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This is a transcript of Michael Rosen lecture about reading and, in particulr, this week's reading SAT. Here's the lecture I gave yesterday
at Nottingham Trent Uni, - it includes an analysis of this week's English SATs! by Michael Rosen on
Thursday, 12 May 2011 at 08:02 Nottingham
Trent Lecture I want to
begin with this week’s Key Stage 2 English SATs. The teachers amongst you will
know that these were done the day before yesterday (May 10 2011) unless you
teach in Wales or Scotland. For some reason this is something that intelligent
and sensible people in the Department for Education think should only be
inflicted on children, schools, parents and carers in England. What
characteristics of England and the English make us more suitable for being
Satted has never been made clear. So this
year, ten and eleven year olds had a booklet to examine: it was part of the
Travel Section of the Sunday Times from 16th February 2003. It’s called: ‘Caves
and Caving in Davely Dale – Visitors’ Guide.’ It’s a
mix of text and pictures, in five sections – ‘Caving
in Davely Dale – Introduction to this Guide’, ‘Need to
Know – useful information’, ‘An
interview with Lisa Clark, Find out what drives a real caving enthusiast’,
‘Caving…what lies beneath – A description of a terrifying experience in a
cave,’ and ‘Visit
Davely Dale Caves, an advertisement’. Let me
give you a taste of the language here: ‘And I
was struck by the beauty you can only see underground. Etched on a wall, as big
as my hand, are the delicate fronds of a soft coral. Further on, a long expanse
of wall seems to have been covered in melted candle wax: in fact it’s rock, and
the surreal effect is produced by the same process that makes stalactites.’ Let’s
leave aside, perhaps, that it isn’t ‘coral’ that the writer is looking at but
fossil coral and consider the range of ten and eleven year olds being asked to
read this – and indeed, the kinds of preparation that their education, as
prescribed by ministers and advisers, has given them. Immediately,
I guess many of you will have been struck by the language being used here:
words like ‘etched’, ‘fronds’, ‘expanse’, ‘surreal’ and ‘stalactites’. I think
I’d be understating things if I said that vocabulary like this would be
‘challenging’ for many KS2 children. Same goes for the constructions. The
sentence ‘Etched on a wall, as big as my hand, are the delicate fronds of a
soft coral’ is the kind of construction that you only ever meet in written
English where, for example, ‘fronds’, the subject of a 17 word sentence is
delayed till the 13th word and the main verb ‘are etched’ is split between the
first word of the sentence and the 10th word, and an adjectival phrase ‘as big
as my hand’ is closer to the word ‘wall’ (which it doesn’t refer to) than it is
to the word it does describe, ‘fronds’. All this
makes for difficult reading. There’s
also a question we could ask of the verbs: we have ‘seems to have been covered’
and ‘is produced by the same process that makes’. These are complex ways of
expressing things requiring a good deal of experience of sophisticated texts to
enable a person to fully grasp what’s going on here. To unpack it: the melted
candle wax isn’t really melted candle wax. It’s rock. It looks surreal. How did
this come about? In the same way as stalactites are made. In the
middle of all that is the word ‘effect’ – a highly abstract word which actually
refers not to the object, the rock, or even the process that made the rock look
that way but to the writer’s mind ie the rock, he says, had an effect in his
mind to make him think it was ‘surreal’. To put it
mildly, this is extremely difficult for anyone, let alone 10 and 11 year olds. Then
there’s the question of what we might call the cultural hinterland of the
passage. The subject matter of this immediate passage is caves, but a word like
‘etched’ takes us into art, ‘fronds’ into botany, ‘coral’ into marine zoology,
‘expanse of wall’ into architecture, ‘melted candle wax’ into the use of
candles in the home or church, ‘surreal effect’ back into art and ‘stalactites’
into geology. Now, the
word ‘stalactite’ gets a gloss in the booklet thus: ‘A column
of rock hanging from the ceiling of a cave. Formed when water drips from the
ceiling. Minerals dissolved in the water leave a trace which builds up over
millions of years.’ Mysteriously,
the lay out of this writing breaks all the rules that will have been hammered
into the children in the preceding years. There is
also the problem that it’s a rubbish piece of description. ‘Minerals dissolved
in the water leave a trace which builds up over millions of years.’ What builds
up? The minerals or ‘a trace’. Or both? And if so, how does a ‘trace’ build up?
Yes, you and I may know that it means many traces but it doesn’t actually say
that. It can only be inferred. In other words, another difficult job for the
reader, especially a child one. Difficult
for the reader…unless…unless what? And
that’s the crunch question here. What kind of child is this booklet easy for?
What kind of child is this booklet difficult for and why? And the
secondary question, given the kind of education that teachers have been asked,
coaxed, cajoled and bullied into providing over the last ten years: how could a
child coming through that system – with little or no other input from his or
her background – be equipped to cope with this booklet? In order
to avoid pointing fingers and getting too complicated here, I’ll answer the
first question in a rather odd way. I’ll tell you what kind of child this
booklet is easy for? The child I once was. And this is why: 1. I was
read to every night from the time I was one or two, till I was about 7 or 8. 2. One or
other of my parents still read to me regularly and on appropriate occasions
until my father stopped writing at the age of about 85. 3. With a
combination of library books, bought books, comics, annuals, magazines, sports
programmes, catalogues, I and my brother were surrounded with print material –
texts, if you like – for the whole of our lives in our parents’ house. 4. Most
of these texts were talked about and argued about, performed and played with
almost every day. 5. Though
we didn’t go caving before I was 11, we were taken for most of the holidays on
the kind of outdoor camping holidays which brought us into contact with people
who talked about landscape in terms very similar to the ones used in this
booklet. 6. We had
a very same hinterland of art, history, zoology, architecture being talked
about in our house or on trips that would have made most of the passage I read
to you fairly comprehensible. My
parents were both teachers who would go on to become teacher trainers, (my
father a professor) but who were also committed to the process of learning
about human beings in the environment which this passage and the whole booklet
exemplifies. In other
words, the 11 year old me (and of course there is a tiny minority of ten year
old me’s in the cohort who’ve just done this SAT paper), would have been at a
fantastic advantage tackling this paper. So, what
does this mean? It means,
what I for one suspects about a good deal of education – it confirms the
position, the status and achievement of those who already have a particular
lifestyle, a particular way of talking, writing and reading. And worse, it
confirms the position of those who don’t. It’s
almost as if the SATs paper has been devised specially in order to winkle out
the children who have these kinds of expertise and then to go on and reward
them for having them. What can
be the possible purpose of this? I’ll leave that hanging in the air. And now
for a moment let’s look at a few of the questions, the children were asked this
week: Section
3, question 16 gives the children the first part of the opening paragraph of
the same piece I read from earlier: Here it
is: ‘Imagine
this: I’m flat on my back, lying on a shelf of wet rock. Looking up, all I can
see is another sheet of rock. It is ten centimetres from my face. The surface
of the earth is 140 metres above me, the other side of thousands upon thousands
of tons of (fairly) solid limestone. I am a tiny scrap of meat in a colossal
rock sandwich.’ Question
e asks: ‘Why does the writer include so many numbers in this paragraph?’ Question
f quotes: ‘Imagine this’ and asks ‘What is the effect of starting with these
words.’ To be
honest I find this sort of thing quite incredible. These are what you might
call psycho- and socio- linguistic questions of immense complexity – that’s to
say, they are about the writer’s motive, his background, his reasons for
writing, his sense of what he thinks will work in an article. Put another way,
they are questions about what used to be called ‘rhetoric’ – that’s to say,
they are attempts to tie down what kind of effect using language in this or
that sort of way is likely to have. The only
problem is that whether you’re talking about the writer’s intention or the
effect on the reader, both are a kind of wild speculation – a speculation that
relies again on a wide-ranging hinterland of knowledge about writing, texts and
audiences and indeed an experience of being part of talk about writing, texts
and audiences. That
said, I find I can’t answer either of those questions with any confidence –
rather the reverse actually – I find myself getting that feeling of mild humiliation
that always accompanies this kind of questioning – I don’t know enough, I don’t
understand enough, I don’t know as much as the person asking me the question,
there is some kind of secret occult knowledge that I need to be able to answer
the question and I just don’t have it. As if
that isn’t enough for one test, blow me, if the paper hasn’t selected the very
passage I quoted to you earlier and asks: ‘Starting
from ‘And I was struck by the beauty…to the end of the article, ‘Explain the
writer’s thoughts and feelings.’ What does
this mean? I’ve already talked about some of the major difficulties both with
this passage and the gloss on ‘stalactite’ that supposedly explains but doesn’t
explain one of the terms. And here they are, now asking the candidate to
‘Explain’ the writer’s thoughts. Explain them? Does that mean re-phrase them in
your own words? Or does it mean explain why the writer is thinking and feeling
this? Or both? The question is both difficult and ambiguous. Again, I just feel
humiliation and dejection, so I dread to think how children felt about this. Now let’s
remind ourselves of the gravity of what’s going on here. The marks the
candidates of any given school are going to get are turned into stats. SATs
into stats. These stats will in effect grade the school and by implication its
teachers and, on account of that will have a direct effect on what is taught
and how it is taught. There is
no escape from this vice-like grip. The only
room for manoeuvre will be how any given school thinks that it can best help
children read such a booklet and answer the questions. Well, the
first thing a school should do is obviously do all it can to get hold of as
many children who are like the child I was – however you want to describe that:
a reading child coming from a home full of books, talk and discussion, taking
children out on regular trips, ideally to places which require some kind of
understanding of the built, natural or historical environment and/or places
full of high art artefacts. As you
will have detected there, that solution has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do
with education and everything to do with the level of education and commitment
of the parents in the square mile around your school. So, is
that what SATs measure? Perhaps they do. In fact,
schools have been told that there are ways of getting children to perform well
(I think that’s the phrase) when faced with papers such as these. You’ll be
familiar with this sort of thing. Here’s
page 78 from ‘Junior English’ by Haydn Richards published in 1965, revised in
1997 and still being used. ‘ I saw a
ship a-sailing A-
sailing on the sea. And it
was deeply laden With
pretty things for me. There
were raisins in the cabin And
almonds in the hold The sails
were made of satin And the
mast was made of gold. The four
and twenty sailors Who stood
upon the decks Were four
and twenty white mice With
rings about their necks. The
captain was a fine plump duck With a
jacket on his back, And when
the fairy ship set sail The
captain he said Quack!’ Now I’m
going to guess that this room is full of people who like this sort of thing and
what’s more that if I said to you, you’ve got a group of children in front of
you for the next hour and you can do anything you like with that poem and the group,
you could all devise some pretty interesting and important things. Let me
anticipate, you could do living tableaux for some of the verses, perhaps? It
seems to me to cry out for children to paint pictures or make models – perhaps
of the whole thing, or close-ups of one mouse-sailor or of the captain himself… There’s
also the question of who ‘me’ is in the poem, as in ‘Deeply laden with pretty
things for me.’ There doesn’t seem to be any answer available – which quite
often happens in poems – so we could perhaps ask the children to come up with
some questions to ask this ‘me’ . And when we had collected a whole bunch of
questions, perhaps we could ask the children to pretend to be the ‘me’ and
answer them…or something like that…and see where that takes us. There
might be some questions for the mice and the Captain too, though we might have
to imagine that the Captain can say something else other than quack… I, for
one, want to know where the ship has been and how come all this stuff is for
‘me’…And where did I see this ship…? Or perhaps how did I see it…as in ‘I saw a
ship a-sailing…’? I have a
feeling that if I can get to the bottom of some of this, I will get nearer to
what it’s all about. But what
does Haydn Richards and his reviser Angela Burt think is the best thing to be
doing with this poem? They
think it’s best to ask: ‘Where
were the raisins? What were the sails made of? What part of the ship was made
of gold? How many sailors stood on the deck? Who were the sailors? Who was the
captain? What did he have on his back?’ There it
is: first the poem, then a set of factual questions. The poem is treated as if
it is a series of facts which have to be gleaned and then provided correctly to
the examiner/teacher. In other
words, you the child cannot be an expert of your own experience of reading this
poem. You cannot, in conjunction with your peers, ask this poem any questions,
or find out different ways of thinking and feeling about it. It is just about
facts. The poem is not a poem to be enjoyed, wondered about and speculated
about – solo or with others. It is just there for surrendering gobbets of
information. Shunt
forward to this week’s SATs paper and virtually all the questions on the paper
(apart from the ones I’ve talked about so far) are of this kind. They are
questions that ask the child to find the correct link, or correct fact, or the
correct correspondence to words and phrases in the booklet: ‘What is the name
of the cave?’ ‘What is the difference between caving and climbing a mountain?’
and so on. When you
make the link between the test and the questions asked of ‘I saw a-ship
a-sailing’ you can see that what’s happening is that the study of text across
all ages in schools is being slanted heavily towards treating writing as if it
was just a matter of getting hold of facts and away from feelings, speculation,
ideas and reasoning. And yet,
as I hope I showed with the passage about the cave with its fronds and surreal
effects that reading and understanding are about much, much more than eliciting
facts from texts. Apart from anything else, they are often about that
hinterland of previous reading and knowledge that the text refers to and
alludes to. They rest on the experience of a wide range of ways of expressing
things, of written English, convoluted expressions and the like. These aren’t
facts. They are something much more complex – it’s actually about how we turn
what we feel and think and see and hear into texts so that they can interest
and excite and intrigue readers. They are about using what we read in order to
anticipate what might happen. They are about pondering on outcomes and
conclusions and scenes that we feel are important. So I saw
a ship a-sailing is what’s dished up to the youngest children. A little
older we get this: ‘Perseus
and the Gorgons’ ‘This is
part of a myth from ancient Greece’ ‘At last
Perseus found the Gorgons. They were asleep among the rocks and Perseus was
able to look at them safely. Although
they were asleep, the live serpents which formed their hair were writhing venomously.
The sight filled Perseus with horror. How could he get near enough without
being turned to stone? Suddenly
Perseus knew what to do. He now understood why Athena had given him the shining
bronze shield. Looking into it he saw clearly the reflection of the Gorgons.
Using the shield as a mirror, he crept forward. Then with a single swift blow
he cut off the head of the nearest Gorgon. Her name was Medusa. In one
mighty swoop, Perseus grabbed the head of Medusa. He placed it safely in his
bag and sprang into the air on his winged sandals.’ So now,
we’ve moved on to a unit on mythology but as you can see neither the children
nor the teacher have been entrusted with a whole myth. We have: ‘This is part
of a myth from Ancient Greece’. Why? What’s the matter with a whole myth? And then
when we look at the passage we’ve been given we see that it is really a rather
odd piece of writing. For a start no one in this narrative has any motive or
reason for doing anything or being the way they are: So, we
have no idea what Perseus is doing hunting down Gorgons. We don’t know why
their hair is made up of snakes. We don’t know why he should want to get near
to them. We don’t know why they have the power of turning people to stone. We
don’t know who Athena is, or why she has given Perseus a sword . We don’t know
why he should want to cut off the head of one of the Gorgons. We don’t know why
one of them has a name. We don’t know why he wants to put that Gorgon’s head in
his bag. And we don’t know why he’s got winged sandals. If you
leave this kind of thing out of a story it either makes it very, very
mysterious and intriguing or it makes it very, very dull and pointless. In this
case, I’ll go for dull and pointless. And this is reinforced by what happens
when you turn over the page. Questions! Here they are: ‘What
were the Gorgons doing when Perseus found them? What was unusual about the
Gorgons’ hair? What would happen to Perseus if the Gorgons looked into his
eyes? Why had Perseus brought a bag with him? What happened to Medusa? Look at
the picture. Why do you think Perseus needed to have sandals with wings on? Who
had given Perseus his shield? How did Perseus look at the Gorgons without them
looking at him? Write down the word in the third paragraph that tells you
Perseus moved very carefully towards the Gorgons? Write down the word in the
second paragraph that means wriggling?’ So, once
again, the children are plied with factual questions. A Greek myth has been
gutted of virtually all its meaning and purpose – that is to say, gutted of
motive and consequence in order to explain a moral truth, or idea or piece of
wisdom about human nature – and then the children are asked to overcome their
boredom and confusion and gut the story further in order to get its facts out. But to
state what’s important here: a Greek myth was not and is not a factual account.
It’s a story that was invented to represent ideas and thoughts wrapped up in
superhuman beings and creatures so as to engage the emotions. It asked of its
listeners and readers to care and to think. In some
dark recesses of the minds of the people who concoct this nonsense there seems
to be some awareness of this. There are two questions which are of a completely
different order of thought: ‘Why do
you think the Gorgons had snakes for hair?’ As far as I can figure out this
invites the child to go in for a bit of informed speculation. So, having done
all it can to smash the child’s imagination, the test asks them to…well…imagine
something. And then, as a final question, the sheet asks: ‘Using
two or three sentences, write down what you think happens immediately after
Perseus flies into the air on his winged sandals.’ Again,
having deprived the story and the child of the means and the motive to go in
for such speculations and imaginations, rather oddly the child is asked to
start doing something creative. Someone
somewhere clearly has no idea about how to engage children in creative
activities, and I suspect, doesn’t care two hoots about doing so, anyway. Then, in
order to rather prove the point of what I’m saying here, the paper ends with
this: ‘Myths
are old stories that tell us amazing tales about the heroes and gods who walked
the Earth in ancient times.’ To which
you or I might want to say, well, the least you might have done is give us one
of these amazing tales, well told, so that we could become…well…amazed. Then: ‘In
myths, people who do wrong are often punished by being turned into monsters.’ Yes
indeed, and perhaps you could have shown us that happening, rather than tell us
about the fact that that’s what they do. Then: ‘The
Gorgons were once three sisters.’ Now you
tell us! ‘They
were turned into the monsters you can see in the picture.’ So,
having been bored out of my head with all that other stuff, you now start to
tell me something interesting. Though the picture is really pathetic. Then: ‘Write
the story that explains why these three sisters were turned into such dreadful
creatures. What had they done to be punished in this way? Why were they given
snakes for hair and the power to turn people into stone?’ Well,
yes, this is exactly what could engage an interest in the original story and
enable me to care about what Perseus is up to. But, please, not afterwards! Not
as a postscript! What I
see here is a complete lack of faith in the power and importance of literature.
As I’ve said it’s as if neither child or teacher is entrusted with the real
thing. The only way children, teachers and myths can come together in the
pedagogy being modelled here is through dull extracts, a series of even duller
questions virtually all of which are dominated by fact and then throwing a
creative exercise in at the end, without any exploratory work into feeling,
motive and the language and ideas of misdeed, punishment, revenge and the rest. As I’ve
said, these stories are about wisdom and thought and human nature – as
understood in that time and place…and shouldn’t education be about such things?
Or does that only come at ‘circle time’ or at PCHSE or SEAL? Why should
children and teachers be forced to treat poems and stories as if they are
factual accounts from which it’s necessary to glean the essential facts? And now
we come to the pre-SATs children… ‘Key
comprehension: Teachers Resource Book, Upper Junior Book 4. Poem:
significant author: Mid-term
break While
Seamus Heaney was away at boarding school, his young brother was killed in a
road accident. In ‘Mid-Term break’, he writes about his vivid recollections of
the day before the funeral. I sat all
morning in the college sick bay Counting
bells knelling classes to a close. At two
o’clock our neighbours drove me home. In the
porch I met my father crying – He had
always taken funerals in his stride – And Big
Jim Evans saying it was a hard blow. The baby
cooed and laughed and rocked the pram When I
came in, and I was embarrassed By old
men standing up to shake my hand And tell
me they were ‘sorry for my trouble’; Whispers
informed strangers I was the eldest Away at
school, as my mother held my hand In hers
and coughed out angry tearless sighs. At ten
o’clock the ambulance arrived With the
corpse, stanched and bandaged by the nurses. Next
morning I went up to the room. Snowdrops And
candles soothed his bedside; I saw him For the
first time in six weeks. Paler now, Wearing a
poppy bruise on his left temple, He lay in
the four foot box as in his cot. No gaudy
scars, the bumper knocked him clear. A four
foot box, a foot for every year.’ This time
we get: ‘Why do
you think the teachers decided that it was best for Seamus Heaney to stay in
the sick bay that morning? And this
time I want to typify the kind of knowledge that this paper is asking of the
child because I think it tallies with some of the kind of knowledge being asked
of the child doing this week’s SAT. The only
resource a child has to answer that first question is a knowledge of motive and
psychology. The answer doesn’t lie in the poem. And actually it’s a knowledge
of adult and/or teacher psychology. Why a child should have this knowledge is
not clear. Some do, Many don’t. Why this should be what a school or an exam is
testing is not clear to me at all. ‘What
does ‘close’ mean in the first verse?’ That’s a
dictionary question. Either you know it, or you have to look it up. ‘Why was
Seamus Heaney embarrassed when his hand was shaken?’ Another psychology
question. ‘What
does ‘stanched’ (sometimes spelt ‘staunched’) mean in verse five?’ Another
dictionary question. ‘In what
ways could candles and snowdrops ‘soothe’ a bedside?’ This
seems to me to be a religious question, which for those of the right religion
and the right cultural background, fine. If not, you’re snookered. ‘In what
ways did the bruise on the little boy’s forehead resemble a poppy?’ I guess
this turns on knowing what a poppy looks like and there are of course thousands
of children who’ve never seen a real poppy. ‘What is
the meaning of ‘gaudy’ as it is used in the seventh verse?’ Another
dictionary question. ‘List all
the sounds of the day in his childhood that Seamus Heaney remembers vividly.’ This is
one of those questions that I call ‘harvest-the-facts questions’. This is
usually quite arbitrary, with no indication as to why this or that fact or
series of facts has to be harvested other than that it earns you a mark. And
this again is part of the problem with such papers and tests: they don’t
explain any purpose as to why such a question is being asked. What greater scheme
of things are they part of? Again, this is occult knowledge only available to
examiners, treating the child as unfit or unable to comprehend the big picture.
It’s another example of mild humiliation. ‘What
time of year was it? How can you tell?’ This involves
botanical knowledge, I think…along with intimate knowledge of when private
school children attend school and have holidays. ‘What
makes the last line of the poem so moving? Find as many reasons as you can to
explain why we are left feeling so sad?’ Here we
are back with the questions we saw on the SATs paper which are really about
rhetoric. So, this time we are told that the last line is ‘moving’ even though
we may not necessarily have been moved by it, and then asked to explain why we
felt the feeling we may not have had. The answer, I know, because I’ve done
this sort of thing before, is to go off and hunt down the rhetorical devices in
the poem that supposedly deliver this effect, as if poetry was about some kind
of crude behaviourist exercise of stimulus and response. The whole
thing is a perfect example of how to wreck a great poem. The purpose is clear –
to enable the child to do better at that SATs paper. In fact,
I suspect that what happens as a result of drilling children through these is
that like the SATs paper it simply reinforces the status quo. For those
children with the experienced reading and the cultural hinterlands it’s fairly
straightforward though at times mildly humiliating and tiresome. For those who
don’t have that reading and hinterland it’s extremely humiliating and tiresome
and any sense of progress or self-worth is extremely hard to achieve. So, what
to do? Well, let
me start with one small example. Let’s go back to the Greek myths. Either these
are worth reading or they’re not. If they’re worth reading, then that’s because
of the way they tell stories, and what they tell stories about. So, assuming
that they score on both these fronts, what do we do with them? To me,
the first thing, is to tell them and re-tell them, and re-tell them in
different ways, in pictures, in drama, in poetry, in monologue, in tableaux,
with hot-seating…with powerpoint, updated, inverted with male figures turned to
female, female to male, humans to gods, gods to humans just to see what
happens. This way,
the ideas and feelings of the stories can be investigated and brought to the
surface without any humiliation or dejection. You work on the assumption that
everyone is an expert of their own emotions and feelings and that through
co-operation and discussion, different kinds of knowledge and response can be
shared. In this
way, texts aren’t something mysterious which are part of some secret knowledge
that only examiners and testers possess. You, the child, can possess it. You
can create effects both with that story, (by re-telling it) and by creating
your own. If we’re
going to spend time asking children questions, let them be open-ended but
profound: we can ask is there anything in this story that reminds you of
anything that has ever happened to you, or you’ve heard about? What is that?
Why were you reminded of it? Discuss that… We can
ask: is there anything else you’ve ever read or seen on TV or at the cinema
that you were reminded of when you read or heard this story? Why’s that? Alternatively
or in addition, you can ask them to come up with questions for the characters
in the story and come up with answers to them. This puts the children into the
driving seat in the face of a story. They are the ones interrogating it…and the
answers they come up with will be its meanings, informed in part by the earlier
questions about what they’ve been reminded of…what links they’ve made between
this story and other texts they know. This puts open-ended investigation at the
heart of the matter: weighing evidence. Now in
amongst that, there are nearly always what we might call ‘puzzles’. In fact
that can be another question. Are there any puzzles? And then we make a list of
these and see whether we can find out ways of answering them? From each other?
From books? From the internet? Asking parents that night? Or how? Again:
investigation, evidence-collecting. And I
want to give one example of this. Enraged
by the wrecking of a Greek myth, with that Perseus and the Gorgons worksheet, I
suggested to the child it was aimed at, that we read together a book of Greek
myths. We started with the Orchard Book by Geraldine McCaughrean. In
‘Persephone and the Pomegranate Seeds’ one of the gods takes pity on
Persephone. The child in question asked me, ‘what is pity’? And then
we talked about the god feeling sorry for Persephone and we talked about her
feeling sorry for other people if something sad or bad happened to them. What is
going on here? Something
absolutely crucial to everything we’ve been talking about today: We’ve
moved from a concrete situation in a story – and it was one she cared about –
there were several moments when she called out, ‘No I don’t want that to
happen.’ Or ‘I didn’t want that to happen to Persephone’ - in other words she
was emotionally engaged. And we’ve made a comparison with a feeling in her own
life, feeling sorry for someone else. And then we’ve pinned all that to the
abstract term in the story, ‘pity’. This is
the kind of initiation into higher order thinking that education claims that it
is in part about. It asks of children and school students to move from the
particular and the concrete and make generalisations and abstract observations
and on occasions even to throw abstracts about. Consider
this that I saw on the wall of a school: ‘Together
we care, enjoy, challenge and achieve.’ I suggest
that most children wouldn’t have much problem with ‘enjoy’ and ‘achieve’, they
could relate those words to their own lives. Some would have a bit of
difficulty with ‘care’ because it’s quite an ambiguous multi-purpose sort of a
word: you can care for others, you can care about things, you can take care of
yourself…which of these does this ‘care’ mean? I’m not sure I know myself. But
then ‘challenge’. Who do we ‘challenge’? Others, ourselves or both? Or the
school?! Perhaps not! So,
here’s a well-meaning slogan up on a school wall, which requires of children to
think abstractly about very concrete things. This is a difficult and complex
thing to do. If we
think this kind of thinking is desirable and worthwhile, then it’s clear to me
that neither these worksheets nor the SATs which have brought them into being
help children get to making and handling these generalisations and
abstractions. I would suggest that reading, say, Greek myths in an open-ended
and creative way does. Now
there’s something else going on with all this work, that I’ve been describing
and I wouldn’t want to make disparaging comments about this at all. All the
worksheets and the SATs paper ask of the children and students to browse,
select and extract. Again, these are highly complex processes involving many
kinds of thinking and reading strategies. So, for
example, it requires a reader to be able to scan texts…there isn’t time to keep
reading and re-reading everything. Scanning involves being able to pick out key
words and phrases. In other words, to be so experienced with text, to be able
to see how structures repeat themselves in such a way as you know where to look
for key points. It requires of you to know how to see within sentences and
paragraphs there are salient parts and less important parts in relation to the
question in hand. So, for one given question, the way in which something is
described may be terribly important, in the next question it might be
irrelevant. Where
does this kind of ability come from? From doing worksheets? I don’t think so. I
think it comes from a completely different source and I’ve seen it with my own
children many times. It comes from the regular, self-motivated handling of
books, comics, magazines and what we might call sundry printed matter. This is
how it works. One of my children inherited hundreds of copies of the Beano from
his older brothers. He then added his weekly Beano to the library of Beanos. I
noticed that as he went about the house, he would carry with him selections of
the Beano and then he would install himself somewhere, on the floor on the
stairs, anywhere, with that pile and work his way through them. However, he
didn’t read a whole Beano. He would read an extract from one and then move to
the next Beano and read an extract from that. When I asked him what he was
doing, he would explain that he was choosing his favourites of this or that
character’s stories and putting them in order of best, not so good and not very
good and so on. On another occasion he would classify them according to age of
copies of the Beano. Another according to the best whole issue, graded from
best to least good. So each
time he was scanning, selecting, comparing and ordering, according to his
different theories, or different ‘sets’ as we would say in maths, each
according to different criteria. He was taking the concrete details of a given
copy or a given story, and turning that into an abstract quality that he could
then rank. I’ve seen
my different children do this with fairy books, football programmes, Dr Seuss
Books, Asterix and many others. To my mind, this is one of the most important
things about the reading and ownership of many texts. It enables a child to
teach him- or herself the basic processes of scanning, selection, comparison
and classification that are central to much of education, including these SATs
papers. So, are
these hunches and observations borne out by research? I would
like to draw your attention to a piece of research that was published in
‘Research in Social Stratification and Mobility’ in 2010. Volume 28, Number 2. It’s
called ‘Family scholarly culture and educational success: Books and schooling
in 27 nations.’ By MDR Evans, Jonathan Kelley, Joanna Sikora, Donald J.
Treiman. Here is
the abstract: ‘Children
growing up in homes with many books get 3 years more schooling than children
from bookless homes, independent of their parents’ education, occupation and
class. This is as great an advantage as having university educated rather than
unschooled parents, and twice the advantage of having a professional rather
than an unskilled father. It holds equally in rich nations and in poor; in the
past and in the present; under Communism, capitalism, and Apartheid; and most
strongly in China. Data are from representative national samples in 27 nations,
with over 70,000 cases…’ So, this
matter of coming from a home with many books will give the child as much
advantage as having university educated parents. Why
should this be? I’ve already mentioned two of my favourite reasons: the
built-in tendency for children owning many books to browse, extract and
classify. And given the likelihood of children reading those books, those
children are highly likely as part of their leisure time to raise questions
with parents and older siblings that move from the concrete to the abstract and
back to the concrete – a mini replica of what we ask children to do in schools
a lot of the time. What else
do the researchers come up with? ‘ A
book-oriented environment, we argue, endows children with tools that are
directly useful in learning at school: vocabulary, information, comprehension
skills, imagination, broad horizons of history and geography, familiarity with
good writing, understanding of the importance of evidence in argument, and many
others.’ Where
they say ‘vocabulary’ I think I would want to say ‘awareness of many different
kinds of language’. Where they say ‘broad horizons of history and geography’ I
might want to say ‘broader cultural perspectives other than the one they live
in’, where they say ‘and many others’ I would want to put, let’s say, ‘the
matter of talk around such books. You can’t live in close proximity with others
and a pile of books without talking about them. That talk is central to our
ability to unpack what is important and interesting about texts. So, if we
know this – (and there is other research to back this up, which has linked
reading for pleasure or wide reading patterns with school attainment), why
hasn’t it been a central plank of every country’s education policy? It’s so
simple isn’t it? We need children to be reading many, many books, comics,
magazines, newspapers in their time away from school, so how is this best
brought about? Let’s put our minds together, we might expect ministers to say,
as to how best to achieve that? But they don’t. At best they pretend to, or do
it in tokenistic ways. Well, the
last government did it this way. They rather furtively bunged money into the
hands of reading agencies, ngos and charities which are concerned with
children’s reading for pleasure – organisations like Booktrust, the Reading
Agency, the National Literacy Trust. Each of these organisations produces
excellent materials and administers excellent programmes all of which produce
excellent results. But of course it’s not universal. It’s policy by patchwork
(in other words ‘The Big Society’) and frequently their policies and
initiatives come into conflict with what educationists are saying is necessary
in order to pass SATs. So we have the worksheets on the schools side versus
reading whole books from the reading ngos battling it out, particularly in what
are called under-achieving schools. To their
credit, the last government also introduced a free book scheme administered by
Booktrust. But of course it was only one book a year. Better than no book but
still only one book. So, I
went to the last government when I was Children’s Laureate and gave them what I
called a twenty point plan to create book-loving schools and pleaded with them
to send out something like that to every school as a kind of blueprint policy
that each and every school could carry out. No go.
Not possible, said Ed Balls, Jim Knight and Vernon Coaker. One of
the suggestions was for the government to formalise the relationship between
every school and every local library, making sure that every child had several
books on the go all the time with the local library. I put that to Margaret
Hodge, and to the present libraries minister Ed Vaizey. Not possible. No go. So now we
have Michael Gove and at first glance he seems to be making similar noises as
me. He appears to be acknowledging this need for children to read widely and
often in order to get the most out of school and, he implies, life after
school. But then
he appears greatly attracted to the idea of lists of books which either he or
the government will prescribe with targets of numbers of books that must be
read. This
misses the point, or worse. Of course, we need to recommend books to each other
but this is a process between equals, between people we know or can find out
about. It’s not a process of diktat from anonymous state sanctioned experts,
telling us what to do with our or our children’s cultural lives. I was
asked to submit evidence to Michael Gove’s curriculum review and I took along
my twenty point plan which is universally available on a website anyway: www.
Readingrevolution.co.uk My point here is that unless we have very concrete
examples of how schools can put books at the centre of education and how
parents and home reading has to be part of this, we’re not really doing much
more than waving flags with ‘read a book’ written on them. I took
along the research paper I’ve looked at with you. I took along my evidence to
Margaret Hodge and the libraries review. And I
took along what I called a Model letter for Headteachers to send home to
parents; Here it
is: Model
letter about books and home reading This is
for adapting and re-cycling to suit local needs Dear
Parents and Carers We want
to do everything we can to help your child to read and write – and we will. We
teach children how to read. We teach them how to write. But we
want them to read and write really well so that they are confident when they
see pages of writing that they haven’t seen before and so that they are
confident when we ask them to write things. But if
you help us, your child will do really well. If you
have young children, please make sure that you read to them. Try to do this
once a day. We can give you books to read to your children but you can get some
books from the local library, some local shops, from catalogues and from online
shopping. We also
run a school bookshop where you can buy books. The most
important thing you should do is make sure that your children see plenty of
books or magazines or comics – or all three. Why is
this all so important? 1.
In school, we ask children to read
things and find out what’s important – ‘browsing’. It is very hard to teach
browsing. The best way to learn browsing is going to a bookshop, going to a
library or sitting with a pile of books or magazines and choosing what you want
to read, or just sorting your books and magazines in ways that you like. 1.
In school, we ask children to think
about difficult ideas. This might be about, say, why or how things happened in
history. It might be when we ask children to think about ‘if’ and ‘why’. If
children read lots of different kinds of books, they will start to think about
such things as part of their reading. 1.
In school, we ask children to think
beyond themselves, to think about why or how other people think and behave. If
children read lots of different kinds of books, they will start to think about
such things as part of their reading. 1.
In school, we want children to ask
questions, wonder about things, be curious and interested. Again, if children
read lots of different kinds of books, they will be children who do just that:
ask questions, wonder, be curious and interested. 1.
Like adults, children are full of
feelings and thoughts. Like adults, these sometimes boil over and the children
don’t always know what to do with them. Reading books often show us people
facing up to problems and finding ways to deal with them. This means that
reading books helps children find ways of dealing with their feelings and
thoughts. We know
from research all over the world that children who read widely and often and
who have plenty of books or magazines to read do better at school than children
who don’t have books and magazines. Here are
some important addresses and websites: Your
local library – where you can take out 12 books on one ticket! Your
local shops where they sell books and magazines and comics Book
catalogues for children online Read
books with your children. Get hold
of books for your children. Best
wishes Headteacher
and…. So where
are we? I think
we are, as ever with a change of government, at a cross-roads. I think this
matter of reading has become ever more urgent. It seems to me that what is
happening in the face of SATs tests like the one I’ve looked at is really not
much more than a means of discriminating against children who don’t have books.
Either that, or just affirming what is little more than a particular set of
cultural references. I work with children who are massively expert in such
things as their own bilingualism, the cultural background of their parents and
grandparents who might come from anywhere and everywhere in the world. We seem
to find it impossible to devise any kind of system of assessment of such
children which rewards the kind of cultural and linguistic literacies that they
already possess. Instead, we end up punishing them for having those literacies. But of
course something else is going on. Libraries and library services including the
schools library services are being cut. So, at the very moment that Michael
Gove is saying that children should be reading x amount of books, his
government is making it harder for people on low income to get hold of those
books. This is
not just lamentable. It’s criminal. It merely reinforces the very
discrimination I can see at work in the SATs papers. So, to
conclude, I think we have to take note of the research, we have to fight for books
in schools, books in the hands of every child and we have to fight for reading
for pleasure and we have to fight for a curriculum which gives creative space,
time and open-ended energy to books of all kinds and leaves behind these
tiresome fact-based worksheets which grind the life and feeling out of great
writing and great ideas.
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