There is no magic bullet

In the mid 1950s, the American sociologist, Leon Festinger, infiltrated an apocalyptic sect called ‘the Seekers’.  It was led by a suburban housewife, Dorothy Martin, who claimed to have received messages from ‘the Guardians’, a group of superior beings from another planet, telling her the precise date when the world would end.

He wrote a book about the sect, called When Prophecy Fails.  It is a fascinating study of how human beings react when cherished beliefs do not deliver the expected results.

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What brought Festinger and his book, When Prophecy Fails, to my mind was a report published by the Sutton Trust last week which reviewed a good deal of evidence about educational theories that have dominated thinking about teaching and learning over the last two or three decades.  The report tells us that effective teaching depends on the subject knowledge of the teacher and their mastery of the craft of the classroom.  Yes, I thought, I was saying this twenty years ago, and precious little good it did me.  To most of us, it is a statement of the obvious, but not, I am afraid, to the theorists and pundits who have driven education policy in recent times.

They prefer to believe, to quote some of the theories discredited by research that the Sutton Trust report lists, that: lavish and indiscriminate praise turns unmotivated students into committed and enthusiastic seekers after knowledge; it is better to allow children to discover things for themselves than ever to cut through the fog of time-wasting ignorance and actually tell them anything; the teacher must cater for every individual ‘learning style’ in a class of thirty or more students; and that ‘active’ learning, in which, for example, a group of bedraggled teenagers spends their morning counting the number of delivery vans parked in a suburban high street, is preferable to time spent ‘passively’ listening to a teacher explain and inspire.

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Read the full blog here (£)