Scottish education: Some Like It Hot

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David Rabadà

Some Like It Hot — the famous comedy by Billy Wilder in which the protagonists spend the film dressed in women’s clothes — has nothing to do with the Scottish kilt worn on formal occasions. And yet, when it comes to education, Scotland seems to have taken the title rather literally. Educational reform there was pursued with such enthusiasm, and revised so many times, that it eventually began to resemble a comedy of its own.

At the dawn of the twenty-first century, Jack McConnell assumed responsibility for the finance and education portfolios with a clear ambition: to make Scotland top of the class by giving it the best education system in the world — something it did not yet possess, but was already within reach. Instead of refining what already worked, however, the essence of Scottish teaching was reshaped through pedagogical constructivism and the latest fashions in educational theory. Project-based learning, competence-based education, discovery learning and constructivism were enthusiastically imported from educational trends that had been circulating in the United States since the early twentieth century. They were presented as innovations, though most were already more than a century old.

A new curriculum was thus born, very much in the spirit of Some Like It Hot: boldly, enthusiastically, and with little regard for foreseeable consequences. And, as the film reminds us, nobody’s perfect. From then on, the Curriculum for Excellence reduced the centrality of knowledge transmission in favour of vague competences. Even though it was already well understood that competences cannot develop in the absence of knowledge, Scottish policy persisted along this path — a disaster waiting to happen.

Take history as an example. Pupils no longer needed to learn historical facts in any structured way; instead, they were encouraged to project their emotions onto past events. Knowing history became less important than feeling it. The past was to be interpreted through present sensibilities, while rigorous knowledge of what had actually happened faded into the background. Yet without what happened, there is no way of understanding the present, let alone making sense of it. Try explaining the Second World War without knowledge of the First, or the French Revolution without the Enlightenment.

What occurred in Scotland was a radical pedagogical shift: what had worked was dismantled in favour of what merely sounded appealing. Where once subject-specialist teachers stood at the centre of learning, now the pupil was declared the centre of the system. It sounded admirable, but it quietly displaced the subject expert from the heart of education. Learning by doing, discovery learning — the teacher stepped back while the pupil was expected to construct knowledge independently. The value of what was to be learned became secondary to the fashionable idea of preparing pupils for jobs that do not yet exist. A curious paradox: if we do not know the future, how can we prepare pupils for it by depriving them of the knowledge accumulated in the past? No robust evidence ever supported this assumption. At most, an OECD report in 2016 casually claimed — without empirical backing — that 65% of today’s pupils would work in jobs not yet invented, a claim seemingly invented out of thin air.

By 2010, the reform was fully under way in Scottish schools, accompanied by widespread bewilderment among teachers and an avalanche of bureaucracy. More reports, less teaching. Spain has experienced a similar absurdity since the LOGSE reform of the 1990s through to the current LOMLOE education law. Quebec, Portugal, France, Norway, Sweden, Finland, Denmark and the Netherlands followed comparable paths. One begins to wonder whether educational reforms spread like a contagious virus, or whether political imagination simply recycles the mistakes of neighbours.

The consequences soon became visible. Within a few years, educational outcomes declined markedly, while responsibility dissolved into the background. McConnell simply washed his hands of the matter. Today, this downward trend shows no sign of recovery, closely mirrored by its counterparts in Spain, Quebec, France, the Nordic countries and the Netherlands. The Dutch, however, had already warned others of the consequences of embracing constructivist, pupil-centred approaches to education. In the 1990s, Dutch pupils achieved excellent results in mathematics; after adopting pupil-centred reforms in 1998, performance dropped sharply within a year, prompting public protest. Dutch society, highly educated and critical, refused to accept what it regarded as a deception, and in December 1999 took to the streets in protest. In New York, similar reforms triggered backlash within four years. In Spain, many families are only now beginning to notice what has long been obvious: a system that gives the appearance of culture while quietly eroding knowledge.

It is clear that ceasing to value knowledge leads a country towards educational failure, and that shifting the centre of education from the teacher to the pupil may sound appealing, but becomes sheer nonsense when driven by a poorly applied constructivism. The way out of this domino effect is clear: restore the value of knowledge transmission through expert teachers, high-quality textbooks, demanding curricula, and national assessments at the end of each stage. A genuinely effective pedagogical reform is one that upholds the teacher as an academic authority, values the transmission of knowledge, and ensures a deep command of reading comprehension among pupils. Without a rich and extensive vocabulary, without a culture of effort, and without learned points of reference from whom to learn — whether books or teachers — it becomes very difficult to learn how to acquire new knowledge. In this respect, one of the poorest states in the United States has managed to reverse poor academic outcomes by applying precisely these principles. From 2013 onwards, the state of Mississippi implemented a plan centred above all on reading comprehension, textbooks, standardised assessments, grade retention where necessary, a rigorous curriculum, targeted support for struggling pupils, and strong teacher training. Today, Mississippi’s school results rank among the best in the United States, at a cost below the national average. In educational terms, Mississippi has come to represent a model that is effective, affordable, and good value for money.

Fortunately, Scotland now seems to have put the ceremonial kilt back on in earnest. Knowledge is once again being restored to the curriculum, literacy is returning to the centre of schooling, and structured assessment at the end of each stage is being reintroduced. We shall see whether their educational counterparts — who may not wear kilts, but have certainly embraced questionable ‘competences’ — will finally abandon this educational comedy so reminiscent of Some Like It Hot.

Source: educational EVIDENCE

Rights: Creative Commons