as mental illness. Using teachers as amateur counsellors is not good for education or for young people. The therapeutic education model is one in which subject knowledge is replaced by the idea of personal self-development. It is one of the main reasons why teachers find it hard to instil discipline in the class and in individual pupils.
Scotland has a serious problem with teacher training and its General Teaching Council. Teacher training courses are not recruiting or producing enough teachers in the right subjects, and subject-specific skills are not being taught properly. The General Teaching Council has been ideologically captured, and a culture of intolerance has been created in which trainee teachers are taught how to promote the ‘correct’ political values rather than develop their understanding of their subject or a range of pedagogies.
As a consequence of a decline in teachers’ ability to be impartial, their authority has been undermined. They also seem to have lost a sensitivity to what is age-appropriate, not just in relation to sex education but also in relation to many issues debated in modern life, such as climate change, armed conflicts, and politics generally. Teachers are now encouraged to see themselves as activists tasked with educating future activists, rather than as objective and impartial observers hoping to enable children to evolve into independent thoughtful adults.
A new approach to the past and to history has undercut the traditional love of our national and cultural achievements. Some schools feel they can’t even have pupils reading Burns poems and enjoying the work without references been made to the poet’s relationships to women and to slavery. Very few Scottish pupils are introduced to the wonders of the Scottish Enlightenment or the magnificence of eighteenth-century Scottish engineering and science. The literature and the history which is now taught is often unfamiliar to parents and grandparents and sometimes of an inferior quality to the ‘classics’. We’ve abandoned the idea that schools teach ‘the best that has been thought and known’ in favour of a list of ideologically correct texts that bear little relation to social reality.
Over the next week, SUE plans to write a manifesto which we will put to all candidates standing in the election. If you want to contribute or you are planning on standing, please get in touch (info@sue.scot).
Penny Lewis, Editor
Putting AI into perspective
Rex Last was Professor of Modern Languages at the University of Dundee, with a particular interest in computing. Here, he provides advice for teachers on how to approach the controversial issue of artificial intelligence.
Long before the emergence of artificial intelligence (AI), there was a famous weekly humorous magazine called Punch, now no longer with us. I fondly remember so many of the cartoons, but the one relevant to what I’m going to explore in this column depicted a desert landscape with several ostriches scattered about, all with their heads buried in the sand. Enter left another ostrich, who looks baffled and calls out, ‘Where has everybody got to?’
I guess that aptly describes one extreme – but not untypical – response to the sudden uptick of interest in AI, and it’s a not uncommon human reaction to anything that’s new and unfamiliar and vaguely threatening. Whether we like it or not, AI is here with a vengeance and growing at an exponential rate. You cannot wish it out of existence. Once a technological toy has been created, it cannot be uninvented, and it will have an accelerating impact on education, for better, for worse.
The beginnings of AI
The history of AI proper is chequered and goes back a long way, to the days in the middle of the last century when the very early commercially available computers entered the marketplace. The first computer I had the chance to play with was, if my memory serves me right, called the ICT1202, requiring input either directly from a console with rows of buttons and impressive lights, or punched cards. Output was a noisy and leisurely line printer. VDUs were unheard of.
I was fascinated by the potential and frustrated by the limitations of the technology in equal measure. Imagine a past world where the average turnround time for a program under development was a day at least, and longer if the machine was ‘down’ (not depressive but broken). I did manage to write interactive programs for students in assembly language for the university’s ICL 1900 series machine and my commitment to the technology and its potential grew over the years, but progress was painfully slow and the antediluvian attitudes of the majority of language academics somewhat unhelpful.
The AI doldrums
In my book Artificial Intelligence Techniques in Language Learning (Ellis Horwood, 1989), which was written during what the pundits call the ‘AI winter’, I found myself taking the pessimistic lines that: (a) the technology is far too limited for us to be able to break through the glass ceiling into true AI; and (b) even if we did, the dangers of ‘allowing a piece of machinery to imitate human fallibility’ to exist would be a pretty massive elephant in the room. But as I write this article in June 2024, I’ve come across a Times report on an AI safety summit in Seoul, where the big names spoke out optimistically, with their fingers firmly crossed behind their backs, about holding back the flood of superhuman and autonomous intelligences. We always underestimate the key human ability to adapt and cope with shifting goalposts.
Technological advances tend not to take place in a smooth gradual pattern, but like the (in)famous hockey stick diagram of Al Gore, American vice-presidential candidate for heat rash around the turn of the century, a sudden insight would catapult a potential quantum shift out of the doldrums and into the headlines, and this happened to AI when the concept of neural networks became mainstream. Computer productivity was greatly enhanced by graphics processing units, which were high-speed devices capable of blisteringly fast calculations using large datasets. The term neural networks refers to a huge data-storage system in which information is held in structures roughly patterning the neurons and their synapses in the human brain, and the adaptability with which they make and alter connections. The impact on the power of AI was immediate and game-changing, enabling the concept of large language models to become reality.
Why then should educationalists fret about AI? After all, you cannot rewild education back to the days of chalk and talk and lament for the village schoolmaster’s skills in Goldsmith’s poem:
And still the wonder grew,
That one small head could carry all he knew.
The first industrial revolution aided our bodies with the advent of powerful machines. Now, the AI revolution threatens to do the same for our brains.
The challenges of AI
Among the educational elite, AI has had a pretty poor press so far. Regarded as a threat agent from cyberspace, it encourages laziness and cheating and deskills the learner. And as for individual questions, why bother with acquiring knowledge when a smart phone keeps it all ready and waiting for you, ready to use and instantly forget?
Log tables ceased to be lists of numbers and have now morphed into conveniences for eating at in the great outdoors (pun alert), and might I delicately point out that cheating is not an invention of the computer age, and that growing awareness of the challenges we face is a good thing, not a matter to be shunned.
There is much concern about deskilling. Many moons ago, I recall watching a steady trickle of research students staggering under huge bound piles of learned journals to and from the library and chemistry departments and even wrote an article bewailing such log jams and speculating on the computer as an electronic workhorse liberating us all for actual academic study. Then, the balance was quite different. If you want to know a fact, a formula or whatever, you are now able to grasp it immediately online. But you are standing on the shoulders of giants, I hear you cry. Wasn’t that ever the case, and isn’t that what research is about? Or am I missing something?
Once familiar, any new advance rapidly transforms itself into part of the furniture. The electronic calculator is now part and parcel of your smart phone. Now you have housefuls of electronic aids: ‘Alexa, what time is it?’ ‘Alexa, play Radio 3.’ So, if you are a technophobe, bite the bullet and get to know your enemy: Claude, Microsoft Copilot, Google Bard, Chat GPTo (the lower case ‘o’ stands for ‘omni’), or whatever emerges as the leader of the pack when the market settles down. As I write, the technology appears to be transforming on an almost daily basis, and they are all pretty good.
My view on cheating is twofold. First, if a student cheats during term time, then flunks the examination, they’ve dug their own grave twice over: first, for missing out on important grades; and second, by giving clear evidence that they have been cheating. That would not look too clever on a job reference.
The second aspect is that students should be told, in no uncertain terms, that the whole process of essay writing, painful though it may be at times, is a vital constituent of learning and builds invaluable transferable skills for use when school becomes employment. It is no small achievement to examine a subject, write a well-presented case for and against differing viewpoints or interpretations, and then emerge with a conclusion. That’s much more satisfying than decreasing our balance of trade with a scrivener or investment banker in a third country or knowing that you are busy bringing about your own downfall.
And, in general terms, I have always found that standing on my hind legs in front of a class of thirty or so teaching the pluperfect tense of French verbs is a fairly grubby compromise: one-third of the class is way ahead of you and sneaks out the smart phone to check their likes; a middle third is keeping up nicely, thank you; and the final third is lost. Individual tuition combined with classroom teaching seems a much better approach. I tried it years ago in the computing stone age and it seemed to work. Imagine it also working now with AI chatbots across the globe in countries starved of educational resources.
The Luddite’s last stand is to argue that we are all going to hell in a handbasket. What happens when the AI gets brighter than we are (already happened in some areas, by the way)? Won’t it mean the end of mankind, like with HAL in the film 2001? My answer to that and any other futuristic shroud wavers is that there is only one thing that mankind cannot predict, and that’s the future. It doesn’t happen on its own either; proper governance is also up to us.
PS: If you think my comment on Al Gore was unkind, remember that, worldwide, scientists are using AI far more effectively than wildly inaccurate hysterical rhetoric to confront the challenges of global warming.
PPS: If you feel a little like a child lost in a store when faced with AI, be wary of the countless books on Amazon (other book retailers are available) rambling on about AI. Let me go out on a limb and suggest you use the YouTube search box to find the more sober evaluations from TED, Intelligence Plus, MIT, and other leading US agencies and universities, to ease yourself into a more confident and knowledgeable frame of mind. I’ll resist the temptation to cite Buzz Lightyear.
After becoming the sole carer for his wife, Oksana, Rex wrote a book deploring the plight of the carer: The Informal Dementia Carer – Who Cares? He has also written several novels, which can be purchased online.
News round-up
A selection of the main stories with relevance to Scottish education in the press in recent weeks, by Simon Knight
Andrew Doyle, What does “liberalism” actually mean? Many of those who attack liberalism have failed to define their terms. 29/05/24
Joanna Williams, Children do not need lessons in mental health. 28/05/24
https://substack.com/home/post/p-144882916?source=queue Harley Richardson, The Seven Liberal Arts part 2: Three roads to knowledge. Exploring the historical origins of grammar, rhetoric and dialectic. 26/05/24
https://archive.is/VUoIe Nick Squires, Backlash as Muslim children in Italy exempted from studying Dante. Mediaeval poet placed the Prophet Mohammed in hell in The Divine Comedy. 24/05/24
Colin Wright, Is the Cass Review a “Sham”? Why would anyone confident in the truth and evidence of their position pass up the opportunity to defend their position to an audience they believe is in dire need of persuasion? 23/05/24
https://www.scottishdailyexpress.co.uk/news/politics/snp-told-let-kids-kids-32827681 Douglas Dickie, SNP told ‘let kids be kids’ as government confirms no plans for ban on sex education for under 9s. Concerns have been raised that children are being exposed to ‘inappropriate’ materials in school with nursery aged children among those being taught gender ideology. 16/05/24
https://archive.is/m7ND8 James McEnaney, Revealed: the schools hit hardest by Glasgow teacher cuts. 20/05/24
https://archive.ph/2SwXv Daniel Sanderson, Over 95pc Scottish secondary schools allow children to self-identify gender. Report finds only 4pc of institutions always inform parents when child discloses identity ‘distress’. 28/05/24
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