A Response to Mitra Part 3: The Past

The aim of this series of posts is to review and respond to Sugata Mitra's vision for education as outlined in his article published in the 16th June 2013 edition of the Observer. Although I have quoted liberally from the article I will, once again, urge interested parties to read it in its entirety before progressing any further here.

In Part 1 of this series of blogposts I concluded that Sugata Mitra considers employability to be the main purpose of education and is erroneously in favour of a progressive curriculum that overwhelmingly focuses on skills rather than knowledge. In Part 2 I discussed how Mitra's beliefs have, unsurprisingly, manifested into an extreme form of progressive pedagogy that is of questionable value.

This penultimate selection of quotes are related to perceptions about the value of technological advances:

“Any standard room in a Holiday Inn is better than the best facilities in an emperor's room in the 15th century. Air conditioning, hot and cold running water, toilets that flush, TV and the internet. The middle class lives better today than any emperor ever did. Going back to horse-drawn vehicles is not the solution to our traffic problems and pollution.”

“We don't need to improve schools. We need to reinvent them for our times, our requirements and our future. We don't need efficient clerks to fuel an administrative machine that is no longer needed. Machines will do that for us.”

“Longhand multiplication of numbers using paper and pencil is considered a worthy intellectual achievement. Using a mobile phone to multiply is not.”

Most progressive educators seem to have little time for the past, they are preoccupied with the notion that we live in an era of perpetual and profound change that devalues knowledge and the authority of experts (Furedi 2009). Given this orthodoxy it is hardly surprising that a curriculum consisting of 'skills for the 21st century' and 'child centered' pedagogy are favoured by the progressive movement. Mitra differs from the majority of progressives in that he chooses to subtely devalue knowledge through the exclusion of experts and explicitly devalues certain 'skills' on the basis that they are rendered obsolete by technology.

The problem with Mitra's argument, particularly the analogy about the hotel room, is that he is confusing skills with tools – critics of progressivisn are not objecting to the introduction the flushing toilet and running water; the objection is that we should expect little more of people than the ability to use them. Mitra frequently makes no distinction between the value of using tools and the value of having more than a superficial knowledge of the jobs tools do, in British secondary schools it isn't uncommon to encounter people who input data incorrectly into a calculator and believe the result, no matter how absurd, is the answer they are looking for. If we want to avoid situations like this then we ought to get children doing multiplication the 'old fashioned' way first so they have at least some idea when tools get it wrong. If one accepts this idea then it is easy to see why longhand multiplication is considered more intellectually worthy than using a calculator because it is a skill that requires more knowledge about how multiplication works.

This final selection of quotes are related to perceptions of the past:

“We have a romantic attachment to skills from the past.”

“But to the people who invented it, longhand multiplication was just a convenient technology. I don't think they attached any other emotions to it. We do, and it is still taught as a celebration of the human intellect.”

“The brain remembers good things from the past and creates a pleasant memory of the “good old days”. It forgets the rest. It is dangerous to build a present using vague memories of the good old days.”

Mitra's response to those who value knowledge of work more highly than the ability to use convenient tools is to dismiss said values as romanticism towards the past. His suggestion that people forget all the bad things that happen to them is ridiculous; is Mitra seriously suggesting that people who describe traumatic experiences from their past consider thier memories to represent the 'good old days'? Even in education circles Mitra's point doesn't stand up to scrutiny as evidenced by parts of this fascinating exchange about a knowledge based curriculum (see Webb 2013):

“The teaching of grammar went out of fashion in English schools in the 1970s, 1980s and into the 1990s. Consequently, I was never taught grammar at school; at all. Punctuation was almost as de-emphasised. What have I lost? I cannot use commas or colons very well. As soon as someone takes about ‘subject-object agreement’ my eyes glaze over. Every so often, I try looking some of these things up on the internet but I just can’t access what is written; I know too little to even get started.”

Presumably, if I lost something then I must have gained elsewhere. What else did I do in English lessons if I wasn’t studying grammar? I remember making a video guide to the school grounds – this time Daz pretended to urinate against a tree. Videos were all the rage at the time – a bit like ipads now. I also remember a series of lessons where we had to bring in pop songs with people’s names in the lyrics – can’t remember what for. On balance, I would rather have had the grammar.”

“I left school with 4 A grade GCSEs (in Art, English Literature, French and RE) and a handful of Bs Cs and Ds. I have a handful of lacklustre A levels, including A grade General Studies (which nobody ever cares about and I forget to put on stuff unless it’s arguments about knowledge-based curriculum ideas) I went to a polytechnic and I did well because for the first time, I began to see I could learn myself if I wanted to. It was the first time I was supposed to apply my knowledge, which is why it went well.”

The first quote was from Harry Webb (author of the thouroughly recommended blog Webs of Substance) who is in favour of a knowledge based curriculum while the second is from a commentator on the blog who attended what sounds like a traditional grammar school and, as a result of this, seems in favour of more progressive pedagogy. What is interesting is that, contrary to Mitra's point, neither seems to have particularly pleasant memories of their own school days. On this note it is interesting that some of the most vocal progressive educators including Ken Robinson (Liverpool Collegiate School & Wade Deacon Grammar School) and Mitra (St. Xavier's School, Delhi) himself did alright for themselves having attended schools that, at first glance, appear to have been nothing like the type of school they are proposing. Contrary to this there appears to be a vacuum of influential people demanding more progressive schools on the basis of their own educational experiences.

References

Furedi, F. (2009) Wasted: Why education isn't educating. Continuum: London.

Mitra, S. (2013) Advent of Google means we must rethink our approach to education. Available from:http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2013/jun/15/schools-teaching-curriculum-education-google#start-of-comments (accessed 18.06.13)

Webb, H. (2013) Plutarch and the Empty Vessels. Available from: http://websofsubstance.wordpress.com/2013/02/17/plutarch-and-the-empty-vessels/ (accessed 29.06.13)

 

 

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