Professor Roland Meighan is a writer, publisher, broadcaster, and consultant/researcher on learning systems
He is Director of Educational Heretics Press, Director of Education Now Publishing Co-operative Ltd. Director/Trustee of the Centre for Personalised Education Trust Ltd.
Introduction
In the UK, in 1999 something is about to happen that seemed impossible 25 years ago. We are about to enter the next century with the same basic learning system with which we entered this century. A previous Chief Inspector of Schools, Edmond Holmes, wrote off this kind of system, based on imposed uniformity, as 'The Tragedy of Education' in 1911. It was both anti-educational and unchristian, he explained. Bertrand Russell in 1935 gave his verdict: "We are faced with the paradoxical fact that education has become one of the chief obstacles to intelligence and freedom of thought." But since 1977 UK has gone back to just such a system. In this situation there is an urgent need to try to establish some principles of reconstruction if we are to cope with the challenges of the next century.
Principle one: Uniform approaches to all, are intellectual death to some
Given the fact that we are able to locate over thirty differences in individual learning styles, any uniform approach to the curriculum or to learning is intellectual death to some, and often most, of the learners, and is therefore suspect. These learning differences fall into three broad categories, cognitive, affective and physiological.
Thus, some learners have a style which is typically deductive in contrast to those whose style is usually inductive. Others learn best from material which is predominantly visual as against others who respond best to auditory experiences. There are contrasts between impulsive learners and reflective learners. Some learn better with some background noise, others learn better in conditions of quiet. Some are early day learners, for their peak learning time is in the morning, whereas others are afternoon learners, and others late-day learners. As Aviram observes in "Non-lococentric Education" Educational Review, 1992, volume 44, no. 1:
"In sum, we have sound empirical evidence that both individuals' motivation for learning and the effectiveness of their learning processes vary with the ability of the environment to cater to their specific learning styles."
In The Age of Unreason, (1989, London: Arrow), Charles Handy notes that another way in which individuals differ is in types of intelligence. At least seven types of intelligence, (analytical, pattern, musical, physical, practical, intra-personal, and inter-personal) are identifiable. Only the first is given serious attention in UK schools. Handy declares:
"All the seven intelligences, and there may be more, will be needed even more in the portfolio world towards which we are inching our way. It is crazy, therefore, to use only the first of the intelligences as the criterion for further investment in any individual by society."
Principle two: What we want to see is the learner in pursuit of knowledge, and not knowledge in pursuit of the learner.
Principle two is a quotation from the Irish writer George Bernard Shaw. It identifies the basic flaw in official thinking in Britain about education as something to be 'done to' learners rather than something the learners are encouraged and coached to do better for themselves. This is not a pious hope. This is exactly how parents assist their children in learning to talk and walk, and to begin to make sense of the world around them. Thus, arguably, the most successful piece of learning we can find operates on this principle. How stupid of us to forget it, ignore it or lose confidence in it.
Principle three: The modern world requires behaviour flexibility and competence in all the three forms of discipline: authoritarian, autonomous and democratic
Schools in the UK work almost exclusively to an authoritarian model of behaviour. Being comfortable with the logistics of authoritarian behaviour is useful and necessary because there are situations in which this is the appropriate pattern. Therefore, the authoritarian form of discipline has a modest part to play in the scheme of things, but only a modest part. Other types of discipline are necessary at other times. Autonomous behaviour and discipline are more appropriate much of the time. Indeed, we live in a world that increasingly expects people to manage their own lives in an autonomous way. In other situations, co-operative or democratic patterns of behaviour and discipline are appropriate.
The absence of democratic experience is a serious weakness of present-day schools. Far more than at present, schools, homes, and the community could be enabling pupils/students to learn the democratic arts of co-operatively planning, doing and reviewing all aspects of their education. This implies that they would learn to speak their minds responsibly and with civility, but nonetheless fearlessly, and listen attentively to others. These skills are not merely optional or desirable, but absolutely essential to the education of people who are to be citizens of a democratic country, and creative members of a participant workforce, in the next century. The obsessively authoritarian and competitive schools favoured by the present government cannot meet these needs of future citizens. Until schools become more flexible in providing the variety of behaviour patterns necessary, they are doing their pupils a disservice - 'mis-educating' them.
This participation cannot happen successfully unless the next generation, from their earliest years, becomes accustomed to it, and acquires by experience the inner strength which can empower it to negotiate responsibly, and ultimately on equal terms with parents, teachers and fellow pupils/students, with the assurance that their voice will be heard. Learners need real, honest respect. It is not enough to talk in abstract terms about how we value the individuality of our young people, if we only show our esteem in token ways, such as letting them have a school council, but only letting it discuss non-controversial subjects. This breeds cynicism and alienation in many young people. Participation must be real, and involve the actual experience of sharing power and responsibility for decision-making, otherwise it will be rejected as mere adult manipulation. Tacking a study called citizenship on to the imposed curriculum will not do it.
Principle four: With information doubling in quantity about every ten years we need a different kind of learning
As regards knowledge, we need to avoid approaches that imply that everyone needs to know the same bank of information or that learners of the same age need to know identical things. Subjects, the staple diet of schools, are only a minor part of the tool-kit of knowledge and declining in importance. In any case, learning the tool-kit does not constitute an education. We do, however, need another kind of knowledge to be effective in the modern world - the 'know-how' of the researcher. This requires that we know how to find out, to learn, relearn and unlearn, and how to manage our own learning on the principles of 'plan, do and review'.
Principle five: An iron law of education is that 'rigid systems produce rigid people and flexible systems produce flexible people'.
Clive Harber, echoing Bertand Russell writing years earlier, proposes that the first question is about the kind of people a society is trying to encourage:
"All too often, in debates about education, the basic questions are ignored in favour of mere technical issues. We should always begin by asking, 'What are we educating for? What sort of people are we expecting to produce? What kind of society do we envisage?' "
In a complex and changing society, I propose that flexible people are necessary rather than rigid people. The day-prison model of schooling and the uniform models of curriculum are not noted for their success in achieving this. Instead, we need chances to change direction, to have second chances, to have diversity that allows real choices, to have rest and reflection periods away from systematic study, in a more flexible system of learning opportunities. If we adopted the approach of flexi-education providing 'alternatives for everybody, all the time', we would be, "getting closer to the flexi-education we need for our flexi-lives". (Charles Handy in The Age of Unreason, page 178).
Principle six: An information-rich society allows a variety of learning locations
Here is another consideration: given an information-rich and media-rich society, the day-prison model of schooling devised in an earlier phase of our history, is now educationally defunct because knowledge is now widely available and not limited to the one place called a school, as once was the case. (The Custodial School may be thought to be socially and economically functional by providing a mass child-minding and teenager-control service at public expense. In this case, teachers do not need much reflective training to perform this particular function as the present British government has noted. Hence its main policy of teacher education which is to, more or less, do away with it and replace with on-site crowd control and crowd instruction training.)
There does not have to be a single location for learning. There can be a variety, including homes, workplaces, museums, libraries and schools. Resources available at home can be increasingly utilised in educational programmes including television, radio, cassette recorders, video recorders, home computers, CD players, inter-active video, special interest magazines, newspapers and books. There is also the know-how and experience of adults with time to spare as the demands of our working lives change and shorten - about half the adult population is now 'unemployed' because of retirement or the collapse of work, or child-care duties. At the university level, the example and experience of the Open University has made this idea of variety in learning locations and resources commonplace.
Principle seven: Deep learning is needed more than shallow learning
Ference Marton of Gothenberg University established a crucial difference between shallow learning and deep learning. In the former, learners learnt a wide range of facts and attitudes without any effective conceptual map as to how they were related. Their knowledge was fragmented and shallow because they had no understanding of the deeper level principles that underpinned their studies. Schools are better at shallow learning than deep learning because of the limited range and inflexibility of their curriculum, teaching methods and assessment approaches. (This is only the start of the analysis of learning: Robert Gagné in the classic book The Conditions of Learning identifies eight varieties of learning with the conditions for effectiveness varying in each case.)
One consequence of this kind of analysis is that we are probably wasting our time and money training many more subject teachers. Not only do they teach the least effective kind of learning for the modern world, but all they know can now easily be made available through a variety of interesting resources - CD-ROMs, Interactive Videos, Video-conferencing and the InterNet. The teacher as a subject 'living database' or 'talking book', is now becoming more and more obsolete.
Principle eight: Effective teaching requires much more than being an instructor: welcome the 'learning coach' and the 'learning travel agent'.
The American writer John Holt proposed that what we can learn best from good teachers is how to teach ourselves better. The roles of teachers need to be extended, the most important being that of learning coach - supporting learners as they develop the complex skills of learner-managed learning. The experience of the home-based educators has clearly demonstrated this point.
How do you know when someone is educated in our complex and changing society? I propose a simple but not simplistic answer. They can fill the gaps. All programmes of study leave people with huge gaps in their knowledge and skills. Those who have learned how to be taught must wait on someone else to motivate them and direct their next learning. Those who have learnt how to learn and how to research, can go on to fill the gaps at will.
Principle nine: Schooling and education are not the same thing.
We would need to go back to Winston Churchill's advice to his Minister for Education, Mr. R.A. Butler in 1944 :
"Schools have not necessarily much to do with education ... they are mainly institutions of control where certain basic habits must be inculcated in the young. Education is quite different and has little place in school."
The American writer Mark Twain agreed:
"I never allowed schooling to interfere with my education."
Schools often claim to work with children. In truth, they end up working on children. Why are we so easily fooled? What deceives us was indicated by Everett Reimer from the USA:
"Some true educational experiences are bound to occur in schools: they occur despite school and not because of it."
This is because lots of teachers try their best to rescue bits from the wreck of the custodial school.
Schooling can become more educational but it needs a new fundamental vision. Until schooling becomes a voluntary part of a flexible education system for everyone, it is always only a bigot's move away from totalitarianism at the best of times. As John Gatto, (1992, Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling Philadelphia: New Society Press), observed:
"When you take the free will out of education, that turns it into schooling."
It is crucial to note that the type of choice in question here is humanistic choice based on the needs of people, not the inhuman market forces type of choice which is based on the need for profit.
Chris Shute notes in Compulsory Schooling Disease (1993, Educational Heretics Press) that whatever their intentions and claims, schools end up training most young people to be habitually subservient. And there are seductive arguments for keeping children under a sole regime of authoritarian control. It makes them easier to handle and it pleases their parents - whilst society in general feels comfortable, for it appears to make the whole task of taking responsibility for children safer and more predictable. The democratic and autonomous forms of discipline are more demanding to work with and they are often outside the experience of the teachers and other adults, in any case. The process looks satisfactory in the short term, but the long term outcomes are often a disaster, because it produces large cohorts of subservient and inflexible young people, smaller groups of alienated, or philistine, or aggressive young people, and a group of leaders high on dominance and low on democratic leadership.
Various critics of the current model of schooling, John Holt, Chris Shute, Seymour Papert, John Taylor Gatto and myself, hold the view that we can regenerate schools into all-year round, open-all-hours, all-age learning centres so that they cease to be anti-educational. Our model is not that of the factory or the day prison, but that of the public library or the user-friendly type of museum, or as my partner Janet insists, a good nursery school. Replacing compulsion with invitation, schools, perhaps renamed Learning Resources Centres, will be used as places where anyone who happened to need help with their learning at any time in their lives could go to receive it. The curriculum will be a personalised one and not a standardised one.
Principle ten: We need to learn from the experience of home-based educators.
Home-based education is blazing the trail towards the next learning system. During twenty years of researching home-schooling, I grew to realise that most of the features of the next learning system were being field-tested in front of my eyes. It was uncanny that home-schoolers, often with no knowledge of modern brain research or of learning systems, or of multiple intelligence theory, etc., have worked out some of the consequences of these in their approach to learning. As the evidence came in, it became clear that home-schooled children performed much better than their school-based counterparts, being on average two years ahead on any aspect tested, and up to ten years ahead in above average cases. In areas not always tested they were also ahead, such as personal confidence and self-esteem.
Now if we took research seriously, the implication of these findings would be that children should be discouraged from attending school, because they would be at an inevitable disadvantage - exactly the reverse of what had been feared!
Why were home-schooled children so successful? The reasons form a complicated network, which is why I had to write a book to explain them.( see The Next Learning System: and why home-schoolers are trailblazers Nottingham: Educational Heretics Press, 1997) But they can be expressed in a broad generalisation:
Home-schoolers create a learner-friendly learning environment and are able to exploit our information-rich society flexibly and at will. Schools find it difficult to do either.
The reasons for their success can be expressed as a list:
- They create a non-hostile learning environment.
- They are more efficient in the use of time.
- They employ purposive conversation rather than crowd instruction.
- They use a catalogue curriculum approach.
- They access our information-rich society at will.
- They develop learner-managed learning using the sequence of 'plan, do, review'.
- They develop social skills in the real world.
- They adapt to a wide variety of learning styles.
- They act as if they know the logic of Multiple Intelligence Theory.
- The adults become learning agents, learning coaches, and learning-site managers.
- There is plenty of first-hand experience.
- They call on all three forms of discipline in turn.
- They use natural learning approaches and 'dovetailing'.
- They act as if they know the research about how the brain actually works.
Some key ideas for the next learning system
(a) Learner-managed learning
In an information-rich society the need for teacher-directed learning gives way to the idea that learners, whether as individuals or as groups, will manage their own learning.
(b) A network of learning sites
To replace the current model of custodial schools, a network of learning sites could include: Early Life Studios for parents with young children; Stimulus Studios with a constantly changing array of films, tapes, videos, exhibitions, books, resourceful people from the community, and virtual reality experiences; Gaming Studios with educational games and simulations, role play and theatre; Project Studios where learners work on real projects such as making a video, writing a book or TV script, designing new materials and products, or planning projects to be undertaken later in the community; Learner Banks to store and loan out the tools, equipment, books, tapes, videos, CD ROM's needed by learners. A key institution would be Year-round Learning Centres where families could learn together in meetings, seminars, tutoring or community-centred discussions. Provision would be made here for those who want to learn, for some of the time, in school-type settings. Community facilities such as homes, businesses, public places, sports facilities, would be available as appropriate, as part of the learning network which would remain permanently fluid, open to evaluation, review and change.
In the new learning system, it is learning that is the central concern and not teaching. Every person is simultaneously a learner and a resource person for the learning of others.
When I was collecting information from home-schooling families in the late 1970s and 1980s, I found that I had to do most of my visits on Sundays. This was because whenever I telephoned to fix appointments, I would find that the learners were, as often as not, learning out-and-about in various libraries, museums, exhibitions, gatherings such as auctions, expeditions, sports centres, meetings with adults who had offered some learning opportunity, and the like. They had already taken on the idea of the community as a source of learning sites.
(c) The Catalogue Curriculum
Here, the learners, whether in schools full-time, or in flexi-time schooling plans, or full-time home-based education, are offered a printed or electronically-stored catalogue of learning opportunities including set courses, ideas for making your own courses, instructions as to how to set up a learning co-operative, self-instructional packages and available learning resources and opportunities. Because the catalogue includes pre-planned, negotiated and individual options, it serves the requirements of both the democratic and autonomous approaches whilst also allowing authoritarian offers to be included. It thus serves the Flexi-schooling synthesis which is an attempt to incorporate the advantages of all three approaches and types of discipline.
When I wrote about the Catalogue Curriculum idea in 1995, Don Glines of the Educational Futures Project, USA, wrote about his experience of using such an approach in his US High School:
"We found the 'window shopping and shopper's guide' notions helpful in the first year and for new students, but once the programme was rolling, the students just developed all their own studies and planned their own self-directed curriculum experiences ... even the 'low achievers' really take off when they finally learn that you are telling the truth - that they can create their own learning based upon interests and success."
I can accept what Glines is saying here. When I gave student teachers choice about how to organise their initial teacher education course, the same thing happened - fifteen times in fifteen years. But 'the catalogue' enabled them to move to a position where they locate the best option for their purposes.
(d) Personal learning plans
The Royal Society of Arts has been promoting the idea of personal learning plans as part of its current educational initiative. The director, Sir Christopher Ball, saw the aim of the project as creating a learning culture in Britain. By implication, years of compulsory mass schooling have done no such thing, so something has to be done to reverse the trend.
(e) Direct access to the information-rich society Seymour Papert in Mindstorms forecast how computer technology would change things by modifying the environment outside classrooms:
"I believe that the computer presence will enable us to so modify the learning environment outside the classroom that much, if not all, the knowledge schools presently try to teach with such pain and expense and such limited success will be learned, as the child learns to walk, painlessly, successfully, and without organised instruction.
This obviously implies that schools, as we know them today, will have no place in the future. But it is an open question whether they will adapt by transforming themselves into something new or wither away and be replaced."
(f) Teachers as learning agents
In John Adcock's book In Place of Schools he develops the idea of a new role for teachers. The model would be that of family doctors operating in health centres. The new teacher would not work in a school but in a centre, or from their homes, or both, and their concern would be to help devise and service the personal learning plans of a group of clients.
For my own part, I prefer a slightly different model - that of the travel agent. Teachers as learning agents would operate from their 'learning travel bureau' helping any learner to 'visit', explore and complete any learning that was chosen.
(g) Assessment on request
Philip Gammage observed that: "Nobody grew taller by being measured." This would seem to put assessment firmly in its place as a mass schooling fetish.
There are, however, several provisos. Systems such as the education systems of the Scandinavian countries certainly manage perfectly well without anything like external examinations such as the UK's GCSE and GCE 'A' levels. But they introduce vocational tests post-schooling, on the sensible grounds that people who provide services in society need to be appropriately qualified; e.g. nobody I know wants their teeth attended to by unqualified people.
In addition, testing can be available on request. The grades for musical instrument proficiency are example of such tests. The 'on request' is, however, crucial. As a non music reading jazz musician myself, of somewhat modest achievement, the tests are no use to me, nor do I desire them. A compulsory testing system would, erroneously, identify me as a non-musician.
Conclusion
With some key concepts now established, we can juxtapose the assumptions of the current compulsory mass schooling system with those of the next learning system.
The mass schooling system assumes that:
- Learning is preparation for life, so at some point learning stops and living starts.
- Learning occurs mostly in school.
- Specialists are needed to impart knowledge.
- Education takes place in a school and requires a prescribed curriculum.
- People do not and cannot learn on their own.
- People with a large quantity of memorised information are better people than those with less.
- Schools are needed to socialise and civilise.
The next learning system, on the other hand, assumes that:
- Learning is life, because humans are learning animals, and whilst we are alive, we are learning.
- Learning occurs everywhere and anywhere.
- People can direct their own learning.
- Education is a lifelong activity that needs to be personalised using a catalogue curriculum.
- People can learn to make decisions on what and how to learn.
- Everyone is important regardless of how much they have memorised.
- People are socialised and get civilised in their communities.
The next learning system could develop in a variety of ways. It could be driven into being by commerce and market forces seeking only profit. As a democrat, I prefer the next learning system to be subject to democratic values and democratic controls. Winston Churchill noted that democracy was the worst system of organisation - except for all the others. Aristotle noted that there could be the rule of the untutored mob voting for any fashion or whim that took its fancy - this is immoral democracy. Moral democracy, on the other hand, is underpinned by the value system of human rights, as proclaimed in the UN Declaration of Human Rights. If you do not have democracy, of the moral type, you are bound to have something worse, such as tyranny, totalitarianism, fascism, bureaucracy, or some other form of domination. The next learning system can be a liberation, but only if we exercise democratic discipline and develop democratic lives.