A personal response to the Cambridge Primary Review
Michael Armstrong
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For all its caution, the final report of the Cambridge Primary Review is a revolutionary document. As hinted in its title – Children, Their World, Their Education - its recommendations are grounded in a deep respect for children and a corresponding appreciation of the role of parents, carers and teachers.
Some years ago, in a review of Jerome Bruner's cultural psychology, the anthropologist Clifford Geertz neatly summarised the radical educational implications of this way of thinking about the world of childhood:
"Seeing even the infant and the pre-schooler as active agents bent on mastery of a particular form of life, or developing a workable way of being in the world, demands a rethinking of the entire educational process. It is not so much a matter of providing something the child lacks, as enabling something the child already has: the desire to make sense of self and others, the drive to understand what the devil is going on."
The Cambridge Primary Review answers this demand, rethinking pretty well every aspect of English primary education. Its radicalism is argued with studied moderation, supported by the mass of critical research surveys which it commissioned, as well as by the evidence which it assembled on its own account.
Its conclusions are at once adventurous and authoritative. If its recommendations were to be implemented, primary schools would be transformed, in their aims, their curriculum, their pedagogy, their methods of assessment, and their cultural significance.
It is not surprising that Government and Opposition alike have for the most part rejected its recommendations and sought to dismiss or ignore its evidence.
But the failure of the political elite hands local schools a unique opportunity. Backed by the weight of evidence made available in the Review, they can make its argument their own and start to implement its recommendations without waiting for a sluggish and backward Government to catch up.
So how might a school, or better still a small group of collaborating schools, start? One way to begin would be to select one or another of the twelve aims outlined in Chapter 12 of the final report, and examine the ways in which the school's practice achieves or falls short of that aim and how to rethink the practice in respect of the aim in question. Here is one example:
Take the 11th of the Review's 12 aims: Enticing the Imagination.
I have drawn up a list of ten sets of questions which a school might ask itself. This is where I would start if I were still a headteacher, and indeed I wish I were!
1. How far are we exciting the imagination of our students across the curriculum? Thinking of the curriculum in terms of the eight domains set out in the Review, how do we respond to our students' imaginative needs, not just in arts and creativity, or in language, oracy and literacy, but equally in mathematics, science and technology, place and time, citizenship and ethics?
2. What evidence do we have of success? Where and with whom are we doing well, where and with whom not so well? Which ideas or practices seem to work best and why? Which domains seem hardest for us to pursue imaginatively?
3. How do we describe, interpret and evaluate our students' imaginative achievement? How do we document imaginative work? How do we celebrate it? How do we exhibit and display it? What kind of archive might we produce of our students' imaginative work, domain by domain? How might we make use of it, within the school and beyond?
4. How do we relate the imaginative work of students to other aims, for instance to fostering skill, or enacting dialogue? What balance do we strike between the individual imagination and the collective imagination? How do we match skill to imaginative purpose?
5. How far do the statutory demands of the curriculum and its assessment constrain us in exploring the imagination? How can we loosen or circumvent these constraints?
6. How do we demonstrate and describe our commitment to the imagination to parents? How do we involve them in our practice? How do we justify our practice, whether to the children and their parents, or to governors, advisers and inspectors?
7. How can we explore, revive and advance our own imaginative practice as teachers and thinkers?
8. How do we, or can we, involve other creative workers in the life of the school - artists, writers, musicians, actors, dancers, mathematicians, engineers, craftspeople, sports players, local historians, ornithologists, gardeners?
9. What can we learn from our students and their imaginative works? What fresh insights do they offer us? Tolstoy, in 1861, wrote an essay about the teaching of writing, entitled "Should we teach the peasant children how to write or should they teach us?" What might it mean to take Tolstoy's question seriously?
10. How can we make our school a centre of imaginative enterprise within its surrounding neighbourhood?
For myself, this last question is perhaps the most important of all. I see primary schools as centres of learning, centres of culture, a "major embodiment of a culture's way of life" as Jerry Bruner is quoted in the Review as having put it.
That is how they were described, many years ago, in a beautiful essay written for the education journal FORUM, by the American philosopher and educationalist David Hawkins. Hawkins, who had spent a year in England studying primary education, wrote of how the best English primary schools were committed to what he described as:
"a major reorganisation of subject matter into a common and coherent framework. The sand and water and clay, the painting and writing and reading, the cooking and building and calculation, the observing and nurture of plants and animals, are woven together into a complex social pattern which sustains romance as it extends a concern for detail and for generalisation. Teachers of the young are not usually regarded by themselves or by others as intellectual. Yet the skilful among them are able to see order and number, geography and history, moral testing grounds and aesthetic qualities in all the encounters of young children with the furniture of a rich environment."
I believe that it is time that we recaptured that vision. I see the final report of the Cambridge Primary Review as the essential authoritative document we've been waiting for. It will be an invaluable critical friend in the enterprise of educational reconstruction. It couldn't be more timely.
Michael Armstrong is the author of ‘Closely Observed Children' and a former primary headteacher.
References:
Imbalancing act: Jerome Bruner's cultural psychology, Clifford Geertz, in Jerome Bruner: Language, Culture, Self, ed. David Bakhurst & Stuart G Shanker, SAGE Publications, 2001, p.22.
Two Sources of Learning, David Hawkins, in FORUM for the Discussion of New Trends in Education, Vol.16, No.1, Autumn, 1973.
Should we teach the peasant children to write, or should they teach us?, in Tolstoy on Education, ed. Alan Pinch and Michael Armstrong, Athlone Press, 1982,pp.222-247.
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