'Personalised learning' and the attack on knowledge

Teachers in Britain often argue that changes to the education system are cyclical; what goes around normally comes around again in a few years time. In short, nothing really changes. This paper argues the opposite, using contemporary developments – without denying that more research is needed - as indicators of more far-reaching changes in the system. In short, everything is changing.

The central question is a moral one. The moral responsibility to teach the best that is known through cultivating the virtues of scholarship is increasingly being displaced by biological assertions and metaphors (Adler). The result of this process has been the transformation of the child into a kind of secular cult, rather than a future adult. The child-centred approach to education, previously influential but peripheral to the educational aims of the nation, is beginning to dominate the system. In doing so, it is replacing knowledge-centred approaches. This is, of course, just as much a political project to create a particular kind of adult as previous, ‘top-down’ methods were, even if it is expressed in the particularly banal and excruciatingly neutral language of Every Child Matters.

Cohered, even if unstably, by the institutionalisation of Every Child Matters in everything from borough plans for children and young people to the Qualification and Curriculum Authority’s programmes for 14-19 curriculum reform, the meaning of education has been subtly and quietly transformed in the past ten years (1). From outside, the education system has been subject to radical new governmental interventionism in the interests of ‘the child’ as well as an impulse to modify behaviour at the micro-level. From inside, education appears to have undergone a foundational collapse in the intellectual authority of abstract knowledge. As a result, education, traditionally defined as a ‘leading out’ of the child by the teacher, has become a leading in of the teacher by the child. Naturalism and authenticity have taken over many classrooms, leaving humanism and intellectual development fighting for recognition – or worse, seen as morally bad or arrogant. In consequence, knowledge has become counterposed to childhood, rather than seen as the historical outcome of the long childhood of humanity.

The psychologisation of knowledge

Across all sectors, there has been a psychologisation of knowledge, and an institutionalisation of that psychologised knowledge as the one ‘true way’ to educate. In effect, contemporary school education wears its new psychological categories like an 11-year old wears new shoes on their first day at ‘big school’. The reality, nevertheless, is that those categories are merely old psychometric categories and prejudices (such as thick or bright) dressed up as biological assertions (such as Gifted and Talented, Special Educational Needs, Multiple Intelligences, Learning Styles) (2). The useful distinction (for the sake of abstract knowledge of the world and organisation of that knowledge into subjects) between mind and reality appears to have collapsed. And knowledge, counterposed above to the category of childhood, is also counterposed to the category of intelligence. In this context, abstracted from the living tradition of disciplined study and the imaginative achievements of their classification into subjects, there is little room for the teacher as educator. Indeed, there is increasingly little room for the normal student. The above process has led to the development of an increasingly diagnostic educational system, specifically aimed at cultivating the aptitudes of children – and their fossilisation. The counter-argument, that the task of education is to transform and develop the child, is not heard at all. In consequence, in a growing number of cases, the educational psychologist, the counsellor, the mentor, have become more important than the teacher (Hayes, 2004, 2006). In this way, the educational learning limits of the child have been formally set as opposed to the educational teaching of knowledge.

With this new educational setting now generating its own inspection and assessment criteria, the basis of educational examination has been comprehensively undermined. From the point of view of the child, previously interesting and exciting questions of basic human curiosity and collective knowledge have been transformed by the new approaches. ‘What can I know?’ (The Second Law of Thermodynamics? Ancient Rome? Beethoven’s 9th?) has become ‘What am I?’ (Intelligent? Passionate? Visual? Stressed? Depressed?). It can be objected that the traditional subjects still dominate the curriculum and oppress the child, but are these not skeleton subjects, mere pretenders to knowledge? Surely they must be, for they sit alongside the credentialist subjectivism of newer ‘subjects’ such as Citizenship, ICT and Thinking Skills (3). Surely they must be, for they have been tailored, pseudo-scientifically, to the supposed brain types of learners. Surely they must be, for they are undermined from within (O’Brien). Are these impoverished versions of old subjects and equally impoverished versions of new subjects worth the paper they are examined on – if, that is, they are examined at all?

The erosion of the belief in the educational value of abstract knowledge appears to have a logical counterweight: an explosion of the belief in the educational value of abstract emotions. However, these two trends do not share the same philosophical ground. They are not merely equivalent. It has been forgotten by many ‘educators’ (who, enabled by the evacuation of intellectual authority from the arena of education, may simply be politicians or therapists) that intellectual learning is always active learning. Instead, the new orthodoxy asserts that ‘active’ problem-solving, for whatever age-group, is superior to ‘passive’ abstract knowledge. And that teachers, caricatured as drones, must shut up, and learn from their pupils (4). This further counterposition is, therefore, one of collective human knowledge against what has been termed ‘autonomous’ learning and ‘emotional’ intelligence. These approaches, to develop the philosophical point above, have different organisational outcomes. The appeal to the intellect is to educate, while the appeal to the emotions is to indoctrinate. The trends towards autonomy and emotions lead to a shift away from the need for a teacher of collective knowledge and towards a need for a facilitator of personal truths. Those same trends may go further and lead to a shift away from the need for any adult at all, except in a caring capacity. These processes and categories, perhaps originally competing as potential ‘leaders’ of the new educational perspective, have been brought together by the government and centralised in the new doctrine of ‘personalised learning’. This appears to be the new ‘gold standard’ of education policy under the Labour Party, but it importantly also appears to the gold standard for all those who notionally oppose the Labour Party. The political transformation of education into learning has therefore not been accompanied by debate about the educational value of personalisation as opposed to the educational value of abstract knowledge. Instead, the debate has been about the level of personalisation the system should aspire to (5). Or the level to which abstract knowledge should be constrained.

Teaching without knowledge

Despite the preceding analysis, the rhetoric of ‘Teaching and Learning’ remains strong throughout all the educational sectors, and still dominates the secondary sector. Indeed, there has been pressure to accredit university lecturers with teaching certificates as they are presumed – not necessarily incorrectly – to lack the necessary skills to communicate the knowledge that they do have. However, the frequently polarised terms of teaching and learning are increasingly understood as expressions of personality rather than in relation to subject matter external to the self. They have become contentless assertions of personality. Expressions of personality, it is contended here, are not the same as education (6).

The emphasis on Teaching and Learning implies a further emphasis on ‘methodology’ as an educational imperative to compensate for the decline in the perceived social value of knowledge. This trend has now developed to the point at which questions of process and method become autonomised and self-standing areas of knowledge. So, to spell this point out, anti-knowledge based approaches have themselves become areas of knowledge. There are a number of questions which require further analysis here. Do we thank Dewey (1859-1952) and Rousseau (1712-78) and their respective centuries for this situation? Perhaps the roots are with child-centred educators and their educational psychologist progeny? Has there been a collapse of epistemological confidence at university level? Or, the more likely originator of the process, has an ideological crisis in the political class spawned a compensatory desire to intervene in education?

As previous political outlooks and their mass basis have withered, social theory – lacking a social to theorise about - has similarly become more introspective. Theories of government and the state, responding to the collapse of political vision and its relationship to the population, have shifted to ideas about community in and of itself (7). The collapse of the distinction between the state as political aspiration and the state as social service has created a political and educational vacuum which has been filled with support and empathy. And theories of personalised learning, happiness and well-being. Indeed, personalised learning perfectly expresses the attack on knowledge because it synthesises the anti-intellectualism and behavioural interventionism of the current government.

In more historically progressive situations, educational approaches emphasised the need for all students to get to the truth, which then influenced the political futures of the educated public (however few actually achieved it in practice). This idealised - yet sometimes realised - public then espoused the notion of objective knowledge both as a value in and of itself and as a check on excesses of power. Education mattered. We now have a situation where the truth itself is not seen as that important – and theories of education have become irrelevant (8). They have nothing to defend. The truth – even the provisional truth of the greatest scientific theories - is not defensible in the era of personalised learning. The intellectual mediation of the relationship between adult and child, previously known as education, has become advice and mentoring. Following this, subjectivised primary school values have begun to drive the system from below, leaving objectivised university values looking isolated and irrelevant. In such a state, some of those isolated values have rushed to subjectivise themselves as well. In such circumstances, is university, increasingly seen as compulsory, even worth aspiring to?

How have teacher training courses responded to these developments? The doctrine of ‘reflective practice’ and the extension of this doctrine from the secondary to the university sector symbolises the collapse of educational theory as a defender of social epistemological advances, and as an aspiration for trainee teachers. With the collapse of educational theory as a defender of abstract knowledge and how and why it is taught, educational process itself, as previously stated, has itself become an object of knowledge. And here, everything goes. Method is further autonomised as teachers are encouraged to ‘research’ outside traditions of scholarship, leading to a further atrophy in educational substance, however well-meaning the aim. Scholarship is therefore devalued and seen as a barrier to knowledge. While no-one wants to create academic obscurantists, and we all recall academic eccentrics who have subordinated their sociability to their pursuit of knowledge, the current approach promotes the incorrect view that scholarly knowledge is unworthy, difficult and intimidating. Or, even worse, that it is actually wrong to face such difficulties down. Pseudo-science therefore replaces scholarly knowledge as teachers re-invent educational theory in the guise of ‘action research’ (9). Such research may stretch as far as ratifying the previous research which says it is acceptable not to mark books. This is called ‘assessment for learning’ (10). Alongside this, obscure searches for ‘originality’, ‘creativity’ and ‘intelligences’ in the child substitute the engagement of the child for the living tradition of subject knowledge. Process, according to the new gurus of education, is everything. Learning to learn, according to the new gurus of education, is everything. And yet everything is really nothing.

Dissatisfied parents have taken the hint, and further developed ‘theories’ of learning such as the Indigo Child phenomenon. At the extremes of rational thought, estranged adults have attacked their parents through the repressed memory circus of unchallengeable personal histories of child abuse (11). Some parents do not even see the point of any schooling and have joined the growing home education movement, specifically formulated to follow children rather than challenging them. Instead of combating these tendencies, government has joined in, and developed its own spin-off, ‘Family Learning’ (12). Through this process, the epistemological focus of educational theory (subject knowledge) has shifted towards the ontological practice of modern schooling (the child). The anti-educational result is the largely undebated cult of the child as the supreme being. The only thing left to do with children is worry about them (13). There is precious little room here for the educators who notice how little we actually demand of our children (14).

The infantilisation of education

Once the child is put at the heart of the educational system, the logical place to look for theory is the place where the child attains its purest form: the primary or nursery school. The basis for the development of the new rhetoric of every child mattering is legitimised in the smile of a baby. The adult must worship the child. But formulaically. In the new advice and care centred world of education, intellect is replaced by emotion, knowledge by advice. The state itself, while it intervenes prodigiously in this advice, even inventing a children’s commissioner for children to ring up, in fact ties itself in knots, because there is no one way to bring up a child. But, once subject knowledge is downgraded, the intellectual path is open to substitute parenting for education (15). The potential outcome of the current situation is that child development and parenting become the ultimate subject knowledge. And that new subjects sprout up around them regarding what food is ‘healthy’ or how much water or fish oil is required to make the brain work (Goldacre). Childhood in and of itself becomes more important than education as an aspiration of the child because adults lack intellectual self-confidence. And abstract subject knowledge is seen as a barrier to the true knowledge of the child. And how is that knowledge to be attained? Through inspection by Ofsted, the QCA and the GTC and all the other educational gatekeepers (16). Yet it should not be forgotten that the constant inspection of children (and their educators) by the state get things the wrong way round. Education should aspire to the democratic inspection of the state by the educated child – as a politically aware and informed adult.

Within this dynamic situation, where legitimate knowledge is shifting away from subjects, such subjects as remain are rendered apparently pointless and exist only as skeletons of the triumphs of human imagination that they are. With subjects excavated of knowledge, there is no real need for teachers as such, and the door is opened to the de-professionalisation of the teacher and the emergence of the facilitator, even, in some cases, an online one. Abstract knowledge as potentially an objective and democratic check on tyranny (true citizenship) is translated into increasingly subjective citizenship (citizenship studies) (17). Theories of education have become dogmas of psychological and pseudo-scientific method. Emotional needs replace emotional detachment as educational aspirations. Experience replaces knowledge in educational assessment. And collective human knowledge (which people can have a genuinely personal stake in) becomes personalised learning.

Teacher education, to summarise, has become a factory line product, where even previously ‘debated’ processes such as ‘experiential’ learning or ‘development’ now no longer require a theoretical ‘author’. When theories lose their fathers, anti-intellectual ideas are absolutised. There is therefore little incentive for teachers to get involved in genuine dialogue with the knowledge to be taught and those to be taught, or to take personal and moral responsibility for the living tradition of human knowledge from school to university and beyond.

What is the logic of the current position? The elevation of primary school methodology has led not just to the denudation of subject knowledge. It has also led to a necessarily associated focus on the ‘stages’ of life as potential problems rather than normative opportunities. This has led to the growth of ‘transition’ ideas between previously unproblematic stages of life (primary-secondary; gap year between secondary and university). This will further encourage an accentuation of the caring rather than educational function of teachers. The naturalised ‘ideology’ of parenting will become more important, even if parents do not actively support it. Hence, behaviour and the associated explicit socialisation are likely to become even more politically important than knowledge and the associated implicit socialisation. Education in knowledge is likely to become increasingly pressurised to become inculcation in behaviour and the banal management of human interaction. This is not teaching, but treading water in pools drained of knowledge.

Historically, educational ground has been lost to uncreative infantilisation and the formalised intellectual eugenics of emerging orthodoxies. In the era of agreed lesson plans for lesson aims, there is no general agreement on educating a human being. However, this should not be mistaken for a woolly relativism. The situation is increasingly absolutist. Education, the one area of life where informed and critical debate should be defensible, is the leading area for the demonstrable absence of it. The political emphasis on participation and inclusion has masked the decline of the educational ideal. For Aristotle, even if not achieved, politics was the highest art for the educated citizen to aspire to. In contrast, for Blair, or for the bog standard Head, it may now be social service. Understood in itself, this is an impoverished ethic. Where is the intellectual defence of the imaginative, logical and reasoning individual who is not a robot? Where is the defence of knowledge as cumulative, collective, social and potentially democratically available to all individuals who work for it? How can the case for humanistic education be argued for and hung with the starry lights of knowledge?

These are some of the questions to be faced. Fortunately, there is one thing we can rely on. There is a disposition to rationality in all human beings, and it is particularly evident in children and university students. They are waiting for us to win the arguments with them. They are waiting to be taught. This requires the defence of knowledge.

Mark Taylor, history teacher
Introduction given to a meeting of the Manifesto Club education hub, London, 16 September 2006

Notes

1) See Every Child Matters and Cheminais (2006). For the further inclusion of the ECM perspective in education see, for example, the ongoing work of the QCA to restructure the curriculum around ECM starting principles in History. For the foundationalising of the ECM perspective see Lewisham Children and Young People’s Plan (2006) and associated developments such as a Directorate for Children and Young People.
2) Jay Gould (1981) for references to psychometric testing. Most schools now have formal programmes for Gifted and Talented pupils as well as a bureaucracy dealing with Special Educational Needs. See Gardner (2005) for the view that pupils have Multiple Intelligences.
3) In his well-intentioned ‘defence’ of rationality, Law (2006) misses the point completely in promoting the need for Thinking Skills.
4) Any good teacher knows that he or she can learn from his or her pupils, particularly through their questions. However, to formalise this process is to destroy its educational integrity.
5) See Abrams (2006), West-Burnham and Coates (2005), Miller and Benn (2006), Miliband (2004). Probably the work by Hargreaves (2006) is the most developed attempt to use personalised learning to, in his own words, ‘reconfigure secondary education’. Also note that the NUT backs personalised learning.
6) ‘The historically dominant paradigm of learning as the product of teaching is being replaced by a recognition that teaching is a necessary but not sufficient condition for learning. This is being reflected in many ways in educational practice, not least in the Ofsted framework, which has now separated Teaching and Learning as significant variables in assessing the effectiveness of classroom practice’ (West-Burnham, 2005: 33).
7) Speaking of the reality of the contemporary industrialised world, Tony Blair stated recently that ‘the barriers between public, private and individual are coming down’ (BBC1 TV Interview, Sunday, 24-09-09). ‘We need to get back to the public’, he added.
8) Philosophers of education might point to a conflict between the status of Aristotelian truth and the more pragmatic Deweyan ‘warranted assertability’. But how many philosophers of education are arguing for knowledge these days, if their departments still exist? White, to take one example (2006), is not.
9) More on action research.
10) See Black (2004). Obviously, although I am in favour of marking books, it is clearly extremely difficult to do thoroughly even for committed teachers. Nevertheless, this is no excuse for throwing out the baby, etc.
11) For a report on the Indigo Child movement see Buckland (2006). For repressed memories see Pendergrast (1997).
12) For the ideas behind home education, see Meighan (2002). For family learning, see Greany (2000) and the governmental promotion of Family Learning Week in October 2006 (http://www.campaign-for-learning.org.uk/campaigns/familylearning/familylearningindex.htm)
13) For the worries, see Fenton (2006) also posted at and the associated letter from over 100 academics calling for the reclamation of childhood on the previous day.
14) Students are passing more and more exams despite increasingly irregular and episodic presence in the classrooms, once ‘reception duty’, Gifted and Talented Trips, Mentoring, Target Setting, etc. are factored in. Does knowledge really matter in this context?
15) On parenting see the work of the General Teaching Council and any work on developing ‘engaged parents’ such as the US - but probably soon to be developed in the UK - community engaged parent education paradigm. Also note the developmental work by the psychologist Sheila Wolfendale for the Department for Education and Skills. Finally, note the tentative steps to synthesise personalised learning with parental involvement by the Specialist Schools Trust (eg. article entitled ‘Personalised Learning Must Involve Parents’ by Conor Ryan in Specialist Schools Trust News of Summer 2004, Issue 27).
16) Such as the Specialist Schools and Academies Trust and the National College for School Leadership.
17) ‘Education in citizenship, if it is wise, can retain what was best in individual culture. But if it is in any way shortsighted, it will stunt the individual in order to make him a convenient tool of government’ (Russell, 1993: 14).

References

Francis Abrams (2006) 'Traditional School Walls Begin to Crumble', Guardian Education (The Risk Takers), 23-05-2006: 6.
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Paul Black (2004) 'Working Inside the Black Box: Assessment for Learning in the Classroom' NferNelson
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Rita Cheminais 'Every Child Matters: A Practical Guide for Teachers' David Fulton 2006
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Ben Goldacre Bad Science: Exercise the Brain without this Transparent Nonsense Guardian March 25 2006
Ben Goldacre Bad Science: How to avoid the bitter pill of regulation Guardian September 23 2006
Stephen Jay Gould (1981) 'The Mismeasure of Man' Norton: New York.
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