The Problem with prioritising Knowledge and Mastery in schools... or How Inclusion Will Save the Planet!

“Man can and should make himself master over nature by his knowledge of the subject” (F. Mitterrand)

Trigger Warning: Contains graphic depictions of animal cruelty and Michael Gove

Last Spring I started noticing this bird sitting on a tree outside our bedroom window. At about 8am it would sing, patiently, to this other, similar looking bird perched on an antennae on the roof of the house opposite. Every morning for about a month it did this. This might happen every year, I don't know. The roads were a lot quieter than usual, and I had a bit more time around the house to notice. And then they went somewhere else. Maybe they got freaked out by the saucepan banging, who knows. But one day I realised they weren't there any more. And all that was left echoing down our empty street was a fading, imperfect memory of their song, and my lingering regret that I never found out what they were called.

Anatomy of a songbird

Dominion

25 years ago, on New Year’s Eve 1995, François Mitterrand was preparing himself for his final meal. In what he knew were the final stages of terminal cancer, his team had sent invitations out to 30 guests for one more party. As everyone sat making nervous small talk around this obviously dying man, the chefs brought out the dish he had chosen to be his last.

The ortolan is a tiny songbird about the size of a pritt-stick. They are caught in nets set throughout the French countryside during their migration to Africa each Autumn. That year, as is customary, the President’s chefs had kept the birds caged for two months in complete darkness so that in their diurnal confusion they gorged themselves on grapes and grain. Once suitably fat, they were thrown alive into a vat of armagnac - both drowning and marinading them - before being roasted for 7 minutes in their own juices. The ortolan were served to the former President on a platter, and he ate them whole, one by one, feet first. According to tradition, Mitterrand placed a napkin over his head to shield the act from the eyes of God. He didn’t eat anything else before dying a week later.

Ortolan Bunting (Emberiza hortulana)

Mitterrand, it turns out, produced a great deal of writing on the subject of nature. Growing up in rural Jarnac in Western France, he professes to have developed a deep and long-lasting fondness for the natural world and all its species.

“We joined, without thinking of it, in the dance of the days and rhythms of the seasons. Animals, trees, fields, all had names. I learned to tell the stars. I knew the life cycles of whatever belonged to the land, horses, bees and roses. I learned too that there existed fish called rainbow perch, birds called moorhens and owls called grand dukes.” (F. Mitterrand)

Yet scholars have questioned how someone can dwell so much on his love of nature while at the same time writing very little (and doing even less) about its protection. His time as President coincided with a period of advanced understanding and scientific consensus around man-made climate change and the risks of inaction on greenhouse gas emissions. And yet on this topic he remained conspicuously silent throughout.

It is a question that will legitimately be asked of us by future generations. How did we know so much, yet do so little? Knowledge, it turns out, is not enough. And the love of nature that all our leaders seem to profess is meaningless on its own. What we have been lacking is not sufficient knowledge or data, we’ve had plenty of that, but leaders who have the fundamental values and attitudes sufficient to bring about the substantive and widespread behaviour change necessary to change our course.

“carbon dioxide remains the most important contributor to anthropogenic forcing of climate change; projections of future global mean temperature change and sea level rise confirm the potential for human activities to alter the Earth's climate to an extent unprecedented in human history” (IPCC second assessment report: 1996)

The quote above is from a report published a year after Mitterrand left office, and a year before New Labour started their first of 14 years in government. Blair's first manifesto promised a 20% reduction in CO2 emissions, because it was known back then that this was approaching the scale of reduction needed if we were to have any hope of avoiding catastrophic climate change. He had a huge majority, he could pass any bill he wanted. And yet by the time Blair left office, emissions were higher than when he started.

It's not just Blair, of course. Many will remember when some photographers were lucky enough to chance upon David Cameron bothering some Huskies in the Arctic and promising to deliver the ‘greenest government ever’, before removing wind farm subsidies, passing tax breaks for companies investing in further fossil fuel exploration and demanding in 2013 that his government needed to “get rid of all the green crap” from their policies.

David Cameron (right) with a husky

With the UK hosting the COP26 climate summit later this year, environmental issues will soon rise up the agenda again. And Boris Johnson has made a lot of bold promises on the matter. Should we be grateful that in Johnson we finally have a leader who would surely never go back on his word?

Or should we ask ourselves why we keep failing on this issue? Why we've failed our planet for 50 years and will in all likelihood continue to do so? Is there something going on underneath, something essentially misaligned in our cultural mindset that keeps preventing leaders from ever following through on the steps that are actually necessary to protect our planet? And what if our failures are fundamentally rooted in an education system that has failed to produce the leaders we have needed?

 

The Willow Tit (painting above by A.W.Seaby) is the fastest declining widespread resident species in the UK according to an RSPB report published last month. Its population has dropped by 94 per cent since 1970 and by 33 per cent between 2008 and 2018. 

Back in the 1980s, Stephen Kellert, a professor of social ecology, developed a typology of ten basic attitudes towards nature.

These formed part of his biophilia hypothesis, which become a cornerstone of research into human attitudes towards the natural world in the decades since it was first published. I came across it In my work earlier this year with Daniel Sheinwald, as part of his mission to provide children with a wider range of opportunities for nature-based learning. Lockdown had afforded a colleague and I the opportunity to take time out of the school day to go with him to Hampstead Heath and plan a series of trips and nature activities for students if and when they ever returned. Kellert’s paper led us to some discussions that have really stayed with me, around what was and wasn’t important when introducing children to the natural world. How valuable is it to learn the names of songbirds like the one outside my window? Is it more or less important to learn how to protect their habitat? To learn which mushrooms were poisonous, and which were delicious? To learn about systems of land ownership and management? To write poems about the fading light? To sit for a while, eyes closed, just listening? Of all the activities you can engage children in, of all the lessons you can teach them, which are the really important ones? Which of Keller’s attitudes need to be fostered the most?

There is of course no one right answer to any of these questions, and I'm sure a blend of several is preferable to a myopic focus on one. But one of the most salient findings of the studies that have been undertaken into Kellert’s work found that contact, emotion, meaning and passion were all predictors of nature connectedness. Knowledge based activities were not. In other words, they found that learning the names of the birds made you no more likely to feel any connection with them. Does an education system that prioritises knowledge of - rather than a connection with - nature, pave the way for behaviours that are more likely to lead to its destruction? It is surely easier to destroy that to which we do not feel connected.

Michael Gove - Secretary of State for Education (2010-2014)

Tradition

Michael Gove, and several other acolytes of ‘traditional’ education models, are very keen that our children should leave school with as much knowledge as possible, and should be memorising facts whenever they can about the world they are entering into.

“I’m an unashamed traditionalist when it comes to the curriculum... children sitting in rows, learning the kings and queens of England, the great works of literature, proper mental arithmetic, algebra by the age of eleven, modern foreign languages. That’s the best training of the mind and that’s how children will be able to compete.” (Gove, 2012)

It is a mantra that has been fully taken on by fellow friends of the Tories and educational traditionalists like Katherine Birbalsingh, head of the unfathomably influential Michaela school, who stands by her rote-learning techniques, or ‘drills to thrill.’ Poems are routinely “learnt by heart and belted out by students before lunch.”

Memorisation leads to knowledge, and with knowledge comes mastery. Their argument is that once you have internalised and memorised ‘knowledge’ of the poetic form, of kings and queens, birds and rivers, then it frees up mental load so as to enable the student to extend into the higher order understanding that leads to mastery of a subject.

Except there’s a problem. Once your attitude towards the learning of a subject is set, there is a risk that it becomes immutable. Once you have established the core values of education as being about memorisation and knowledge then it may well lead to mastery, but only in the dominionistic sense of the word. It is a sense of mastery that gives us a sense of ownership of, rather than a connection with the object of our studies. A mastery that allows out leaders to profess a love of nature, while at the same time taking us all down a path that leads to its destruction.

“How many other Frenchmen would be capable of reciting ten or twenty names of birds or plants?” (F. Mitterrand)

Which is why it reminds me of Mitterrand, who seems to conflate a joy in being ‘part of nature’, with a desire to extricate oneself from it, to rise above it, learn it, to do what only humans can do - name it. His is an attitude of “nature subjected to man, and of humanity there to dominate nature”; an attitude deeply rooted in the anthropocentric values that run through a traditional conservative Judeo-Christian education.

Despite leaving Education six years ago now, this Goveian ideology still sets the course for much of current education policy. There are echoes of him throughout the new Institute of Teaching that is seeking to place its emphasis on a "knowledge-based curriculum" when it opens in September 2022. 1000 teachers a year trained to deliver knowledge the way it should be delivered. Critical thought and creativity is not prohibited, of course, but rather situated within a 'knowledge-based' framework. It's a vacuous, dog-whistle phrase, but it can teach us something important about the people using it. I feel compelled here to offer one of my favourite Gove quotes, on how to teach poetry the ‘proper’ way:

“Even apparently frivolous exercises - like the study of French lesbian poetry - can develop the mind in a way every bit as rigorous and useful as any other study. Not, of course, if the study of these tests are faddish exercises in rehearsing sexual politics. But if the study of poetry occurs within the discipline of proper literary criticism, with an understanding of metre and rhythm, an appreciation of the difference between sonnet and villanelle.”

Now I've taught poetry to GCSE students for years, and if any them come away from reading Carol Ann Duffy or Jackie Kay without being able to engage with sexual politics then I’ve obviously done something wrong. But the sexual politics explored by poets is not something that Gove would ever be able to... to own. So, in his fear, he rejects it on principle. He is happier retreating to the world of factual recall and knowledge acquisition. It is safer, more stable. And it can be his.

Naming things is an act of power. It is asserting one’s dominion over a corner of the world which, while it remains unnamed and unknown, remains outside of one’s control. That which cannot be mastered cannot be controlled. And that which cannot be controlled might one day turn against you. That is why hidden within the desire to ‘master’ subjects like nature and poetry is a desire to reinforce the status quo. And why this approach to pedagogy is so loved by traditionalists and conservatives, because it seeks to keep things the way they are, consolidating power for those who already have it.

The Eton beagles. Eton is one of three private schools, along with Radley (£13,400 / term) and Stowe, (£12,700 / term) who keep their packs of hunting dogs (beagles) on site. Since the hunting act (2004) they are not supposed to use the beagles for hunting wild animals, but it remains legal to hunt for rabbits if you have the permission of the landowner. There are investigations going on at Eton after footage emerged of an illegal hare hunt they were apparently involved in.

Zero tolerance schools like Michaela, exclusive, selective schools like Eton, ensure students leave with a reinforced belief in the hierarchical power structures that have always governed. They will go on to exert control over the world around them in the way that mirrors the power-control dynamics of their own school lives.

Traditionalists point to the fact that these schools are always at the top of the league tables. They are very successful, and the students that pass through their doors go on to be successful too. This is true. But perhaps that’s only because of the way in which we currently define success. Exam results, future earnings, economic growth. What if success was framed around the successful stewardship of our planet? How successful would the schools be then who are currently at the top of the league table? They have produced world leaders, sure, but what world are they leaving behind?

A non-inclusive education system works fine as long as you don’t spend too much time thinking about all the people it doesn’t work for. And therein lies the problem. Climate change has never threatened the livelihoods of the people who have had the power to avert it. The biggest victims of climate change are somewhere else. Disconnected. Out of sight, out of mind.

Hence we have a system where an environment secretary professes his endless love of the natural world but then consistently votes against measures to combat climate change. A system that for centuries has promoted mastery over empathy, dominionism over ecologism, knowledge and memorisation over understanding and connectedness. Hence we end up with a string of leaders who could tell you the names of every river in England, but who are doomed to watch in impotent disbelief as those rivers burst their banks with increasing ferocity and regularity.

From Évocations / La Conque (1903) by Renée Vivien (1877-1909), a poet well known within the ‘Paris-Lesbos’ movement at the turn of the Century. “In my heart sings again the illusory music/ Of the ocean. - I keep in my frail memory/ The murmur and the breath and the soul of the sea.”

Inclusion

It sometimes feels like rearranging the chairs on the titanic talking about inclusion in the face of the giant iceberg of doom towards which we are heading. But inclusion is about more than just a set of teaching strategies. In its most meaningful sense, inclusion is an attitude. A mindset. One that stretches out beyond the display boards of the classroom and forward into years that aren't even on SIMS yet.

Inclusion means inclusion not just of the quiet children sitting at the edge of the lesson, but of the marginalised children sitting in distant corners of the planet, children years from now, who will suffer the first and worst consequences of our present (in)action.

Inclusion means understanding that there are different ways of perceiving the world - aesthetic, naturalistic, moralistic, ecologistic - and no single way of doing so that is more ‘proper’ than the rest.

The voices of those in power will want to hold onto their power as tightly as possible, regardless of the vacuous environmental promises they routinely belch out. An inclusive culture subverts this mindset, and it needs to. Because until our current mindset changes, our leaders will continue to plunder the planet of resources which they regard as rightly belonging to them. Other children, somewhere else, will have to face the consequences of an increasingly inhospitable planet. But until then, our leaders will rest safe in the knowledge that their children at least will still be sitting in perfect rows, learning how many lines are in a villanelle, memorising the order of kings and presidents, learning the names of the songbirds and quietly listening to audio clips of what they used to sound like.