So, farewell then....

This is a poignant juncture in my life. For very nearly 30 months now I have poured my life into this crazy project of building a new school from the ground up (in China!!); and for the past 22 months I have been teaching here. It has been strange and wonderful and - mostly - a lot of fun. But it has also been at times frustrating, and overall profoundly exhausting. I haven't completely stopped working at any time in that 30 months, even during supposed vacations; and during term time, I've been typically working 80-100 hours a week.

I am sad to be leaving - but I really need A REST now.

Here are a couple of fripperies I just shared with my students and colleagues, two things that always come to my mind when I think of farewells:

Exquisite Canadian acapella group The Wailin' Jennys singing the traditional Scots/Irish folk song The Parting Glass....

And what the dolphins said when they abandoned Earth at the beginning of the Hitch-Hikers' Guide To The Galaxy saga....

My 'Legacy' (II)

This was one of the best of last year's Film class efforts on their unit of study on Reality TV: 'Fat Chance', a diet makeover show created by Joe Littler, Kameka Herbst, Hayson Chu, and Amy Hopkins. Hayson played the narrator/personal trainer, Joe the compulsive eater, and Vanessa Wat was his would-be love interest. I showed this to this year's class, as an inspiration, when they began to work on the same unit.

But probably my favourite of last year's many excellent productions was this one by Brian Lau, David Zhang, and Jasper Ng (who appears as the runner), on the impressionistic theme of 'Journeys' (alas, we didn't have space for that unit in our cramped timetable this year). The simple subject of a student running a few laps around our sports field becomes a rather broader and more resonant evocation of our campus life.

I was particularly impressed by the inventive variety of different shots used in this short film; there was a lot of clever dolly work, improvised using one of the wheeled chairs from the Library! (The accompanying music is Techy by Marcus Neely.)

I will really miss helping kids to produce stuff like this.

My 'Legacy' (I)

One of the things I have most enjoyed about my teaching here at CIS Hangzhou over the past two years has been taking on the unfamiliar role of 'Film Teacher'. My only qualifying experience for this was a lifelong love of the cinema: I've watched a huge number of films, I know quite a lot about the history of the cinema and the critical theory that's grown up around it, but.... our parent school has developed a very practical approach to the teaching of 'Film' as an International Baccalaureate subject, both at the Middle Years Program and the Diploma levels: the kids actually learn how to make their own films. And this practical side of things - setting up cameras, arranging lighting, sound and film editing (these days mostly done with software on the computer) - that was all completely new to me. I was learning most of this stuff alongside my students (but I like it that way!); indeed, many of them have been far more skilled and knowledgeable than me in many of these aspects.

It's been a fabulous experience for me, and lots of fun! And I'm really proud of the student work that's been produced here in my time.

Our culminating practical project this year, in a study unit on the 'Reality TV' phenomenon, was to produce a season trailer for a new show of the students' own devising. We did not have enough time to create 'genuine' shows, so the various scenarios had to be carefully scripted and staged for the camera (this in itself was one of the most important elements in this unit of study, demanding that students pay attention to questions of how much manipulation and fakery goes into many of the actual 'Reality' shows they enjoy, and what the ethical implications of this are).

There were two really outstanding productions. This one, The Sweet Life of Stacey and Tracey, a 'real life soap' concept depicting the tense relationship between a pair of pregnant middle-class teenagers, was filmed and edited by Tiffany Ng; her teammates Yew San Cheah and Vrithik Metha provided logistical support, and produced the voiceover narration and some other additional sound recording. Vital input also came from Emily Duncan and Frances Amos, who improvised most of the script in playing the two leads.

And then there was P-Ranked, a competitive prank show that is intended to pit friends against each other in an escalating series of tit-for-tat practical jokes. This was created by Tristan Wong, Fenton Garvie, and Lauren Justice - with a lot of help from various of their dorm mates. This one, I fear, was at times a bit too 'real' for comfort, with some of the pranks being staged without the victim's prior knowledge or consent to capture genuinely surprised - and annoyed - reaction shots.

Other groups' efforts also achieved much of merit, but were compromised by a failure to get to grips with the extreme time pressure we were under in the latter part of this semester: they just didn't get enough footage to present their concept fully and coherently.
Dominic Law, Hugo Chan, and Tippy Pei came up with Hell's Dorm, an 'extreme makeover' style of show focused on the occasional chronic untidiness of our dorms - but unfortunately they didn't get around to shooting the crucial mentor intervention/successful transformation scenes.
Jae Lamb, Ethan Chu and Kevin Ho produced Rap Wars, a talent show format in the style of American Idol, which boasted some very stylish lighting effects, but omitted to include any actual rapping, or an introduction of the judges. 
And Daniel Carolan, Constance Lam, and Samantha Koo created a piece called A Couple of Wheels, which was intended to be a challenge competition for couples - something in the style of The Amazing Race, but involving goofy physical tests like bubble-wrap wrestling. They underestimated the difficulty of arranging shoots with large numbers of actors and failed to shoot many of the scenes they needed to complete the trailer. Daniel, in the final edit, came up with the ingenious idea of padding out this patchy footage with a lot of explanatory captions, now trying to pass the piece off not as an actual trailer but as a jokey film school re-enactment of a long-forgotten Vietnamese (?!) TV show.
There's lots of inventiveness - and fun - in these films too; it's a pity they're not quite 'finished'.


Content advisory:  'Reality TV' has an unfortunate tendency to concentrate on some of the less attractive aspects of human behaviour, and our students embraced this dark side of the genre rather too enthusiastically. There is quite a lot of swearing in all of these films (one key skill students learned was how to 'bleep out' offensive dialogue!).




There will be a couple more examples of my Film class's work to follow shortly....

Another of my artist friends

German-Brazilian art photographer Juliana Borinski (who I'd met quite by chance during a holiday in Cambodia a while ago) came up for our end-of-year 'Arts Festival' this past week as an artist-in-residence, generously sponsored by our school's absurdly well-endowed 'Annual Fund'. Our overall Head of Art in the parent school in Hong Kong had invited her to spend the previous week there before joining us here in Hangzhou. Here are some photos of the activities she led for us while she was here.

She showed us a slideshow of some of her work, gave talks on her fascination with the history of photography, and led some workshops in which Art and Film students had an opportunity to play around with some long-exposure contact development processes to create collages. A technique using albumen (egg white), similar to the silver nitrate process used by pioneer photographers in the 1800s, producing sepia-coloured images, was a limited success; problems with 'fixing' the images meant that most of them soon faded and disappeared. These pictures created using cyanotype paper (long used to copy architectural drawings and engineering diagrams - 'blueprints') worked much better.

And she concluded her week with us by leading a small group of volunteers in creating a fun little stop-motion animation.

The music in the first slideshow is Endless Summer (artist uncredited) and in the second Skating (by Vince Guaraldi), both part of the iPhoto music library licensed by Apple for royalty-free use.

A wizard on the fretboard

I was particularly pleased to be able to arrange a visit to our school this week by the extremely talented French musician and composer Jean-Sebastien Héry, as he has been a close friend of mine since we first met in Jianghu, a quaint little hutong music bar in Beijing, about 8 or 9 years ago. Jean-Sebastien is staying with us on campus for four days, leading a series of workshops on electronic composition with our two classes of music students.

Yesterday, I persuaded him to sit in on one of the final choir rehearsals for the upcoming Closing Ceremony, and...  he entertained us with this stunning improvised performance afterwards.

And then he played this mesmerising concert for us in the theatre tonight. In his time, Jean-Sebastien - now mostly promoting himself under the stage name Djang San (or Zhang Si'an, in Chinese) - has played almost every musical style imaginable, but in recent years he has become especially interested in using technology to build up multi-layered, largely improvised compositions that fuse electronic and acoustic music and have a strong influence from Chinese folk music. In addition to the guitar (and numerous effects pedals!), he also played his favourite zhongruan and, in the encore, a pipa which he has electrified with a guitar pick-up. [I'm afraid I missed that final part of the performance because my camera battery ran out!]

A fond farewell

It has become a regular little treat for our school to round off one of our 'sessions' of residence with a mini-holiday on the idyllic river island of Tongzhou, an hour or so south-west of the city. (Well, this is the third time we've done it in only two years. Our October visit this year was only precipitated by the miscarriage of other plans. But the June appointment seems likely to become a regular fixture, since our host Chinese school is always obliged to kick us off campus for a few days at this time of year, in order to accommodate the security arrangements required of it as a test centre for the sitting of the gaokao, China's notorious national university entrance exams.)

Even very heavy rains could not dampen our spirits (though, on balance, I would have preferred some more of the blissful sunshine we were blessed with in October!). And I found myself getting rather sentimental: some of my happiest experiences with this school have come on the Tongzhou trips - and this will be my last.

Here's another of my slideshow roundups of the shenanigans.

The music is Incident at Gate 7 by Thievery Corporation, part of the iPhoto music library licensed by Apple for royalty-free use.

An inspiration

This is a song, 'I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel To Be Free', that has astonishingly powerful resonances for me. And yet, until I found this on YouTube a few years ago, I don't think I'd ever seen this performance of it before; or indeed, any performance up to that date. It's entirely possible that I'd never heard the song all the way through before.

The reason it induces such a swoon of nostalgia in me is that it was used as the theme music for BBC1's weekly roundup of new cinema releases (imaginatively titled Film + last two digits of year in question), a Monday night fixture throughout my childhood and adolescence. I think it was originally presented by a journalist called Iain Johnstone (ah, well, Johnstone certainly covered for the more regular presenter a number of times later on, but I discovered the early days of the show had a number of different presenters, including Freddy Raphael and Joan Bakewell.... before my time!); but  he soon ceded the position to Barry Norman, whose lugubrious wit in the role soon made him a popular figure, even something of a media celebrity (and the target of numerous comedy impressions). Norman helmed the series through most of the '70s and '80s, and on into the '90s - when I became a less regular watcher (overseas a lot; and without much access to television even when I was in the UK). I hadn't noticed at the time when it finally disappeared from British TV screens; but I learned online that it was cancelled in 1998 (when I was spending a year in Canada, on a law scholarship).

I really should not have been able to watch this as a child, since it was usually on after the Monday night film - and thus starting at well after 11pm, and sometimes after 11.30pm, and going on until around midnight. However, staying up LATE - especially for a film - was something that I had come to regard as the best of treats at a very early age, maybe as young as 4 or 5 years old; and I'm sure I made such a pain of myself when denied one of these treats that my parents soon began to give in to me. Once I'd proven that I could still get up in the morning and function at school the next day, they started allowing me to stay up until 10.30 or 11 every night, and occasionally until 12..... even when I was barely 10 years old. By the mid-70s, Barry was a Monday night addiction for me. This was where my love of cinema began - and particularly where my awareness of a broader cinema began, my first exposure to an artier sort of film (things that would never appear in my local 'fleapit' theatre; films I would only get to see years later, when they showed up in a late-night slot on BBC2, or when I finally had access to art cinemas as a student).

The music played every week under the opening montage of micro-clips of famous films (which remained largely unchanged for long periods - although I think they updated it occasionally during the course of each year to represent some of the recent big hits). It was also used during the show for shorter montages of the films to be featured that night. It could be quite a challenge to spot all of the excerpts - they were usually without sound and some were subliminally brief; and, as often as not, they were from films that I'd never actually seen. Even so, I usually did pretty well: my competitive film-buffery started early!

And so...... well, I've heard this tune - especially the opening few bars - countless hundreds of times; yet it's such a catchy little number that it never seems to lose its charm. The Beeb seems to be rather over-zealous in deleting any clips of the Film shows that turn up on Youtube; but here's a rather poignant little montage of Barry 'through the ages' - accompanied by what he once not unreasonably described as "the best theme music on television".

And here is the piece's composer, the great jazz pianist Billy Taylor, playing his original instrumental version (the one, I think, used as Barry Norman's theme for all those years) - for once! - all the way through.

Shortly after discovering the clip above, I learned through further online researches that Billy Taylor had generously 'donated' the song to one of my greatest musical heroes, the divine Nina Simone. Here she is, absolutely tearing the piece apart during her celebrated concert at the 1976 Montreux Jazz Festival. (You can find most of this show on YouTube in segments; but it really is worth sitting down to watch the whole thing from start to finish, if you can - it is one of the great moments in musical history.)

And here's a link to a more restrained - but still powerful - recording of this song by the great lady.

Enjoy.

Thought for the week

"You can cage the singer, but you can't cage the song."

This line by the great singer Harry Belafonte seems particularly apposite to me in the week of June 4th.

An answer?

In a long post a few days ago, I railed against many of the things that most bug me about education - all the misguided ideas and flaws and shortcomings that bedevil it.

But I wasn't able to offer any solutions to any of this (or only a few, just hinted at here and there).

Well, I do have an idea that might offer some solutions - one big idea, with a few subsidiary ideas revolving around it like satellites. And that idea is modularity.

I really like the model followed in the American college system of allowing students to choose from a wide array of short courses, with a fair degree of latitude to explore some areas that are completely unrelated to their 'major' field of study. I'd like to try to apply that to secondary education (and even perhaps lower down than that).

One of my great dissatisfactions with secondary education today (although I largely passed over it in my post the other day) is that students are limited to a fairly small number of subjects of study - and yet devote a somewhat excessive amount of time to each of these subjects.  [This fault is compounded by the fact that the pace of study is often so leisurely these days. When I was at school, individual lessons were only 35 or 40 minutes long; but now, it is becoming more and more common for 60 minutes to be the standard lesson length; or even 70 or 80 minutes, the length of a 'double period' in the old days, a rare extravagance usually reserved for practical work in art or science - and even there it may be doubted if such a generous allocation of time was really necessary. With lessons like that, there is usually far less emphasis on punctuality (students - and teachers - may arrive a few minutes late; and take their time to get properly started!); and there's a lot of 'down time', where not much is being done, or is being done without any very urgent time pressure.]

I believe children really enjoy working at a brisker rate: they like being pushed to complete tasks within a narrow timeframe (and they can accept - it's good for them to learn to accept - that it isn't always possible or necessary to finish something in the given time). They also like quantity: getting the feeling that they are acquiring lots of new knowledge, exploring lots of new topics, encountering lots of new ideas and ways of looking at the world - within a short space of time. And above all, they relish variety: they like to be studying lots of different things.

A fully modular curriculum, with numerous short courses (4-6 weeks should be enough, as a maximum) on offer, would better satisfy these desires, I believe. Students would probably be able to study rather more different things at any one time, or certainly far more different things within a school term or a school year. And they would be exposed to a far greater variety of subjects and topics overall. (Just reviewing course summaries when making their next batch of selections might become a valuable part of the educational process under such a system - broadening horizons, provoking curiosity, opening up new paths of study that a student had not previously dreamt of).

Such a system would not only be more stimulating for students, and cater better to their individuality, but would also allow far more space to 'minority' subjects - particularly some fields of study that are at present marginalized or completely excluded from most secondary curricula: engineering, website design, linguistics, philosophy, sociology, etc. And if this displaces the more traditional subjects (mathematics, "geography", "science", modern languages) from their dominating position at the core of present curricula, I believe that would also be a good thing.

There would have to be some limitations. A certain 'foundation level' of introductory courses in an agreed core of subjects would have to be compulsory for all. But I would hope that this could be largely dealt with in the first year or two of secondary schooling; or perhaps even in the last year or two at the primary level. And thereafter, students could rapidly build out - each effectively creating an individually-tailored curriculum for themself. 

Certain parameters would no doubt have to be set (and students could be reminded of these by a combination of advice from a teacher-mentor and automated notices from a computer program): that they must complete a certain number of courses to a certain level in order to qualify for a graduation certificate, etc.; or that they must follow certain combinations of specific subjects at the higher levels to be eligible to enter a highly specialised university degree/career path such as medicine or software engineering. Timetabling issues would be enormously complex, of course; indeed, they would have been quite insoluble, unthinkable until recently; but with the rise of super-smart computers, such problems are rapidly becoming tractable.

Of course, there are many other practical challenges to be overcome in trying to implement such a radical system - not least in the development of the new graded courses (encompassing so many new subjects and so much new content). But nothing worth doing is easy. I believe it could be done.

And here are some (of the many) peripheral changes - and advantages - that might be associated with this modular study approach:

1)  Fully realising student autonomy

Or realising it as fully as it ever can be. We can't do away with school completely. And we can't make it purely voluntary. And I don't think we can move to having schools run too far on the principle of 'self-directed study'. (I have not been all that much impressed by a lot of what I have seen of such 'project work', where students have been given complete freedom to come up with a topic of investigation in history or science or whatever. Most seem to be severely unambitious - raiding their ideas from the Internet, and selecting one that seems likely to be least demanding of them.) But if students are able to exercise choice almost every day as to what subjects they are studying (and, to some extent, whether they are studying them in a group or alone, in class or at home - see my further points below), they will feel genuinely empowered - in control of their educational experience. That's been a 'Holy Grail' of educational theory for years now; but, apart a series of lurches towards more of this project work, there hasn't as yet been any progress towards achieving it. At present, students are generally offered only a rather limited range of subject choices, and mostly only in the upper years of secondary schooling. My proposal is to try to make choice fundamental and ubiquitous throughout the entire secondary school experience.

2)  Achieving real student differentiation (without marking!)

If we could build as much variety into the subject offerings as I envisage, almost no two students - or very, very few students, anyway - would pursue exactly the same set of courses, with exactly the same results, across their whole school career. The effective differentiation between individuals that universities and employers so crave would be achieved by the fact that every student's academic record was virtually unique. And this could be done without reference to individual marks on every separate course component; the differentiation would now be established simply by the number of courses taken (and completed), the levels reached (and at what age), the variety of courses chosen (and the changing patterns over time, perhaps revealing a gradually emerging primary specialist interest, or a continuing lack of one), and the commonalities evidenced in the majority of highest-level courses taken in the last year or two at school. 'Performance' in individual courses (of which there would eventually be some hundreds over the period of a high school career, perhaps as many as as fifty or sixty in a single year) would not really matter: they could simply be classified as 'Pass/Fail', or - preferably - 'Complete/Incomplete'. It might be possible, and useful, especially for courses at the higher levels, to provide one or two levels of 'distinction' for particularly impressive work. And course supervisors would still - hopefully - provide detailed written feedback on each student's experiences on a given course. But 'assessment', of individual tasks and of the overall course, could become entirely formative; and, I fondly hope, it could dispense with marking scales and the rank ordering of class members altogether.

3)  Breaking away from the single-site school (and diversifying methods of study/teaching)

The much greater breadth of possible classes this model entails would naturally tend to undermine the position of a single school as the centre for all of a child's study (and I believe this would be a very good thing). Much of the course delivery might be done - would probably have to be - via online formats (which could be pursued by students at home, or in designated 'study centres' such as a local library or Internet cafe, rather than on the traditional school campus). And some courses might require attendance at different schools in the area.

4)  Breaking away from traditional notions of the class group, providing more social variety

I believe this modular study approach would offer students a much greater variety of classroom environments and of study peer groups. They might not see many, if any, of their fellow students in every single class they are undertaking at any one time. And many of their classes might place them among total strangers. Some classes, I hope, might require their attendance at teaching/learning venues outside of their main school. And many, if not most classes, particularly at the higher levels of difficulty, would include students with a wide range of ages, not all drawn from just one year-group. And I would like to see the fostering of informal 'study groups' (I think the nature of these courses and their manner of delivery would create a powerful incentive for this) for collaborative work outside of class, which might again cut across the traditional silos of class, year-group, and school.

5)  Allowing for more independent study

'Homework' has become a bit of a dirty word in teaching circles in recent years; but the only thing I can find to be said against it is that is has traditionally been done at home, in what should really be a student's leisure time. I generally quite enjoyed homework as a child, and I am sure I did my most productive schoolwork in this format; I just resented the fact that it occupied so much of my time that I might have preferred to spend reading or watching TV. I think these very short but very intensive courses, requiring a lot of independent work (whether collaboratively or solo) and relying extensively on online resources, would naturally suggest a timetabling model where a significant amount of time is set aside for 'private study' (as we used to call it in my school days), even in the late-primary/early-secondary years: 'homework' during the day. Internet technology makes it possible - indeed, easy and enjoyable - for nearly all students to work at home these days (alternative study venues might be established for any for whom this might be a problem; ideally, such centres should be only very lightly supervised, and located outside of regular school campuses). And teachers - or monitoring software - can check in occasionally, to see if students are logged into and interacting with recommended resources; or, at the very least, proof of work carried out on a regular basis should be able to maintain a fairly conscientious approach in most cases (I wouldn't want to create an atmosphere of cyber-surveillance on out-of-school study; I really believe that 99% of the time, kids could be trusted to use this time reasonably sensibly). Children, I'm sure, would quickly adapt to this new way of working; but, of course, good pastoral care monitoring by teachers would be especially important in a transitional period, and would continue to be crucial for any students who find it difficult to maintain any self-discipline in unsupervised study.

6)  A further degree of 'freedom'

I would hope that this new approach to working - highly flexible timetabling, a lot of self-directed work, a lot of work occurring unsupervised and outside of the school environment - could provide an additional opportunity for the exercise of student autonomy: the right to skip a certain number of classes or courses each term or year. Of course, this would have to be sensitively monitored by individually assigned teacher-mentors, to try to be sure that not too much work was being missed, or that there was not some serious emotional or health issue - bullying or boredom or a personality clash with a teacher or whatever - triggering the 'opting out'. But I'd like to see this work, in effect, like the idea of the 'duvet day': an unquestioned 'day off' - or 'week off' - every once in a while, when the individual feels they need it. With such a plethora of courses being undertaken (and such flexibility to pursue a stepped sequence of courses on any timeline the student pleases), it won't much matter if someone fails to complete a few courses here and there, especially in the earlier years of secondary school. And, ideally, there should be scope for students to substitute online work for what they would have done in class.... or perhaps to re-take a course later on in catch-up sessions (which might perhaps be provided during weekends or vacations, or delivered purely online). Indeed, with the large amount of time set aside for 'private study', it should be possible for students to sometimes squeeze in an extra course or two - if they want to, and appear able to cope with the workload - during their regular working week.

7)  De-specialising the teacher

I have always thought it a bit ridiculous that a university degree (and a 'good' degree from a 'good' university, at the more rarefied private schools) is considered the main prerequisite for a teacher, who is never likely to teach in high school at anything near an undergraduate, let alone a post-graduate level. Indeed, I am rather suspicious of teachers whose academic qualifications are too elevated; I think they are more likely to be out of touch with the needs and interests of their much younger, less knowledgeable students. (Disclosure: I may be particularly grumpy about this because I was once told at interview that it was already pretty much decided they were going to appoint a friend of mine from teacher training college in preference to me, even though he hadn't yet been interviewed, purely because he had a doctorate and I didn't.) And it is a more widely accepted criticism of the 'teacher' as traditionally conceived that an excessive aura of authority attaching to him or her can intimidate and alienate students, and works against the ideal of 'student-centred learning'. I have always preferred to view myself as a facilitator or encourager.... and, as often as possible, as a fellow voyager on the learning journey. I love being able to say, "I don't know!" - and then going and finding out, in the company of my students. The great diversity of subjects/topics envisaged in this modular curriculum will necessarily mean that staff leading a class will find themselves more in this 'facilitator' mode rather than taking a more traditional 'teacher' role: often, they may have no prior knowledge of what they are "teaching" at all, and may even sometimes be volunteering to teach something that lies well outside of their own subject specialism. Most teachers would no doubt be absolutely terrified of this, at first; but I think that they would soon come to relish the dynamism and variety of this new style of working.

Ah, there is quite a lot more I could say on all of this; but I think this is quite enough for now. I may return to the topic at a later date....

What's wrong with Education?

Our parent school spent some years conducting a review of 'the way ahead' for its own development, grandly framed as seeking a blueprint for The Future of Education. Contributors were encouraged to indulge in 'blue-sky thinking', to be as wild and wacky and unconstrained in their suggestions as possible. Some of this 'new thinking' was amusing, and a little of it might be, at least indirectly, useful in some ways. But I fear most of it missed the point. (Well, they didn't ask me, did they?)

Before you can think outside the box, you need to recognise where the boundaries of the box are.

So, what do I think is wrong with education...?  (How long have you got?)

1) It is highly vulnerable to faddishness.

I think there are a number of likely reasons for this. Teachers - and academic educationists - tend to be people who have consciously 'dropped out' of the more workaday world, and thus often like to think of themselves as radical and subversive, unconstrained by 'conventional wisdom'. Schools themselves mostly operate somewhat outside of the usual economic forces that discourage reckless experimentation in the business world. And since it is so difficult - impossible - to verify the impacts of proposed initiatives in education other than by real-world trials, a lot of things get tried out; and if the early indicators of outcome appear even vaguely positive, these ideas can spread very rapidly, without having proven themselves to be of any real value (project-based learning, interactive white boards, laptops in the classroom all the time, etc., etc.). I am not at all against experimentation and innovation; but I think they need to be pursued with caution and discrimination - and in the education field, they are often adopted without such careful forethought, embraced for the thrill of novelty alone.

2)  Yet it is also fundamentally conservative.

This is unsurprising - because education policy, especially at the level of individual schools, is driven largely by the concerns of parents, and parents are naturally cautious about taking risks with their children's 'future'. Also, many of them tend to be unduly nostalgic for their own schooldays (sometimes, even, with an overlay of 'super-nostalgia' for an imagined earlier period - their parents' schooldays, perhaps - when things were assumed to have been even better). Though this might be changing with the rapid rate of technological and social transformation in our modern digital era, parents in the past have certainly tended to lag half a generation or so behind the contemporary world... particularly in regard to how their children should be educated. Parents - pretty nearly all parents, even the most progressive and enlightened of them - tend to be fixated on 'academic performance' (and on a rather narrow view of 'success' in life which will follow on from this): constant improvement, closing in on perfection, outdoing classmates; getting good exam scores, getting into a good university; getting a good degree, and, as a result, getting a good job with a good income. (Ultimately, though, I think parents pushing their children - and their children's teachers - to accept this template for progress through life might be perhaps relatively unimportant. The push to 'success' from the bottom end of the educational process is probably outweighed by [and subconsciously dictated by?] the pull from the top end: the perceived demands of the economy as filtered through the government and the universities - see my final point below.)

3)  Hence, it is too often a battleground of the uninformed.

The tension that I outlined in my first two points between 'trendy' educationists or teachers on the one hand and (mostly) fairly reactionary parents (and school governors, district school boards, etc.) on the other, the constant struggle between people who are seeking to innovate (though usually for no clearly thought-out reason) and those who oppose such innovation (for no other reason than their fearful gut instincts), tends to produce either stagnation or a violent see-sawing of policy. Schools - and national education systems - are unlikely to be well run until a more harmonious and productive synthesis can be found between these opposing tendencies. (Moreover, neither teachers nor parents are necessarily very insightful about the broader issues of education. Parents are too focused on their own children's performance; teachers are too focused on preserving their jobs - or on how they'd like to be able to do their jobs. That narrowness of viewpoint is not conducive to conceptualizing a 'big picture'.)

4) But worse yet, it is fundamentally institutional.

Both at the level of any particular school, and at the levels of there being an 'education sector' and 'education policy' - and 'educational theory', too, the very idea of education... well, it's all so self-important and monolithic. And I am wary of any kind of institution. I don't necessarily know what I'd want to put in its place, but I do recognise in myself a very powerful impulse to tear down most of what we have currently.


5) And the nature of the institution is profoundly collectivist.
I particularly dislike the sense of community identification that schools seem to foster - encouraging pupils to conceive of themselves in terms of their form or class group, their year group, their 'house', and then as belonging to the school itself. Schools all seem to promote the idea of community over individuality; and that really rankles with me. And kids spend so long in schools - so many hours in the week, so many years of their young lives - that they inevitably become 'institutionalised' by their school's culture, unconsciously conditioned by and dependent on it (just as long-term prisoners or career soldiers are affected by their habitual environments). It particularly worries me that there is a growing tendency toward single-site schools covering all ages, from pre-kindergarten through to university entrance: some kids are going through their entire education in one place, going 15 years without a change of scenery (or very much change in their peer group).

6)  The worst of this institutional mentality is that it is so excessively social.

The suppression of individuality becomes an even bigger problem because school occupies such a huge proportion of young people's time: they are forced into these artificial communities for so much of their waking lives. These problems no doubt become intensified in very large schools (witness the invariable film and television depictions of how rigid - and how wretched - the social stratifications in US high schools are). But even within the smaller sphere of the classroom, there is such a relentless emphasis on interaction - performing with and in front of your classmates, undertaking activities in pairs and groups and so on. This may all be useful and healthy up to a point; but it dangerously undervalues and marginalises the significant number of children who are averse to such enforced socialization. The introspective or socially awkward, the intensely private or 'quiet' child should not be alienated or demonized or overlooked, in the classroom or outside it - but that is what schools tend to do.


7)  And it is so obsessed with measurement.
The 'trendy' received wisdom has been for many years that 'assessment' is not an entirely good thing, particularly in terms of its psychological impact on children; and that it should therefore be de-emphasised. But this is a classic example of the hypocrisy or 'doublethink' that is rife in the world of education: most educators pay lip-service to this ideal of moving away from a preoccupation with assessment of performance, without attempting to confront the contradictions that.... schools (mostly; the private ones, anyway) want to have some measure of their success, to establish their superiority over rival schools; parents want to have some measure of their children's success, to be reassured about their 'progress' (and their prospects in life after school); teachers accept - and not all that grudgingly in most cases (I am a rare outlier in my distaste for constant grading) - their school's and parents' demands for all this measurement; and - sadly - the children themselves come to expect this too, even to need it and crave it, feeling confused and unsatisfied without it. People - parents, teachers, students, society at large, everyone - mostly turn a blind eye to the fact that all grading systems are inevitably superficial, crude, narrow; lacking insight into detail (it's impossible to define criteria that cover every aspect of a child's performance in a task) and unable to differentiate effectively between different levels of performance (it's impossible to distinguish between 100 children - or between 100 pieces of work by a small group of children - with a 10-point scale [on which, in practice, only 5 or 6 different marks will be awarded]; but broader marking scales soon become unwieldy, and will be more and more inconsistently applied - even by the same teacher, let alone a whole group of them); subjective and unreliable; of very little use even in charting a single child's improvement over time, and often little more than a lottery in rating children against each other. Marking is resented by most teachers for being tedious and time-consuming. And, for the most part, it isn't even capable of achieving what it is intended for. But the most insidious and objectionable aspect of education's obsession with marking is that (as the wonderful thinker John Holt, one of my great personal inspirations, once put it) it inculcates in children "the ignoble satisfaction of feeling that they are better than someone else".

8)  And, oh yes, it is riddled with sacred cows.
'Progressive thinking' about curriculum tends to focus on things like introducing more project-based learning, more extra-mural learning, or more inter-disciplinary learning. But such initiatives are usually still grounded in the long-established traditions of subject discipline distinctions and standardised content. You almost never hear anyone question, for example, "Why do we teach maths - at all?" Maths is, without doubt, the least practically useful subject taught in schools, for the great majority of students; I have never used anything that I learned in a maths class in the outside world. Basic numeracy, yes - that's very important. But you learn that from playing 'shop'; and later from counting your pocket money, playing darts and cribbage, etc. You don't really need to be taught any of that in school, not beyond the very early years. I wouldn't advocate abolishing the study of maths completely; but I do think the type of content it covers, and the way in which it is taught, needs to be drastically transformed. And, even more importantly, it needs to be dislodged from its central - and unquestioned - position in the secondary curriculum. Similarly, I would challenge whether it is really so very useful for everyone to 'learn' a foreign language - at least, for such a substantial portion of the timetable, throughout the secondary years. I'd prefer to see courses being offered in philology, teaching students how languages in general work, rather than harrying them to pursue a modestly high level of competence in just one additional language - which they may never use in earnest. Although there are issues of practicality, of course, I'd like to see students being given the opportunity to acquire a simple 'beginner's level' in perhaps four or five different languages, before exercising an option to pursue one or two of them to a rather higher level. With languages, I am sure that it is an awareness of comparative linguistics that is really important to a child's mental development, rather than attaining a modest competence in one particular foreign language. Unless you're really sure that a language is going to be useful to you - because of family connections, or a particular career path - studying one for hours a week throughout the whole of secondary school is a wasteful use of time; most students, rightly, find it unengaging and pointless. And history.... is neutered by hang-ups about studying more recent times (too politically charged, too uncertain??); when I was in school, we didn't dare venture beyond the origins of the First World War, some sixty years prior; even today, it's rare to find any topics approaching as near as the 1950s or 1960s. All the near-contemporary history I know, I had to learn from TV documentaries. I could go on and on: nearly all of the traditional school subjects have serious flaws (in syllabus, teaching style, narrowness of conception, excessive proportion of timetable allocated to them); while potentially far more engaging and important subjects - like economics, social psychology, engineering, electronics - are marginalized or overlooked completely.

9)  But the worst thing of all about education is that it's compulsory.

Modern schools - the better ones, anyway - espouse the ideals of promoting dignity and respect, enhancing students' capacity for autonomy and self-realisation ("student-centred learning", and all that). How does that square with the fact that the activities intended to facilitate this are all required? It doesn't. Being forced to attend school every day, and to follow a fixed pattern of classes and activities every day, necessarily erodes a student's sense of empowerment and self-worth. Alas, I fear that purely voluntary education just would not be practicable. But the more one insists on defining when and where children attend school, what subjects are available for them to study, and what assessments in these subjects they must undertake, the more one crushes the life out of the ideal of student autonomy.

10)  No, absolutely the worst thing of all about it is that it's such a sausage factory.

Radical reform of education is probably impossible, certainly very, very, very difficult - because education is enmeshed in a wider socio-economic construct. Education policy is formulated by governments, who largely depend on 'successful' management of the economy in order to stay in power. Governments generally listen to the 'leaders of industry' - rather than the electorate - in regard to what the economy needs to be successful. Thus, 'industry' - via the government - tells the universities how many doctors, lawyers, computer scientists, accountants, engineers, etc. the country is going to need in 10 or 20 years' time. The universities tweak their faculty budget allocations and admissions policies to try to meet those supposed needs for the output of certain types of skilled contributors to the economy in the coming decade. And schools - and exam boards - dutifully train their students to pass the right exams, to get into the right universities, to gain the right degrees, to get the right jobs.... to keep the good old economy sailing serenely along. The main limiting factor on the development of primary and secondary education is that, at present, primary and secondary education are almost exclusively focused on preparation for tertiary education - and on 'the world of work' beyond.

I don't think we can make education 'better' - a substantially more satisfying and valuable experience - even for those students who are sure they want to go to university and then become bankers or architects or whatever... until we can embrace the idea that not everyone wants or needs to go to university. And as working careers become increasingly fluid and varied, and as online learning becomes more and more widely available and adopted, the number of young people choosing to follow the university path could - probably should - decline very rapidly. 

I don't think anyone on our Future of Education think-tank said that.....

Thought for the week

"Success is not final, failure is not fatal. It is the courage to continue that counts."

Kung Fu frustration

A bunch of my favourite students were away on a 'Project Week' trip last week, staying in a Buddhist temple known as Da Fawang Si, in the Songshan region of Henan province - the area famous as the home of the Shaolin style of martial arts. It is one of the few temples there that still runs a traditional kung fu school for its young trainee monks; and it is the only temple school which admits outsiders to study.

The party - twelve students and three accompanying members of staff - were subjected to six days of dawn starts, long training routines, spartan living conditions.... and vegetarian food. But they seem to have had a blast! (As one of the girls put it to me, "It's amazing how well you sleep when you've had to get up at 6 o'clock in the morning!")

And I am mightily frustrated that I was not able to experience this with them. The trip had originally been conceived by my friend, Pierre Biret, a keen martial artist who used to teach French for us. But when he had to go back to France suddenly after encountering unexpected visa problems at the start of the year, I inherited the leadership of the project.... and it was a huge load of stress and trouble to organise!

Unfortunately, I aggravated an old foot injury rather seriously while running a half-marathon in nearby Suzhou over our Easter Holiday six weeks ago. And I am now in so much pain I can barely walk - or even sleep. So, I wouldn't have been able to participate in any meaningful way in such a physically demanding excursion. And indeed, I needed to take a few days off to seek medical advice on the condition.

But I am very, very disappointed to have missed out on this. It really was a once-in-a-lifetime kind of experience.

I've just finished editing together the video that was taken on the trip... which has added salt to my wounds!

Thought for the week

"The true test of character is not how much we know how to do, but how we behave when we don't know what to do."

Thought for the week

"Tourists don't know where they've been, travellers don't know where they're going."



As we enter our annual round of 'Project Week' adventures around China, here's hoping that our students approach their journey with more of the 'traveller' mentality!

What we did in the days before Google....

Youngsters today find this a hard concept to grasp, but it was not so very long ago that people actually knew stuff - rather than just relying on being able to look everything up online at the drop of a hat.

In those days of yore when we had to depend on our own minds.... well, for one thing, I think we were more self-aware about the gradations of our 'knowledge': did we feel really sure about something, or at least reasonably confident, or were we more in the realms of 'hunch'?

And if we realised we didn't 'know' something.....

We'd try to remember.

Or we'd seek to infer an answer from scraps of relevant information we could assemble in our leaky old heads.

If we didn't have much to go on, we might speculate.

Or simply make a wild guess.

Indeed, we might just bullshit - conjuring some vaguely plausible-seeming (or not!) answer out of the ether, and trying to persuade people we knew what we were talking about.  [I would be particularly sad if this art were becoming lost to us: it is not only, at times, hugely entertaining - for both speaker and listener - but it is uncanny how often it inadvertently stumbles upon a truth.]

So much inventiveness is being discarded now that the knee-jerk response to any and every discovered lacuna in our knowledge is to dive into a search engine. Inventiveness, and mental acuity more generally is withering. Google is making us stupid (and if you haven't read this linked article yet, you really should).

The terrible danger, I believe, of 'offboarding' the human memory (as the tech geeks rapturously characterise this process) is that it will restrict our scope of thought, particularly in the more creative spheres of human activity. Creativity is born of memory: it arises from unconsciously forging connections and perceiving patterns within the things that we know, the things that we carry in our minds with us all the time. The less we carry, the less we have to work with.

You may dismiss this fear as exaggerated, but as I've been working closely with teenagers over the past few years, I have become shocked and appalled to discover how little they know any more - even about that which is most intimate to them. Many now keep lists (online, and/or on a digital device) of their favourite books or favourite films; and they struggle to remember much about the story of one of these, let alone its title (or the author/director), without consulting this list. The phenomenon is most marked in relation to music: kids today seem to be unable to name any of their favourite songs without looking at their playlist.

If we abandon the need to remember, we lose the ability to learn... But I worry that the new generation not only doesn't know very much, or seek to acquire - and memorise - much new knowledge; it is even losing the ability to make things up.

Results of our 'Caught Reading' photo competition

Yesterday, I announced the results of the 'Caught Reading' photography competition my Library Committee has been running since just before our half-term break a month ago.

Here's a montage of the entries.

Thought for the week

"I distrust the cheap anarchy of 'Rules are made to be broken'; I prefer to say that 'Rules are made to be creatively reinterpreted.'"

Another escape to Shanghai

We have a very active Model United Nations Club in Hangzhou this year, largely thanks to the vigorous leadership of Emily Duncan. Last weekend we visited Shanghai again to attend a one-day conference hosted by Dulwich College Shanghai, the inaugural Shanghai International MUN (SHIMUN), organised by two outstanding young Dulwich students - Pan Ling Wan and Johnnie Yu. 

Many thanks and congratulations are owed to Pan Ling and Johnnie and their admin team for setting up such a great event inside the space of barely three months!

Here is another of my slideshows of the expedition. There are also some pictures from Sunday, when we took advantage of some spectacular early summer weather to stroll around the French Concession, ending up at the delightful Garden Books (my favourite place in Shanghai; indeed, just about the only place that currently makes living in China still tolerable for me) - after having a very big lunch at the Southern Barbarian Yunnanese restaurant. The 'Nighthawks at the Diner' shot at the end was taken at a roadside service station just outside Hangzhou (I was still full from that lunch, but these teenagers needed to eat again!).

The music is generic iTunes/iPhoto "slideshow music", so hopefully not infringing anyone's copyright.

Thought for the week

"When you hit a wrong note, it's the next note that makes it good or bad."

Driven to abstraction

I shot so much video during our school's 'Science Fair' the other week that much of it had to end up "on the cutting-room floor" (as we used to say in the good old days). Here's a little montage of some of those clips I couldn't find a use for in the 'official film' of the event, some visually arresting little oddities I got distracted by while out and about with 'Marty' that day. 

[I've recently given all of our cameras the names of famous film directors. The one I usually use with our 'Fig Rig' is named in honour of the legendary Mr Scorsese.]

The music is Surf Rider by The Lively Ones (perhaps best known as the end credit music from Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction).

Thought for the week

"Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire."

Caught reading!

The Library Committee (which, as my school's Librarian, I chair) launched a fun little competition just before our Easter break, challenging students - and staff - to produce some striking pictures of themselves reading a book in unusual circumstances or location.... something a bit more inventive and amusing than the average 'selfie'!

I hope our kids took advantage of the short holiday to do as much reading as I did (mostly on a trip back to visit friends in Beijing....)

The music here is Hey Now, by jazz pianist Red Garland & his Trio

Thought for the week

"Habits are our refuge from the chore of making choices."

Maths in the wild

Just before our half-term break for Easter, my school took a couple of days "off" for one of our occasional Inter-Disciplinary Experiences. This one was focused on Maths (um, actually, it was pretty exclusively maths; not sure what was so "inter-disciplinary" about it - but who cares!), as students were sent on a 'treasure hunt' to find and solve a number of mathematical conundrums that had been devised for them.

Thursday, spent in the gorgeous Xixi Wetlands Park just south of our school, was splendid, like a balmy foretaste of early summer. Friday, when we ventured down to the far southern end of the city, to Hangzhou's most unusual tourist attraction, the Bagua Tian (a group of fields arranged in the form of Taoism's 八卦, the 'Eight Symbols'). suddenly turned grey and rainy, as if our host city's dreaded 'plum rains' season had descended on us a month early this year. Such is Hangzhou's weather: decidedly changeable.

It is no doubt rather subversive and heretical of me to say so, but I feel that the value of these activities lies more in giving our kids an opportunity to relax for a while (we do drive them very hard most of the time) rather than in providing any very meaningful learning experience.


Here's a photo slideshow I made of our excursions.

TEDx comes to CIS Hangzhou

In our inaugural year, a couple of our brightest and most enterprising students, Catherine Wang and Crystal Leung, mounted a TEDx-like event towards the end of the school year; but they were putting it together at too short notice to get an official TED endorsement for the event, so they cheekily dubbed it TAD instead.

Unfortunately, I was busy looking after a visiting artist-in-residence, and so was not able to attend or participate as I had wished. Even worse, amid the mad whirl of the end of the semester, the video that had been shot of the event got lost. I've spent months trying to track it down, but it appears that the last surviving files were left on the laptop of a student who was leaving the school (and his hard drive got wiped automatically by the IT staff as soon as he handed it in). I'm sure it was a great evening; but it lives on only in the memories of those who were part of it. (And maybe that's not such a bad thing. As my school's 'film guy' - and unofficial archivist - I have led the way in trying to document everything we've done in the past 18 months or so in photographs and video; but I do worry that sometimes this detracts from rather than enhances our own memory of events.)

This year, a vigorous team of students, Georgina and Jasmine Savage and Enrique Chuidian, put together a similar event - and this time, somehow, they managed to get the TEDx branding on it. (We possibly shouldn't enquire too closely into that; I'm not sure it was entirely kosher.)

Three of my students and I all filmed the event. This is a short selection of highlights I've quickly put together.

This is a cross-post from the CIS Hangzhou TV Channel. The main post there includes links to full versions of each of the individual speeches and music performances.