Our Zoology course was a disaster. We had a huge mass of facts to learn and regurgitate. Instead of a celebration of life it was a boring memory test. Instead of piercing the awe and wonder of living specimens it was a tedious analysis of dead bodies. We had to learn diagnostic features and categorise everything.
It ran counter to our love of the living world.
Pete summed it up with this cartoon.
Science should we about wonder, awe and mystery. It should be fun and fulfilling. It is the most exciting subject ever.
Early years in teaching, William Burroughs and censorship
When I went into teaching I was determined to approach it in a different manner to the experience that I had imposed upon me in schools. A lot of my teachers were tyrants and I hated them. I refused to have the distant hierarchy of teacher and pupil. I insisted the students called me by my first name. For me teaching was a privilege. I was not there to force-feed reluctant kids with turgid facts; I was there to enlighten and expand minds, to promote thinking, questioning and discovery and turn on kids to the awe and wonder of the universe.
It did not quite work that way.
The world was not ready for me. The teaching staff thought I was a rebellious nutter and the kids thought I was being weak and played up.
Over my first year or two I had to adjust to find the balance. It was a lesson in life. People liked order and to be told what to do. The kids preferred a strict vicious teacher to a weak one. They felt safer. They knew where they were. That’s why we elect psychopaths and sociopaths; they are strong, clear and black and white. You know where you stand with fascism.
I found a middle way.
At lunch-time I shunned the staff table and sat with the kids. I ran clubs, played sport and got to know them.
I believed teaching was not about power but more about relationship. That learning was not about knowledge so much as the skills and qualities necessary to experience life. I still do.
The students found me interesting and we developed good relationships. They asked me to contribute to a student magazine. I wrote a piece for them. The Senior Team thought it was not appropriate and banned it. The students published the magazine with a space where my story should have been with ‘CENSORED’ written over the pages.
Great stuff.
One of the brightest of the young rebels, a certain Stephen Ellis, won a prize for speech day. That meant that he received a sum of money towards a book of his choice. He came along to me and asked my advice as to what book might be a good one to purchase.
Without too much thought I said that probably something by Kerouac, Ginsberg or Burroughs might be good. He bought a William Burroughs.
The day before Speech day, when the prizes were to be distributed, the lads took their books in. The Religious Education teacher went apoplectic when he saw the William Burroughs book. He took it home to check.
The next day he brought it back. He had painstakingly cut out all the offensive bits. Now anyone who is familiar with Burroughs will know that he is renowned for his straight talking offensiveness. The book was a colander of holes. There were as many holes as words.
I thought all those cut out bits were right up William Burroughs street. He was famous for using the cut-up technique. That would have been something – to make a new book out of a rearranging of all the offensive bits!
Stephen was marched off to the Headteacher to explain why he had chosen such an extreme book. I thought my short career might be on the line. Stephen did not mention me. He feigned innocence. He seemed delighted at what had happened.
I think he went on to become a solicitor. I hope he still has that book.
I taught in Secondary Schools in England and America for thirty six years. I focussed on the child. I concentrated on fun, exploration, wonder, awe and investigating all that was incredible. It was a journey of adventure.
My school was based on respect, responsibility, empathy, and relationship. Tolerance, happiness and equality was the basis for our huge success. We became the best in the country with three successive Outstanding Ofsted’s.
This is my story. It doesn’t pull punches.
If you want to read all about it you can buy it here:
Education is fundamental to all of us, our children and the society we live in.
In this book I have given my views, anecdotes and feelings from an inside point of view. It is highly readable and you don’t have to be a teacher to enjoy it. It is controversial and real!
Here’s the foreword:
Foreword
I am a survivor of a concentration camp. My eyes saw what no person should witness. Gas chambers built by learned engineers. Children poisoned by educated physicians. Infants killed by trained nurses. Women and babies shot and killed by high school and college graduates. So I’m suspicious of education. My request is: help your students to be human. Your efforts must never produce learned monsters, skilled psychopaths, or educated Eichmanns. Reading and Writing and spelling and history and arithmetic are only important if they serve to make our students more human.
Leadership is about empowerment. If a leader doesn’t empower their staff to take risks and grow they aren’t worth their salt. For a leader to succeed all those working with them should reach their potential. That is good leadership.
A school is like an ocean liner. It builds up a head of steam and gets carried along by its own momentum. It cannot stop or change course abruptly. You have to guide it and plan each change of course well in advance. It takes all the sailors working as a team to run smoothly.
A Headship is like a race down a steep snow run on an old tin tray. You have limited control and your journey is perilously at the mercy of events and obstructions that cannot all be foreseen.
A Head sets the tone for everything that happens in the school.
The art of Headship is to sell your vision so that the whole community is pulling in the same direction.
Paradoxically a Head is largely impotent. As a Head you have far-reaching responsibilities and limited power. There are good things about this. Many Heads have proceeded to Headship out of a desire for power, control and money. They are ambitious and can be overbearing, ruthless, vicious and self-centred. At least the system prevents them exerting their regimes of fear and control to such a huge extent. The downside is that it stops you dealing properly with poor teaching. The kids deserve better but on the whole having restraints is better than tyranny.
You always find when you reach the top that you’re actually in the middle. A Head is in the middle of everything.
It is said that the fact that someone wants to be a politician should automatically ban them from standing; the same thing is true of Headships. Those that think they know what they are doing are usually the worst. If a Head starts their Headship by asking for more power or money they can be guaranteed to be doing the job for the wrong reasons.
The only reason to become a Head is that you have a passion for trying to make the world a better place, to make people happier and to see education as the only way of achieving this. After all, it has to be better than war, religious hatred and sectarian violence.
Then we approach the thorny subject of the purpose of ‘Education’. Education is all things to all men. To politicians it is a way of maintaining social order, reinforcing class or enabling mobility and addressing the economic needs of the country. To many it is purely about careers while to others it is about expanding minds, opening horizons and creating wonder. I’m very much in the wonder and awe camp. I am also of the repairing damaged kid’s persuasion. All my students were equally important and equally valuable. I hope I succeeded in making some of their lives better. That’s what I set out to do. Their chosen career and economic value was secondary to their self-esteem and happiness.
Before starting this I checked on ‘Rate my Teacher’, a scurrilous website that has given a voice to some rather dubious individuals, but one which reflects a series of views of how some others see you. It offers a modicum of objectivity. It was a little unsettling to see oneself described as an obese penguin from the CIA but on the other side there was the recognition of the care and respect. It showed a career that was not entirely wasted.
I worked in Education for thirty six years and prior to that I was largely a victim of it for twenty years. My experience of schooling gave me the impetus to get involved and work to change it. My disgust at Gove and the Tory attempt to belittle all the achievements of recent decades and drag education back to the appalling 1950s is my main reason for writing this. Children should be valued as human beings and not economic units. Education that is not developing all aspects of humanity and expanding minds is not only wrong it is disgusting. Most leading fascists have been highly educated after a fashion. It was their empathy, compassion and warmth of spirit that was allowed to atrophy. Any education system that fosters elitism and the smug arrogance that stems from it should be resisted by all caring people. A system that ignores the promotional of human feeling, sound moral and ethical values in order to focus on exam league tables and economic performance is flawed. The society created would be cold and bitter. It is a vision I have fought against all my life. I am for the warmth and light.
In my teaching experience I have known students with little intelligence, destined for poor grades, but possessing such a range of immense qualities that they are humbling. I have known highly intelligent individuals, destined for top jobs, who were vicious and mean spirited and likely to create misery. My job was to bring out the best in both and my hope that both types left school better equipped to make a positive contribution to society.
Education is a nebulous thing. We are building the future and the future is not only concerned with careers and wealth; it is also about families, societies, relationships and supporting those less fortunate. How to build a better world should be our curriculum. How we repair damaged children should be our imperative. How we foster positive human values should be our main aim. Teaching and Learning, Exam results and league tables are superfluous in the face of such paramount challenges.
This is why I believe the most important subject, and the most difficult to teach, is PSHE. All too often it is poorly taught, pushed to the shadows and taught by reluctant exponents who happen to have some free space in their timetable. This is a travesty. PSHE is about life, about preparing students for a better world, dealing with the big issues of responsibility, respect, tolerance and empathy. PSHE, like the Pastoral system, is about guidance, interaction and development of those qualities that raise the sensibilities. It should be given centre stage, pride of place and only taught by the very best of teachers with the most advanced skills. Anything less is short-changing the future.
The only way to address the world’s problems is good education.
As a probationary teacher I set about taking on the hierarchy of the school and changing the beast. I wanted a revolution. You don’t have to be in Senior Management to have a power base to promote positive change. I fought and managed to bring in a number of improvements. However, after twenty years of influential input from a lowly position, I realised that the best way of changing the beast was from the top and seized my opportunity to move into Senior Management.
I did things my way. I did not follow the rules. I was the grit in the Vaseline. The Senior Team found me a major problem. I refused to compromise. I did it the way I felt was right for the students and my own philosophy. Yet the method was highly successful. In the whole of my time in teaching I did not have a single report or inspection putting me below excellent. On the schools first Ofsted inspection, in which it achieved Satisfactory, all my areas were Outstanding. Over the next three Ofsted inspections, two as Deputy Head and one as Head, all my areas of responsibility were deemed outstanding. Being a maverick and not following the rules does not necessarily mean you cannot gain recognition. Risk Taking is a big part of the game. Covering your back is a weakness and a flaw. Doing what is right, even in defiance of the orders from above, is an imperative.
Duke Ellington supposedly first said that there were only two kinds of music: good and bad. The same is true of education. Bad education is destructive to minds, spirits and society. It should be banished even when it seemingly produces results. My Maths teacher always got 100% pass rate. I passed Maths from his class. Yet nobody was more successful at destroying a subject. To a man we came out of there hating Maths.
I have always questioned the education system. It seems crazy to put groups of people together grouped by age. That never happens in normal social interaction. It is asking for trouble, particularly during teenage years when hormones are rampant and brains are melting and becoming rewired. It reinforces lots of negative behaviour patterns. It is almost as bad as grouping people according to ability, but not quite. I think we need to bring our best minds to bear to find a better way forward. What Mr Gove proposes, a plunge back to the dark days of the 1950s emotionally challenged society would be a disaster. It has to be better than that.
I only served five years as a Head. It is something I regret. I was never personally ambitious and was severely lacking in self-confidence when it came to formal situations. One thing that was obvious was that there were going to be many formal situations and they came with the post. Consequently I came to Headship too late. I got used to the formal situations, overcame my anxiety attacks, and grew into them. One thing I have learned from life is that you should always push yourself and try to extend your reach. To not do so is to leave yourself with an unsatisfied life. You’d never know what you could have achieved. I guess I’ll never know. I would have liked to have served as a Head for longer and really got things going as I would have liked. The school was motoring. My cherished beliefs, that I had spent thirty six years establishing, were bearing fruit. The atmosphere inside the school was warm, friendly and buzzing with energy. We were a positive, can-do, all inclusive community. There was a lot of love.
If you review the full panoply of responsibilities involved with Headship, as with many other jobs, it becomes obvious that it is not possible to carry out the role successfully. You are responsible for everything twenty four hours a day, seven days a week. You have to know every rule and regulation inside out. You are expected to represent yourself without legal representation. To achieve this you would need to be in ten places at once, have a myriad of skills, be super intelligent and be able to read and hold in your memory a mass of legal documentation sufficient to fill a library. As with all such roles you learn to prioritise, deal with the pressing, delegate and relax into the knowledge that you are always exposed and could flounder at any moment from circumstances largely beyond your control. The stress is enormous. I was threatened with prison three times during my short stint. You can go two ways. You can become anal and try to nail everything down, creating a bureaucratic mediocrity or you can hold on tight, guide the tin can over the bumps and away from the trees, experience a spectacular journey and enjoy the adrenaline rush.
Outstanding can only come as a result of going for it and reaching as far as your spirit will allow. All the checklists in the world cannot create a single spark of originality or flash of genius. Inspiration comes from passion.
Headship is a lonely place but it can be exhilarating when you have the support of the community you have helped create. Sometimes it all comes together and is transcendental. Those are the moments we live for.
As far as I was concerned mediocrity should never be an option.
What follows are my views on education and the mechanics of how the school came to become Outstanding while prospering as a friendly, supportive community in which everyone was loved and valued.
I believe with all my heart that we can mend broken kids, soften the arrogant and aggressive, and use education to change the world into a tolerant, peaceful place that works in harmony with nature.
When education is done properly it soars. It should work to take humanity out of the morass of war, poverty and religious intolerance into a new age.
I look forward to a new world, risen like a phoenix from the ashes of the old, where selfishness, greed and violence have been banished.
This is no idle dream of a helpless romantic idealist. This is the true product of education.
Chris Goodwin 16.11.2012
Education – the perversion into mindless vacuity and statistics.
We teach the young to read and write; two tools that have unlimited power to expand the mind. At once all knowledge and wisdom is at their finger-tips – the greatest thoughts of the greatest men and women; the most wonderful poems, the most brilliant use of prose to paint pictures in the mind. All power resides in their hands to take the electricity in their minds and paint their own pictures to enthral, elucidate and educate others.
Reading and writing are the greatest pleasures in life. They excite and open doors to other universes.
We teach them to read so that they can read the adverts that sell rubbish they do not need, read the texts that indoctrinate and befuddle, read trivia that serves no other purpose than to titillate and pass the time, read the political pamphlets that lie and deceive and set in motion the mechanism of their own downfall.
Perhaps it is best they never learnt to read at all?
We teach them to write so that they might sign the cheques, agreements and mortgages that sell their souls, send the texts that talk of nothing and deliberately misspell and destroy the grammar so that all understanding of the beauty of language is negated.
Perhaps it would be better never to have learnt to write at all?
What we need is the education that creates the awe and wonder, reveals the beauty and discloses truth. An education that makes a joy of language and thrills and excites in a way that statistics cannot measure.
Until such time as all the millionaire business-people, politicians and establishment have to send their children to the bog-standard comprehensive we will never get the level of funding necessary to create a brilliant education system.
While an elite can give their children advantage and privilege by means of a cheque-book there will never be a level playing field.
The establishment actually have a vested interest in keeping the rest of the people down. It reduces competition. Their children can prosper at the expense of ours.
There is no reason why our children should suffer inner-city deprivation, shoddy classrooms, over-crowding, political dogma, bureaucracy, poor teachers and unimaginative lessons. Down the road the Toffs Public Schools have plenty of funding, no political interference, Ofsted or National Curriculum and can buy in the best. If one of their students is floundering they target endless support and nurture them through. While in the State system where it is fraught, under-funded and over-controlled tyranny, redeployment, sacking and fear is the order of the day.
I bet if the rich had to go to a State School we’d soon find funding and standards shooting through the roof.
Read what a highly successful ex-Secondary Headteacher has to say. I’m the only one making sense!
The Grammar School system was and is a disgrace!
At the age of eleven children were arbitrarily tested and shunted down pathways to success or failure.
It was all self-prophesising – those marked as failures became just that!
less than 10% were creamed off. The 90+% were dumped. They were ear-marked for a ‘technical’ career – using their hands, even though most of them were not interested in using their hands for anything other than battering people. They saw themselves as thick failures and went through life as a no-hoper, an outcast and full of resentment.
I would not like to encounter a number of the ‘products’ of the Secondary Moderns down a dark alley
We need everyone being equally welcome, everyone being valued. We need social cohesion and self-esteem. The world is not all about intelligence. There is a place for everyone. We all have worth.
I speak from experience as both an eleven-plus failure and a Headteacher. With an IQ of 155 I failed my eleven-plus and was dumped into a terrible place where education was a battle. If it hadn’t been for luck, parents and intrinsic intelligence I would have, like so many other talented individuals, floundered and gone under. The eleven-plus is a terrible thing to impose on young people. It can destroy a fragile psyche. We cannot tolerate over 90% of our children being sacrificed in that way.
Read what a highly successful ex-Secondary Headteacher has to say. I’m the only one making sense!