mrkirkman's blog

I’ll let you into a secret. I bloody hate Charles Dickens. I can, despite my loathing, appreciate the wonderful craft and characterization of his storytelling, but do I like them? No! Would I be educationally the poorer if I didn’t know who Miss Havisham is? I doubt it. What Nick Gibb implied in his speech regarding knowledge in education is that traditional learning is better. Knowing this king and that capital city is what will fix the broken minds of the broken children of broken Britain. As an educator, I couldn’t disagree more. Indeed, there is a place for such knowledge and much of it is important and entirely necessary. But just because little Johnny can rattle off the counties of Ireland in alphabetical order, it doesn’t mean he is a, or is going to be a, good learner. Because that’s what we want. Young people with the capacity to and understanding of learning. I think that this is quite nicely summed up in the following quote:

‘There is only one twenty first century skill. And that is the ability to act intelligently when you are faced with a situation for which you have not been specifically prepared” (Seymour Papert)

Because this is what we need to help children form the most disadvantaged backgrounds to be able to do. Lists of presidents and characters from Dickens might help those who come from backgrounds where learning, culture, language and aspiration are already highly regarded and the skill and capacity to act intelligently might come quite naturally. But if all you know is that list because you don’t have the background of learning, then what do you do? No amount of Oliver Twists or David Copperfields will help you when you need to learn something new.

Indeed, E.D. Hirsch, the man who has written the bible from which Gove and Gibb preach, wrote:

“The children who possess intellectual capital when they first arrive at school have the mental scaffolding and Velcro to catch hold of what is going on, and they can turn the new knowledge into still more Velcro to gain still more knowledge” (E.D. Hirsch, The Schools We Need and Why We Don’t Have Them)

So it’s not necessarily do they know who Miss Havisham is, more, do they have the capacity, the Velcro as Hirsch puts it, to find out.

And ironically, I predict that about half of students leaving year 11 know who Miss Havisham is, seeing as the poem ‘Havisham’ by Carol Ann Duffy is compulsory study for the English Literature paper at GCSE.