This morning I received an email from my younger brother, who’s the headmaster in an international school in China. As you may gather he was originally a history teacher. He’s the one who persuaded me to try teaching. This was his response to a conversation we had on Saturday.
Dear Tim
What you are doing at the moment on your PGCE has got to be one of the most challenging things in teaching: taking a lesson or so out of some other teacher’s sequence. Instead of implementing your values, you are a finger in someone else’s dyke.
Nevertheless, these lessons are not an end in themselves; they are part of a bigger mission. You have gone into teaching at an age, with an experience of life, and with an intelligence, which mean that you have already developed a set of relevant values: the challenge now is how to realise those values.
Quite rightly you reject behaviouralism. There is of course the moral perspective: the assumption of extrinsic motivation insinuates that humans can never be truly moral, and by such assumption transferred into action makes it true. However, there is a far more pragmatic reason to reject it. And it is the operationalisation of that rejection that could make education the truly cutting edge industry of the twenty-first century: or, in a failure to reject, a millstone around the neck of progress.
But you know me, I am far too interested in the past to end a paragraph with talk of the twenty-first century without steering the next few toward the Ancient World – Romans, Greeks and the like. You see, the Romans really do represent the past – not just the ancient past, but the past that clings to us now. One value above all others made the Romans successful: standardization; and it was the habituation in their citizens of that standardization that conquered the known world.
The Romans faced barbarian armies that may have been strategically united in terms of purpose (generally a purpose created by an invading Roman army and which could be summed up in the words, ‘sod’ and ‘off’), but tactically a disparate group of individuals, exercising individual initiative. That is what Roman soldiers did not do: they fought as a cohort, a century, a legion, an army, an empire. Soldiers in Britain trained to use the same short sword and shield in the same tactics as soldiers on the Parthian border.
And what did that immense standardization of killing, of roads, of engineering achieve? The mightiest, most prosperous, peaceful state that Europeans enjoyed until the modern age. In such terms then, how is it possible to reject the forms of extrinsic motivation with which the Romans habituated their citizens to obedience and standardization?
Well I shall start by making my case even more abject by bringing the Greeks into it – for the purposes of this argument, the antithesis of the Romans. Greek education was discursive – it questioned and demanded justification. Solutions were thought of by one, condemned by another who offered the opposite, only for both to be synthesized by a third. Yet joyful theory could still be tempered by stark practice: the remarkably creative thinker Empedocles ended his days by jumping into volcano to test his belief he was fire proof.
And what did the Greeks achieve? In the heyday, a hundred years of internecine strife, followed by subjugation by better organized neighbours.
But having brought history into it, this is where I reject the supposed lessons from it. These stories are not templates to pick and chose from, but analogies to sharpen the tools with which we analyse our own times. What did the Romans do for us in their 1232 years under the Western sun – 700 of those as Europe’s superpower – 500 of those it’s only power? Remarkably, nothing much, – or I should say, as Monty Python fans would find such a statement a little difficult to swallow, nothing much new; just nothing much new on a far greater scale than it had ever been achieved before.
It was Greek architectural ideas that built the cities of the empire, adorned by statutes that only ever paid homage to Praxilites, peopled by citizens carrying out the charade of Greek political forms and entertained by Etruscan death games, in a prosperity cleared by the Spanish short sword. While the Greeks invented whole artistic genres, the Romans struggled to find a compatriot to master one. A famous Roman playwright? It took more than a thousand years of history to produce just Virgil and Ovid, and that in the brief moment of the Republican imperium. It is no great complement to say that Roman creativity flowed into prose and the law, while in science the Western World’s creativity stopped with the Greek Ptolmey’s view of the Cosmos, the Greek Galen’s view of the human body, the Greek Aristotle’s system of categorization and logic, the Greek Plato’s metaphysics, the geometric rules of the Greeks Pythagoras and Archimedes.
For us, now, it is not a question of selecting a Greek or Roman template because we can have our Roman cake and eat it Greek style. Globalisation was built on a base of standardized industrial processes. America, the giant of the second industrial age, created modern standard forms, and from cars to restaurants used a combination of technology and management systems to reduce human input to a mindless act of habituated dexterity; in it’s perfect form, like the thrust of the gladius, a single repeated act that created an empire – although these repetitions were not on the battlefield hacking out military victories, but in Ford factories and MacDonald restaurants building empires of money.
But Globalisation built outsourced this standardization from its imperial citizens to machines and to the barbarian fringe peoples. This is where we cannot compete. We cannot afford to spew forth citizens from educational production lines that are equipped to compete with machines, Indians and Chinese on skills because they will always lose out on cost; as India and China will lose out to the next wave of Asian tigers unless they change their educational values.
Although we have outsourced and automated Roman values, we still need standardization – common measures, agreed principals of construction – things that all are taught; but this can only be the beginning of education: not an end in itself. In the globalised world we can compete on brand or cost. If we compete on cost, our ability to churn out standardized production, we shall be like the Chinese who earn 17 cents for each Bratz doll sold for $17 in the States. We must therefore compete on brand, and be the creators of identity and of meaning.
Culture is created by education (and of course, we should recognize in the new systems, non-linear world: education by culture). That is why what we do is so vital. Identity and meaning are personal; they are discovered, not imposed. We cannot break down our meaning into component parts and demand our students to follow procedures to reconstruct a meaning that is not theirs. Our job is to provide the intellectual tools and the opportunities for them to create their own.
This email is long enough, so I will write another one with some suggestions on how to operationalise this rhetoric; what a rejection of behaviouralism may look like in practice.
Nick
Posted by Tim Little 
Posted by Tim Little 
Posted by Tim Little 
