The Book or Facebook?
Matthew Taylor kick started an interesting exchange about the internet as a force for good or evil this week, shortly after this blithe announcement about virtual gateways for schools was made. Yet another example of policy makers who can’t see the good for the geeks! Ed Balls is quoted as saying; We need to find innovative ways of involving parents in schools, particularly secondary schools…to which my first question would be, Why? But putting that aside, his additional comment, I like to think of it as a 'virtual school gate' - where parents can chat to each other online, find out what is happening in the schools and pass on useful information to each other really is one for the staff noticeboard. No one who had any experience of dealing with parents from a school’s perspective would make such a naïve statement, never mind anyone who had taken the trouble to read anything at all about social networking sites and the complex psychological and social issues surrounding them. Add those two together and…oh joy!
But Matthew’s blog also coincided with me doing some work revising my new book on Milton’s Paradise Lost and I was suddenly struck by the parallel between the explosion of self generated publishing on the web (blogging being by far the best example) and the outburst of pamphleteering which accompanied the abolition of the Star Chamber in 1641 and the way in which Milton especially, exploited it. Anyone who has read any of the pamphlets or newsbooks published in vast numbers at the time, will know that they had little interest in fact or objectivity and are in contrast to anything like journalism, examples of pure invective at its most extreme. Milton himself was adept at this kind of writing, abusing individuals with precisely the same kind of ferocity and personal abuse that characterises such a lot of online writing today, though I imagine he wouldn’t have liked to have been told he was merely indulging in smack talk or flaming.
The connection back to Matthew’s original question, the net: good or evil? is that one of the things which came out of the freedom to print what you liked in Milton’s day was…civil war. The great irony is that when this uncontrollable welter of opinion reintroduced censorship in a hypocritical act of self preservation, it wasn’t the pamphlet (or blog) that Milton turned to in his brilliant defence of freedom of the press, Areopagitica…it was the book...
As good almost kill a man as kill a good book; who kills a man kills a reasonable creature, God's image; but he who destroys a good book, kills reason itself, kills the image of God, as it were in the eye.
...and not Facebook.
Joe Nutt
6 Comments
Reader Comments (6)
We sent out a letter to all parents of pupils with poor literacy skills inviting them to a meeting; the response was excellent. Parents were asked to come into the school for one 35-minute period each week for a spelling lesson conducted by myself, TAs or our Senco. We used SRA spelling programmes, which are scripted (very much as our own programme is now), and parents were given copies to use at home. Pupils were taught in groups of 2 to 8 pupils, all matched for spelling ability (and not age).
This all worked brilliantly, and teaching these groups was a joy. The parents developed a sense of group solidarity, and helped each other out when children missed school.
From our head's viewpoint, my programme wasn't such a good idea, but he couldn't stop it. For a start, it made me all but unsackable. But the real problem is that it got him in bad odour with the heads of our feeder schools.
The point of all this is that we really should ask why teachers feel threatened by parents. This certainly wasn't the case in the distant days when I grew up; back then, adults were always very careful to present a united front. They understood kids a lot better than we do.
But perhaps the biggest difference was that schools could do pretty much as they saw fit. There were no CPD courses to fill teachers in on the latest fads, and local authorities (at least in the US) were all but invisible. Teachers used the same lesson plans year after year (you could tell how long they had been teaching by how shop-soiled they were).
Since it was unheard of for parents to walk their kids to school (let alone drive them), there were no conspiracies at the school gate. In general, parents had quite enough to do without worrying overmuch about what went on in school. And schools respected this: kids learned to read without parental assistance. PTAs were virtually the only source of contact between parents and teachers.
We'll never go back to those days, and I expect that you are quite right about the destructive potential of social networking sites. But I do think that schools make a lot of their own problems by refusing to be candid with parents. This is, to a large extent, the result of outside pressure: schools have to pretend everything is just fine, and instead of dealing with problems, they are ignored or denied.
I will, however, take issue with you about Milton, whose only paid employment was working as a censor for Cromwell. I am at one with Samuel Johnson on this subject.
I could fill up pages and pages of examples, some genuinely tragic and others just hilarious, but a school which lacks the confidence and strength to deal with intrusive or challenging parents firmly on the basis of the school's ethos and values and not the parents' own, is almost certainly not much of a school.
I have to make a speech on such themes next week (esp the decline in UK pupils' foreign language learning) and it occurred to me that your insight and/or those of your readers would be most helpful.
Many thanks!
Charles
My first port of call would be CILT, the National Centre for Languages. They carry out and publish research online and have a respectable reputation. I haven't done the detailed reading, but I suspect and you might find what you are looking for here.
http://www.cilt.org.uk/home/research_and_statistics/research/research_digests.aspx
http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2005/aug/25/schools.uk2