Why Are We Taught to Memorise and Not Learn?
I am a TA, watching a teacher come into primary school and have to be taught by the kids what a "fronted adverbial for time" is. Why?
Because we used to teach people how to write instead.
The Average Lesson.
Children today you will write a letter to Willy Wonka. You must use the following success criteria:
- I can use alliteration
- I can use the rule of three
- I can use direct address
The children will be assessed only on the inclusion of these techniques. Their effectiveness is irrelevant. The emotion they incite in you is irrelevant.
Creativity is irrelevant. Perspective is irrelevant. The children must learn the techniques.
This mind numbing process is the responsibility of one Michael Gove. You may remember him from "the people of this country have had enough of experts," an interview soundbite that more or less summarised Brexit itself. Gove was Education Secretary from 2010-2014, and fundamentally restructured English at schools, introducing a SPAG (Spelling, Punctuation and Grammar) test because it had "right and wrong answers". I hope I do not have to tell you that this is false. Spellings differ across dialects, (colorful, colourful) grammar changes all the time, several rules about the placement of commas have been rewritten and changed, and linguists often debate how words are defined. Even word classes have tons of different names, sometimes conjunctions and sometimes connectives. Tests like this are wildly influential in a metrics focused, OFSTED enforced education system, and completely shape the way we teach.
Poet Michael Rosen has a great article on this topic. His conclusion that this (and media studies/drama no longer counting for league tables despite their obvious relevance to literacy) are part of the goal to "simplify the process of failing more children" to maintain "a low wage economy". I agree, but I also think this goes a little deeper.
At gov.uk there are example texts for children of "good writing".
What you may notice here is that the actual feelings that the writing is supposed to incite in you, the sense of tension or imagination, is utterly and completely irrelevant. The only thing that matters is the grammar. It is not about being compelling, it is only about being correct. A child takes away that writing isn't about emotion, but about being proper. This is deeply rooted in the obsession with prose that comes with British Classism, in which an accent or dialect "not being proper" is a signal of lower status, regardless of actual wealth. The absurdity of this is made plain when looking at the many authors that we read to children.
Roald Dahl does not use fronted adverbials for time and coordinating conjunctions, he deliberately makes his work simple and frenetic, the stream of consciousness of a curious child , the turbocharged imagination of youth in prose it can easily understand. The Govian education system has you read Roald Dahl and learn nothing about why Roald Dahl is good, it tells you to use him for inspiration but write nothing like him. Why? Why remove valuable data about the way we educate children to interact with literature in other forms? Why build an education system so nakedly anti-art, so literal, so incapable of getting children to think of writing beyond a technical exercise? Why memorise and not learn?
To Tories, Art Is Not Proper. Grammar is Proper.
Of course, this handily explains the move towards metrics obsession in the UK, but this is a long term phenomenon that predates Michael Gove. Our education system was advocated for and partially financed by industrialists, who saw that teaching the necessary mathematical and numerical skills to perform middle management tasks could be funded by the taxpayer. This is in the bones of our education system, the set structure. Metrics obsession isn't just a class thing, it's factory floor thinking. Everything must be quantified in terms of output, you are performing mock standardised tests every 6 weeks from the age of 8.
In Pink Floyd's The Wall there is a sequence spanning mostly Another Brick In The Wall Part 2. It's five minutes long, you should watch it here. The statement here is obvious, Pink's teacher rejects his poetry because memorisation is more important than intelligence and understanding, it produces the better scores, it retains dormant capital via your grades. The children are carted off to school before becoming faceless, perspectiveless versions of themselves eventually sent into a meat grinder. They are prepared as meat, and fed into the machine, to become another brick in the wall.
Telling too is the unhappiness of the teacher character. He too is traumatised by the system, having flashbacks to beating children over dinner. In the modern age we don't beat children, but we do feel completely consumed by the metrics obsession we are encouraged to impart on the kids. A headteacher at a school near to me killed herself over an OFSTED rating. I came close to doing the same thing over my own exam results in the past. My secondary school headteacher said he wanted us to cry over those practice tests, to use those tears to produce a higher number at the end of the year. I wonder how those number made him feel.
The rejection of the humanity of all participants feels almost fascistic, indeed the film this clip is from is very much obsessed with the aftermath of WW2, and the homegrown fascism of those that bragged about beating the Germans. The imagery of a slaughterhouse also resembles the imagery of the camps, largely because the infrastructure for both was quite literally the same. One wonders how institutions that teach mass obedience, that teach us to memorise facts about historical events over true understanding of them, play into the general populations susceptibility to fascism. The Nazi's might have changed the curriculum, but they left the structure wholly untouched, it was already perfect for authoritarian thought.