The Sec Mod site which is creating an archive of memories about Secondary Modern School education 1944-early 1970s is developing. There's a great new post up there from 'Archie'.
If you went to a Sec Mod yourself do contribute. If you know someone else who went to one, perhaps you could encourage them to contribute.
Here's the site link:
http://secmod.blogspot.com/
Saturday, 4 February 2012
Inventing stories without meaning or feeling
Here's a serious question: do you think you could come up with a way in which a group of people could come together and either talk about, or write some stories and then spend an hour, say, talking about those stories, without at any point talking about the meaning of the stories?
One way, you could talk about 'structure' - but you would have to do it in such a way as to be so abstract that you couldn't ever refer to notions of good and bad, powerful and less powerful, individual versus the rest, the forces of nature appearing to be either easily dominated or overwhelming...none of that.
And you couldn't really talk about the 'little guy' or the 'big guy', or 'boy meets girl'. And you couldn't even talk about motifs like Cinderella or the deposed king or the wicked step-mother, or the robot that gets out of control. That's all forbidden.
In short, you must only talk about such things as 'the setting' or 'characters' or the 'introduction' as if these are god-given, essential parts of every story. In fact, it's a formula! And if it's a formula you can sell it!
Yes, you can dilute narratives down until all you have is this 'structure-without-meaning', package it up as if this is some form of sacred knowledge and flog it as a solution to Writing in schools.
And it makes the marking of Writing dead easy too. Has the child done the structure? Good if she has, bad if she hasn't.
Needless to say, this has absolutely nothing to do with how writers write or how readers read. Analysis of hundreds of stories, writers' methods, motives and intentions, readers' experience of reading will not deliver you these diy packages.
Instead, you'll hear writers talking about, say, catching a hint of something from what they've read, seen or heard. And this appeared to them to be some kind of problem or dilemma or oddity that needed solving or relating or unravelling. Sometimes writers will say that at some stage in the process they remembered things they had read and, yes, a structure or several structures appear to them from those read books or films or TV programmes or plays as they write. Or motifs from these sources appear to them, a 'search for the true king' or the 'lost child' or whatever. In these circumstances, writers are playing with the 'paradigm' - that's to say the 'syntax' of a story-form might stay the same but it's the elements that can be taken out and swapped. Thus: if you say the rom-com has a syntax - boy meets girl, boy (or girl) doesn't like the other party, they are in each other's company and sparks fly, the result is that the one or two in the relationship suddenly discover that they have a liking for each other. What a writer can do is take that syntax and change elements - the reluctant lovers are both divorcees instead of young inexperienced lovers; or there's a political element: the couple aren't of the same cultural group....that's the paradigm changing and not the syntax - a fruitful way to write but one that also involves talking about meaning. But, note, these story forms have different syntaxes - not one syntax!
These are some of the ways writers work. That's not to say they don't study or learn about 'structure', but that they learn about it in the context of trying to write stories with meaning and power. They discover that this or that structure might enable or hinder what they're trying to say. But, it's about meaning.
So how come schools, strategies, course plans in relation to the writing of stories are full of reductive crap about structure? How come such strategies demote or eliminate questions of meaning and feeling?
I believe it's a crisis in educational culture. It's a lack of belief in the human and in particular the human that is the child. It's an attempt to de-humanize narrative, purely so that these humans can be measured. And yet the thing that makes us human - our ability to make meanings and pass them on to each other - is being demoted or marginalised or eliminated from this activity.
So what's being measured? What possible worth can be placed on such measurement if the human has been subtracted from what is being measured? After all, we're not talking about something which is of itself an abstract process - like Maths. We're talking about a process which humans invented in order to pass on meanings and feelings.
There are people out there who have become afraid of children's meanings and feelings and these 'structures' are just right for them. Out go the tears and laughter, in come the marking systems.
Beware.
One way, you could talk about 'structure' - but you would have to do it in such a way as to be so abstract that you couldn't ever refer to notions of good and bad, powerful and less powerful, individual versus the rest, the forces of nature appearing to be either easily dominated or overwhelming...none of that.
And you couldn't really talk about the 'little guy' or the 'big guy', or 'boy meets girl'. And you couldn't even talk about motifs like Cinderella or the deposed king or the wicked step-mother, or the robot that gets out of control. That's all forbidden.
In short, you must only talk about such things as 'the setting' or 'characters' or the 'introduction' as if these are god-given, essential parts of every story. In fact, it's a formula! And if it's a formula you can sell it!
Yes, you can dilute narratives down until all you have is this 'structure-without-meaning', package it up as if this is some form of sacred knowledge and flog it as a solution to Writing in schools.
And it makes the marking of Writing dead easy too. Has the child done the structure? Good if she has, bad if she hasn't.
Needless to say, this has absolutely nothing to do with how writers write or how readers read. Analysis of hundreds of stories, writers' methods, motives and intentions, readers' experience of reading will not deliver you these diy packages.
Instead, you'll hear writers talking about, say, catching a hint of something from what they've read, seen or heard. And this appeared to them to be some kind of problem or dilemma or oddity that needed solving or relating or unravelling. Sometimes writers will say that at some stage in the process they remembered things they had read and, yes, a structure or several structures appear to them from those read books or films or TV programmes or plays as they write. Or motifs from these sources appear to them, a 'search for the true king' or the 'lost child' or whatever. In these circumstances, writers are playing with the 'paradigm' - that's to say the 'syntax' of a story-form might stay the same but it's the elements that can be taken out and swapped. Thus: if you say the rom-com has a syntax - boy meets girl, boy (or girl) doesn't like the other party, they are in each other's company and sparks fly, the result is that the one or two in the relationship suddenly discover that they have a liking for each other. What a writer can do is take that syntax and change elements - the reluctant lovers are both divorcees instead of young inexperienced lovers; or there's a political element: the couple aren't of the same cultural group....that's the paradigm changing and not the syntax - a fruitful way to write but one that also involves talking about meaning. But, note, these story forms have different syntaxes - not one syntax!
These are some of the ways writers work. That's not to say they don't study or learn about 'structure', but that they learn about it in the context of trying to write stories with meaning and power. They discover that this or that structure might enable or hinder what they're trying to say. But, it's about meaning.
So how come schools, strategies, course plans in relation to the writing of stories are full of reductive crap about structure? How come such strategies demote or eliminate questions of meaning and feeling?
I believe it's a crisis in educational culture. It's a lack of belief in the human and in particular the human that is the child. It's an attempt to de-humanize narrative, purely so that these humans can be measured. And yet the thing that makes us human - our ability to make meanings and pass them on to each other - is being demoted or marginalised or eliminated from this activity.
So what's being measured? What possible worth can be placed on such measurement if the human has been subtracted from what is being measured? After all, we're not talking about something which is of itself an abstract process - like Maths. We're talking about a process which humans invented in order to pass on meanings and feelings.
There are people out there who have become afraid of children's meanings and feelings and these 'structures' are just right for them. Out go the tears and laughter, in come the marking systems.
Beware.
Friday, 3 February 2012
So what happened when you met Nick Gibb?
I know you've been on the edge of your seats longing to know what happened up at the Department for Education.
Schools Minister, Nick Gibb, is collecting ideas on how to encourage children to read. He says that he's got the 'decoding' in place (acknowledging that we wouldn't agree about that). He said he wanted to tackle the syndrome of 'can't read, won't read'. What ideas did I have about that?
[small intermission while Rosen muses on the phenomenon of canny sods who go about collecting vast consultancy fees every time they open their gobs within a hundred metres of a government minister and idiotic mugs like himself who turn up, gas on about reading, poetry, writing, teaching, schools, children, life, beauty, truth, the meaning of life and the universe and we don't even get to keep the security badge they give you on the way in.]
So, I repeated pretty well everything I've said on this blog about reading, writing, schools, teachers - I raved on about the model of teacher INSET pioneered by the Language in the National Curriculum project - why not a 'Reading Project' on the same model? I handed Nick Gibb my 20 point plan to turn a school into a book-loving school with the strong proviso that this shouldn't be a directive, that it was something schools could adapt to suit local conditions. I mentioned the 'reading revolution' website. I talked about how every school should be legally entitled to issue a library ticket to every child when they enter schooling in reception or Year 1 with a map showing the nearest libraries. We talked about how teacher training should include a module on children's literature - on all courses, not just some. I talked about 'browsing' and how this is a form of abstract thought, when children 'sort' their books into categories, how reading a Greek myth with my daughter aged 7, led her to between concrete and abstract thought as she investigated the meaning of the word 'pity'. I provided the reference to the research I've written about on this blog (see 'Books, books, books') which showed that having 500 books in your home (could be library books coming through), guarantees your child getting 3 years more schooling. (Mariah Evans, University of Nevada 2010) and so on.
[second intermission while Rosen remembers this conversation going with Ed Balls and Jim Knights, being treated with mild disdain because NuLabour were 'levering up standards' using SATs.]
It was a conversation. Nick Gibb listened and talked. I think I listened and talked. He said he was very interested in all this. He said that he would convene a meeting of all the Children's Laureates. I said that they were all passionate about reading and it could be fruitful.
I left.
Schools Minister, Nick Gibb, is collecting ideas on how to encourage children to read. He says that he's got the 'decoding' in place (acknowledging that we wouldn't agree about that). He said he wanted to tackle the syndrome of 'can't read, won't read'. What ideas did I have about that?
[small intermission while Rosen muses on the phenomenon of canny sods who go about collecting vast consultancy fees every time they open their gobs within a hundred metres of a government minister and idiotic mugs like himself who turn up, gas on about reading, poetry, writing, teaching, schools, children, life, beauty, truth, the meaning of life and the universe and we don't even get to keep the security badge they give you on the way in.]
So, I repeated pretty well everything I've said on this blog about reading, writing, schools, teachers - I raved on about the model of teacher INSET pioneered by the Language in the National Curriculum project - why not a 'Reading Project' on the same model? I handed Nick Gibb my 20 point plan to turn a school into a book-loving school with the strong proviso that this shouldn't be a directive, that it was something schools could adapt to suit local conditions. I mentioned the 'reading revolution' website. I talked about how every school should be legally entitled to issue a library ticket to every child when they enter schooling in reception or Year 1 with a map showing the nearest libraries. We talked about how teacher training should include a module on children's literature - on all courses, not just some. I talked about 'browsing' and how this is a form of abstract thought, when children 'sort' their books into categories, how reading a Greek myth with my daughter aged 7, led her to between concrete and abstract thought as she investigated the meaning of the word 'pity'. I provided the reference to the research I've written about on this blog (see 'Books, books, books') which showed that having 500 books in your home (could be library books coming through), guarantees your child getting 3 years more schooling. (Mariah Evans, University of Nevada 2010) and so on.
[second intermission while Rosen remembers this conversation going with Ed Balls and Jim Knights, being treated with mild disdain because NuLabour were 'levering up standards' using SATs.]
It was a conversation. Nick Gibb listened and talked. I think I listened and talked. He said he was very interested in all this. He said that he would convene a meeting of all the Children's Laureates. I said that they were all passionate about reading and it could be fruitful.
I left.
Thursday, 2 February 2012
Can't stop. Off to the Ministry to see Nick Gibb.
In a few minutes I'll be meeting the Schools Minister, Nick Gibb. He asked to see me to talk about 'how to encourage children to read'.
In the words of Terry Venables, it's deja-vu all over again.
While I was Children's Laureate I was in and out of the Ministry faster than Sugar Ray Leonard's left jab. Who didn't I get to see! Oh it was fun. If it wasn't Ed Balls telling me that schools were reading books - he'd seen a school where they were reading in the playground, it was Jim Knight telling me that I had a point but he was moving on, it was Vernon Coaker telling me that they had just the same problem with PE - 'variability, Michael, variability', it was Jim Rose with his 'how do you make books come alive, Mike?', it was Phil Hammond from Ofsted telling me about how it was all very well people reading poems by you, Michael, but what about the other poets? it was Margaret Hodge saying, 'And what's happening with libraries, Michael, what's going on? and there was even one young woman who came up to me furtively as I came out of one of those meetings to ask me if I knew 'anything about multi-cultural education' because she had a report to write...
Maybe I could get a job up there - odd job man: 'Mend your light, Mr Gove?', 'Got a spot of bother with your taps, Mr Gibb.' 'Oh did that Mr Balls leave a mess on his desk? Don't worry, I'll give it a good old wipe down with swarfega...'
In the words of Terry Venables, it's deja-vu all over again.
While I was Children's Laureate I was in and out of the Ministry faster than Sugar Ray Leonard's left jab. Who didn't I get to see! Oh it was fun. If it wasn't Ed Balls telling me that schools were reading books - he'd seen a school where they were reading in the playground, it was Jim Knight telling me that I had a point but he was moving on, it was Vernon Coaker telling me that they had just the same problem with PE - 'variability, Michael, variability', it was Jim Rose with his 'how do you make books come alive, Mike?', it was Phil Hammond from Ofsted telling me about how it was all very well people reading poems by you, Michael, but what about the other poets? it was Margaret Hodge saying, 'And what's happening with libraries, Michael, what's going on? and there was even one young woman who came up to me furtively as I came out of one of those meetings to ask me if I knew 'anything about multi-cultural education' because she had a report to write...
Maybe I could get a job up there - odd job man: 'Mend your light, Mr Gove?', 'Got a spot of bother with your taps, Mr Gibb.' 'Oh did that Mr Balls leave a mess on his desk? Don't worry, I'll give it a good old wipe down with swarfega...'
I make a generous offer to ex-head of Dept of Education
I didn't make it up. Look (and see below this extract from today's Guardian, my generous offer to Sir David):
Let state schools be run for profit, says former Department for Education chief
Sir David Bell, the department's top civil servant until last year, believes move to profit-making is likely but is still 'a bit far off'
The former top civil servant in the Department for Education has said he sees "no principled objection" to profit-making companies taking over state schools and believes they will "probably" be allowed to do so eventually.
Sir David Bell, permanent secretary at the department until the end of last year and now vice-chancellor of Reading University, said in an interview with Education Guardian: "In those areas of systematic failure, where all other options have failed, can you object to somebody coming in and trying something very different and making some profit out of it?
"It could lead to better education for the kind of students who have been systematically failed for generations."
But, he added, profit-making was still "a bit far off" and it would be introduced "very gently, not in a big bang sort of way".
Michael Gove, the education secretary, said last year: "I don't have any particular objection to involving any organisation that is going to improve our education."
But he added: "We don't need to have profit-making organisations involved at the moment."
Though Nick Clegg has stated the Liberal Democrats' opposition to "running schools for profit", many in the Conservative party – particularly those associated with Tory thinktanks – support the move and are pressing for its inclusion in the party's next general election manifesto.
Bell's cautious backing for commercial firms running schools comes as a surprise because of his long background in state education and public service.
A former primary school teacher in Glasgow and Essex, he became chief education officer in Newcastle and chief executive of Bedfordshire council. He was head of Ofsted before moving to the Department for Education in 2006.
"Psst, Sir David, come over here. Come and sit in the car with me for a moment. I won't take up much of your time. I work for a company with many different interests: we import food from Poland, sink oil wells in Alaska, install surveillance systems in public toilets - pretty well anything actually.
We've seen your statements about the schools of the future and we like what we're hearing. Let me blunt with you, Sir David. Do you have a pension? Might I be so bold as to ask how much? Hmm, doesn't stretch all that far, does it? I'm going to make a guess: you would give your right hand to pay a visit to, say, the Grand Canyon, the Sidney Opera House, the Great Wall of China...or an exclusive Mediterranean holiday with a private beach. But it's all beyond your means, isn't it?
I think I've got the answer. We're very interested indeed in getting into the schools market. The snag is we're very good on surveillance systems, we've very good on waste disposal in low lying areas but education is pretty well a closed book for us. I'll be frank - closed books are the only kind of book I know. Last time I read a book was 'Noddy' in 1986. But hell, education - it's just something you have to get through before you start doing real things, don't you think? Well maybe you don't agree but don't let that stand between us.
Here's what I'm suggesting: you could come on to our board, we would pay you a generous stipend worth several thousand pounds a year. In return you would share some of your expertise with us. You would enable us to establish our education portfolio. We need to know exactly what are the weak spots, the areas of anxiety, if you like, so we can go in there with both boots on and grab the market. With you on the board we could be market leaders. What do you say?"
We don't want poor people finding out too much
"What is becoming increasingly worrying for those of us in the business world is how naked our work has become. In the past, we could go through decades of business life without people mentioning a word like 'capitalism'. For years people's attention was forever drawn towards benefit scroungers, builders working on the black, skivers who took time off work, trade union trouble-makers, strikers - the list goes on. Meanwhile, questions of how rich company bosses should be, or indeed, how did they get to be rich - were almost invisible. In short, we lived through many happy years where people who were poor were obviously poor because they were stupid. They hadn't learned how to get rich. Meanwhile, we at the top of the business tree managed to convey the idea that we were clever, canny, shrewd and above all, rather attractive.
But now this has all changed. And I'm not sure it's for the better.
Every day the newspapers are full of stories about fat cats, tax avoidance, inequality, bonuses, high-earners and the rest. Even the word 'capitalism' is being mentioned over and over again.
Look, those of us at the top of business just want to get on with our job. We don't want people prying into the exact nature of our earnings and bonuses. We want it to appear that we just happen to be rich. Or that we are being justly rewarded for doing a damned hard job, or that we are great leaders who know how to do things like 'turn a business round'. We particularly don't want the whole world and his brother trying to figure out how share-holding works. So when Stephen Hester was due to get his bonus, you'll remember it wasn't cash. It was a pretty hefty number of shares. If the whole world hadn't bloody started poking their nose in, that could have been Hester's pension. He could have spent the rest of his days, collecting the dividends.
You see, if you get people trying to figure out how a stack of shares can deliver a hefty pension to someone, they'll start asking where do these dividend share-outs come from? In the end, you go all the way back to the people doing the work for a company, the people we call the shit-shovellers. They're the ones who actually do the work that our companies need and so give the dividends to people like Steve Hester.
But if people concentrate on that sort of thing, they'll be much less likely to accept the cuts that we in business are calling for. We desperately need people to be earning less - which of course means pay cuts and unemployment. We need for that to happen so that people like me at the top of business can go on dishing out the dividends to all of us who own hundreds of thousands of shares.
Now I rather like the way Osborne and Cameron have made it seem as if the great financial crisis happened because people like my employees were greedily hanging on to their jobs, or taking pay hikes. I think far too much attention is being paid to the idea that a good deal of the crisis came from trillions of poundsworth of loans couldn't be paid back. They turned out to be worthless.
But you can't have your ordinary Joe going about saying that. Or where would we be then? Strikes? Occupations? Or worse? Do we really want ordinary Joes stopping work and then sitting right where they are, saying, 'this office or factory or store is ours. We've paid for it many times over in the dividends we've earned for you guys at the top.'?
What a nightmare."
But now this has all changed. And I'm not sure it's for the better.
Every day the newspapers are full of stories about fat cats, tax avoidance, inequality, bonuses, high-earners and the rest. Even the word 'capitalism' is being mentioned over and over again.
Look, those of us at the top of business just want to get on with our job. We don't want people prying into the exact nature of our earnings and bonuses. We want it to appear that we just happen to be rich. Or that we are being justly rewarded for doing a damned hard job, or that we are great leaders who know how to do things like 'turn a business round'. We particularly don't want the whole world and his brother trying to figure out how share-holding works. So when Stephen Hester was due to get his bonus, you'll remember it wasn't cash. It was a pretty hefty number of shares. If the whole world hadn't bloody started poking their nose in, that could have been Hester's pension. He could have spent the rest of his days, collecting the dividends.
You see, if you get people trying to figure out how a stack of shares can deliver a hefty pension to someone, they'll start asking where do these dividend share-outs come from? In the end, you go all the way back to the people doing the work for a company, the people we call the shit-shovellers. They're the ones who actually do the work that our companies need and so give the dividends to people like Steve Hester.
But if people concentrate on that sort of thing, they'll be much less likely to accept the cuts that we in business are calling for. We desperately need people to be earning less - which of course means pay cuts and unemployment. We need for that to happen so that people like me at the top of business can go on dishing out the dividends to all of us who own hundreds of thousands of shares.
Now I rather like the way Osborne and Cameron have made it seem as if the great financial crisis happened because people like my employees were greedily hanging on to their jobs, or taking pay hikes. I think far too much attention is being paid to the idea that a good deal of the crisis came from trillions of poundsworth of loans couldn't be paid back. They turned out to be worthless.
But you can't have your ordinary Joe going about saying that. Or where would we be then? Strikes? Occupations? Or worse? Do we really want ordinary Joes stopping work and then sitting right where they are, saying, 'this office or factory or store is ours. We've paid for it many times over in the dividends we've earned for you guys at the top.'?
What a nightmare."
First stories of Sec Mod life in
People are beginning to send in their stories of what life was like in Secondary Modern Schools between 1944 and the early 1970s.
Here's the site:
http://secmod.blogspot.com/
Here's the site:
http://secmod.blogspot.com/
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