Tonight:
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I was talking to a group of 12-year-olds about their life at school. One of them gazed at me with a puzzled demeanour and asked: "Why do teachers call thick children gifted?" The entire group looked at me knowingly.
What is going on here? These children grasped that their teachers were self-consciously obscuring the truth.
This is not because teachers are fibbers. Most are hard-working, honest, committed and do an excellent job.
But the self-evident nervousness of teachers - which those boys picked up on - about defining and asserting objective academic standards in the classroom goes to the heart of the educational crisis we face today.
As a society, we are obsessed with education. But as a society we seem to have given up on adult authority and the idea that the person who knows best in the classroom is the teacher.
The crisis of education is intimately linked to that of authority.
What is happening in our classrooms today reflects a far more fundamental problem about the confusion adults have with exercising authority inside and outside of schools.
Teachers are not immune to this confusion. Education requires the conscious and regular imposition of adult authority.
Yet teachers often attempt to avoid acting authoritatively because they feel uncomfortable with this hierarchical role.
Consequently, teachers often adopt the affectation of a friend or a mate in their dealings with children. It is now common for teachers to call themselves "learners" - some heads even refer to themselves as lead-learners.
Although this tendency to redefine the relationship between adult and child appears progressive and enlightened, it represents an evasion of the responsibility grown-ups have to the younger generation.
Disastrously, with the reluctance of teachers to be the grown-up at the head of the class comes a mood of casual disrespect for what our children are taught. The assumption that adults have little to teach children is rarely made explicit.
But there is a growing tendency to flatter children through suggesting that their values are more enlightened than that of their elders because they are more tuned in to the current moment.
The result is a throwaway "relevant" pedagogy coupled with a deep-seated hostility to the teaching of traditional academic subjects to young people.
As we head into the 2010 election we have been warned of "Curriculum Wars", with the Conservatives hinting at curricular reforms. But tinkering with the curriculum will not fix the problem of adult authority at the heart of our education system.
Wherever we are on the political compass, we need not only to back teachers' authority in the classroom but to recognise that authority is gained through a firm commitment to transmitting knowledge - a task that new "learner" teachers shy away from.
Any education system worth its salt is underpinned by the assumption that children are the rightful heirs to the achievement of the past.
Society needs teachers with the authority and confidence to, as Alan Bennett's Hector in The History Boys would say, "pass it on".
Frank Furedi is professor of sociology at the University of Kent at Canterbury.
He will launch his new book, Wasted: Why Education is not Educating, at the Battle of Ideas 2009 opening lecture on Saturday at the Royal College of Art, SW7.
www.battleofideas.org.uk.
Reader views (3)
Agree. My own daughter,when she was around eight-years-old, informed me that the pupils were always given 'positive feedback' even when they knew they'd not made much of an effort with a particular piece of work/lesson. Subsequently, she tended to be unsure that praise for a genuinely good piece of work was honest.
It also seems that passing on a body of knowledge, learned over centuries, no longer happens; instead, lessons in, for instance, history, are taken up with pupils being told to imagine they are some character in the past and what it must have been like then, rather than being informed (appropriately for the age and ability of pupils) of the knowledge we actually have of a particular era.
- Mrsbrixtonventnor, Londoner, 30/10/2009 00:07
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Well as the majority of people seem to agree with this point of view, why are things not changing? Almost every parent I know would say ah men, but still it continues. I'm trainging to become a teacher and praying that the inevitable swing back towards more structure and discipline in education starts before I stand up in front of my first class of teenagers.
- Mark, London, 29/10/2009 17:29
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well said Frank, utterly agree, adults are simply too worried about upsetting the delicate sensibilities of children and they're too blinded by dogma to realise they're creating a generation of disrespectful kids. It's also why we have more brats around instead of well-behaved kids who don't talk back to strangers these days.
- Helen M, West Hampstead, 29/10/2009 13:58
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