Newsom (1963)

Notes on the text
Preliminary pages Membership, Contents, Introduction, Principal recommendations

Part 1 Findings
Chapter 1 Education for all
Chapter 2 The pupils, the schools, the problems
Chapter 3 Education in the slums
Chapter 4 Objectives
Chapter 5 Finding approaches
Chapter 6 The school day, homework, extra-curricular activities
Chapter 7 Spiritual and moral development
Chapter 8 The school community
Chapter 9 Going out into the world
Chapter 10 Examinations and assessments
Chapter 11 Building for the future
Chapter 12 The teachers needed

Part 2 The teaching situation
Chapter 13 What should secondary imply?
Chapter 14 An education that makes sense
Chapter 15 Attainments and achievement
Chapter 16 The subjects and the curriculum
Chapter 17 The practical subjects
Chapter 18 Science and mathematics
Chapter 19 The humanities
Chapter 20 School organisation and staff deployment

Part 3 What the survey shows
Chapter 21 The 1961 survey
Chapter 22 The boys and girls
Chapter 23 The work they do
Chapter 24 The men and women who teach them
Chapter 25 The schools they go to

Acknowledgements

Appendix I List of witnesses
Appendix II Sex education
Appendix III Deployment of teachers
Appendix IV Letter to Minister on teacher training
Appendix V Statistical detail

Index

A report of the Central Advisory Council for Education (England)

London: Her Majesty's Stationery Office 1963
© Crown copyright material is reproduced with the permission of the Controller of HMSO and the Queen's Printer for Scotland.

Chapter 14 An education that makes sense
[pages 114 - 118]

317. Most boys and girls, and especially those with whom we are concerned, want their education to be practical and realistic. They feel a good deal better if they can see that it is vocational. They like to have some say in choosing what they shall learn. We believe that these four words - practical, realistic, vocational, choice - provide keys which can be used to let even the least able boys and girls enter into an educational experience which is genuinely secondary. This chapter of definitions is necessary because these four words have been so bandied about that it often appears that those who use them mean almost contradictory things. If we could have avoided them we would have done so; but we have been unable to find others which express so well the qualities which give life to the secondary education of the boys and girls of our report.

318. Time spent on 'practical subjects' was defined for the analysis of our survey roughly as time spent away from the classroom and its desks. (1) It included, therefore, art and music and physical education as well as wood or metalwork, rural studies, housecraft and needlework. This yardstick will do well enough as an indication of the way our minds are working, and, which is perhaps more important, the way in which the boys and girls feel. Practical, then, when applied to work tends to mean doing something where physical skill is needed to produce ends which may be as entirely different as throwing a javelin, building a rope bridge, budding a rose, making a table, painting a picture, singing a descant or baking a cake. Usually it leads to something which can be seen or handled, though this test will not apply easily to music or drama. Apart from the sheer joy which most people feel in making something, the special importance of practical work to the boys and girls of our report is that it is for many of them both the surest way in which to achieve some success and the area in which success is best recognised by their peers and their parents. The radio works, the canoe floats, the dress fits, the top of the mountain was reached. Practical work leads not only to success which is easily recognised, but to success which is obviously worthwhile. A healthy and vigorous body, good food, serviceable and stylish clothes, music and art that lift man out of himself - these are indisputably things worth having.

319. The 'practical subjects' have special value for less able pupils also because it is often easier to make the bridge between school and non-school in these subjects than in others. The table made at school can lead naturally to the table in the department store window; tables (and for that matter furniture in general) will be looked at with a knowledgeable and appraising eye if the woodwork master teaches his boys to see and to think as well as to make. The choir that sings in schools can sing in hospitals; the jazz group that practices in the dinner hour can play for evening dances. Here is an easy gate to one of the qualities that makes education secondary. It is in contexts like these that we use the word practical; and it is for these and similar reasons that, without underestimating its value for abler boys and girls, we find it an indispensable key to providing really secondary elements in the education of the boys and girls of this report.

320. Two cautions are necessary. The practical subjects ought not to be an ivory tower in which our boys and girls take refuge, or are shut up because they are not good at words and ideas. Taught properly, they should indeed be one of the major ways by which ordinary boys and girls find they have ideas to express and acquire the words to express them. But, our second cautionary word, not all the boys and girls with whom we are concerned are practically minded. Some pupils of well below average ability are better with words than with things. This is no reason for their avoiding practical work, but it limits its usefulness as an instrument of their general education.

321. 'Realistic' in our usage is a word that has a good many affiliations with 'practical', but it is applied more particularly to situations in which people find themselves. Realistic stands to the classroom subjects in the same kind of relation that practical does to those carried on in the specialist art room, the craft rooms and the gymnasium. To set a class to study a carefully defined problem in human conduct and human relations into which boys and girls can project themselves and work out the various implications of different courses of action - this is realistic teaching. It is also imaginative teaching. Indeed very often the only way to be realistic is to use the imagination as an aid to responsible living, thus developing conscience from the stage of taboo to the level of insight. There is, however, an apparently contradictory context in which we use the term. It is sometimes almost equivalent to 'utilisable'. Much of the information, for instance, that is given in courses on citizenship or civics can seem remote and, consequently, is likely to be quickly forgotten. But if, for instance, some way is found of relating this information to a real situation with which the pupils are or want to be familiar - household budgeting, gross and net wages are obvious examples - it becomes useful information which is obviously worth acquiring. To our boys and girls 'realistic' means belonging to the real world, that is to the world of men and women, not of school children.

322. 'Vocational' is a dangerous but indispensable word. It rightly means all that belongs to a man's calling. That itself is no doubt an old-fashioned word, but at least it suggests that there is more to a job than money. This is recognised by the still current use of the term to describe the process by which a man discovers whether he ought to be a priest. This meaning runs the risk of being lost in the narrow context in which a course in bricklaying is no doubt rightly described as vocational education. Probably at first boys and girls only think of a subject as vocational if it involves learning to do something, like bricklaying, which is part of the way people earn their living and which is not related to school work as they have hitherto known it. They can see the point of a vocational subject and often enjoy it whether they themselves are going to take up this kind of work or not. Once they begin to clear their own minds about what they are going to do, vocational takes on for them a more precise and yet a wider meaning. They know that shop assistants, for instance, have to talk to customers; and with this knowledge the whole of English, not just some special limited 'trade English', gains significance. Ordinary school work becomes vocational. Probably the noun with which 'vocational' can most helpfully be associated in a school context is 'guidance'. This is something which should run through much of the work in the last years at school, which should be concerned with what the young people are going to make of themselves both as young workers and in a much wider sense as young men and women. To girls especially the personal aspect of vocation to marriage is already apparent. The interest is ready made; there is an opportunity to give it depth of meaning.

323. The next step forward in life should be seen and talked about positively as going to work, not negatively as leaving school. This step needs to be prepared for in many ways through many subjects of the curriculum. Going to work means earning money, and this is important psychologically as well as financially. Both implications should be explored. Going to work means choosing between this and that opening. The choice ought to be based on knowledge of what openings there are and what the jobs are like. This leads on to weighing one kind of consideration against another - the interest of the job, the pleasure of companionship, the fatigue of travelling, the size of the wage packet, the possibilities of promotion and many more. A right choice involves self-knowledge as well as knowledge of the job - what one can do and what one can't. These are issues which a good school will help its pupils to face, and will take great care to see that they are brought forward and not ignored.

324. But what of vocational work in the narrower sense of learning a skill or a trade? Many of our boys and girls will work with their hands. (2) They will thus be engaged in activities which in a more advanced and specialised way, but also in a more circumscribed way, are akin to much that goes on in the practical subjects. Sometimes there will be a direct relation between what is done at school in these subjects and the work that is subsequently taken up. If there is, so much the better. But in the great majority of instances, there will not be. The value of the practical work at school is not thereby destroyed. It is worth its place both in general terms as part of the education of the person and also in the narrower vocational sense of providing broad experience in physical skills on the basis of which a reasonable judgement about employment can be made. The boys and girls of our report value practical work because it has vocational relevance - possibly for them, certainly for others. It may be school, but it is also real. In the last years at school the same realistic value, as we have already noticed, can be given to other subjects by vocational references without destroying their importance in their own right. English, above all, has vocational relevance to many jobs. Exact understanding of oral and written instructions and clear expression in speech can be seen to be important in many situations which boys, and even more often girls, know they will have to face. But if this was all that English had to offer it would be a stunted contribution. Going to work involves working with other people and getting on with them. It is in this matter of human relations that English has most to give.

325. Education in the junior school and in the early stages of the secondary school is like a table d'hôte meal. The subjects are there on the form timetable and are taken by all the form. There is no choice. Some secondary schools continue in this way right up to the end; indeed as far as timetable making is concerned our survey shows that this is a great deal more common than the reverse and especially so where the less able boys and girls are concerned. (3) But, if we are right in the broad significance that we have given to the word vocational and to the importance of helping boys and girls to make a wise vocational decision, there should also be some element of choice about the later stages of their school work.

326. The less able of our boys and girls are good at so few school things that it is surely common sense to let them develop what strengths they have. They will then enjoy what they are doing and they will want to do their best at it. Their choice may also sometimes be dictated partly by personal reasons - the fact that they like one teacher or cannot get on with another. Such personal likes or dislikes may seem frivolous reasons for selecting an educational curriculum; but they are certainly worth paying attention to for boys and girls who find learning difficult anyhow. This is especially true during adolescence when physiological changes make tremendous inroads on personal equanimity. To provide a means of avoiding a personal quarrel or to enlist the support of a strong liking is often educational wisdom.

327. But to give pupils a sense of being free to choose does not always involve a choice between subjects or between teachers, both of which involve problems of timetable and organisation which may be difficult to resolve. There is often a choice of craft or medium which can be made within a 'practical subject'. This can go far to meet a growing boy's or girl's desire to follow his own bent and to follow it long enough to reach some real competence. This can be just as true in physical education. On an even narrower front it is possible in the humanities. Here the division of labour involved in a cooperative project can be used to give boys and girls some opportunity of contributing their own special interests and talents to the making of a greater whole. Single lessons may also be used to present pupils with the necessity and pleasure of making a personal decision. This may involve a weighing up of the arguments for two different courses of action, which is the beginning of sound moral judgement, or a comparison of several accounts of the same event in different newspapers which provides an approach to a critical opinion. In both instances the pupils take a hand in their own education so that they feel they are being treated not only as real people who have the right to their own views but also, which is even more important, as people who have the capacity to form a right opinion. Freedom of choice is something which all adolescents claim; wise teaching and organisation can help them to justify that claim. We have it in our power to change what might otherwise be brash defiance into responsible judgement.

328. An education which is practical, realistic and vocational in the sense in which we have used these words, and which provides some ground in which to exercise choice, is an education that makes sense to the boys and girls we have in mind. It should also make sense to the society in which they live and which provides their education. But if their education could be completely described in these words it would be sadly lacking. An education that makes complete sense must provide opportunity for personal fulfilment - for the good life as well as for good living. This is not, of course, a matter for a series of lessons. It is a quality to be sought, not a subject to be taught. One of the elements involved is that which shines out when the only possible answer to the question 'why are you taking so much trouble to do this properly', is 'because I enjoy doing it'. This situation may well arise in the course of a hobby, but it may also be found in parts of school work. Wherever it occurs, it is something to be fostered - doing something worthwhile for its own sake is a principal aim not only of education but of life. It is within the reach of clever and stupid alike.

329. Boys and girls of average and below average attainments may initially be attracted - we think they will be - by the approach to secondary education which we have been discussing. They are not, however, likely to persevere unless something is done to lessen their greatest handicap - that inability to express themselves which soon convinces them they have nothing to express. Any education that makes sense to them must concentrate on helping them to talk sense. Sometimes their ineffectiveness may be caused solely by poor intelligence; their understanding is not attuned to the wavelength of mature talk which simply goes over their head. They need to be taught where others would 'catch on'. At least as frequently a naturally slow mind is associated with a word-starved environment and quite often, we believe, the environment alone is to blame for a disappointing failure both to understand and to express thoughts above a childish level. It has long been noticed that country children from remote farms where there is no young companionship have a great deal of lost oral ground to make up when first they come come to school. Something of the same kind of handicap attends boys and girls as they pass from childhood into adolescence in homes where there is no intelligent adult conversation to hear. At a time when they should be reaching out in curiosity to the things their elders talk about, they may find that nothing but the simplest physical pleasures and needs are discussed. The only outside subjects of passionate argument may be the fortunes of football clubs or of pop singers. Many boys and girls may well appear to be much more stupid than they need be simply because of the inarticulate homes from which they come.

330. The remedy, of course, is not a matter of speech training or formal debates, though both may come into it. It involves the cultivation of all the means by which people express their thoughts and emotions - mime, drama, music, conversation - so that the atrophy may be overcome. A double obligation rests on the schools. They have to provide the background of conversation and exchange of information which an educated family offers, and they have to coax their pupils to take part in it. Family opinion and the verdict of those a little older than the pupils is often against what the schools try to do in this field. They are working against the grain. For this reason many failures must be expected, but success can be achieved. When it is, there is nothing which schools do which provokes more genuine gratitude. There is no gift like the gift of speech; and the level at which people have learned to use it determines the level of their companionship, the level at which their life is lived.

Footnotes

(1) See paragraphs 639, 640.

(2) It should be remembered that industrial developments point to a reduction in manual work; and it must not be assumed that manual work is, or ought to be, hereditary.

(3) See paragraphs 643, 644.