Play the ball, not the man

I read Wikipedia founder Larry Sanger's blog with interest this week. In response to my post Content as Curriculum? he had written a protracted and elaborate response. Although I was gratified that someone with such a standing in the academic community had taken the time to read my post and respond so comprehensively, I admit I was also a little disconcerted to find that not only had he misapprehended my original message, but had also apparently resorted to name-calling. Now, anyone who knows me reasonably well will understand what drives me to blog. It is to provoke discussion, to agitate, and to disrupt, with the long term goal to hopefully improve aspects of education and training. Sometimes I deliberately take a strong position to achieve this. Readers will disagree or agree with me - see for example this response from another blogger - and we all learn. I am open to criticism and my ideas, theories and contributions are there to be shot at, or built upon. But for Sanger to label me as an 'anti-intellectual' on the basis of the reading of one of my blog posts seemed somewhat reactionary. I'm not convinced there should be a place for this kind of tactic in reasonable discourse. Unfortunately, his stance serves to detract from the otherwise serious debate that I tried to instigate around the current state of curricula in schools. Before anyone else treats my ideas with similar disdain, let me clarify a few points about that blog post.

Firstly, let me deal with the misapprehension: Larry Sanger seems an intelligent, eloquent man, and if you can steer around his personal references, his response analyses my post almost line for line and he has produced some interesting commentary to counter my views. It is a useful contribution to the debate, and is exactly the kind of dialogue I wish to promote. It is the reason I continue to blog provocatively. I won't attempt to respond to him verse by verse as he has done, but I will make some key points. In my post I held that schools need reform, and at the heart of that reform should be an overhaul of the curriculum. For some time now, many highly respected commentators (see for example Stephen Heppell and Sir Ken Robinson) have argued that the majority of school experiences are still organised around old industrialised models. Many have called for a radical change in the way schooling is conducted to improve the chances of young people when they leave school. In my post I suggested that a possible way forward would require a reappraisal of the current curricula, with more emphasis on competencies and literacies. I wish to make something clear: My remark that some knowledge was susceptible to obsolescence was not a call for all knowledge to be removed from curricula - that would indeed be ridiculous. I am not attacking knowledge, as Sanger asserts. Rather, I am calling for schools to re-examine the content of curricula and to find ways to situate this knowledge within more open, relevant and dynamic learning contexts. I am also calling for more of an emphasis on the development of skills that will prepare children to cope better in uncertain futures. It was probably an error to use poor illustrations and analogies to underpin this call. Regardless of any argument thrown against it however, the call still stands, and I am not the first to make it. John Seely-Brown and Doug Thomas (2011) have argued that the majority of school experiences are mechanistic and need to be better contextualised. Regarding current school practices they state: 'The goal is to learn as much as you can, as fast as you can. In this teaching based approach, standardization is a reasonable way to do this, and testing is a reasonable way to measure the result. The processes that necessarily occur to reach the goal therefore, are considered of little consequence in and of themselves. They are valued only for the results they provide'. (p 35). Clearly, this situation is far from ideal. Teachers are pressurised to deliver an over-stuffed, content-laden curriculum in the limited time available, which leaves little time for experimentation and play, conversation or self discovery.

I also called for an end to the compartmentalisation of subjects within the curriculum. Studying a subject in isolation from other subjects suggests to children that there are no connections, as surely as using computers only in an ICT suite suggests that there are only some conditions within which the use of computers can be conducted. Again, context is required, and as Gerver argues: 'learning should be an expansive, personal and unpredictive journey' (p 62). Yet how can we achieve this, he asks, when school becomes an increasingly defined, predictable series of divorced lessons. How can we maintain the interests of children when they know exactly what is coming next - dull routine? Here lies the argument that context is now king, and content has become a tyrant.

But let's go back to the personal comments. At the heart of Sanger's argument is a concerted attempt to establish that I am an anti-intellectual. He does this on the basis of a belief that I am calling for an end to knowledge. But his belief is misfounded, and I have attempted to offer clarification in my recent blog post Conversation as Curriculum. He admits in a previous comment that he was confrontational and pointed. It seems a contradiction that he can view me as a 'serious theorist' and then spend the majority of his post trying to convince his readers that I am 'anti-intellectual'. Surely the two cannot be compatible? His descent into hectoring tones of name-calling detract significantly from his otherwise reasonable arguments. Larry Sanger and I have never met, so we don't know each other. How then is he able make such sweeping judgements about me on the basis of the reading of one of my posts? The answer is, he can't, and I would not presume to reciprocate. To label me as 'anti-intellectual' suggests that he has already made his mind up, and no amount of argument will change that.

I am sure that my academic achievements come nowhere near to Larry Sanger's. My list of peer reviewed publications and the frequency of my invited speeches around the world will not compare with his. Considering my track record, however, I feel that I deserve a little better than to be ridiculed as 'anti-intellectual', and it is ironic that Larry Sanger's act of ridiculing could itself be construed as anti-intellectualism. If by anti-intellectual he meant that I oppose the ivory tower mentality endemic within academia, then I would gladly accept the title, and he might also consider inserting 'dangerous' as a prefix. Sadly, this is not what Sanger intends. Instead, the title is meant to suggest that I am against knowledge, and that therefore my arguments must be dismissed because they are merely 'popularist'. Well, he is entitled to his opinions. Just don't be fooled by the rhetoric - examine the evidence yourself and then make your own mind up: Do current school curricula make sense, or should they be changed? Whatever the outcome of this debate, you can name me, but you'll never tame me. I will continue to provoke, cajole and disrupt via this blog, and I welcome all conversations from all comers. Just make sure you play the ball, not the man.

References 

Gerver, R. (2010) Creating tomorrow's schools today: Education - our children - their futures. London: Continuum.
Seely-Brown, J. and Thomas, D. (2011) A new culture of learning: Cultivating the imagination for a world of constant change. Create Space.

Image by John Garghan


Play the ball, not the man by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.