Nightmare or Opportunity in UK Education?
Grethe Hooper Hansen, UK
Grethe Hooper Hansen is a former director of SEAL. Now she is writing, researching and is also currently involved in Open Eye, a campaign by independent teachers against early-years policy in UK education. E-mail: ghooperhansen@onetel.com
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Introduction
Background
Argument
Outcome
You may not feel that an article about early-years education has much to do with your daily teaching of EFL/ESL, but in fact it involves developmental and learning issues that may offer clues towards more effective methodology. I came into EFL as a refugee from state school teaching, in the heady days of Gattegno, TPR, Counselling Learning and Suggestopedia, and after many years of pursuing psychologically oriented approaches, was appalled to hear last year that New Labour was about to introduce a compulsory cognitive curriculum for UK 3-year-olds. I joined with others to form a protest group.
Open Eye blew the whistle last November, but few people believed such a thing could really happen. In spite of our parliamentary petition, an Early Day Motion and our July letter in the Times signed by Philip Pullman and many other leading writers, academics and psychologists, EYFS (Early-Years Foundation Scheme) became law in September. Thousands of nursery carers had by then resigned, a national tragedy, in the face of legislation that could be described as somewhere between Orwell’s 1984 and Huxley’s Brave New World. On the one hand, toddlers are assessed all day long, carers ticking boxes to grade them on 69 official learning goals (Orwell), including such things as writing sentences with punctuation, ages 3 – 5, and using mouse and keyboard. On the other, a brightly coloured brochure entitled “It’s Child’s Play” reassures parents that really all this is just play (Huxley). See our website, www.savechildhood.org
To understand this situation, you have to know something about the history of political influence in British education. In the old days, the state supported everything in the public domain; in education, it set a vision but left professionals to implement it in their own way. This was the First Way. Then Thatcher’s focus on shaping a ‘work-force’ led to the polar opposite: markets, performance, emphasis on competition and assessment, the ethos of privatisation. In spite of the intention to create a ‘free market’, in forcing its business orientation on education, the government took an ever more controlling role.
When New Labour came to power, the UK was still near the top of the international literacy league. Blair’s Third Way tried to combine market and state, pouring in massive funding, intensifying competition and assessment, with focus on numeracy and literacy, increasing pressure while at the same time improving teachers’ salaries and conditions, and the government was now in total control. The Inspectorate, a much-loved supportive advisory body, was replaced by Ofsted (Office for Standards in Education), which named and shamed ‘failures’ and created a culture of fear. Teachers were soon crippled with endless bureaucratic accounting, and children (only in the public sector) with the millstones of pre-determined aims and goals, and constant SATS testing.
In spite of vast spending, the UK has now sunk almost to the bottom of the international leagues. The £50millon literacy campaign made no difference whatsoever to literacy but caused great stress to children and teachers (Times Educational Supplement, November 2007). The huge ‘academies’ now replacing many regional schools, some of which have no playgrounds or natural light, and all subject to control by their financial backers, are reminiscent of the disastrous ‘tower blocks’ for housing in the 1970s. The inflation of ICT (including electronic whiteboards to replace blackboards) poses a threat to student and teacher health. Contracting exam marking to private companies caused irredeemable chaos. More people than ever are now fleeing to private schools or home education.
Formal education had never in the past intervened in early years; school began at 5, so teachers were not trained in this very different area. When the government decided that young mothers were needed in the work-place, it extended the educational reach in haste, without research. An Advisory Committee was set up, but when it disagreed with the government’s proposals, overridden and disbanded. For the first time in UK educational history, private schools were forced to comply with legislation that opposes their own principles, a breach of human rights.
So what are the early-years issues, and how do they affect language teaching? We know now that the brain grows from bottom up: reptilian first, limbic and finally cortex. As children develop, the ancient structures unfold before the more recent. Up until age 7, the sub-cortical brain is busy building the physiological basis that underpins all subsequent growth (balance, coordination, etc.). The sub-cortex also contains species information to be selected according to culture, language, location etc., a task that has to be completed before energy is given to the cortex, an action facility waiting to be filled. During this early period of physical and sub-cortical growth and development, the right hemisphere dominates so that all can be achieved holistically and holographically, every input resonating throughout the whole. Nature’s ingenious solution is to give us the desire to play, which ensures a natural progression of all the interrelated and coordinated physical and mental complexities in conditions of maximum ease, energy and autonomy.
Of course the child can be forced to work prematurely in an analytical left hemispheric way (focus on literacy and numeracy), but this is always at the expense of vital functions that nature needs to set in place first. Imagination, for example, which is largely sub-cortical, establishes a neural foundation for the cortical structures of intellect; without it, the mind lacks depth and wisdom. EYFS also imposes control on all that the child does. The phrases ‘structured play’, ‘directed play’ and ‘purposeful play’ are adult-centric and show that the speaker has not understood the holistic, sub-cortical nature of true play, which flows from inside out. The moment that adults begin to direct it, the delicate bottom-up dynamic collapses. The only way to teach a young child to listen is to listen, genuinely, to the child – who will then reproduce the quality of your listening. If you tell children to listen, what they learn is that they must do as they are told, and attempt to control others; in effect, this stops them listening. It certainly stops them playing; in UK classrooms, infants sit waiting to be told what to do.
It is not until the age of 7 that the left hemisphere reaches readiness. Cognitive functions can then develop rapidly and easily as windows of opportunity open. Some children are slower; Einstein began reading at 8. If so, they need more play and story, not less. Lozanov loves slowness, which he claims, leads to greater complexity later.
When children are forced into the state-defined model of development, and have to leave the sub-cortical world before they are ready to do so, the most likely result is physical, mental, emotional and spiritual impoverishment. Carers are forced into compliance by their fear of Ofsted and the need to think forward: their ratings are fed into national statistics to ‘track’ children so as to anticipate future problems. We received a letter from a mother whose son, aged 5 yrs 2 months, had been put into a catch-up group to improve his reading and writing! This caused him to miss playtime, stories and artwork.
The relevance of all this to language teaching is two-fold. First of all, as Lozanov, Gattegno, Asher, Krashen and other holistic innovators realized, we can replicate the sub-cortical period in the early stages of language teaching for a richer and more enjoyable experience. Many psycho-linguists claim that all learning naturally follows this pattern: at first when we know nothing, we absorb as much as possible because everything could be relevant, whereas once a sense of form begins to emerge, we know what to look for and become analytical. Lozanov makes a point of targeting ‘peripheral learning’ at all ages and stages so as to engage the greater power and capacity of sub-conscious learning, carefully negotiating its different rules for selection and activation.
The second point is that languages are best begun before age 7, following the sub-cortical way of learning through games, singing and make-believe, to establish a deeper and more global sense of the language. I remember teaching adult beginners in Italy, some of whom in their infant years, had attended kindergartens that offered a year of English through games and songs. Although they remembered little or nothing consciously, they were outstanding learners, showing an astonishingly accurate sense of the forms and patterns of the language.
A wider picture
Some countries keep children in kindergarten until 7, forbidding cognitive work: Wales, Finland, Scandinavia, New Zealand, Germany and Cuba are examples. Others do not begin state child-care until 6. Almost all other than UK allow private schools (such as Steiner) to follow their own system. Finland is of special interest because it leads the world in literacy; it not only delays cognitive work until 7 but expects children under 7 to spend most of their time outdoors in nature, and it retains performance arts throughout education. The Reggio project in Italy is the most notable for its search of enrichment through arts. Did you know that one of the interesting claims of art historians is that medieval man had a subtler and deeper mind than modern man, as shown by the sophisticated use of symbolism and spiritual nuance in art of that period?
Just over a year ago UNESCO rated UK and American children to be among the unhappiest in the world. One thing the British are known for is our stiff upper lip, not unrelated to the claim that the battle of Waterloo was won ‘on the playing fields of Eton’. The public schools in those days were so brutal that society made a joke of admiring a gentleman for his ‘bottom’, meaning his ability to survive perpetual beating. Those schools are gentler now, but there was never a deep examination of the situation, just a gradual change. Childraising has become kinder than it used to be, but what EYFS reflects is a general level of denial and disregard for children’s feelings that is based on the adults’ own experience of childhood pain.
Back in the days when I taught in state schools, I would certainly have supported EYFS in its present form. It was only after discovering Lozanov’s method, which makes a point of nurturing the student, that I did the emotional work that changed my attitude to children. EYFS is the creation of politicians, most of them the product of public schools, who have ‘fought their way to the top’ in an adversarial culture that still follows the principle of Darwin’s survival of the fittest. But Darwin was discredited by quantum-based ecology, which shows that empathy precedes aggression; aggression is a reaction to the failure of empathy. Adversarial attitudes are not just out of date but prevent us from moving forward towards technology that relies on receptive and intuitive abilities.
EYFS is a particularly shocking example, but severity towards children is widespread in the world; Lozanov’s method developed from his horror at the “school for little soldiers” that existed in the Soviet Union. He found that when he combined sensitivity and kindness with what he called ‘infantilism’, meaning a carefully conceived subcortical approach to learning, he could achieve miracles. We can only hope that the EYFS debate will provoke the emergence of a new and intricate early-years model, which might bring with it patterns and directions for use throughout education. The ‘infantilism’ that fell on such stony ground in the 1980s and even Blake’s Songs of Innocence, rarely seen as the complex models that they really are, may yet have a role to play in arriving at new methodology for a deeper mining and greater refining of the human mind.
Please check the Methodology and Language for Primary Teachers course at Pilgrims website.
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