Thoughts on OECD and PISA data

As the PISA and OECD tables talk reaches its expected frenzy, stand by for reductive lying crap about how our economic performance depends on where a country sits on the table. This is a neat way to sidestep questions of eg investment in manufacture, corrupt, crazy and incompetent banking, levels of immigration, price of and availability of raw materials, inequality - all of which have powerful bearings on economic performance.

Worse: the OECD data accept 'competition' (between countries in this instance) as the key determinant of success. If nothing else this shows us that this is indeed the dominant way in which our ruling class thinks. They are unable or unwilling to see the world through the prism of need and use. In a rational world, we'd be a) developing goods and services based solely on principles of need and use and b) we would be sharing our 'successes' in finding or inventing these with everyone else.

Instead, OECD tables are symptoms of a crazy world in which huge amounts of time, resources and wealth are wasted (see advertising, PR, duplicate production etc) in order to steal a march over the next company, the next country or the next continent.

With OECD data, children are being used as the cannon fodder in this competitive frenzy. The education system is used in the same way that generals complain about guns not working - without stopping for a moment and wondering why they are at war.

An atheistical thought

The simplest and easiest way to be an atheist is to just be it and do it. If you don't want to, you don't have to argue it or try to prove it. You just do all the big things and all the small things - everything - without ever referring to any kind of supernatural force. You can have wonder, mystery, tragedy, ecstasy, love, hate, memory, foresight, wisdom, foolishness or whatever - and none of it needs to be hooked to a deity. If it already comes that way - attached to a god or to worship - so be it. That's how they thought it or lived it. But they cannot prescribe how you must think it or live it. And an atheist doesn't have to tell the believer how to think it or believe it.

Two thoughts.

1.

This government have perfected a new collective art form: blaming the poor for being poor and blaming professionals for deiberately keeping them in poverty. Boris says they're stupid; Gove blames teachers;IDS blames benefits; Cameron blames immigrants etc etc. The one group whose fault it can't be are those who become extremely wealthy from employing people on low wages.

2.

The continuation of the system turns on how successful our leaders can be in keeping up the illusion that everyone or anyone can become rich. To do this, they have to point at the tiny minority of people who have done this and to ignore a) the fact that most wealth is retained dynastically by rich families and b) that the system works by virtue of there being a tiny minority who are rich and a massive majority who are not. So really the system is much more interested in guaranteeing that there are enough poor people doing the work than digging out the odd poor person who might possibly one day become rich. But that should remain a secret. Or at least not very well known. One way for that to happen is to tell everyone that life's a competition, work's a competition, your home is in a competition, love is a competition, your body is in a competition.

Time to become literature activists: doing and thinking

This is the text (more or less) of the talk that I gave at the RSA.

You can see me giving the talk here:


http://www.thersa.org/events/audio-and-past-events/2013/rsa-commencement-michael-rosen


Doing and Thinking

My mother was a primary school teacher but when she was in her early forties she took study leave to do a diploma in primary education at the Institute of Education with a person who for us at home, seemed unfathomable and mysterious: a man called Christian Schiller.

I was around 16 and the first immediate consequence of my mother’s studies, was that I found that I had to get my own tea. The next was that my mother started to talk in unfathomable and mysterious phrases. These would surface sometimes after she had spent half an hour or an hour or so staring into the middle distance. I remember coming home from school once, the house was dark and I thought no one was in. I opened the door to the living room and saw that my mother was sitting there and she hadn’t turned the light on. I asked her if she was OK and she said she was fine. Later I heard her say to my father: ‘It’s all a matter of doing and thinking’. My brother, the family satirist, had tuned into this way of talking and he’d started a new comedy routine where he would pretend to be my mother, look into the distance and say, ‘Harold, it’s all a matter of ‘being and seeing’, no, Harold, what it is is ‘talking and walking’’ and so on.

At the time, I had no idea what she was talking about. My notion of what ideas or knowledge were, was wrapped up in senior school type problems like the downfall of Antony and Cleopatra or the unification of Italy. To my mind-set at the time, a phrase like ‘doing and thinking’ wouldn’t or couldn’t capture anything that I thought worth knowing.

And yet, for the last fifty years, I can see that whether I knew it or not, the phrase has been some kind of pole star for me. I grant straightaway that there is a problem in the idea that you might be locked into following a guide that you don’t know you’re being guided by, but let’s leave that for a moment.

So, from the vantage point of now, what do I think my mother was on about?

I think my mother was expressing what might be called the activist thesis which in summary - or ‘in my own words’ as the best teachers always said to us - goes something like this:

In activity of any kind - imagine throwing a ball, or squeezing a sponge - we get our minds and bodies to go through actions. The way this involves our minds seems to involve such things as memory, recall, observation, response, reflection, interpretation, evaluation as well as a synthesis of some or all of these. Yet none of these is entirely separate from whatever it is that our bodies are doing. So even as we say a word like ‘observation’, we need to understand that it means observing something from the inside of what it is our body is doing. It then follows that if we do new and challenging things, we develop our ability or capacity to do more thinking.

As my mother was a primary school teacher, she was much concerned by the environment of the classroom. This I know because whenever we went on walks, she said she’d ‘collect bits’ to take into school. She was of course, interested in the collective of children she was in charge of for the year, and how they could all make advances in that time. For her, I know, it was especially important that it was ‘all’ the children.

So, as anyone knows who has been in that situation or anything like it, a teacher has to address the matter of how this group of children co-exist and co-operate. At which point another of my mother’s principles comes to play a crucial part, as expressed by her or my brother or both as ‘talking and doing and thinking’.

And as she sat in dark and amalgamated what she was learning from Christian Schiller and from her fellow students with her 12 years or so of teaching experience, she included in the mix that her flock had to feel that they were allowed or entitled to experiment with what they could do, with what they could talk about and with what they could think.

So let me cut to the chase, for her - and people like her - the route to learning - or if you prefer - understanding - involved the idea that children would try out things, talk about them, do them, discuss them, think about them - and though I’ve separated these processes out, they might do these simultaneously or in conjunction with each other.

Now I should say that I didn’t ever have the conversation with my mother where we talked about all this. I left for university and got involved with trying to solve the problems of the world. I have no regrets about that, though I regret that I think there was a part of me that thought that my mother wasn’t as wise or as quick-witted as my father; and so when I came back in the holidays or on visits after I had left home, it turned out that I ended up getting in a talk-huddle with my father. Then by the time I was 30, she was gone.

She left behind papers, stories, poems and a book she wrote with my father about the education of primary school children but I didn’t ever have a real face to face chat about all this, and she didn’t live long enough to see what has happened to education.

Even so, when I look back, say, all the way to when I was at university, I can see that there must have been part of me that knew that if I wanted to understand something, I had to ‘do’, I had to co-operate and I had to talk. To take one obvious example: Shakespeare. I loved reading close textual examinations of Shakespeare plays. I still do. And there are thousands of them. But I have to concede that very few of the very scholarly ones are about what it means to make a production or what it means to sit in a theatre (or any space) and watch a production. It’s as if there is some kind of invisible hierarchy between a gold standard, bona fide analysis - which is about the written form of the play - and there is something below that which is less serious, and this is about such things as: how you might turn that script into a live play, or how and why a person experiences the passing of events and thoughts of the play in the real time of a performance. Interesting but less important.

To give you one small glimpse of what I mean. A few weeks ago, my wife and I went to see Othello at the National. I have to say that I found it an overwhelming experience. Looking back on it, I can see that bit by bit I was being wound up tighter and tighter so that when we reached the final unravelling at the end, after the killings, and Othello realises that Iago has engineered the whole situation, (or depending on how you look at it, Othello realises that he was only too willing to believe what Iago suggested to him) it became unbearable. Then, just as Aristotle suggested thousands of years ago, as a consequence of that explosion of feeling, and in reflection afterwards, it’s possible to ask questions like, ‘What if Othello hadn’t believed Iago?’, or ‘What if the bit inside us all that’s a bit like Iago, or a bit like Othello could be suppressed, or avoided, wouldn’t we and the world be better?’

But - and this is crucial - for all this to work as I’ve suggested, it took a particularly brilliant production. When Othello looked across at Iago and realised what he realised, and when in the physical real time and space of that moment, we realised that he realised, the script could do its work. Or as my mother would say, doing and thinking.

Now, that wasn’t me out there acting - if only - but at university, I did quite a lot of ‘doing’ around Shakespeare and other plays and the more I did it, the more I reckoned I could get to a level of understanding about plays and drama that I could not get only or purely from reading the scholarly stuff. What any performer knows, is that the script can be as good as can be, but it has to work on the night. Voice, movement, looks, glances and a hundred other elements. Did I absorb that from my mother?

Around that time and for a few years more, I started to write poems. I thought I was writing wry little pieces about my childhood that adults would find interesting. The trick I was playing with, is that the narrator in the poem doesn’t know as much about himself as the reader. (Dramatic irony, I told myself.) Again, I had arrived at this point by churning up what I was reading - into things that I wanted to write. Writing (or ‘doing’, if you like) was in a way a kind of criticism.

In fact, there didn’t seem to be many adults who were interested other than a schools radio producer and an editor children’s books. These were for children, they both said. So the poems became a book, whereupon I started being invited into schools, libraries and on teaching training courses to read the poems. To start off with, I did this in a rather non-doing way. On one occasion I arrived at a school, Princess Frederika, in north London, and the deputy headteacher said that the children were very excited and they were all waiting for me. I thought he meant a class was waiting for me, but he took me through an arch and there was the whole school. 300 of them. Mr McElaine, the teacher, said, ‘Boys and girls, here’s the moment you’ve all been waiting for,’ and they all roared. I suspect that they roared not so much because it was me but that they liked roaring. So I hid. I hid behind my book and started to read, in my reading-a-poem voice.

“The ship in the dock, was at the end of the trip

The man on board was the captain of the ship

The name of the man was Old Ben Brown

And he played the ukelele with his trousers down’.

Now, when you perform in front of three hundred children, you usually have about 30 seconds to prove yourself and if you don’t or can’t, it’s not that they’re rude or start heckling, they just start getting interested in other stuff - their shoes, their hair, their ears.

And this is what started happening.

I looked across to Mr McErlaine and he looked horrified. He had read the poems off the page and interpreted that I was some kind of livewire, who could electrify his school.

So, he seized the moment and said to the children

‘Noooo, it doesn’t go like that, does it children?’

And they roared back at him,

‘Nooooo’

And then he did something I’ve never forgotten, he danced the poem. He read it with the whole of his body and the whole school joined in moving and singing the poem:

“The ship in the dock was at the end of its trip

The man on board was the captain of the ship

The name of the man was Old Ben Brown

and he played the ukelele with his trousers - DOWN

he played the ukelele with his trousers - DOWN. “

In that one moment, I learned that if I was going to make contact with a live audience with the words I had written on to a page, I would have to do some serious ‘doing’, I would have to dance the poems too. And if I did that, children would do that too. They wouldn’t just read poems. They would ‘do’ poems.

Much more recently, I’ve been involved in writing a book about a particular aspect of language: the alphabet. Now, another side of being a child of my parents is that language was treated in our home not only as something functional, something expressive, and something reflective, but also as something endlessly provisional and endlessly malleable. My parents exchanged English words with words, expressions and songs taken from Yiddish, French, German, Latin and Italian. They exchanged their accents with experiments in American - (my father had been in the US army) Welsh (my father had been evacuated there) . They implied in how they spoke that language was a resource - no - more than that - it was a playground. When our dishwasher broke down, my mother called it a ‘wishdasher’. When she saw what a mess our bedroom was, she called it a ‘mishadamonk’. When we asked her what a ‘mishadamonk’ was, she said it was our bedroom. When either or both of my parents heard or read or said something that seemed to them pithy or ironic or significant, they cut and pasted it into their conversations. My mother said, ‘Ask your father what he’s doing and tell him to stop it.’ It was requoted a thousand times.

I learned that I could think of language this way too. I could make it and remake it, quote it and edit it, make substitutions and additions, switch between accents, dialects and languages. And all this activity was not a matter of being clever-clever. It was again a matter of doing and thinking. By doing all that stuff, it was a way of thinking about language. At the heart of it, is a question about who language belongs to.

A good deal of education implies that language belongs outside of yourself: it belongs to the invisible know-alls who set and mark tests and exams; to invisible writers of dictionaries; to the invisible writers of the scripts that teachers appear to be using in order to teach - especially when they say things like, “I would prefer not to be doing this, but we have to...”

It’s a nonsense. Language belongs to all of us because we’re the ones who use it and change it. It is at times a battleground with all kinds of instructions and demands being issued whilst some contest these, while millions carry on regardless. At times it’s a place of exchange, borrowing and lending between groups. The activity of people leads them to put language to use as part of those activities. Doing and thinking and talking.

And yet, even if I know all this, I can find myself caught out. As I started work on the book about the alphabet, my first feeling was that the alphabet was something fixed. After all, people call the alphabet I’ve used to write this talk with, ‘the Roman alphabet’ and there it is carved into stone on Trajan’s column in Rome. You can’t be more fixed than that...other than that the Romans wrote the word ‘Julius’ as ‘IVLIVS’ all in what we would call ‘capital letters’. We don’t write like that anymore. So unchangeable but changeable. And who did the changing? Who thought up the little letters, and the letters ‘J’, ‘U’ and ‘W’? Julius Caesar? Elizabeth I? Napoleon?

Well, it took me four hundred pages to find out, but these changes and many more happened because, more often than not, the doers in the actual material business of getting writing on to paper and screens - scribes, printers, compositors and people sitting at terminals, decided through doing, talking and thinking that change was a good idea or even a necessity.

Maybe my mother would like that.

So I believe that we not only all make and change language but that we have the right and necessity to find out how it works by playing with it. Most classrooms I go into have a poster on the wall of specially good words or ‘wow’ words as they are often called. I am always curious about this. Where do these words come from? What’s so good about them? Why do good words come from outside the children? Who decided that these particular words should be ‘wow’ words and that ‘gloomy’ is better than ‘dark’. Again, perhaps informed by my mother, I always suggest that teachers could create a magpie wall, where children and the teacher put up words and phrases,things that parents have said, lines from songs, stories, poems, newspaper headlines that show interesting, exciting, odd or intriguing use of language. As I often say, poets may or may not be people with imagination - whatever that means - but we are also people on the hunt for a good way to begin a poem. Looking for things said, written or sung ‘out there’ is as good a way as any. It’s a way of ‘doing’ language instead of just receiving it.

Yesterday I was at a teachers conference. We were talking about ‘reading for pleasure’. It seems to be a good idea. There are vast quantities of research from all over the world which show that when children have the opportunities to choose what they want to read and have time to read it, the benefits are enormous. So, though we call it something soft and cosy - reading for pleasure - it has gloriously serious consequences. Governments know this. They even put it into the kinds of documents they turn out to show that they are not entirely dominated and obsessed with measuring, classifying, selecting and segregating children. Then they do nothing about it. And get on spending millions on not reading for pleasure.

Reading for pleasure is a kind of ‘doing’ too. The reader is active about choosing, browsing and selecting, and then active with playing with the possibilities in a text. More often than not, readers for pleasure will talk about what they read. They pass on their enthusiasms and raise queries, ask questions and try to answer them.

That’s why it gets banned. At the teachers conference yesterday, a teacher told us that she had been told not to spend time doing such things because it was a ‘waste of time’. Another told us that if she went on doing role play around stories she would be graded as ‘unsatisfactory’, which is a short cut to being slung out.

This week, I decided that I am going to stop calling myself a poet or a writer or a broadcaster. I’m going to call myself a literature activist.

I hope my mother would like that.

No, I’ll rephrase all that. I’m going to suggest that all children and all teachers become literature activists.

I’m sure that my mother would like that even more.

English Literature, eBacc, Hunt, Gove...waste of space

Tristram Hunt was screwing it up in the House of Commons yesterday going on about 'dumbing down' (a phrase that should be banned), and how Gove is going to stop people studying English Literature etc. The point should have been made much more simply:

by hiving Literature off from the English Language paper, then of course it becomes an option which most students will choose not to do. The question then is whether this is intentional, and if so why? ...because it seems to conflict with Gove's blather about 'cultural entitlement' and all the Hirsch stuff. 

So, instead of that coming out, Gove made mincemeat of Hunt trying to be clever and the moment is lost. And then these twerps wonder why we think the House of Commons is a waste of space.

A story to celebrate about schools and libraries

I was sent this today:

" For three years Carterton Community College was an Oxfordshire secondary school with no library after a previous headteacher had closed it down in order to use the room as an engineering suite for 15 students.

Our current headteacher, Niall McWilliams, was appalled by the situation that he inherited and wanted to restore our lost library. But it takes longer to rebuild than to destroy so it wasn’t until September 2011 that we were able, with the support of our school governors, to start the restoration project. I moved from my role as Head of English in order to manage the new library project.

We were almost starting from scratch with an empty room. Although we were able to bring old fiction books out of storage, no records had survived – and much of the non-fiction had been thrown out. We had to have new shelving installed, and buy furniture, IT equipment, and new books. Our colour scheme is grey for the shelving and tables (students wanted something quite grown-up and smart) with splashes of lime green, purple and orange in the seating (they didn’t want primary colours). Visitors’ comments have been enthusiastic, calling the new space ‘stimulating, welcoming, funky and cool’! In September 2012 the new library was officially opened by Sir Tim Brighouse.

Carterton Community College library should never have closed and we know that there are at least three lost years to make up. We are still trying to build up our book stock and are grateful for donations received from individuals and local organisations. The restoration project was long, sometimes difficult, sometimes exciting - and a surprisingly emotional process. So we were absolutely thrilled to win the School Library Design Award 2013! This would never have happened without a headteacher who strongly believes that a library is ‘the heart of the school’.

We continue to post updates about our progress on Twitter @cartertoncc_lib and there is a photo gallery of the library on our school website: http://www.cartertoncc.oxon.sch.uk/page/default.asp?title=Home&pid=1

Rosemary Stables
Library Manager "

Open Letter to Tristram Hunt on Reading. Do it!

Dear Tristram Hunt

You may or may not be aware but your predecessors in your position on the Labour Front Bench have considered and rejected submissions from various people concerning the idea of 'reading for pleasure'.

I suspect that you may not read any further because the phrase 'pleasure' can surely have very little to do with education - or if it does - it surely can not help the Labour Party win more votes. I have already picked up the vibe from your Front Bench of people trying to outdo the Tories on benefits and immigration and you too have already given signs of agreeing with flagship Tory ideas even as it becomes apparent that these are unravelling.

But I'll get back to Reading for Pleasure. An assumption grew up over the last twenty years or so that a) education was failing most - or at least far too many - children b) the best way to remedy this was by imposing more testing, more education reduced to heavily directed small tasks and some kind of 'return' (real or imagined) to the good old days. Labour bought into this bigtime with such crazy adventures as the National Literacy Strategy, a micro-managed journey to boredom and diminishing returns which was abandoned without any kind of intellectual analysis about why it was misconceived and had wasted many millions.

The Tories cynically used the resistance to this misconceived policy by coming into power talking of 'freeing' up schools and teachers to do what they do best which is teach, and you guys looked foolish and wrong-footed. Suddenly the Tories looked (for half a moment) as if they were going to release the talents and professionalism of teachers to play a major part in devising curricula, assessment and teaching methods.

Not so. It was just a hoax. Instead they have marketised education, setting schools against schools, teachers against teachers, pupils against pupils in a race to find customers, positions on leagues tables, and the best places on pre-determined exam curves. This has been policed (as if this wasn't policing enough) with new and toughened up high stakes, government testing from 6 to 16, embedding failure, failure, failure into the system - thereby obliging the employers by providing low wage fodder for the low wage economy that this austerity regime has accelerated.

Within this, education in relation to that highly reductive concept 'literacy' has been modelled by Michael Gove in two ways: in his public statements he produces watery eyed grandeur with references to Shakespeare and Dryden and on the other imposes dull, trivial testing which demands rote learning, meaningless lists of words, exercises in 'retrieval and inference' thereby leaving outside the classroom door the powers of interpretation, reflection and invention expressed by every child and student from  pre-school through to university. In fact, it is through pupils' powers of reflection, interpretation and invention that 'literacy' has meaning. What's more there is plenty of evidence to suggest that when pupils have the opportunity to read in depth, read widely and talk about what they're reading, most of the so-called 'skills' of literacy embed themselves in pupils' minds and consciousness. Conversely, there is no evidence to suggest that the apparatus of phonics, cloze procedures, retrieval exercises, spelling lists, grammar lessons prior to the age of 11, punctuation exercises help children understand language and literature nor enable them to produce coherent continuous prose, drama and poetry.

You will find plenty of research to show that the core activity that should take place within schools is 'reading for pleasure'. As one example I'll refer you to Mariah Evans et al and their research from the University of Nevada but this has been reproduced in different ways and reaffirmed by PIRLS, PISA and many others, It is clear that active readers, who read widely and often, self-select their reading are people who can access and benefit from education much more easily than those who don't.

It's not a mystery why this should be. Reading widely and often asks of young people to browse amongst differing kinds of written material. This involves scanning passages of writing, selecting what is important, processes which ask of young people to absorb the structure of language, the structures of continuous prose with its methods of subordinating, listing, logical argument, metaphor, illusion, illustration and so on. It connects meaning with purpose, meaning with pleasure, meaning with choice, meaning with existential need. The alternatives trumpeted by the Literacy Strategy and Michael Gove involve hours of tedium, dictated work programmes and small meaningless tasks.

When I was Children's Laureate I was asked to come and see Ed Balls (Sec of State for Education) and the Schools Minister, Jim Knight along with Jim Rose who had been hailed as the literacy guru until - as is constantly the case in your line of work - he was junked because he didn't quite fit the political bill for that particular moment. I showed Ed and Jim the research. I put them in touch with the Literacy Trust, the Reading Agency, and Booktrust. I met with the literature officers of Ofsted and then when the Tories came in I went in to see Nick Gibb to talk about 'reading for pleasure' .

For half a second, I was lulled into thinking that when Ofsted produced their 'Moving Forward' document in 2011 and saw that it included a 'recommendation' that 'reading for enjoyment' should in effect be on the curriculum or, as they put it, be school policy for every school, I detected movement.

Needless to say, the Tories did nothing more than wave in that direction, start some kind of  reading competition and instead put into place a piece of policy that has no evidence to support it, the 'SPaG test' which occupies even more time on the curriculum on tasks that won't produce what it claims to do namely produce better writing. That too was only a recommendation on the Bew Report, nailed on to the end of a Report that was supposed to be about Assessment and Accountability - not a report that looked systematically at what works in literacy and language teaching. So much for rigour.

So, Tristram, you have a great opportunity to show and expose all this. You can show the bookloads of research which show the efficacy of encouraging school-led policies on creating 'reading for pleasure' schools - not as a bolt-on to curricula that are killing interpretation, reflection and invention - but as a core curriculum,  You have an Ofsted document to back you up. You have research from Mariah Evans et al, along with the work of such people as Professor Stephen Krashen, and many documents from UKLA as evidence. You even have somewhere in the archives the documents from the late lamented 'Language in the National Curriculum Project' to guide you. In many university departments from Exeter, Canterbury, the London Institute of Education, King's College, Goldsmiths and many others you have academics who have worked with children and teachers looking at what really works in literacy education. You have the work of projects initiated by the Reading Agency, the Literacy Trust and Booktrust and Rotherham's Inspire project - which can show you what daily, reading for pleasure does for children, education and the wider communities.

You would have many allies from these places who can help you handle with those from the opposite side who might squeal about something or other but they don't have reason or right on their side on this matter. We have thousands of hours of research and analysis. All they have are memories of prep school and homilies based on Puritan ideas of spare the rod, spoil the child - or Gradgrind equivalents.

Reading for pleasure, reading for enjoyment - take your pick. I put up some suggestions on this blog but also at www.readingrevolution.co.uk as to how this can take place. The NUT produced a splendid booklet in collaboration with great reading champion and author, Alan Gibbons. There are documents galore for the Reading Agency and the Literacy Trust, UKLA and others. You could at a stroke, create a new generation of readers and interpreters for whom education really was a door to a new world. You could revitalise the library service by wedding schools to libraries and vice versa - Nick Gibb and Ed Vaizey said they would look into that. Maybe they got tired looking. You could seize the time, Tristram. Do it.

All you have to do is announce that you will take up Ofsted's recommendation: every school should develop a policy on reading for enjoyment. And let's begin a national conversation on how best to implement that everywhere. All the time.