Why knowledge matters in Scottish schools, and the disaster of its loss - Cameron Wyllie

I have just read his new book, ‘Lessons From Scottish Schools’, which is subtitled ‘Why Knowledge Matters’ and I commend it to anyone – his fellow academics, teachers, parents, school governors, council officials and councillors, MSPs, young people and even – I recognise I’m stretching credibility here – those former teachers who gave up the hard stuff and now work for Education Scotland, or became Deputy First Minister: all of you should read it. But of course, you probably won’t. Teachers don’t have the time; parents don’t realise the critical state of Scottish schools, and ‘educationalists’, floating away in the faulty balloon they have themselves manufactured, will see it as heresy.

Prof Paterson is a good, kind, quiet man of rare intelligence. His book is beautifully written, cogent in its structure and progression and lucid in its prose.

It is astonishingly well researched – he draws evidence from the educational progress or reversal of about 20 countries – and it all simply makes sense. I do not know a practising schoolteacher, either primary or secondary, who would not nod in approval, yet, of course, nothing will happen as a result of it. Scottish education is two tramps sitting together in a wood who do not move. It’s fine, it seems, for our pupils to fall behind in international testing providing the quest for Scottish Independence remains footling along. I imagine Professor Paterson in his book-lined study, bringing together decades of thinking, pausing to examine again his notes on Singapore or Germany or Massachusetts, then pausing again to rise and bang his head off the wall in frustration.

Fight the good fight, Lindsay. -

His book is far too full and far too varied to try to summarise in a wee piece like this. Suffice to say that it explores in detail the content of the curriculum in Scotland over the last fifty years, and explains how the ideas invested in what is popularly but hysterically inaccurately called ‘Curriculum for Excellence’ came to be, and how much of that downward slope is a product of politics rather than educational good sense. It discusses through international examples the importance of knowledge in the curriculum, and how knowledge has become unfashionable. The parents and grandparents of today’s schoolchildren might be rather surprised about this. One imagines, to use language rather less erudite than Lindsay Paterson’s, that they might see schools as places where you go in order to ‘learn stuff’ ie gain knowledge. This move away from seeing knowledge as having primacy in our young people’s learning has been fostered (perhaps ironically) by university academics. It has led to a situation in which, to quote the very first line of this book ‘Scottish school education is not doing well’. The disaffection with knowledge which has grown in our educational system has, at its root, a misunderstanding of what knowledge is – it’s not just ‘facts’. It is as the book cogently puts it ‘an interconnected network of facts and of concepts which make sense of the facts’, and these are grouped into what we call subjects. It is our neglect of these essential concepts which has led to the falling away of Scotland’s place in worldwide educational league tables.

Perhaps gratingly, more or less the opposite has happened in England. We used to be so proud of our education system in Scotland. People used to come and live here because of it.

This book is, however, not just about knowledge and its place in the curriculum; it also discusses the equally important issue of how teachers teach the curriculum (and how they are taught to teach in teacher training institutions before they are let loose on today’s Scottish schools). For me, as a teacher for 38 years, who, no matter how high in the educational tree I accidentally found myself, always insisted that I had to have a class in front of me to teach, my own class, even if it was only one Second Year class, so that I remembered what an exhausting but joyous thing teaching is, the great news from Professor Paterson’s book is that good teaching is always child-centred, but as he puts it, ‘adopting a child-centred way of teaching [is] not the same as letting the children choose what [is] to be learnt’. Teaching, as everyone should know, is a job for ‘experts’ who know their subjects and know how best to convey it to the class of individuals in front of them; we need to reestablish respect for teachers as experts. He also writes about what ‘skills’ are – they ‘serve as a bridge between knowledge and performance’. In other words, in order to do something with your learning, you need to know everything about what you are going to do.

Sigh. I sigh all the time when I consider the state of Scottish education. Professor Paterson may gain a little relief from the fact that a comprehensive review of the Scottish curriculum is under way, but this is a government which specialises in ‘comprehensive reviews’ which often don’t achieve very much or aren’t delivered.

In the meantime I urge you to read Lindsay Paterson’s book – he knows his stuff; he is the expert; let him teach you.