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:
‘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
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
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