How did we lose love of learning?

Published on Friday 9 November 2007 00:07

VIOLENCE and verbal abuse against teachers at a new high; English schools outperforming Scottish ones; tens of thousands of pupils in Scotland failing to master basic literacy and numeracy skills by the age of 14: just a few of the headlines in the Scottish press this year.

Whatever has happened to our reputation in education, and the respect we had for teaching and for learning?

For as long as I can remember, a Scottish education was held to be one of the finest in the world. We seemed to recognise earlier than most that learning was not simply a refining grace, but a vital ladder to a better life. And through that recognition, our teachers enjoyed a standing and regard that seemed timeless and unassailable.

How did we let slip this prize and end up with a system beset with decline? It now battles with a relentless change and convulsion that has turned much of a teacher's life into mesmerising form-filling over targets, budgets and quotas.

Even to venture into this area is to invite a cascade of denial. Has not the physical state of our schools greatly improved? Have not the quality of teachers and their support systems become immeasurably better? Are there not stunning exam pass rates and shining examples of failing schools that have been turned round? I do not deny any of this. Much has been done to help schools and teachers cope with a changing world and the challenges that a relentless social degradation has come to set.

I am wary also of romanticising the past, glossing over the poverty of resource and chalk-and-tawse tyranny that characterised much of the old way.

But, nevertheless, this sense of a lost reputation in education is widespread. It is deeply felt among many teachers who feel their core mission to teach is fighting for survival in a bigger agenda of welfare dispensing, lifestyle policing and stifling political correctness. In this, teaching is losing out to a bigger, more elemental battle against indiscipline, violence, absenteeism and a collapse in respect for learning.

Those shining examples of school success do not deny this bigger picture. Indeed, their very fact is itself a confirmation of the darkness that surrounds them and an admission that real achievement is too often the exception, not the rule.

Scotland's reputation was rooted in a system noted for the breadth of its secondary education and the dominance of its universities. It had by far the largest percentage of primary, secondary and tertiary educated people in Europe, until Prussia caught up in the 18th century.

Much of that reputation was founded in an era when there was no state provision. Donaldson's School for the Deaf in Edinburgh, now sold for luxury flats, opened in 1851, well before the 1872 Education Act made school attendance compulsory. Learning was more than an activity. It had a status.

Many of my generation recall their early schooling with a mixture of fear and pride. The names of our teachers and their reputation have stayed with us, for, outside of our families, they were unique in their influence and undisputed capacity to shape and to change our lives.

I had no reason to remember my teachers especially. But half a century later, when the glow of childhood memory has faded into a fine ash of forgetfulness, I can recall their names and their mannerisms instantly.

At my junior secondary school, a respect for learning, and a compulsion to learn drove everything it did. Discipline was high and incidents of serious class misbehaviour so rare as to be vivid, even after all this time.

Across much of Scotland, this is a world that has gone. The standing of teachers, the regard in which they were held, and the culture of respect in which learning was undertaken, have declined. Changed attitudes among parents have played a part. One Stirlingshire teacher says: "When a parent has been visited by social workers, they often use the language of social workers to deflect attention from their own shortcomings."

Yet no effort has been spared to project an image of flawless improvement and to suppress any doubt over the insatiable vanity of the new. Each year, the administration reports stunning Standard Grade pass rates - one recently as high as 98.4 per cent. It was an absurd, Orwellian figure, akin to Ukrainian tractor output in the Stalin era, and one later found to have been distorted by a decline in entries, with weaker candidates being entered for less advanced exams.

The paradox is this disappearing reputation has unfolded in the face of an explosion of public spending on education: a record 641 million next year, up from 224 million in 2002-3.

SERVICING Scotland's education has also become an industry, spawning an array of supporting institutions and agencies. This educational establishment will argue ferociously that there is no problem, or that the problems lie outwith the classroom, or that solid achievements have not been recognised. Many of the problems do, indeed, lie outwith schools, not least a decline in the culture and practice of reading and writing.

So, where are the hard facts of decline? Take, for example, last year's report by HM Inspectorate of Education (HMIe), which found big differences between the 32 education authorities in Scotland and unacceptable differences in the quality of teaching within individual schools.

It said: "We are still reporting important weaknesses in leadership across all formal education sectors, with 15 per cent of head teachers attaining 'unsatisfactory' or just 'fair' standards, which were not good enough".

According to figures obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, thousands of high-school pupils have failed to reach basic standards in literacy and numeracy. More than 30 per cent of second-year pupils had poor results in reading, nearly half failed the standard for writing, while four in ten failed the basic standard for maths.

Comparisons drawn from the latest exam results in Scotland and England, at S4 or the English equivalent, and released a few weeks ago, show that, despite the financial bonanza, the performance of Scottish schools has not improved over the past decade and may even be starting to decline. In 2006-7, only 39 per cent of pupils achieved the benchmark (five good grades, including in maths and English), down from 43.8 per cent the previous year. The percentage of pupils in England reaching the benchmark rose from 45.3 per cent to 45.7 per cent.

As for discipline, 41 per cent of teachers in Scotland experienced pupil-on-teacher verbal abuse on at least one occasion during a survey week last year; 8 per cent had recorded pupil-on-teacher physical aggression.

And only this week, it was revealed incidents of violence and verbal abuse against teachers reached record levels in 2006-7, rising to 7,306 - more than half involving physical violence. Absenteeism is now grazing 10 per cent and the percentage attendance in secondary schools was as low as 87 per cent in one area.

Against this must be set examples of success. One such is St Mark's Primary in Barrhead, Renfrewshire, where the head, Patricia Kennedy, received the best ever HMIe report and the Head Teacher of the Year Award last year. "It was a hell hole", says East Renfrewshire's education press officer, Hugh Dougherty. "And she turned it round. She is a disciplinarian and her foundation was built on the three Rs. But she also brought in peer-group mediation and trained the older pupils to sit down with the problem children."

ONE leading education commentator said: "The pupils leave her school, ready to do well at secondary and, therefore, able to hold down a steady job at the very least when they leave school. It's what the Scottish education system used to be known for."

Note the phrase "used to be known for". The causes of this decline are many and complex. I would certainly say that outside and, especially, home influence has been critical. We can rail at feckless parents, a dumbed- down culture and trash TV. But these are proxies for a deeper cheapness: a dismissal, bordering on contempt, for an educated life and the choices learning can bring.

That is the profound loss our vanishing reputation in education represents: that absolute primacy of learning. I do wish more teachers had taken a stand to defend it from the relentless interference they have had to endure. But I rejoice at those who have, and salute those who may yet do.