It seems that the only thing that we learn from history is that we don\u2019t learn from history.\u00a0 The story behind the development of public schooling and the shape of its administration typifies the message behind this verisimilitude. Schooling is supposed to be attached to learning and teaching; and history has shown that the more we try to improve the circumstances of school learning and achievement by intrinsic means, the greater the opposition to it. Indeed, it seems that the more things change through school-level innovation, the greater the desire to go backwards with apoplectic haste.<\/p>\n
The fundamental belief in testing as a motivator for improvement has told its story for generations. We are yet to learn from its part in the history of schooling. \u00a0It is not a pleasant history.<\/p>\n
When public schooling started to gain attention during the economic disturbances of the Industrial Revolution, a style of schooling was developed in England that later spread to the colonies. Child labour in the mills and mines and fields had led to excessive inhumanity. Younger children had been exploited and the laissez-faire <\/em>attitude of the general population played into the hands of business corporations. Parents, who could raise a few pence, sent their children to Dame Schools while left-outs exploited the streets with a vigour that few generations have known. These schools provided\u00a0 varying levels of competence.\u00a0 H.C. Barnard\u2019s A Short History of English Education<\/em> [Uni. of London Press, 1952] describes one such Dame school\u2026<\/p>\n In ev\u2019ry village mark\u2019d with little spire<\/em><\/p>\n Embow\u2019r\u2019d in trees and hardly known to fame.<\/em><\/p>\n There dwells, in lowly shed, and mean attire,<\/em><\/p>\n A matron old, whom we Schoolmistress name;<\/em><\/p>\n Who boasts unruly brats with birch to tame;<\/em><\/p>\n They grieven sore, in piteous durance pent,<\/em><\/p>\n Aw\u2019d by the pow\u2019r of this relentless dame;<\/em><\/p>\n And oft-times, on vagaries idly bent,<\/em><\/p>\n For unkempt hair, or task unconn\u2019d, are sorely bent.<\/em><\/p>\n <\/em>This poem was written in 1742, but the circumstances of schooling did not alter for a long time. The birch was the prime motivator for learning and the punishment for low achievement. Tom Paine had to get out of town when he wrote Rights of Man<\/em> in 1791, but a subsequent rise of radicalism disposed influential thought towards more humane attitudes. Pressure was put upon the Church to provide philanthropic schools. Their Charity Schools run by the clergy emphasised Religious Education and Reading. Rote learning was a feature. The birch encouraged memorisation.<\/p>\n Such Church schools, despite their short-comings, provoked community pressure for public schooling. Encyclopaedists demanded state-run secular schooling and, so, schooling became a political football\u00a0field with many codes, rules and was referee-dominant. Adam Smith said [Wealth of Nations, <\/em>1776] \u201cThough the State was to derive no advantage from the instruction of the inferior ranks of the people, it would still deserve its attention that they should not be altogether uninstructed.\u201d\u00a0 Since the Government gave grants to schools for their operation, their progress needed monitoring. Inspectors were appointed [1840] to supervise the training of\u00a0 pupil-teachers, report on the school\u2019s activities and provide advice. The founder of English elementary education, Kay-Shuttleworth was before his time with his beliefs in the\u00a0cultivation of learning habits, training in useful life skills and ‘development of intelligence’, as it was called.\u00a0 He saw the school as a centre for social life and culture. Inspectors were central to the encouragement of developmental learning. His dreams were shattered, however. Testing by the Inspectors of schools was introduced.<\/p>\n Blame Robert Lowe for this misuse of quality control. With him\u00a0at the helm of the Education Department after 1859, the infamous \u00a0‘payment by results\u2019 was\u00a0started, the simplistic notion of testing as a indicator\/motivator of learning. \u00a0It was called the Revised Code [1862], a document produced by the Education Department that had statutory force. A law was passed that specified certain standards. In Mathematics, for instance,\u2026<\/p>\n 1. pupils must write from dictation the numbers 1-20;<\/p>\n 2. pupils must add and subtract orally the numbers from 1-10;<\/p>\n 3. pupils must add, subtract, and multiply correctly in writing all numbers from\u00a01-10;<\/p>\n 4. pupils must perform in writing long division on numbers\u00a01-1000;<\/p>\n 5. pupils must calculate correctly problems involving money;<\/p>\n 6. pupils must calculate correctly conversions and problems with measures of weight, length and distance.<\/p>\n Inspectors were obliged to test each child on what was called the \u2018three Rs\u2019. School classes were graded and passing the test at each grade level was essential. The school did not receive a grant for any child who failed. Punishment and fear of failure became established as an educational\u00a0nostrum that has lasted for a century and a half.<\/p>\n Co-educationists, Kay-Shuttleworth and Matthew Arnold were beside themselves with disappointment and angst, but were unsuccessful in their reform efforts for many years, They were very lonely. The populace cared little and teachers were demoralised, passive and frightened. There was a temptation to falsify records and all teaching was of the didactic, jug-to-mug kind. Hostility developed between teachers and inspectors and the quality of teaching declined seriously. Testing had caused a monumental mess.<\/p>\n There\u00a0are many outstanding\u00a0novels of the period that describe the levels of school-based torturous and barbarous boredom.<\/p>\n During this period, educational thought was also being energised by people who held alternative views of the nature of learning. Pestalozzi, a Swiss gent [1746-1827] and practical schoolie, agreed with Frenchman Rousseau 1712-1778. [Remember his Emile<\/em> ?] that a child was a child who had an idiosyncratic nature and individual needs and, therefore, could not be taught according to some preconceived theory of learning, such as fear of failure. \u00a0Learning and a pupil\u2019s desire to learn resided within each individual. German Froebel went along with this and, knowing that children like play and like learning, the two could be combined in a schooling situation without any fear of testing and its deleterious effects. He developed the notion of a kindergarten <\/em>, a happy place where the children are the plants which grow\u00a0there but grow better when encouraged by a teacher-gardener. Italian Maria Montessori [1870-1952] applied this notion to her school using special apparatus and\u00a0encouraging\u00a0 freedom to learn without special class-methods.<\/p>\n These educational gurus valued the learning capacity of each child and would have been seriously at odds with present-day educrats.\u00a0 It took a few generations for their ideas to materialise on a general basis during the late 20th<\/sup> Century. \u00a0Primary schools tended to establish themselves as sit-stilleries until the 1960s, as left-over Inspectorial operations \u00a0maintained the\u00a0 practice of testing classes to see if they were up to scratch. The use of paper and pencil dominated\u00a0each day\u2019s activities, classroom silence was treasured and the only noise heard\u00a0around schools\u00a0was the voice of teachers sermonising from the front of the classroom where all pupils faced a large chalkboard used only by the teacher. It was standard practice. Group and maieutic strategies were seldom if ever undertaken. Heavy testing programs by school principals tended to encourage the use of these chalk-talk routines. Schools were dull\u00a0and heavily routinised places.\u00a0\u00a0Pupils were seldom anxious to continue with the\u00a0 feckless\u00a0routines past leaving-age. Most\u00a0 left as soon as they could.<\/p>\n The blitz of World War 2 made a huge difference to schooling in England. Schools couldn\u2019t be organised as tidily or strictly as they had been. Teachers found that children learned better than they had ever done when they talked with each other, undertook learning together, handled material that took the place of scarce paper and pencils; and were not restricted by\u00a0 age-grade classifications. Over the next two decades, primary classes in various LEAs [Local Education Authorities], especially Hertfordshire, Bristol, Oxfordshire and the West Riding of Yorkshire, sparkled with learning efforts and joy of achievement that had never been experienced before. Overseas countries sent observers who returned to their country of origin, excited by the prospect of pupilling school clients in a variety of exciting learning centres using the whole contiuuum of teaching strategies; and developing individual learning styles that would produce primary school graduates who might demand similar treatment along the remaining compulsory\u00a0 schooling track;\u00a0and thus\u00a0emerge from schooling as creative tertiary students<\/span> and job seekers with style and ambition.<\/p>\n In Australia, things went well for a while. Public schooling was thematically structured. Part of each state\u2019s cumbersome education departments, to which legislatures had added all sorts of operations to satisfy non-compulsory lobbyists, there\u00a0remained a primary and secondary schooling section at its centre. But these parts of compulsory schooling had to compete for finances, structures, resources and attention in useless, damaging, time-consuming contests. They became vulnerable to all sorts of ideas and pressures.<\/p>\n Onslaughts from moral rights\u00a0campaigners and back-to-basics kitschers during the 1970s and 1980s weakened the ideological fabric of\u00a0 learning-to-learn movements. On its knees already from these onslaughts, compulsory schooling succumbed to\u00a0 the politically powerful business and management industry that persuaded legislators to believe that schools should be run\u00a0as businesses were. This movement had drastic consequences from which it has yet to recover. [See Cullen Phil :Back to Drastics,<\/em> USQ 2006]. Control of schooling was given to parvenus who presented themselves well at interview and showed impressive biographical records.\u00a0Advice was sought \u00a0from \u2018experts\u2019 who knew very little about schooling. This is well illustrated in the Brisbane Courier Mail’s cartoon of 18 November 2008 by Sean Leahy [click \u2018Visiting Experts\u2019 in the side-bar of this presentation] who sums up, in a most perceptive way, the reaction to Queensland\u2019s low test results of the time.<\/p>\n In 1988 or thereabouts, an attempt\u00a0had also been\u00a0made in Queensland to have the blind lead the blind with administrative exchanges between various levels of schooling.\u00a0 Principals and Secondary Principals swopped roles as did Primary and Secondary School Inpsectors.\u2026 a monumental blunder. It is said that life and sparkle drained from school undertakings. Inspectors of schools, products of wide school experience who zealously guarded the spirit of each curriculum guide; who ensured that higher achievement standards were constantly sought;\u00a0 and who \u2018flew with pollen on their wings\u2019 to spread good ideas, were then banished entirely from the school landscape. The Top Controllers of Education Departments were also appointed to school positions from other government departments and serious advice was taken from University\u00a0personnel with high academic credentials\u00a0with none to little \u00a0school experience; and this continues. Few at the work-face know who\u2019s who.<\/p>\n The draining of life and sparkle from schools in Britain, U.S.A. and Australia\u00a0has been\u00a0quite noticeable during the 1990s and since. \u00a0Instead of looking for root causes, each country has now adopted a bogan mentality and blamed those who had already suffered the most\u2026the schools and the teachers. They must account for their actions\u00a0to \u00a0totalitarian legislators who are\u00a0forcing\u00a0teachers to give standardised tests\u00a0to every child, whether their parents want to participate or not\u2026.so that political platitudes can be broadcast about what \u2018we have done to improve education\u2019.<\/p>\n It\u2019s back to 1862\u00a0with Matthew Arnold\u2019s plea to return \u2018intelligent life\u2019 to the classroom to replace the \u2018deadness, slackness and discouragement\u2019 that testing had caused; back to the Minimal Competency Movement in the U.S.[called \u2018graduated flunking\u2019]\u00a0 and the Assessment of Performance in Britain [Maggie\u2019s Mess] that ran off the rails when it was realised that narrow, judgemental, fear-driven testing had no place in complex learning environments.\u00a0Primary\u00a0schools and pupils and teachers\u00a0will have to endure\u00a0another set of\u00a0quixotic reforms for a while.<\/p>\n Here we go again.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 The one thing we learn from history is that we don\u2019t learn from history.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" It seems that the only thing that we learn from history is that we don\u2019t learn from history.\u00a0 The story behind the development of public schooling and the shape of its administration typifies the message behind this verisimilitude. Schooling is supposed to be attached to learning and teaching; and history has shown that the more … Continue reading A Short History of High-Stakes Testing<\/span>