The Education War
‘I don’t care what you teach and how you teach it. All I want is for my child to pass.’ Once we do not take this comment too literally, I believe that the parent saying this is representative of most of those who have school aged children. Yet, ‘For almost a hundred years, educators have been at war with each other over what the nature of the … school curriculum should be.’ Underlying this war are four curriculum ideologies … that advocate very different purposes for schooling and very different methods of achieving those respective purposes’ (http://www.sagepub.com/sites/ default/files/ upm-binaries/47669_ch_1.pdf).
This year the ministry of education contracted the Caribbean Examinations Council to conduct the grade six examinations in Guyana and the thoughts in the preceding paragraph came to mind as I considered the following statement. ‘The basis of assessment used by the Caribbean Examinations Council (CXC) was radically different from what was used previously by the Ministry of Education. This year there was an increased focus on reasoning and a decreased emphasis on retention’ (Cabinet deeply perturbed at Grade Six math results. SN 06/10/2016).
I am not certain what to deduce from the notion of a ‘radical … increased focus’ but it appears to me that the above curriculum approach is but one of competing ideological constructs that was also adopted by the 2003 Basic Education Access & Management Support Programme (BEAMS) that introduced ‘literacy and numeracy standards that recognize the importance of the development of basic skills within the context of a thinking curriculum that promotes meaningful problem solving and higher-order thinking’. In the teaching of maths, which appeared to have been the focus of cabinet’s attention, BEAMS provided a quite instructive indication of the difference between teaching mathematical skills and mathematical understanding. (A National assessment system for Primary Education in Guyana).
‘Questions that assess skills have correct answers given in a speeded test. Abilities, however, are not assessed by right or wrong answers. Abilities are assessed by the relevance of an answer to the question, where the answer introduces a different context. In basic education, we mainly assess the ability to understand. This is simply done by first asking a skills question and then asking for an explanation of the answer. … We then identify if the answer introduces a different context. If it does, we judge the relevance of the answer to our question. If the answer is relevant, we can be sure that the child understands at least in the context of our question. For example, to assess if a child understands that 7 is more than 4, we can ask “would you rather have 7 sweets or 4 sweets?” The child might reply “4 sweets” Then we ask “why?” If the child should reply an equivalent of “More sweets make your teeth bad and I don’t want bad teeth so I don’t want 7 sweets” then this answer introduces the different context of “not wanting bad teeth” and the answer completely encompasses the context of the question vis “7, 4, more and sweets”. Hence, we can rigorously conclude that the child has complete understanding of 7 being more than 4 in the context of sweets.’ (Ibid).
Most people are not aware that there are ideological ‘wars’ in education and much less so in mathematics, which appears quite value neutral. Although the studies quoted herein are directed at the American and British education systems they are also relevant to Guyana and it would do no harm to know that they exist as we proceed with the national discourse on education.
One writer gave the four general ideologies that seek to determine what the school curriculum should look like. (1) the scholar academic ideology, which holds that society has an accumulation of important knowledge organised as academic disciplines and the purpose of education is to help children to inculcate this body of knowledge; (2) the social efficiency ideology, according to which education must meet the needs of society and the objective is to train youth in the skills and processes they will need to be productive citizens; (3) the learner centred ideology, which focuses on the needs and concerns of individuals and believes that school should be an enjoyable place where people develop naturally according to their own innate qualities, and (4) the social reconstructivist ideology, which is concerned with the problems and injustices of society and according to which the purpose of education is to facilitate the construction of a new and more just society (http://www.sagepub.com/sites/ default/files/ upmbinaries/47669_ch_1.pdf).
In mathematics there is said to be a typology of five ideologies: (1) industrial training, which is based upon extending the practices of business and industry to education; (2) technological pragmatism, which is common amongst representatives of commerce and industry and takes a utilitarian approach to teaching mathematics; (3) old humanism, which is based on a desire to maintain the abstract and rigorous nature of mathematics; (4) progressive education, which sees the primary purpose of mathematics education as the nurturing of the individual and the acquisition of skills and concepts appropriate to the needs of the learner, and (5) public education, which is exemplified by a greater commitment towards equity and social justice and aims to develop an awareness of the nature of the subject and to use mathematics to promote equity and democratic citizenship (The Math Wars: Tension in the development of school mathematics curricula. Pete Wright. Learning of Mathematics, Vol. 32, No. 2. 2012).
All of the above approaches have contributed to the development of teaching and no individual educator relies wholly on any single ideology. There is a growing international consensus in favour of the progressive approaches adopted by BEAMS and the CXC although much classroom practice remains conservative. ‘We are all prisoners of our past and act according to various social norms and consequently develop enduring dispositions. … deeply embedded ideological frameworks can lead to teachers’ acquiescence in policies that promote the same conservative teaching approaches that they themselves experienced as successful learners of mathematics’(Ibid).