What’s Next?

I’ve talked before about how using philosophy in education was a far better way of creating moral education than religious education and here’s an impressive demonstration of it’s power in a UK school.

Paul Jackson, one of the school’s two head teachers, said: “Gallions opened in 1999 on a new estate in the East End, with all the problems that an inner-London estate brings.

“Virtually everyone that came here had some kind of emotional or behavioural difficulty.”

Philosophy is taught across the board in place of citizenship lessons and the school has hired a dedicated “philosophy for children” teacher, Lisa Naylor.

She said: “I have witnessed children who barely spoke English and children who had very little self-confidence debating fervently whether the sound of rain on the window was or wasn’t music.”

At first, she had difficulties getting the children involved without being aggressive towards their classmates.

But soon pupils were able to “challenge each other’s ideas in an assertive and non-aggressive way”, leading to better behaviour and greater respect for one another.

How fantastic is that? Some of the comments are from people complaining that schools should be concerntrating on the fundamentals (schools are incapable of teaching children more than one thing you see), but how can teaching children to think not be fundamental? Given the improvement in behaviour shown, it’d suggest that teaching philosophy might make teaching other fundamental skills easier as well.

One comment said that these questions were far too advanced for kids this age, something that is demonstratively untrue from the article. Children are not only capable of thinking philosophically but seem to love it.

I’m pleased to see the government bringing out what looks like intelligent measures to fight cyber bullying. I’m also happy they’re actually working with companies like YouTube instead of decrying them as unfixable evil.

There’s been a lot of noise about teaching unions wanting to shut down YouTube outright, or at least block it within schools. The trouble with this is blocking within schools doesn’t address the problem. Bullying uses of YouTube are in the minority and throwing the whole thing is impracticable at this point. Given how easy YouTube makes marking ‘inappropriate’ videos for removal, this should be where the future of this discussion lies.

Simply banning YouTube within schools doesn’t solve the problem as cyber-bullying is so insidious precisely because it isn’t rooted at school, students are still free to offensively use it yet schools have closed themselves off from being able to monitor the problem. Schools need to be actively pushing themselves into YouTube, setting up alerts on keywords related to the school and teaching students how to (and that they should) flag up offending videos. Banning it simply sends the message to the bullies that it’s their domain. If schools start to take ownership, this message could be reversed.

Now having a look around on the subject, I ran across this.

Teachers are demanding that YouTube, the hugely popular video sharing website, be closed down for refusing to remove violent, threatening and sexual content involving children and staff.

If this was true and YouTube were ‘refusing’ to take down such videos, it absolutely wouldn’t be something that could be trusted on the web, let alone in schools. Deeper in the article I found an example that made reassured me about exactly what ‘refusing’ entailed but also showed a different nature to the problem.

This month three pupils at Hayling College, Hayling Island, Hampshire, were suspended after mobile phone footage of two girls fighting was placed on YouTube. Max Bullough, the college’s headteacher, said he had great difficulty getting the video taken down and eventually had to turn to the police.

Bullough found he was unable to ‘flag up’ the video for YouTube’s attention because he was not a member of the site and then he could not find contact details. ‘They don’t seem to operate a complaints policy,’ he said. ‘They say they have a team who deal with flagged up content operating 24 hours a day, seven days a week, but I don’t believe it.’

The problem here is that instead of working through the system in place, Mr Bullough decided to instead ignore it completely and then complain. From my perspective registration is free and easy if he’d done so he’d have been able to flag up the video before a lot of people had seen it. In fairness however, that’s a lot of seemingly un-necessary steps for someone in unfamiliar territory to go through. This isn’t an isolated mindset and so YouTube needs to reach out here.

It makes perfect sense to need users to register before flagging so schools should be given incentives to create accounts, more powers on YouTube might help them be more willing to engage. I’m envisioning trusted accounts for schools that have the power to remove videos instantly, but which is quickly followed up by a review from YouTube. Accounts that consistently remove videos according to the Terms of Use would be allowed to continue, whilst those that abuse their power would be relegated to the standard flagging power. What I’d really love to see are some stats from YouTube about the processes of removal. Their press page says videos are reviewed ‘within minutes’ and given what I’ve seen I’m inclined to believe them, but I’d like to see something more numeric than that to convince sceptics.

They do have a complaints page, but I will agree it is not easy to find, in fact the only public email address I can find are for security issues and the press. A separate contact for dealing with institutions like schools would be a good idea.

YouTube needs to make it easy for people who don’t really want to deal with it too much to talk to them. Otherwise it and the huge number of educational videos on it might be on the outside for a long time. This is a double blow to students as they lose the educational material inside and when outside still have to face cyber bullying because schools have abdicated responsibility for dealing with it.

Other problems such as camera-phones in classrooms don’t have easy solutions. Of course, for a mindlessly technical solution to the problem, there exist prototypes of boxes that sit in rooms and blind any camera lens they see. Whilst I’m slightly concerned about the potential abuses of the technology (couple a few of them with the pain ray and you have a mobile torture squad that can’t be photographed), this is exactly the sort of situation a VERY low cost version would be perfect. In the meantime we might actually have to give teachers some usable powers over students, and no one wants that.

‘The government is lining up with religious groups to assert that faith schools make a positive contribution to community cohesion in England.’

Wow, that’s a scary sentence.

I’ve sat here and thought really hard about this and I’m confused, how can this possibly be true? I went to a mild faith school that certainly had a community, but was this because of its faith? The issue here isn’t that faith schools aren’t capable of brining community cohesion; they’re saying that they’re actually better at it than a secular ‘community’ school would be. I’m stumped; do communities bond more watching the nativity than any other kind of play? Does collectively closing our eyes and mumbling to a deity (especially bearing in mind how unlikely it is everyone present agrees which one) bring us closer together than actually talking to each other?

As always there’s an appeal to multiculturalism here but this is missing the point of being multicultural, surely true multiculturalism would involve making culture and religion an increasingly private affair and not an issue for the state? We’re obviously stepping away from the idea that schools should teach truth here by allowing multiple faiths in on the act; by definition a maximum of one can be right. If pressed on this, they’d probably respond that this gives everyone the opportunity to ‘find their own path to truth’, but then why I am funding someone to inflict their point of view on a child? If the religion is true surely these children would find their own way to it, is God’s message really so pitiful these days it needs the state to provide a captive audience?

There are of course practical issues, some faith schools require proofs of the child and their parents’ faith to let them in, how can that possibly be positive to community cohesion? Why should local parents have to prove to their tax funded school that they attend church x times in order to secure a good education for their child? Whilst Nick Gibb says faith schools promote ‘choice’, do they really? If there’s a choice of a few schools in an area and one requires your 11 year old child to prove they’re a practicing Christian, is that more or less choice? Faiths schools have also been known to use their ability to select on religious grounds to practice social selection by looking at parents’ marriage certificates and occupations. Some ask kids to write accounts of themselves and their home lives under the guise of examining their commitment to their faith but really this allows the schools to skim off the more articulate ones, giving the impression that faith schools have a special knack for education, when really it’s good ol’ fashioned selection.

Perhaps as worrying is what this suggests about the thinking behind it. This is the government saying that religion is essential for young people in education, an assertion I’d flat out deny. Which is more beneficial: religious teachings or being taught how to think? Which is more effective for teaching morality to a child; someone telling you one of the Ten Commandments is not to steal, or a discussion where it’s discussed exactly why stealing is wrong? Far better than imposing an authoritative morality is building up a moral framework inside the child to allow them to evaluate new situations and understand what’s right and wrong in any given circumstance. What’s more, there’s evidence for this. In schools where philosophy is taught at a young age, there are less playground fights, better behaved kids with greater confidence and self-esteem and believe it or not, children become measurably smarter than those control groups that are not taught it. This really is a no-brainer.

Nothing stops faith schools benefiting from these secular methods and I know from personal experience that not all faith schools are like Vardy’s, but I’ve still yet to find an benefit to faith in school. Religious Education may give benefits in understanding, but teaching religious morality does not when teaching philosophy does. Ignoring the actively anti-community selection methods of some schools I still can’t see how faith schools (which while being perhaps being accepting of other faiths cannot help but promote a singular faith)can be better for multi-faith communities that schools that don’t take sides and teach what can actually be known.

So the question remains: What can faith schools do better?

From Blair’s last Prime Minister’s questions:

Richard Younger-Ross: What advice would the Prime Minister give his successor on the relationship between faith and state, in particular with regard to his successor’s reported views on the disestablishment of the Church of England?

The Prime Minister: I am really not bothered about that one.

Now, I could go off and say that it’s pretty obvious that Blair didn’t give a monkey about any separation of Church and State but I’m going to excuse him for trying to be funny, the question wouldn’t have been expected and answering any questions related to Brown would have been a no-no.

What’s less encouraging though is the general reaction in blogs about it, It’s generally considered to a deserving put down to an obscure Lib Dem. Finkelstein over at Comment Central described it as a “long, boring, pointless and complicated question”; long and complicated perhaps, but boring and pointless? Tell that to the students of The King’s Academy, Emmanuel City Technology College and Trinity Academy, who thanks to Blair’s willingness to hand schools over to anyone with money, are now being taught creationism alongside evolution in Biology lesson as well as the historical truth of Noah’s ark. Tell that to the Church of England officials that are desperately trying to get Intelligent Design into science classrooms. Whist American Secularists may be fighting a constant rear-guard action, at least the constitution is technically on their side; here we have no such help and nutjobs like Vardy get to present their beliefs as facts to impressionable young children in publicly funded schools.

The question is an important one: How will Brown handle faith groups? We’ve already seen signs that he wants to hand back appointments of Bishops, an interesting contrast to Blair who used his veto to turn down candidates for the diocese of Liverpool. Even if this leads to the disestablishment of the Church of England, it’s unlikely to bring about the end of faith schools. Brown differs in important regards here, but there’s little cause to rejoice yet.