Brass Tacks

Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.  Søren Kierkegaard

An ongoing (light-hearted) bone of inter-generational contention in this family is, “You’ll be the same when you’re my age…”. I am not that deterministic in my own outlook, but I can accept that life has its phases that may not differ very much between individuals, even if their individual expression or experience does.

It seems to be that as one ages, one tends to spend more time thinking back over past experiences; perhaps this is not so surprising, as hindsight is a wonderful thing, and allows a degree of interpretation that was not possible at the time. If only it were otherwise, in our professional lives, where being in one’s later career often seems to equate to growing cynicism.  

Approaching my later fifties, this certainly seems to be true for me, though it is perhaps more in sadness than anything more bitter. It was once said that the price of a lifetime in a profession is a close-up view of its grubby underside – and thus it is increasingly easy to view matters from a rather sceptical (but not always unjustified) perspective. I tried to believe in the inherent goodness of the teaching profession – and learned a hard lesson.

This was brought forcefully home to me recently by the same rather heated discussion on Greg Ashman’s blog, that I referred to here. The vanities of the debate over the role of “science” in education (one of those things you are expected to accept unconditionally), were suddenly pricked by a contribution from a teacher in New Zealand – though I suspect the comments are more widely true:

Stop splitting hairs about the niceties of advanced practice; what is more important is the needs of the many who are in teaching not because they are any good, but because they saw it as a means of earning a living – and who need to be told how to teach.

Sadly, I recognised a good deal of truth in this, probably not only for New Zealand.

Over thirty-plus years in the profession, this once-young-and-naïve teacher has concluded that despite its virtuous public image, there is a level of complicity in teaching no less than in any other profession, and the New Zealander had shone a harsh light on the reality. It is no less true in this profession than any other, that if you want the profession to be kind to you, you have to “play the game”. Being no lover of hypocrisy, this is something I can say with honesty, I have never done.

It gradually became apparent to me that much in the profession was double-speak. Much of the “essential work” that the profession does is all too easily seen to contain a large helping of “bigging-up”. This has been seen most recently in the profession’s response to the Pandemic, where its cries of apparent despair were at odds with the whole, wider picture being reported about the impact on children. I have seen this many times before: the ignoring of evidence that does not suit the collective professional agenda.

Despite the supposed wish for ‘engaged professionals’, what is really wanted is not engagement with the reality, but compliance with the laid-down agenda – for that is what the system rewards, no matter how valid your alternative ideas. It is only acceptable to express your views if they correspond with the official version. No surprise here, I suppose, in a profession with a strong left-of-centre bias: top-down disguised as bottom-up.

My own well-meaning attempts to contribute to the professional debate fell mostly on deaf ears, I suspect because they often fell outside the orthodoxy; it was Not Done to question what you were being told; it turned out the ‘engagement’ that was wanted was with obedience, not independence of mind. I concluded eventually, that my ideas may even have been used against me.

I saw it again in the review by a school manager in the Times Educational Supplement of my book; she panned the chapter on management out of hand – but had clearly not bothered to read much more of it. What can a mere classroom teacher know, after all, even after several decades? (I was later wearily told by a much more accomplished educational author, that this is not uncommon.)

This is hardly new: from what I can tell, my parents both experienced similar during their time as teachers, but it seems to have got worse: the inevitable consequence of the “professionalisation” of teaching, by which I mean the increased corporate emphasis on career-progression, managerial status and pay as success-markers, and by implication personal worth or wisdom. No matter that such things only have marginal bearing on the dirty business of actually teaching young people, nor the fact that it is a deeply anti-intellectual mindset.

With this have come the forked tongues and vested interests of those who publicly profess ad nauseam how much they love teaching – even when it sometimes turns out they don’t actually do very much of it any more, themselves – and how concerned they are for the fate (it is nearly always threatening) of young people – for whom the teaching profession is of course the Knight in Shining Armour.

Unfortunately, far too often this feels like little more than the virtue-signalling that now seems to be a sine qua non for the ambitious teacher. I was left with the distinct impression that what they ‘loved’ was not teaching, but their own careers within it. Sometimes I doubt they even realise they are doing it.

The actions match: the early-adopters of every new fad and policy that appeared – and also the first to ditch them when something newer came along to be “right-on” with. But they still went on the CV trajectory as evidence of “leading learning”. If ever there was a more trite phrase….

Such CVs often give the impression that their owners have single-handedly transformed the educational landscape, in stark disregard of the collegiate manner in which they advocate we should work. Clearly, some are more equal than others; all in the interest of “shaping the educational world of today” – or of shaping their careers of tomorrow? There is now so much busy-work surrounding teaching that the ambitious individual barely need get their hands dirty at all…

I saw it most harshly of all in some of the individuals who got to run schools. It was all too apparent from their actions that the wellbeing of the institutions or the people who comprised them came a distant second to the career benefits to the individuals concerned, for all that their words said otherwise. In some cases, the phrase “cynical exploitation” would not be too harsh. Methought they protested too much- and time often proved me right.

It is perhaps emblematic of the matter that you have no chance of even reaching such a position today if you have not been “thrusting” during your early career; personally, I felt that I had achieved the mature practical and philosophical understanding of education that might have made me an effective Head only in my fifties, as used to be the case, after many years of experience and reflection. But far too late to climb the professional career tree, even if I had wanted to take on such a pressured role.

I also cannot help but feel that those doing the virtue signalling might actually better serve education by not flitting from school to school every couple of years to grow their careers, turning everything upside down in the name of “innovation”, and then leaving others to pick up the pieces. While change is of course sometimes necessary, one of the greatest benefits to young (and especially disadvantaged) learners comes from stability. That includes systems that do not change every five minutes, and people they can reasonably assume will still be there in a year’s time, and in whom they can come to know and trust.

And then, into the heart of such thoughts, the New Zealander thrust the observation that many teachers, far from being gifted, selfless beacons of virtue to young people, are in fact nothing more than unskilled wage-slaves, doing the job because they couldn’t think of any better way of earning a crust.

I am not suggesting for a moment, that this is a desirable state of affairs, nor that a win-win situation for teacher and taught cannot happen; simply that far more often, it does not. Fundamentally, the career-ambitious are driven by personal concerns that arguably are incompatible with the self-less nature of teaching and learning – and by virtue of gaining control, they then marginalise those who see things differently. This was all too often the experience of my own working life, where my own sometimes left-field experiences were regularly rejected by the institution they were intended to help, in favour of those who were prepared to say the right thing at the right time to the right person – and sometimes to engage in practices that looked suspiciously like gaming the system they claimed they upheld.

In a way, the career climbers and the wage-slaves are two side of the same coin; the response of the ambitious to the not-ambitious is to exclude them or ignore them. They achieve a monopoly on the success-criteria, which they then cast in their own image. They consider themselves pivotal to the profession, definers of both success and failure – and exercise the control that seemingly renders both themselves indispensable and everyone else (not just the wage-slaves) disposable. It is just the effect which the prioritisation of management over grass-roots practice has had everywhere, especially when seniority, perceived “authority” and remuneration favour the former.

I have no idea how widespread the wage-slaves are. Like most others, I saw examples of brilliant, gifted teaching in my time – but probably more examples that ranged from dull to utterly dire. I encountered people (for example when covering for them) who were clearly running very effective practice that was helping their pupils greatly – and those who were unmitigated disasters. But the correlation with those who were “going places” in their careers was certainly not what one might hope, and at times it even seemed inverse. Not infrequently those who followed approved practice closely were still not effective; others who did not clearly were. Maybe there is a reason for that: the truth about expertise in teaching that as with all professions, dare not speak its name:

Talent and Seniority are not (always) linked.

Naively, I believed the tosh about empowered individual practitioners, and tried (not least through this blog and my CPD work) to add my two-pennyworth. But I was saying the wrong things to the wrong people, no matter how true to my classroom experiences or how rooted they were in my own professional reading and thinking. As a long-standing colleague once told me, I never learned to “play the game”.

Yet I too was pulled up sharp in Ashman’s blog, by such a brutal assertion. I was forced to accept that it is indeed consistent with rather a lot of what I have witnessed in teaching over the years: of people who seemed to have weak command of, or interest in their subjects; whose own sharp intellect was never very evident; who as a result seemed capable of only seeing education in the reductivist, instrumental terms that were handed down by their bosses: who did indeed seem to need to be told how to act. It seemed to be the most fundamental denial of the role of the teacher imaginable: people employed as educators who seemed themselves only to possess only a limited conception of what it really means to be educated.

Maybe they were indeed in it just to earn a crust. In a way, I sympathise because their predicament is as real as it is disowned by the PC-speakers. I no longer believe the myth that all who enter teaching come with a burning desire and talent to do nothing else; I myself only really came to appreciate the importance of that much later on as my age and experience grew. Most others seemed to be the same.

It is all another PC myth that the profession perpetuates, while doing nothing about the problems it causes, be they the better identification of promising young entrants, or the way the subsequent over-specified remedial measures actually compromise perfectly competent but individualistic teachers. I suspect for their own good, the wage-slaves would be better off doing something else – and I now know that education is far too important for it to be left them.

But it is also too important to be left to the office-worshipers. The answer is not a profession so closed to diversity that it will tolerate nothing other than the narrow views of those with the sharpest elbows who muscle their way into position of influence – some of whom themselves seem to have concluded that the best solution to their own wage-slave problem lies in the Peter Principle.

It genuinely rankles most when you find yourself being judged by someone who visibly understands less about your teaching than you know you do yourself, especially when they have half your years or experience. And doubly so when they imply you don’t know what you are talking about.

So I have become no admirer of the gushing PC-speak of those who (think they) control the profession, or who are set on becoming them; it is not needed, to do this work effectively. In fact, it makes me doubt their motives. Probably the wage-slaves need to be removed – but I also suspect that many of them are not as hopeless as they think, had the definition of “Good Teacher” not been narrowed to the extent it has by the loose clique that calls the shots. The effect of that has been felt by far more than those who really did need support: under the deception that there is only one “right” way, and that everyone else was a slacker, it cramped the style of thousands of perfectly good teachers.

None of the above is intended to criticise the many genuine people who work in teaching, who still adhere to the profession’s enduring ethic. But my efforts to be part of it simply left me with a cynical perspective on the wider group I found myself working with, which increasing age and distance has made me both more certain of, and less afraid of calling.

Sadly, I struggle to have much love for the profession as a whole; it seems more concerned with being doctrinaire than inclusive; more concerned with professional form and prospects than the routine, day-to-day delivery of great education to as many people as possible. Its own behaviour often seems completely at odds with the values it loudly trumpets, not least the fake public modesty behind which lies a deep-seated sense of bossy self-importance.  What’s more, it rejects any who dare to disagree. Luckily, the corner of it where I am passing my final years in teaching has better perspective than many, and has done quite a lot to restore some faith.

I suspect it always has been thus; but now that the rewards for supposedly-stellar individuals are as great as they are, it is becoming intolerable. Perhaps it is only seen by those of us with access to hindsight; none of us saw these things as starry-eyed new arrivals.

The real problem, however, is that some never do – and too often, they are in charge.