 learning (as an integrated day in primary
schools displays) that a nagging confrontation ceases to be the common
classroom condition, and the relationship between teacher and taught,
on which ultimately so much depends, is thereby greatly improved.
For my part, it was from Charlotte Mason that I began to understand the
accretions, the system that had developed around our habit of conveying
information constantly through the words of the teacher. If we intend
to change some of the things which now cause so much trouble in
schools, we will first have to change our method of learning.
If you want to see a resource-based learning system in operation you
can go to a PNEU school or to an integrated day primary school.
However, the primary school is concerned with the development of
fundamental learning skills; content therefore matters relatively
little. Collaborating with other children, understanding numbers,
resorting to books. manipulating and making objects, using line and
colour, learning how to listen carefully, observing accurately,
expressing ideas well - such skills as these can be practised without
much worry about what particular subject matter is learned. A single
teacher can look after almost all the varied activities of a class of
children throughout the day and can hope to provide the resources the
children need.
But the situation is wholly different in secondary schools, hemmed in
by social and competitive pressures of which examinations are the
symbol. Customarily subject content matters in its own right and
teachers become specialists. If resource-based learning is to be the
general method used, then not one teacher, but several, will have to
produce the materials that are needed. Moreover, at secondary level the
ratio between the time taken to produce resources and the time taken
for children to consume them is far less favourable to the product than
at the primary level.
Sometimes individual teachers, a department in a school, some
enthusiasts in a teachers' centre, devise materials for their
children's use, but the voluntary labours of willing and burdened
teachers will not suffice to provide a regular and reliable supply of
resources in all the principal academic subjects, and for a succession
of years. Home manufacture can only hope to supply a smatter of
individual bits of independent learning and no real change in the style
and quality of schooling occurs. The first essential for a
resource-based system of learning is a suitable supporting agency.
Without such provision, talk about resource-based learning in secondary
schools is wasted breath.
You will see then the second thing that I learned from Charlotte Mason
was that it is unreasonable to rely on teachers to produce all the
materials they need. Teachers sometimes think they can do so and set
off in high hopes but they soon fall by the way. Thus the Dalton Plan,
of which I am sure most of you have heard, relied absolutely on
teachers in schools producing their own material. In the first flush of
enthusiasm, all went well, then the originating generation moved on and
the next came and the Plan lost some of its impetus. They were not very
keen to use the materials left by their predecessors, materials that
were seldom very good because the teachers had had to produce them only
in their spare time. The result was that the Dalton movement which had
waxed so vigorously - there were at one time fifteen-hundred schools in
this country using the Dalton Plan - as quickly waned.
Charlotte Mason saw very clearly that if you were to have a system
whereby people learnt from resources, somebody had to sit down and work
out what those resources were going to be. The fact that she was
supplying harassed mothers looking after their own children or, in
those Victorian times, inexperienced governesses, doesn't alter the
principle: in exactly the same way teachers need the support of
materials worked out and supplied to them from a centre. That was the
second thing, at 'Resources for Learning' we learnt from Charlotte
Mason.
If I describe to you some of the materials we have been producing, you
will see how in their design too we have learnt from Charlotte Mason.
If children are generally to be the active agents in learning, then
certain basic conditions must be met. First, the resources must be
physically there for them to get at. Second, if they are to use the
resources independently, then these must be so designed, so chosen, so
selected, that children can understand them directly - they mustn't
need constant explanation by the teacher as most text-books do; they
have to be, in Charlotte Mason's phrase, 'living books for the children
themselves'. Third, the resources must be so arranged that the children
know what to do next.
Starter packages of materials meeting these requirements have been
compiled by the Resources for Learning Project and used in a variety of
Comprehensive Schools experimentally. These packages include printed
guides, but the teacher is at liberty to alter the rough sequence of
suggestions. Further, teachers are specifically encouraged - by adding
to, or subtracting from the package - to modify it to suit their own
tastes or their pupils' needs. In using these materials the class
teacher teaches less than in the past, though she may well decide to
include some lessons for the whole class.
She still needs to guide, to encourage, to organise. She has increased
opportunities to act as a consultant, to tutor individuals, to help
small groups. It is not essential for teachers to work constantly
within the framework provided by these packages. Some choose to do so,
others prefer to set aside a regular period each week, or a block of
periods from time to time, for topics they consider best handled by
class teaching. In using these packages children work sometimes as
individuals, sometimes in pairs or small groups, in part according to
the selected activity, in part by their preference or the teacher's
decision.
It is important to realise that the total environment of Resources for
Learning is very much larger than the visible original starter package
we send out. For the teacher makes additions, some in permanent,
duplicated form, others verbally in period teaching to the whole class
or to a group or to an individual. Similarly, the children themselves
contribute additional information and ideas to their working partners,
and research far beyond the materials supplied in chosen projects. I
want to emphasise that the kind of starter packages we have produced
encourage variety and choice. The more that teachers and children,
having received something to begin with, mix in their own labour, the
happier we are.
In this respect we are, I confess, very much out of fashion. The
fashion nowadays is for what is called educational technology,
something Charlotte Mason would not approve. Technology is the
application of science to a given end. In education, as in dealings
with physical matter, the technological process runs like this: a
particular need is identified. Next, the technologist defines the need
as a set of specifications. In education those specifications are
called objectives, 'behaviour objectives' usually. Now, having precise
specifications, or objectives, the technologist selects from existing
knowledge techniques, and materials, those that seem most appropriate
to achieve his objectives. This in educational technology would be
described as making the first draft of a learning system. Now the
educational technologist ensures that it is tested and modified and
re-tested until the specifications that were originally laid down are
as nearly fulfilled as human ingenuity and the available resources
permit. That is known as the 'evaluation and feed-back cycle'.
When you look at some of the new courses, 'technologically' produced,
you have the impression that they have not emerged from the point of a
pen but from the end of a screwdriver. The educational technologists
have produced courses which at first sight seem to have much in common
with those from PNEU, that is to say, they are designed for children to
get on with and work from direct. But for the technologist the
importance of these individualised or independent learning materials is
their self-contained, exactly processed efficiency, by-passing the
unreliable filter of the teacher (or, it might be, a PNEU mother acting
as a teacher).
Teachers are a source of 'noise' or'static': by avoiding them you can
beam the machinery of this world, directly and efficiently, into
children's heads. Charlotte Mason, in producing materials for
independent learning, had an entirely different vision. She thought
that they would allow children more time for their private agenda, for
their own development, for their own choices, for their own
'affinities'. To the educational technologist materials should be
tooled and re-tooled to the closest possible tolerance: to Charlotte
Mason the compilation of materials should stop at the loosest
acceptable fit. Let me just read you something from her:
'Education is a life, that life is sustained on ideas. Ideas are of
spiritual origin, and God has made them so that we can get them chiefly
as we convey them to one another whether by word, or mouth, written
page, scripture word, musical symphony; but we must sustain a child's
inner life with ideas as we sustain its body with food. Probably he
will reject nine-tenths of the ideas that.
He resists forcible feeding and loathes pre-dig. We may offer children as their sustenance, the Lysander
of Plutarch, an object lesson, we think,