School Stops Teaching

The Telegraph reports that St John's school in Marlborough has scrapped homework for 12 year olds, having already scrapped subject teaching, as part of a scheme devised by the Royal Society for the Arts.

But its main idea: that a school education should be about acquiring "competences for learning" and not subject knowledge, is misconceived.

The main purpose of school, as presumably is the main purpose of acquiring learning skills, is to help pupils learn and use a body of knowledge. It may be arguable how best people acquire learning skills, whether by doing or more abstractly, but either way they serve little purpose in themselves.

Being able actually to learn is a matter of practice and experience in learning, and building on what you already know. It is impossible to make connections, and to see patterns and inconsistencies in a subject, if you have no knowledge to work on.

Higher levels of learning are not something acquired overnight once one learns abstract skills. Rather they are based on detailed knowledge and understanding of the subject matter, perhaps painfully and laboriously acquired, which then forms the basis for evaluating further additions to, and extrapolations from, that body of knowledge.

There is also the matter of effective teaching. It is not at all clear that structured subject based learning is inferior to project based learning. I suspect in general it is easier to ensure pupils obtain knowledge and understanding when a subject is taught in a structured way, and classes are taught as a whole.

I wonder if this shying away from imparting hard knowledge to concentrating on soft "skills" is a sign that English education has little meaning for the huge numbers of children who have difficulty reading and writing? It is easier instead fill the time with intangibles: "competences for learning, citizenship, relating to people, managing situations and managing information" and gloss over the failure of schools to teach.