Education: A Very Short Introduction, by Gary Thomas
This book is wrong
Gary Thomas’s Very Short Introduction to Education is a description of the history of educational ideas. But Thomas is so suspicious of formal, or conservative, ideas and supports progressive education so starkly, that the book becomes political. He’s so consistently ideological that he ignores evidence and his language is not at all neutral. He is blinded by his progressivism.
Perhaps unsurprisingly for someone so progressive, the book is not quite anti-empirical, but speculative philosophies of education are strongly preferred to measurable results or “outcomes”. And research is often just ignored. It’s true, as Thomas claims, that measuring understanding and creativity is different to measuring “outcomes”. But Finland’s “outcomes” are praised because they are gained by progressive means. He also puts aside the evidence on class sizes in favour of “common sense”…
The ideal of opening young minds and encouraging a spirit of enquiry is something we can all agree on, but letting progressive education off the empirical hook won’t create utopia.
Thomas notes that progressive education can work well if the teachers are excellent, but he is not very keen on the formal methods designed to improve mediocre teachers. He makes several statements to the effect that “surely” teachers are the most committed profession, etc.—forgetting, as he said earlier, that it is the children and their education that matters. Nice, dedicated teachers using progressive measures have frequently delivered terrible results. That ought to be incorporated more strongly into his overall picture.
This political thinking goes so far that Thomas likes to cite the bogeyman he wants to fight rather than the actual ideas on the other side.
So he argues against a Telegraph journalist and a critic of the Tory government when discussing history curricula—but never cites the policy makers. No-one even remotely sensible wants to teach the outdated and chauvinistic Our Island Story in schools and it’s a waste of space in a short (and supposedly serious) book to pretend this was anything other than a culture war over an op-ed.
Similarly, he quotes Dickens in Hard Times more than once, but that was a not-very-good critique in a novel of utilitarian ideas. And why no mention of John Stuart Mill, an actual philosopher and educational theorist,—and a utilitarian!,—who opposed the “cram” Dickens railed against? Mill still advocated teaching ancient Greek and Aristotelian logic though!
Lots of educational progressives want Mr. Gradgrind to be their enemy but he isn’t, scientific research is, and that’s a much harder fight to win.
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Thomas could have given that space to discussing why England has such good PISA results despite the academy and curriculum reforms he dislikes. After all, PISA data was good enough for his argument about Finland! We are told that direct instruction leads to higher levels of criminal behaviour later in life,—but not that it massively improves literacy.
Oh, and by the way, funny thing, Direct Instruction doesn’t turn you criminal and guess what—being semi-literate because your progressive education failed you doesn’t do great things for your jail prospects either. Oh but don’t worry teachers are surely the most dedicated…
No. No, no, no.
Saving children from piss-poor literacy teaching with formal interventions is God’s own work and Thomas’s fidelity to his side makes this obscure. Read chapter 2 of Seven Myths About Education (by
) or see these posts on Marginal Revolution that summarise much of the research. Direct instruction works and it’s kind of a disgrace that Thomas downplayed this so much.Like, yes, Plato and the ideal of the Academy, and children learning the joy of enquiry, sign me up—but here’s a finding he forgot to cite: “75% of children who are unable to read adequately by the end of fourth grade will end up in jail or on welfare.”
Another example of sleight-of-hand: Thomas cites A.N. Whitehead against the teaching of Latin and other no-longer-useful subjects. But Thomas was forgetting perhaps what Whitehead said elsewhere in that essay, channeling Mill’s address to St Andrews:
The antithesis between a technical and a liberal education is fallacious. There can be no technical education which is not liberal, and no liberal education which is not technical: that is, no education which does not import both technique and intellectual vision.
Or maybe try this:
All sound teaching is concerned with definite, accurate achievements on the part of the pupils—to construe grammatically a Latin sentence, to solve a quadratic equation…
Quite.
It’s fine to be somewhat anti-school—as a homeschooler I’m hardly super pro-school myself (my wife writes about her homeschooling on
)—but the concluding proposal is to have fewer people in school at any one time by using a modularised curriculum, so the kids can get real-word experience, delaying university by a decade or more.Again, I’m sympathetic to children doing real stuff. But his evidence for this proposal is the fact that children who spend long amounts of time in hospital do no worse in school and his “common sense” intuition on class sizes.1 A thin basis for potentially giving significantly less education to huge numbers of children! Coupled with inadequate progressive teaching, which he recognised earlier, this idea could be a flaming disaster.
His reasoning is close to whimsical considering the magnitude of the change he is proposing,—what? John Dewey was praised as a genius by the Chinese government so we should start taking children out of school for large chunks of time? Uh-huh... How’d that work out during covid?
Of course, we cannot teach everything, and there are opportunity costs to teaching the wrong things. But AI will shortly demonstrate once again that many children have more potential than schools realise. And really,—how many children leave school over educated?
This book is wrong. It’s below the standards of the usually excellent Very Short Introduction series. And it won’t help any of the children who need it to get a better education.
Subscribers become members of the Common Reader Book Club—a good way to continue your own education! And there are also occasional subscribers’ only posts like this one.
The next book club is on 9th July 19.00 UK time. We are reading Mrs Gaskell’s biography of Charlotte Bronte. Some people can’t make it so I will organise a mid-week session also. Email me or leave a comment if you have a preference. I will produce an extra subscribers’ only video and essay about Jane Eyre in the interim.
Class sizes are also the way Thomas argues that private schools “cement” privilege. Obviously, private schools cement privilege, but Thomas also notes that many other OECD countries have a much less pronounced difference in state-private class sizes than the UK—are they all models of social mobility? Is there not a privileged group of privately educated pupils in the USA? You might think that intensive selection is what gives private schools their biggest advantage, but Thomas dislike heritability (icky right-wing undertones) so this is not examined closely enough.
From what I can tell and what I have read, the quality of the teacher is the single most important factor in a child’s education. To successfully educate a child to adulthood and citizenship the child must have a continual series of good teachers throughout their school life.
You cannot improve teacher quality without having the ability to fire bad teachers. You can’t fire bad teachers with teacher’s unions in place. There is literally no way to improve education without eliminating or drastically changing teachers unions, at least here in the US.
I would be heartily in favor of paying teachers more money if we could fire bad and improve mediocre teachers. We can’t. To me, all discussion about education ends until we can. Writers like Gary Thomas, full of nebulous ideas, plans and missions, avoid the elephant in the room. Teachers need to have 3 things; a knowledge of the subject, a love of the subject and a connection with the student. Instead we have teachers who know nothing, teachers who see the subject matter as a distraction and the student as an abstraction. And we can do nothing about it.
And now, to add to the insanity, we hear that the actual child belongs to the teacher and not the parents.