Engaging the Future

John Schostak
invited speaker,
conference celebrating 25 years of the comprehensive school in Finland,
National Board of Education, Helsinki,

October 1997


Introduction
The rationale for comprehensivisation as a concept which transcends national boundaries, for me, is this: it is to dismantle privilege and intolerance. A schooling system founded upon dividing people by ability, gender, religion or by wealth as in the case of grammar schools (access by ability, often single sex), religion (church schools, often single sex) or public schools (access by wealth, often single sex) in the UK, functions only to perpetuate inequalities and social intolerance. The interrelatedness of self, environment, community, culture and economic activity is, to my mind, only adequately addressed through a concept of comprehensivisation. In the UK during the last two decades comprehensive schools have been systematically blamed for many of what has been perceived by the right wing press as Britain’s economic and social woes. The success of this blaming has led to an increased demand to engineer the education of children in relation to what is perceived as ‘the basics’, achieving ‘good’ examination results, and the economic needs of society. The school effectiveness movement is seeking to bring about what are considered to be ‘high reliability schools’. All this is the result of a kind of educational panic which fears that Britain is falling behind in the international league tables. It is easy to get caught up in such a panic.

I find re-reading the evaluation report that we prepared as a result of our brief study of the Finnish Curriculum Reform acts as an effective antidote to the British fever. This is because the Reform provides a holistic response to its engagement with the future unlike the British curriculum reforms of the last twenty years which, where it provides a holistic response at all, it only does so in its engagement with the past. In order to explore the engagement with the future, I want to divide this talk into two parts:


1. The Evaluation Report: what did we learn?
2. The Future: what then is the next step?


The Evaluation Report: what did we learn?
The question that needed to be addressed at the time was whether there was a congruence between the conceptual framework, the professional and cultural practices of teachers and their communities and the material level of structures and resources necessary to put ideas into effect. The vision expressed at a conceptual level alone was ambitious. A senior official:


when trying to define the inspiration for the reforms pointed not to key facts and practices but to key values which were, for him, summed up as: Truth, Beauty, Goodness.

(fieldnotes 14/2/95)


One might summarise this by saying that the curriculum reforms were addressing the question of what should be the ‘good society’ in an age of fast paced change. The Framework Curriculum for the Comprehensive School 1994, was perfectly clear that ‘all human solutions are connected with values’ and that the ‘balanced development of physical, psychic and social resources makes it necessary for us to bring up questions which have to do with our health and well-being’ (p.10). The Framework Curriculum consciously sets itself within the context of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of the United Nations and also in the context of questions encompassing sustainable development, cultural heritage, and internationalism. The broad conceptual framework then was extremely ambitious in its scope and it was an ambition that was concentrated upon the school as the agent of change:

It is possible for the school with its support networks to create visions of the future, reinforce morals and knowhow, which man needs as a member of society and in international cooperation, in order to make a correction in the direction of the cultural evolution.

p.16

In order to bring about this vision the Framework Curriculum set out some guidelines which were to be interpreted by decision makers at local and school levels.

In the early days of the project, I was initially looking for some real instances of change. In my fieldnote book I wrote some initial reflections:

What are the manifestations of change? When asked what has changed teachers talk initially of a change in mood or feeling and an increase of co-operation or talking with each other. However, the specifics of change in practices they find hard to illustrate. If a comparison between activities in classrooms of ten years ago were made with today, at first, they say, little difference would probably be seen. It would take a while, they said, before the little differences that combine to produce a change in tone would be noticed.

(fieldnotes 14/2/95)

Concrete instances were initially frustratingly hard to pin down. There were clearly some structural changes which could be identified. I wrote in my fieldbook:

The big change is from relatively small, detailed matters of schools’ working being decided nationally to such matters now being decided at local and school levels. The whole thrust is towards de-centralisation, and flattening of the system. These changes happened at the same time as wider social changes and it was considered that schools should be adaptable to them. The recession was an impetus to speed up the changes in terms of looking for more economically efficient strategies. Frequently we heard from education officers and others that the changes within schools had been tremendous. People could now see themselves as decision makers in an educational process rather than deliverers of a centrally defined curriculum and school process.

(fieldnotes 17/2/95)


However, for this to be really convincing we had to hear it from teachers and parents and also to see it in action in the classroom. Although it could be argued that the reforms hardly got underway by 1995, it was also true that from 1992 Aquarium schools provided an experiential basis for the reforms to draw upon; and indeed, as we were to discover there were earlier examples of school based innovation stemming from the earlier reforms of 1985, so that some teachers we talked to could say that they had a number of years experience (Norris et al 1996:44). Following discussions in one region I wrote the following as a summary:

A doctoral thesis completed in 1992 by Paivi At Jouen was considered to have shown what the National Board thought was useful, indeed was the only way to get innovation in practice. The principle was to get teachers strongly involved in the process. Previously, about half of all teachers never opened the curriculum documents sent by the Board. This was because when a teacher has to follow a textbook, this becomes the curriculum in practice. In short, the key principle underlying the reforms is to create mechanisms which reinforce the teachers involvement which in turn generates commitment.

(theoretical memo February 1995)

Upon turning to my notes made during visits to aquarium schools there is a fairly typical pattern of a particular principal or other individual seeing an seeing a developmental advantage as well as obtaining a few extra resources for the school. For example, in one region it was a particular administrator who had responsibilities for pedagogic leadership. This individual had the opportunity of becoming a principal and put the possibility of becoming an aquarium school to the staff. They were keen, just as were other schools of the region. The new principal felt that they had an advantage because of the prior contacts and because they were geographically closest to the town’s administration. It was the politicians who formally made the decisions but only if the schools were willing. The schools saw the aquarium experiment as a possibility for their own development:

All the schools of the region had the chance to follow ‘one step behind’ and most did so. The general level of willingness to follow was considered to be high but it was recognised that there were differences in enthusiasm. Indeed, the principal stated that his own enthusiasm was suffering from tiredness. Although some of his teachers saw the work required for the aquarium experiment as a part of their job, others saw it as ‘extra’. The principal saw some clear effects on the staff:

In order to get a clearer understanding of the effect on the curriculum we interviewed teachers and particularly those, in the larger schools, who had been involved in a curriculum planning group. The planning involved a considerable amount of time and some staff would not become involved because the meetings took place in their own time rather than school time. Nevertheless, in each of the schools we visited it was clear that a great deal of effort had been involved in rethinking the curriculum based upon the Curriculum Framework guidelines. The effect was to make schools think of their particular quality - whether they wanted to think of themselves as a media school, environment, language, information technology and so on. It made teachers and parents and local communities think together about the key values they wanted their schools to embody. It shifted emphasis from the delivery of content to the processes of thinking, problem solving and handling information. These are important changes. However, what day to day effect did they have in the classroom?

In the words of one home economics teacher, her teaching had changed from telling children what to do, to them ‘searching for information’, ‘thinking about how they do things’ and by ‘learning by doing’. This kind of message was repeated in many other schools. It fits in well with what one would expect from a world that is moving away from rote learning to searching for and accessing global data bases and making sense of the accessed data. The old ‘basics’ are slowly giving way to a new ‘basics’. However, it was one thing to hear teachers say that, and another thing to see them do it. During my first visit to Finland, it seemed frustratingly difficult to actually see classrooms in action. The second visit was quite different. I sat in classrooms watching what was going on in several schools.

The classroom patterns of activity varied from watching traditional teacher led lessons to very much more child centred lessons. The norm, however, did seem to be a rather teacher-led approach. In one art lesson I witnessed, children effectively copied what a teacher presented on the blackboard. The theme was ‘line’ and how this linked with a notion of ‘nature’. The object was to look at branches as ‘lines’. In another lesson, children were learning numbers. The teacher first used overheads, then a text book which she read out then asked questions. Numbered cards were placed on the blackboard which were in turn pointed to by the teacher and the children chanted the numbers. Then there followed a question and answer sequence: the teacher asked, a pupil was chosen to answer. This, it seemed to me was the main teaching method employed by the teacher. It was a method which placed the teacher in dominance and left the pupils as largely passive learners. What is at issue here is not so much the technique but rather the repertoire of techniques that would be experienced by the pupils over their school career. These pupils would experience only a very limited range of techniques, all variants of teacher centred learning. This will have major consequences for their understanding of educational processes, problem solving and the handling of information.

At the other extreme, I witnessed one of the best organised child-centred maths lessons I think I have ever seen in an elementary school. It was clear that this was not simply a unique show presented for my benefit. The teacher employed a variety of techniques. She started with a brief series of Question and Answer sequences testing the children’s learning of numbers from 1 to 100. Next the children were to open their textbooks - textbooks that the children made for themselves. This book enabled work to be individualised for the pupils. Some of the pupils worked in groups, others by themselves. There was not simply one lesson going on the classroom. There were many, as children worked according to their interest and according to their pace. This enabled the teacher to make assessments of children and to tailor her own interventions to meet the individual needs of the children. This was a teacher near retirement who had decided in the last years of her career to radically change her ways of teaching in order to really explore the reforms. It was clear that she was having as much fun as the children.

These examples illustrate what I think is a key point in ensuring the implementation and development of an innovation. There is a tri-partite structure and process that needs to be kept in mind which for the sake of analysis consists of:

    1. a level of ideas, or conceptual structures and processes
    2. a level of practices, mechanisms or procedures whereby ideas are realised in terms of action
    3. and, a level of organisational and material structures, resources and tools which serve to manipulate the real world

Reflecting upon this structure a number of questions can be formulated which map out what may be called the ‘problem structure to be addressed by any curriculum if schools really want to engage with the real structures and organisations tthrough which communities are built:

    1. What are the conceptual frameworks which best encompass the vision of the future? The Curriculum Framework document may be seen as a first attempt at this task. How may it need to be revised?
    2. What are the new practices, the new cultural forms, the new organisational procedures required to deal with knowledge agencies in both their real and virtual forms? Professionals and their communities need to engage in research based experimentation and share the results of their experiences. This is a vital element in fostering innovations that are appropriate to changing circumstances.
    3. What kinds of resources (staff, time, buildings, tools and so on) need to be available in order to:
    4. encourage the development of effective professional and occupational practices, and
    5. establish an evolving network of communications?


Reflecting in more detail, the 1994 Framework Curriculum sets out the key ideas to underpin the curriculum and also the key ideas in the form of guidelines for thinking about practices, mechanisms and procedures. It is, however, at the level of professional and community practice that these ideas are interpreted. What is interesting about the document is that it made a virtue of local interpretation. It says:

The guidelines issued by the National Board of Education are the foundation which is then interpreted, adapted, and added to at the local level in order to come up with a curriculum which is descriptive of, develops, and directs the practical work of teaching.

(p.18)

By allowing for interpretation at the local level, the Board ensured variation. What it did not ensure, however, was the kind of thinking that would inform that variation. Interpretation can work to reinforce rigid and conservative ways as well as creative and innovative ways. As in my illustrative examples at classroom level above, it requires a conscious decision to alter one’s practice. And if there are few examples to draw upon, teachers are likely to revert to what they know. Rather than generating change, people will interpret a given text to support whatever it is that they want to do. Even if change is actively explored, this does not mean that it will become a part of the professional and occupational culture of the teachers. As pointed out in our evaluation report:

The head teacher of a large project school explained to us that they had gone through the two year process, had found it tiring but useful, but now that the project was finished, they had returned to their traditional methods as these were more efficient and easier to manage.

The innovation had never been anything more that an aberration. It did not fit the organisational mechanisms and procedures, nor were there sufficient resources to embed the innovation without overtiring the staff. In order to challenge prior frameworks for thinking and for action, people need not only to have access to alternatives but also to change the organisational structures and practices so that they are congruent one with another. A common complaint from teachers, particularly in the non-aquarium schools, was that they had no real basis upon which to make their developments. There was little prior professional development:


for many schools entering the process in 1994, there was effectively no training or support available to them. There were few courses, and more importantly perhaps, limited funds in either their own or the municipal budget.

(Norris et al 1996: 47)

Both points emphasise the matter of resources and of training, which for many was felt to be lacking.
At this point it may seem that the evaluation had rather a lot of negative things to say. What must be remembered is that the evaluation was carried out at a very early stage in the process of curriculum reform, that is 1995. The evaluation may better be read as providing a problem profile to be addressed. Indeed, Chapter 6 tried to set out in outline form the nature of that problem profile at national, municipal and school levels. Hence the evaluation was meant to provide a formative, that is, a developmental input to aid on-going decision making rather than a final summative judgement. With this is mind, I want to turn now to the final part of this discussion.

The Future: what then is the next step?
The Framework Curriculum is very much future directed without seeking to abandon the national heritage. Its introduction is full of images of fast paced change, of flexibility, of being active in choosing and of organising knowledge structures. It acknowledges the ‘relative truth of knowledge’ (p.11) and emphasises the role of information technology. It presents a picture of the school preparing people to become active citizens involved in lifelong learning. This citizen is a problem solver, an information processor, an independent learner capable of creative thinking and working in cooperation with others in a world that is at least international in its perspective and increasingly globalised in its structure.

The question for schools in particular and for educators in general is to re-think the organisational structure and the professional, occupational and community cultures and practices which impinge on schools. Much of this is already prefigured in the Framework Curriculum document. However, its articulation in practice requires multiple experimentation and the development of procedures to ensure dialogue between experimenters.

Schools are but one among many agencies through which knowledge is produced, organised, tested out, transmitted, and implemented. They are simply one feature of a more complex environment within which learning, self development, self expression and action takes place. To name others there are: the various forms of news and entertainments media; the various kinds of business, religious, social, welfare and governmental organisations; and at another level of social organisation there is the family, friendship groups, gangs and so on. All provide in their various ways the structures, processes and resources for individuals to stage their own learning, problem solving and action in their own and others’ interests. Each such ‘agency’ will in varying ways be involved with the developing, grounding, using and transmission of ‘knowledge’. Why setting the discussion of schools within this broader context of knowledge agencies is important is because the electronic based globalisation of the world has radically transformed people’s access to the forms of knowledge and knowledge production which in earlier times were the province of kinship, tribal, religious social structures or more recently of schools, colleges and universities. Just as formal education radically transformed people’s access to knowledge beyond that which could be provided by say, the family, so global networks are transforming provision bounded by a given state or culture. Now, as never before, information is power and schooling is about empowerment.

How may schools empower people for a future of fast changing knowledge agencies and professional knowledge bases not just in a local or national scene but globally? In order to live in such a world people will need to have knowledge accessing repertoires and the personal confidence to know that they can cope with ever changing networks. What has bedevilled major change throughout the twentieth century has been cultural inertia or indeed nostalgia for lost certainties. Among these lost objects is the comfort of hierarchies of control, authority and of leadership. Increasingly, the new technologies aid the subversion of hierarchy at the same time as increasing the potential both for democratic access as well as surveillance, exploitation and manipulation by large power hungry global organisations. Understanding this complex, polyvalent learning environment is critical for personal, social and national survival.

This new context has re-framed the architecture of everyday life. I mean this quite literally. Look at the ambition of builders in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It was a race to build the biggest ship, the longest bridge, the tallest skyscraper. East and West challenged each other with the most powerful bomb, the fastest plane. They poured billions into the race to the moon. All this was big technology striding over the tiny individual who could only stand helplessly, whether fearfully or in wonder at its might. Now contrast this with the emergent technological trends of the late twentieth century: the smallest yet most powerful computer, the manipulation of the tiniest of material building blocks. And increasingly, it is the individual who buys a relatively cheap piece of machinery who can sit in a school in Northern Finland and ‘reach’ into the data bases placed on servers in Japan, the USA or anywhere else in the globe. The important architecture that now surrounds us is information, not bricks. The vital territory to explore, to exploit, to shape according to our needs is not some newly discovered piece of land whether on our own or on some other planet, but the virtual spaces evolving day by day which exist as such nowhere. How we treat our planet is increasingly dependent upon the ways the virtual worlds of cyberspace interact with the material world and the social practices of its communities.

Children, preparing to be active agents in this emergent world need to be able to identify and express clearly the problem structures that they need to address in their daily lives as participants in this global-local culture, and they need to be able to understand how to formulate, implement and monitor action strategies that address the problem structures that they have identified. What is interesting to me at this point in the discussion is that the curricular strategies required do not have to be invented from scratch. They have been anticipated in a variety of experimental approaches over at least the last century. Most such experiments have been a direct challenge to the predominant mix of nineteenth century factory and military cultures based upon standardisation, division of labour, discipline and control. Such a mix, although antidemocratic, was congruent with the prevailing economic and political context. The latter half of the twentieth century has seen an increasing shift towards what leading business theorists refer to as flattened organisations, team working, shamrock and federal organisation, interprofessionality, multidisciplinarity (cf. Handy 1991) [1]. The strategies currently being advocated in management theory are remarkably similar to the discovery learning, cooperative and even anarchic strategies of a variety of so called progressive or child centred approaches to education developed and promoted over the past century (c.f. Dewey 1938; Smith 1983; School of Barbiana 1969; Schostak 1988, 1991,1993). These, of course, are not enough but they do provide a beginning. The great educational experiment is about to begin. Although Britain and others have temporarily turned their back upon the future, they will not be able to hide for long. The new electronic infrastructures are not optional. They cannot just be ignored. The global market has already been inaugurated and demands a new kind of education for all. An education appropriate to the future must be developed.

 

Notes

1. The Shamrock is like a three leafed clover. Handy uses this image to distinguish between three kinds of worker: the core worker egaged in what is essential to the business; non-essential work is contracted out; and thirdly, the flexible worker - part-time, temporary.

 

References
Dewey, J. (1938) Experience and Education, New York, Collier.

Handy, C. (1991) The Age of Unreason, London: Business Books Ltd

Norris, N., Aspland, R., McDonald, B., Schostak, J.F. & Zamorski, B. (1996) An Independent Evaluation of Comprehensive Curriculum Reform in Finland, CARE, UEA; Finnish Board of Education

School of Barbiana (1969) Letter to a Teacher, Harmondsworth, Penguin.

Schostak, J. F. (ed.) (1988) Breaking into the Curriculum: the Impact of Information Technology on Schooling, London, New York. Methuen.

Schostak, J. F. (ed.) (1991) Youth in Trouble. Educational Responses, London, Kogan Page; Norwich, CARE, University of East Anglia

Schostak, J. F. (1993) Dirty Marks. The Education of Self, Media and Popular Culture, London, Boulder: Pluto

Smith, M. P. (1983) The Libertarians and Education. A guide to the alternative press, Methuen.