The horse before the cart

Some experiments have failed. Others are now entering the mainstream

IN 1899 John Dewey, an American education theorist, published “The School and Society”. He argued that schooling should reflect the lives of children, as well as what they had to be taught. His theories spawned a vogue for “child-centred learning”, accelerating in the 1960s into a challenge to school hierarchies and a carelessness about exams.

That kind of laissez-faire approach to learning has receded in many places. Nowadays, everyone wants to measure outcomes. The most prominent American charter schools, strongly focused on getting poor children into college (see main story), insist that children do regular mental arithmetic between lessons. Germany has also tightened up its examination system in the past decade, to help standardise results.

In Britain Michael Gove, the education secretary, has emphasised a return to core subjects such as maths, English and sciences in secondary schools. He also wants to persuade former army officers into teaching to improve discipline in rowdy schools—boot camp, if you will.

Pam Sammons, a researcher at Oxford University who has conducted a review of successful teaching practices, says that elements of child-centred education are fine, as long as schools teach the basics first. In other words, put the horse before the cart. Problems start, she thinks, when more laissez-faire learning activities get in the way of proper teaching.

Growing diversity in schooling in the West, however, including the rise of free schools, allows more space for those who want to try different education methods. In Britain, Montessori and Steiner Schools, which concentrate on nurturing the whole child rather than on a rigid academic curriculum, can also become state-funded free schools, and are wondering whether they should.

Most of Britain’s new state-funded academies favour a more orthodox approach. At the Mossbourne Academy, in the heart of London’s recently riot-torn borough of Hackney, Sir Michael Wilshaw heads a school which was closed for poor discipline in 1995, but is now one of the most widely-praised academies in the country. His classrooms are basically boot-camps, with strict rules about everything from uniform onwards. “Schools that are imprecise about discipline end up with a huge amount of confusion, with staff taking different views about what’s acceptable,” he says. “That’s when children are taught badly.”

One British researcher, comparing Western reforms with Eastern practice, noted that the main difference was that in Hong Kong “the effective teacher is seen as a figure of authority, morality and benevolence”. Some Western parents might like a touch of such Confucianism in their own children’s classrooms.

Article from: http://www.economist.com/node/21529013