[Talk given by Lindsay Paterson to the conference ‘Raising the Standard of Education in Scotland’, organised by the Scottish Conservative Party, 8 September 2009, Edinburgh. These are the notes for the talk, without references to sources of research evidence; if you would like guidance on these sources, please email lindsay.paterson@ed.a.uk. The views expressed in the talk are those of the author as an independent academic who is not a member of any political party.]
My purpose today is to ask one question: does Scotland have the literacy and numeracy that it needs as a civilised society?
That Scotland has not done well in most of the international studies of children’s literacy and numeracy is well known, but let me remind you of some of the rather dismaying facts here.
In mathematics, science and reading Scotland is mediocre by international standards.
In mathematics, two years ago Scotland was 12th equal out of 16 developed countries at primary 5, and 7th equal out of 12 at secondary 2.
In science, Scotland was 14th equal out of 16 at primary 5, and 9th equal out of 12 at secondary 2.
In reading, 10-year-olds in Scotland were 20th equal out of a diverse group of 41 more or less developed countries.
What’s more, Scotland’s attainment in these three areas has got worse.
In mathematics, attainment at primary 5 has not improved since 1995, and at secondary 2 has returned to 1995 levels after a bit of an improvement in 2003.
In science, attainment at primary 5 is now lower than in 1995, and at secondary 2, as in mathematics, is back to being no better than in 1995.
In reading, Scotland has stood still since 2001, while many other countries have improved.
I could go on. The point is that the situation is dismal.
What comparisons of this kind show is what is feasible.
They do not necessarily tell us what we have to do to raise attainment, because each country is different.
But since the basic material is the same – gowing human beings learning fundamental skills – to retreat into a kind of defeatist relativism as a defence against evidence of this kind is simply irrational.
Literacy and numeracy are not merely optional extras:
they are fundamental to everything else.
You cannot hope to understand science without them.
Without these basic skills, you cannot read imaginative literature,
or respond to great art or music,
or understand where this country has come from or is going to,
or hold our politicians to account intelligently.
It is in fact possible that an attention to such skills is about to be even further weakened through the so-called Curriculum for Excellence, although we are assured repeatedly that it is not,
but I notice that the word ‘grammar’ appears essentially only once in the vast bulk of the Curriculum for Excellence documents relating to literacy, and then only in connection with reading, not writing or speaking,
I read there with concern that pupils are expected to punctuate sentences ‘with sufficient accuracy’, no definition being given of that insidious word ‘sufficient’,
and I am confused by the proposed new numeracy curriculum where there seems to be no systematic attention to the technical skills of arithmetic and basic mathematics,
although it has to be said, as with much else in Curriculum for Excellence, that the lack of precision in the writing leaves almost anything possible.
But at least, it might be retorted, we will have new measures of literacy and numeracy in the tests to be taken at around age 15.
In one important sense these are welcome.
They do recognise the importance of those detailed, technical, craft-like skills which underpin valid knowledge and the valid use of knowledge.
So my main concern about the tests of literacy and numeracy is not that they are being proposed but that they are separated from the disciplines in which they might characteristically be applied, and in which they have their fullest expression,
notably English and mathematics.
These new tests therefore potentially encourage the notion that the more advanced reaches of the disciplines don’t require attention to hard, technical skills.
The tests, being only two in number, tend also to discourage an understanding that all disciplines require distinctive technical skills:
the skills of the laboratory or other kinds of data-gathering;
the skills of deploying the body and the voice in drama;
the physical skills of sport;
the practical skills of art or engineering or cookery.
Most worthwhile learning has something analogous to the skills of literacy and numeracy,
and although these two might be the most fundamental, these others need attention through assessment as well.
So the reason why these basic skills matter is that they lead on to greater things.
And, for all my concerns about the state of Scottish numeracy and literacy, I regret far more what has been insidiously happening to these bigger ideas in the last two or three decades.
It is in this context that I think that what might be called the standard conservative critique is wrong.
Directing attention to the regrettable long-term effects of what has been called 1960s radicalism is fine,
and I wouldn’t disagree,
but it is to miss the point about Scotland’s conservatism in curriculum and teaching methods right through that decade and on into the 1980s.
Scotland evolved by the 1960s and 1970s a rather uneasy but actually quite distinguished balance between radicalism as to educational structures and conservatism as to content.
The ending then of most selection for secondary school,
far from being an intrusion of 1960s romanticism,
was actually merely an incremental development of a process that had been going on since the major extension of secondary schooling early in the century,
an extension that gave unprecedented opportunities to girls, to working-class children and to Catholics.
This process had taken place under governments of all the then three major parties before the second world war;
it had quintupled the number of secondaries in these years
and, by the 1950s, provided competitive entry to what was still relative to population one of the largest university systems in Europe.
Such a legacy, unlike that in England, was not severely disrupted in its essential principles by the further democratisation represented by comprehensive secondary schools.
And that was because, throughout all this gradual radicalism of structural reform, the conservative constant was the essence of what was taught and learnt,
the aspiration, with the great English nineteenth-century liberal Matthew Arnold, that the purpose of education was to acquaint people with ‘the best that has been thought and said’,
the reforming purpose, with the great pioneer of science education T. H. Huxley, in his rectorial address at Aberdeen University in 1874, that ‘in cultivating science as an essential ingredient in education, we are all the while laying an admirable foundation for ethical and philosophical culture’,
or the civic purpose, expressed by Herbert Grierson in his rectorial address in Edinburgh in 1936, when he said to the assembled students: ‘you come to the university to pursue a professional education, a special line of study, one that will help you to earn a living. But you come also with the right to obtain and the duty to seek such knowledge as may help you to do your duty as good citizens in a free country’.
It was that spirit of widening access to the full fruits of liberal culture that defined the Scottish curriculum, especially the syllabuses of the Higher Grade examinations, until the 1980s.
Explaining exactly what has happened since then would be a far larger task than is feasible here,
or indeed than I am capable of,
but I would suggest that the essence of the problem and its origins may be stated quite simply.
We have come to define education increasingly narrowly, and I think there have been two main sources of this:
One has certainly been the belated arrival in Scotland of baleful 1960s child-centredness,
especially of the view that the problem with schooling was not that it denied the majority access to great culture but rather that great culture could never be made relevant to anyone other than the already privileged.
So – simplifying a complex process greatly but not, I think, misleadingly – you get a watering down of everything on the specious grounds that enjoyment and immediate relevance to life are the sole criteria on which a curriculum ought to be judged,
which is an obsession with the applied use of knowledge that is inexplicable when we recall that the one international study where Scotland already does moderately well is of 15-year-olds’ capacity to apply what they have learnt.
But if 1960s radicalism has finally taken over Scottish education, I don’t think that Scottish conservatism has exactly helped:
not only did it give enormous encouragement to a vocational utilitarianism in the 1980s that is ultimately indistinguishable from child-centredness,
insofar as both put the putative immediate needs of the learner before the deferred fulfilment of a curriculum shaped by the structure of inherited knowledge;
Scottish conservatism also failed in its great historic duty of defending what we have inherited from the past:
there was no Scottish Michael Oakeshott, the philosopher who described worthwhile education as a conversation between the generations,
and there was no Scottish Roger Scruton, who wrote a decade ago in defence of the old curriculum that it ‘was far from monocultural. Our ancestors studied – and I mean really studied – cultures that were entirely strange to them. They learned the languages and literature of Greece and Rome; came to understand, love, and even in their own way to worship the pagan gods; translated from Hebrew, Sanskrit, and Arabic; and roamed the world with an insatiable curiosity, believing on the best of grounds that nothing human would be alien to them’.
No Scottish conservative voice has defended the inherited curriculum with such eloquence,
none has argued recently that we should be trying to extend that – with an important admixture of scientific knowledge – to far more people,
and so we have lost a great deal of what was carefully built up over centuries,
built up not only by conservatives but also by liberals and by the most intellectualy distinguised of Scottish socialists.
In conclusion, then, we have too narrow a debate about literacy and numeracy because we have narrowed our understanding of what education is for.
If Scottish conservatism is somewhat culpable in this regard, I would reserve my main complaint for the Scottish left, which,
when it has not succumbed to a philistine vocationalism,
has apparently abandoned the old aspiration to democratic access to high culture:
and if the Scottish right needs its Oakeshott, the left even more desperately needs someone of the calibre of Raymond Williams, the great Welsh socialist, who did not shirk from arguing as long ago as 1958 that
‘the observable badness of so much widely distributed popular culture is [no] true guide to the state of mind and feeling of its consumers’.
Education, he said, is, ‘before everything else, the process of giving to the ordinary members of society its full common meanings, and the skills that will enable them to amend these meanings’.
The technical skills that are usually meant by literacy and numeracy are absolutely necessary to any worthwhile learning, but they are far from being sufficient.
The capacity to apply knowledge is indeed important, but was never in fact neglected in the old curriculum of which Scruton or Grierson wrote.
When we ask what is truly worth learning, we have to look to the past and to the distilled wisdom that our forebears have bequeathed us.
And so I would tentatively suggest, as an outsider, that Scottish Conservatism might do education a signal service by being rather more truly conservative.