In my last blog-post I described how Michael Gove, the previous conservative education minister in the UK, has contributed to the educational debate by bringing in the voice of Michael Oakeshott.  I reproduce below a famous extract where Oakeshott puts forward the idea of education as participation in the 'conversation of mankind'. I have highlighted a few points that I think that Michael Gove and other supporters of what they call 'traditional' education might find surprising, scepticism towards the idea that there are 'facts', rejection of hierarchy, rejection of the idea of any fixed canon, and affirming the need for a diversity of voices. For Oakeshott education is not the transmission of facts - it is drawing students into open-ended and  on-going dialogue. 

“In conversation, ‘facts’ appear only to be resolved once more into the possibilities from which they were made; ‘certainties’ are shown to be combustible, not by being brought in contact with other ‘certainties’ or with doubts, but by being kindled by the presence of ideas of another order; approximations are revealed between notions normally remote from one another. Thoughts of different species take wing and play round one another, responding to each other’s movements and provoking one another to fresh exertions. Nobody asks where they have come from or on what authority they are present; nobody cares what will become of them when they have played their part. There is no symposiarch or arbiter, not even a doorkeeper to examine credentials. Every entrant is taken at its face-value and everything is permitted which can get itself accepted into the flow of speculation. And voices which speak in conversation do not compose a hierarchy. Conversation is not an enterprise designed to yield an extrinsic profit, a contest where a winner gets a prize, not is it an activity of exegesis; it is an unrehearsed intellectual adventure. It is with conversation as with gambling, its significance lies neither in winning nor in losing, but in wagering. Properly speaking, it is impossible in the absence of a diversity of voices: in it different universes of discourse meet, acknowledge each other and enjoy an oblique relationship which neither requires nor forecasts their being assimilated to one another.

This, I believe, is the appropriate image of human intercourse, appropriate because it recognizes the qualities, the diversities, and the proper relationships of human utterances. As civilized human beings, we are the inheritors, neither of an inquiry about ourselves and the world, nor of an accumulating body of information, but of a conversation, begun in the primeval forests and extended and made more articulate in the course of centuries. It is a conversation which goes on both in public and within each of ourselves."  Oakeshott., M. (1959) The Voice of Poetry in the Conversation of Mankind. London: Bowes and Bowes.

​My last blog criticised Daisy Christadoulou for her poor argument against teaching general skills. But I do think that the issue is worth thinking about because thinking about it can lead to a better understanding of education. Engaging with Michael Gove’s argument illustrates this. 

Michael Gove, UK Education Minister from 2007 to 2014 and still, apparently, something of force behind the conservative government’s education policy, gave political support to the view that schools should focus on teaching knowledge rather than general thinking skills. In a speech to the RSA in 2006 he argued passionately for teaching more knowledge, giving  the example of facts like that the Battle of Hastings was in 1066. At the same time he argued for less time spent, as he put it, ‘cultivating abstract thinking skills’. He supports his knowledge focus with a quotation from Michael Oakeshott, usually referred to as a conservative political philosopher,  to the effect that every human being is born heir to an inheritance – “an inheritance of human achievements; an inheritance of thoughts, beliefs, ideas, understandings, intellectual and practical enterprises, languages, canons, works of arts, books musical compositions and so on…”. Gove asserts that access to this inheritance is a right and that is what education is for.  (https://www.thersa.org/globalassets/pdfs/blogs/gove-speech-to-rsa.pdf)

 - This inheritance that Oakeshott refers to sounds, because of the way that Gove cites this, as if it is a body of knowledge to be transmitted across the generations as one might hand down a treasure from the past. But Oakeshott makes it clear that this inheritance is nothing fixed and pinned down that can be parceled up and transmitted. You might be tempted to call this inheritance a ‘culture’ he writes, but, he qualifies this:

‘A culture is not a doctrine or a set of consistent teachings or conclusions about a human life. It is not something we can set before ourselves as the subject of learning …’.
No, he continues, a culture is a conversation of multiple voices which often disagree with each other and so to get students to learn this culture is not to transmit it but to get them to participate in it through what he calls ‘conversational encounter’. (Oakeshott, 1989, p16 - see also my next blog http://www.rupertwegerif.name/blog/oakeshott-on-education-as-conversation).

Oakeshott writes:
‘And perhaps we may recognize liberal learning as, above all else, an education in imagination, an initiation into the art of this conversation in which we learn to recognize the voices; to distinguish their different modes of utterance, to acquire the intellectual and moral habits appropriate to this conversational relationship and thus to make our debut dans la vie humaine.’
 
 So, part of education, for Oakeshott, is about acquiring ‘intellectual and moral habits’ required for ‘conversational relationship’. Oakeshott appears to be advocating precisely what I call ‘dialogic education’ and define as ‘teaching for dialogue’ (Wegerif 2013 ). But dialogic education is, amongst other things, also the best way to teach for general thinking and learning skills including creativity (Wegerif 2010).
 
It is true that Oakeshott is against abstracting general aptitudes from concrete conversational encounters, writing that:
 
A culture is not a set of abstract aptitudes; it is composed of substantive expressions of thought, emotion, belief, opinion, approval and disapproval, of moral and intellectual discriminations, of inquiries and investigations, and learning is coming to understand and respond to these substantive expressions of thought as invitations to think and to believe.
 
But he is certainly all about teaching thinking in the broad sense, it is just that  he understands this broad sense to be thinking embodied in concrete dialogues that go beyond the here and now.
 
The  knowledge-based curriculum understood as memorising lots of facts, like the dates of key battles, might help students win pub quizzes later in life but is otherwise a bit silly. The point of knowledge is using it to think – i.e to engage in dialogue. It is impossible to predict in advance which ‘facts’ are going to be needed for thinking since the field of potential facts is too vast. In this increasingly global and rapidly changing, world it is not possible to know in advance exactly what we are going to need to know in order to think well in every future conversational encounter.
 
To know we need to think and to think we need to know. Where to start? What is needed is not an arbitrary store of inert knowledge taught by rote to every school child in the hope that it might be useful one day. What is needed is, as Oakeshott writes, is initiation into participation in the ongoing conversations of culture by  responding to a few invitations. Participation in thinking, when thinking is understood as the ongoing dialogue of humanity, is learning how to construct knowledge together with others in a context.
 
Rather than opposing knowledge to thinking, the way forward might be through understanding the knowledge-based curriculum as the mastery of some key concepts. In a way it does not matter too much which concepts we select just as long as they are rich enough. Far from being a static object like an ingot of knowledge, a concept acts like a light dynamically illuminating new areas of thought.  Learning any one concept naturally leads to others. Conceptual knowledge is knowledge for thinking that we gain only through thinking. This seems to be the idea that Tim Oates’s has for the new curriculum. His video on this topic makes some good points:

Tim Oates was appointed by Gove to chair the panel of experts advising on the New Curriculum so we have Gove to thank not only for pointing to Oakeshott’s valuable vision of education as a dialogue and as an end in itself, but perhaps also for initiating a process that is leading away from too much superficial breadth of content and towards a focus on the conceptual mastery of a few core concepts.
 
What does it mean to master a concept? It means to be able to use it in a range of contexts and to be able to explain it to others. Using a concept in dialogue is not just a way of testing understanding – it is what understanding is. Learning dialogue, -  asking questions, giving reasons, pursing shared inquiries and so on, - equips students to master concepts and, in turn, mastering concepts deepens the quality of their dialogue.

If the new  'knowledge-based curriculum' is not about lots of facts but about mastering core concepts then I rather like this idea. It is not only compatible with dialogic education but a focus on mastering concepts enriches dialogic education and gives it depth and grain. But in order to be able to master concepts students need to be taught how to dialogue. This combination of dialogic education and conceptual mastery is the topic of a book I am currently writing with Neil Phillipson that is due for handover to Routledge very soon. I think that this is the combination that we need. 
 
There is really no need to oppose teaching knowledge and teaching general skills. As Oakeshott puts it, education  is drawing students by invitation into participation  in the ‘conversation of mankind’. This is a concrete embodied sort of conversation, each time responding to the call  of a specific voice. While we could claim that any dialogue or shared inquiry combines an aspect that might be referred to as ‘knowledge’  - the things we talk about - and an aspect that might be referred to as ‘thinking’ – the way in which we talk about these things  – the living dialogue itself is much bigger than either of these aspects. Oakeshott wrote of education as an adventure. The essence is to put oneself in the way of a call and to respond to that call - then you are off and there is no telling where you might go. If we try to teach aspects of this adventure in isolation, just focusing on knowledge by teaching 'facts' or just focusing on the process of thinking about that knowledge by teaching content-free 'strategies', then the call will not be heard and the adventure will never start. 
 
 
References
 
Oakeshott, M. (1989). The voice of liberal learning: Michael Oakeshott on education.ed. Timothy Fuller. New Haven: Yale University Press. (http://www.studyplace.org/wiki/images/9/9e/Oakeschott-A-Place-of-Learning.pdf)
Wegerif, R. (2010). Mind Expanding: Teaching For Thinking And Creativity In Primary Education: Teaching for Thinking and Creativity in Primary Education. McGraw-Hill Education (UK).
http://www.rupertwegerif.name/uploads/4/3/2/7/43271253/mindexpanding.pdf

Recently in the UK there has been a movement to reject the teaching of general thinking and learning skills. Daisy Christodoulou’s best-selling book ‘Seven Myths About Education’, for example, devotes a chapter to the idea that we should teach general skills and rejects this as a myth not justified by evidence. 

On the other hand to blame theory for poor teaching can be a bit simplistic. I am sure that the tutors at Bristol who kept pointlessly putting us into groups might have justified their practice with reference to Social Constructivism (students can’t just be taught stuff but need to construct knowledge for themselves) but really they also showed a lack of good pedagogical sense. There are good ways to use group work and bad ways. They needed to put us into groups after the input to discuss it and appropriate it for ourselves, not before any input. Christodoulou gives several anecdotes of poor teaching like my experience of group work on my PGCE but she tends to move too quickly from these anecdotes to dismissing the theory behind them.  No one doubts that general skills, like anything else, can be taught badly. If she wants to make the argument that they should not be taught at all then she would do better to focus on examples of when they are taught well.

Against what Christadoulou claims, the evidence shows fairly conclusively that general thinking skills can be taught. I know this because I edit the world leading journal in this area: ‘Thinking Skills and Creativity’ and we publish rigorous research on the impact of programmes that aim to teach general transferable thinking and learning skills. Last year I edited The Routledge International Handbook of Research on Teaching Thinking. In one chapter Professor Steve Higgins of Durham University, a leading expert in educational evaluation, summarises the evidence as to whether it is better to teach general skills separate from curriculum content (‘knowledge’) or ‘infused’ within the teaching of content. His conclusion, based on a major meta-analysis by Abrami (2008), is that the evidence is very clear: it is best to do both.
Combined approaches where skills are taught explicitly as critical thinking lessons and combined with curriculum teaching which is infused with these skills, are the most effective (an effect size of 0.94). If you teach critical thinking separately, then learners do improve (an effect size of 0.38), but perhaps don’t know how or when to employ these skills. If you teach skills embedded or infused into a curriculum, this is slightly more effective than teaching them separately (with an effect size of 0.54) but learners may not be so aware of them or of how they might need to be adapted for a different context or subject (Higgins, 2015).
 
But, you might respond, Cristodoulou is also also quoting research evidence – does this mean that the experts disagree? Not necessarily. When her favourite cognitive psychologist, Dan Willingham, writes ‘There is not a set of critical thinking skills that can be acquired and deployed regardless of context.’ he immediately goes on to add ‘ there are metacognitive strategies that, once learned, make critical thinking more likely.’ (Willingham, 2007). The issue here may be simply a narrow or wide use of the term ‘skill’. What he, as a cognitive psychologist, calls ‘metacognitive strategies’ are probably what others in education call ‘critical thinking skills’. Personally I try to stick to the word ‘thinking’ and even ‘good thinking’ or ‘effective thinking’ to avoid this unnecessary confusion.
 
When Christodoulou claims to quote evidence from cognitive psychology experiments that you cannot teach general thinking skills she is relying on a very narrow and outdated understanding of what a general skill might be. Once upon time, many years ago, cognitive psychologists tended to think of the mind as like a computer and so they searched for things like the single algorithm or programme that would help solve problems in any context. They did not find this. They found instead that problem-solving requires contextual knowledge. There is no general algorithm to play really good chess – really good chess-players have to remember a lot of good chess games.
 
This criticism of general skills from cognitive psychology is not relevant to most of the programmes to teach general thinking skills in education because educationalists tend to use the terms ‘skills’ in a broader way that  stretches to include complex contextualised performances (Bailin, 1998). When educationalists talk about critical thinking skills they do not mean abstract cognition of the kind referred to in those old laboratory cognitive psychology experiments. They mean the sort of dispositions, intellectual habits and strategies exemplified by Daisy Christodoulou, being courageous in challenging orthodoxy, persistent in pursuing enquiries, seeking evidence for claims and so on.
 
Think about it! Don’t you find that curious people who ask questions tend to be curious and ask questions in almost any context? This is a general thinking skill that can be taught. The simplest way to teach it is to be encouraging when children take an interest and ask questions. This is not rocket science. This kind of education does not need laboratory based cognitive psychology experiments based on misguided information processing models of what thinking is.
 
Thinking can be taught by engaging children in dialogue and promoting, through this, the dispositions, habits and strategies needed to think well in a variety of contexts. This is probably why the recent EEF evaluation of the impact of teaching Philosophy for Children found a very clear impact on improvements in learning in maths and English (Gorard, Siddiqui, & See, 2015).
 
Daisy Christadoulou is wrong. We can and should teach general thinking and learning skills. She is wrong partly because of her lack of knowledge but also because of some gaps in her general thinking strategies.

1. She does not define her terms carefully and so moves from the argument that skills (defined narrowly in classical cog psy) cannot work to apply this to programmes, like Claxton’s building learning power, that use a completely different definition of skills.
2. She moves from the particular  – this lesson is a waste of time and is based on the idea of teaching skills - to the general claim – all lessons based on the idea of teaching skills are a waste of time - without any rigorous review of all relevant evidence.
3. She cherry picks the research literature relying only on the examples she likes, Dan Willingham’s writing mainly, and ignoring all the many monographs and articles that do not support her.

Defining terms carefully, not over-generalising without checking and not being biased in the selection of evidence are intellectual habits/strategies that apply to many situations. These and other good thinking dispositions, habits and strategies can and should be taught.
 
 
References
Abrami, P. C., Bernard, R. M., Borokhovski, E., Wade, A., Surkes, M. A., Tamim, R., & Zhang, D. (2008). Instructional interventions affecting critical thinking skills and dispositions: A stage 1 meta-analysis. Review of Educational Research, 78(4), 1102-1134.
Bailin, S. (1998). Skills, generalizibility and critical thinking. In twentieth world congress on philosophy. Boston: The Paideia Archive.
Christodoulou, D. (2014). Seven myths about education. Routledge.
Gorard, S, Siddiqui, N & See, B H (2015). Philosophy for Children: SAPERE, Evaluation Report and Executive Summary, EEF.
Higgins, S. (2015). A recent history of teaching thinking. In The Routledge International Handbook of Research on Teaching Thinking, Edited by Wegerif, R, Li, L. & Kaufman, J. C.(pp19-29) New York and London: Routledge.
Wegerif, R., Li, L., & Kaufman, J. C. (Eds.). (2015). The Routledge International Handbook of Research on Teaching Thinking. Routledge.
Willingham, D. T. (2007). Critical thinking: Why is it so hard to teach?.American Educator, 31(2), 8