Final Word: Fail well

By Paul Moore

I have been teaching for more years than I care to remember, certainly more than I should have been in any sane society. I say that both for myself and the unfortunate individuals who have sat through the meanderings I like to call learning. I generally tense with fear when I meet someone on the street and their opening line of conversation is, “You taught me,” and so far I have been fortunate not to leave these conversations with a bloody nose. My worst example of this fear was arriving to have my first covid injection and both nurses saying in unison, “You taught us!”

Over this period of teaching I have, however, noticed a distinct change in the dynamic between teacher and young person, a change which is framed by people outside the education system and hence whom neither I nor the child has any influence over. The result is we both find ourselves at the whim of whatever ideological idea is most prominent at any time and we try to negotiate our way through it without inflicting too much damage on each other.

The latest of these is a concept called ‘gentle parenting’ which, according to the more Dickensian wing of the teaching profession, is causing young people to fail. Gentle parenting is apparently being friends with your child and reasoning with them in stressful situations rather than punishing them in some way. The alternative is to punish them for failure to comply. An example offered is a man who wanted his child to go to Oxford and demanded that she do school work every evening. He came home to find her reading a book but felt the back of the television and finding it still warm he gave the television away. She did go to Oxford but the state of her relationship with her father when she got there is never discussed.

The answer is, of course, somewhere between gentle parenting and authoritarianism, what we might call ‘authoritative’ parenting where boundaries are agreed and adhered to with appropriate and reasonable consequences if they are not. There is also no doubt that we often embrace nonsense which is then exploited by young people more clever than we are. A recent example I heard was of a special space in a school for children who have PCA. Apparently PCA is Pathological Class Aversion. I can assure you everyone I have ever taught had PAC but I still insisted they turn up because one of the few truths about having a career, any career, is that one must at least turn up. I may have mentioned before that I once taught a wonderful little boy in my time in England who had real difficulty reading, writing or even speaking yet on the occasion of one of his meltdowns, after I had admonished him, he declared, “I am sorry sir, my self esteem is very low today.” Too many child psychologists, I fear and a system which is not equipped to deal with the intelligence of this child.

The real issue with those who want to return to Victorian school values, however, is that they are presuming we all agree on the outcomes learning should have. For the Wannabe Rees-Moggs the only outcome of any value is high examination results and entry into ‘high’ society. Many of us do not want this for our children and young people. Fulfilling employment of whatever kind is what we would all really want for young people in whatever field of work they desire and the role of teaching and teachers should be to offer them the opportunity to get there.

Passing standardised examinations was a system designed for the Industrial Revolution and has no place in the complexity of a 21st century social system. And if we must fail then let us remember, and follow, the words of Samuel Beckett and ‘fail well.’