The latest pedagogical “innovations”, or the town of the three lies

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Pedro López Tolosana

One of the great achievements of what we might call pedagogism has been its ability to brand its favoured techniques as “innovative” in opposition to the “traditional”, thereby securing an immediate advantage. The move calls to mind an old saying from Lleida, a Spanish town: Which village is known as the village of the three lies¹? It turns out to be Vilanova de la Barca, which is neither a town (vila), nor new (nova), nor furnished with a boat (barca). True, when it was founded, it was new, and it probably had a boat of some sort; the river, after all, is still there. Yet no one stopped to consider that time would quietly strip the name of its descriptive power. The term “Escola Nova” (New School), coined at the end of the nineteenth century, has suffered a similar fate. From a palaeontological vantage point, it is modern; from the perspective of technical development, much less so. It is rather as if we insisted on calling aspirin —its contemporary— “the new pill”. The word “new” inevitably conveys a host of false impressions about these so-called “pedagogical innovations”. The truer sensation would be that of wandering through the medieval heart of any city and finding a narrow alley named “New Street” carved into stones worn smooth by centuries.

All these pedagogies amount, in essence, to much the same thing —at least in the way teachers tend to apply them in the classroom: pupils are made to do more things by themselves. They claim as their basis the constructivist tradition, which broadly holds that we build up our inner knowledge by creating and reformulating mental schemas. Yet these “new” pedagogies rest on a mistaken interpretation of constructivism: there is a world of difference between allowing the learner to form mental schemas through the learning process and demanding that the learner direct that process.

The movement that styles itself “innovative” offers a number of long-established pedagogical techniques which have been around for quite some time. A brief visit to the “Ludus” website suffices to reveal no fewer than 800 varieties of supposedly marvellous innovative pedagogy to choose from —a number that irresistibly invites comparisons with the reinvention of the wheel. And just how new are these trends? Let us consider a few of the most commercially successful. Project-based learning derives its name from the American pedagogue William Heard Kilpatrick, whose The Project Method appeared in 1918, the same year as the radio tuner. Had we been attentive, we might have marked its centenary seven years ago. Maria Montessori began to apply her method in 1907 —another centenary we let slip— and the first Waldorf school opened in 1919 in Stuttgart for the children of factory workers at the Waldorf-Astoria cigarette plant. Missed anniversaries, all of them. To be scrupulously fair, one of these currents does date from 2002: the slow school, a kind of educational anti-McDonald’s which, true to its ethos, appears to have taken its time coming into being.

But even so, this still flatters their antiquity. As for their supposedly revolutionary contributions, consider the emphasis placed on emotional education, as though such matters had gone wholly unnoticed until now. Like everything else, this grand idea merely receives more or less attention depending on the surrounding culture. Indeed, Plato noted some 2,500 years ago that when the eldest son of the Persian kings turned fourteen, he was entrusted to four eunuchs: the wisest, the most just, the most temperate, and the bravest. The temperate one, specifically, taught him “to master his passions”.

The “new” educational paradigm places its greatest faith in the so-called basic competences. Following the well-known Delors Report (Learning: The Treasure Within —characteristically splendid in tone), commissioned by UNESCO and published in 1996, education systems were urged to rest on four pillars: learning to know, learning to do, learning to live together, and learning to be. One cannot help wondering how many vast sums are devoted to the production of such reports. Expert reflection is necessary, of course, but there is a distinct sense of going round in circles only to arrive in the land of the Bleeding Obvious. An older example of the conceptualisation of competence may be found in Seneca’s Letters to Lucilius, written two millennia ago, where he laments that “We do not learn for life, but for school” —a sort of Delors Report, in true Roman fashion, without EU funding. This debate on pupil participation and effort recurs throughout history, at least since the Greeks, and can be found without much effort. A paradigmatic case is that of Michel de Montaigne in the Renaissance, who was himself a kind of educational experiment (a highly successful one —its secret, let us add, lay in the lavish resources devoted to him) combining every sort of pedagogy that we would now classify as either traditional or innovative.

In keeping with this new paradigm, its assessment model bears the name “basic competence tests”, administered to all pupils at specific stages of their schooling. At present, tests are carried out in the three languages, in mathematics, and in technology. The tests in the native languages consist chiefly of reading comprehension and writing, including spelling. Those in the foreign language comprise the familiar listening, reading, and writing skills. Mathematics, unsurprisingly, consists of mathematical problems. In short, the novelty of competence-based assessment amounts to this: reading comprehension and maths problems.

We began with a saying from Lleida; let us end with a universal one: the whole affair is older than the hills.

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¹ An old local joke about “the village of the three lies” —a place whose name contains three untruths.

Source: educational EVIDENCE

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