Carl Honore

Blinding them with science…

At breakfast this morning, I heard an alarming report on theBBCabout falling standards in science in UK schools. The Royal Society of Chemistry says that the obsession with exam scores means that even the brightest pupils are being “taught the test”rather than how tosolve problems, think critically or apply mathematics in science. The RSC spokesman argued that exams now mainly reward students for regurgitating facts instead of for using their imagination to think a problem through in stages. A similar lament is heard from universities who now spend a fortune on remedial maths and science courses for pupils, and from businesses who are snowed under with graduates who boast luminous exam scores but lack basic science skills. And the problem is not confined to science. Imposing a rigid curriculum and then making exam scores the only barometer of academic success narrows horizons in the humanities, too.One couple I know have been asked by their seventeen-year-old son not to talk to him about any literature, history, or art that is not on the syllabus at his school in London. He’s worried it will get in the way for his exams, says his father. Part of me admires his focus, but it’s also pretty depressing that education has become so tunnel-vision.It’s not all bad news. Today’s students are very good at finding and manipulating information, and at analyzing visual data, but other skills seem to have fallen by the wayside.University professors complain that students now balk at reading whole books, preferring much shorter excerpts and articles. They also seem impatient with ambiguity, demanding instant answers that are black and white. The reasons for this are complex, but the obsession with test scores plays a role.A century and a half ago, England tried paying teachers according to how well their pupils answered questions asked by visiting inspectors. Schools, in response, put more energy into rote learning and began encouraging weaker pupils to play hooky on inspection days. Today, with so much kudos and cash riding on test scores, educators around the world have been caught doing the same or worse. A fourth-grade teacher in Spokane, Washington, recently gave her pupils answers to the mathematics portion of a state exam in advance and allowed some to swap answers during the test itself. Investigators reported that, in the section where students were asked to show their work, one had written, My techre [sic] told me. In England, the headmaster of a primary school was caught helping pupils cheat on science and math SATs. Not long ago, Japan was rocked by the revelation that hundreds of its schools allowed pupils to skip entire courses to allot more time to studying for the country’s notoriously competitive university entrance exams.

And let’s not forget the basic drawback of exams: the one thing they measure better than anything else is how good a child is at taking exams. Is that really what we need in the New Economy? In the future, the biggest rewards will go not to the yes-men who know how to serve up an oven-ready answer but to the creatives, the nimble-minded innovators who can think across disciplines, delve into a problem for the sheer hell of it, and relish the challenge of learning throughout their lives. These are the people who will come up with the next Google, invent an alternative fuel, or devise a plan to slay poverty in Africa. The problem is that relentless pressure, scrutiny and measuring can make children less creative: rather than take chances or push the boundaries, they play safe, opting for the answer that earns the gold star.

Where do we go from here? The UK government says there is nothing to worry about because science test scores have risen, which seems to misses the point entirely. Part of the problem here is that exam scores have become an end in themselves. But change is coming, even from those most resistant to it. A few weeks ago the UK government abolished all SATs (national standardized exams) for 14-year-olds.

School’s out…side

When I speak in public about Under Pressure, I often ask the audience what they remember most vividly about their childhood. The answers usually break down along the same generational lines. Anyone over the age of about 25 remembers playing outdoors, usually with no adults around. The younger members of the audience recall being indoors, with grown-ups hovering nearby and often with an electronic screen involved. Over the last generation, the way children play has changed profoundly. So much play is now managed, supervised, organized, structured, benchmarked, expensive. It’s no longer enough for children to kick a ball around with their friends in the park or on the street, like Pelé, Maradona and Bobby Charlton did; they have to join a soccer team and play in uniforms with referees, coaches and parents screaming themselves hoarse on the sidelines. It’s not enough for them to mess around with twigs, weeds and dirt in the garden; they have to sit indoors with an electronic educational toy farm. So much play now occurs indoors in sterile environments created by risk-management consultants and bureaucrats from the health and safety department. Or it happens in the home, where anxious parents are desperate to insulate their kids from the perils of outside world. The net effect is that a lot of children nowadays lead very cloistered lives. They seldom go outdoors alone to explore, to take risks, to get lost or get into trouble, to play. Under Pressure examines the price we pay, starting with rising obesity, for treating children like battery hens, but it also investigates the solutions. One of the most promising is outdoor schooling, which has long been popular in Scandinavia but is now gaining ground around the world. The idea is simple: take kids out of the classroom and set them free in Nature. This works particularly well for pre-schools. For Under Pressure, I visited one outdoor pre-school, theSecret Gardenin Fife, Scotland, where three-year-olds spend their time in a forest negotiating harsh weather, open camp-fires and poisonous fungi. I saw more than one of the children break a piece of ice off the top of a muddy puddle and suck on it like a popsicle. In other words, outdoor pre-schools are the stuff of nightmares for a risk-averse society. But they work fabulously well. Sure, the children suffer the odd scratch or burn, but they arrive at kindergarten happier, more confident and less prone to illness and allergies than do their indoor peers. They are eager, motivated learners. They also have a strong feel for the natural world, which is essential if we’re going to save the environment. I’m writing about this now because Canada’s first outdoor pre-school is about to open. It’s set in 77 hectares of woodland on the outskirts of the capital, Ottawa, and is called theCarp Ridge Forest Preschool. As a Canadian myself, I’ll be interested to see how this experiment plays out. What about the notoriously cold winter in the Great White North? Well, the kids will play outdoors all year round, but the organizers are not extremists. When the thermometer dips below 10C, the children will move indoors. My feeling is that the kids could probably carry on playing happily at even colder temperatures but you have to draw the line somewhere. And you have to think of the teachers’ comfort too.

Homework – enough is enough

Some good news from the front line in the battle against academic overload. The Toronto School Board has voted to roll back the homework juggernaut. In Canada’s largest city, children will no longer be assigned work over Christmas, Spring Break and other important holidays. Kindergarten pupils will not face any more take-home assignments apart from reading or chatting to parents. Up to Grade 2, homework will largely consist of playing games and family activities such as baking. There are also strict limits in the later years. Kids in Grade 7 and 8 will get no more than one hour a day across all subjects, high-schoolers a maximum of two. The Toronto School Board’s aim is to shift the emphasis from quantity to quality. As well as cutting the hours, that means making sure homework assignments are clear, purposeful and engaging rather than just box-ticking busy-work.

There is much to applaud here. In schools around the world, homework has become a millstone slung around the neck of teachers, pupils and parents. Yet research shows that it is of limited value up to the age of 11. Even for older children homework is subject to the law of diminishing returns. Some experts think is should be abolished altogether. If it is to have any hope of being useful, homework must be assigned in reasonable amounts to avoid crowding out time for rest, play, and socializing. It also needs a clear purpose beyond keeping kids busy. More and more books are making this point. One of the most compelling isThe Case Against Homework, by Sara Bennett, who writes a splendid blog that has become a lightning rod in this debate. I also devote a chapter to homework in Under Pressure.

Much of that chapter explores how schools across the world are taking steps to free children from the tyranny of too much of the wrong kind of homework and finding that they learn better as a result. The bold change of heart in Toronto is just part of a larger trend that includes a recent decision by the Education Board of Shanghai, China to abolish homework for all first and second graders.

Of course, beyond the academic reasons for keeping homework on a tight rein lies the deeper question of what childhood is for. If we want it to be a time of play, freedom, and wonder, then piling on the homework is not the way to go about it. What are your happiest memories of childhood? I’ll bet they don’t involve slogging through pages of fractions and spelling lists. Mine are of long afternoons playing road hockey with friends in our driveway, and leaving the garage doors covered in a permanent Jackson Pollock of tennis-ball marks. Or war games in the backyard with elastic-band guns made from scraps of wood and bent coat hangers. Or playing Maze Craze, a battle game that we invented using Lego and marbles. Many of the boys with whom I shared those afternoons are still friends today. None of us can remember a single homework assignment.

Warrior girls

Last week I shared a stage in Chicago with Michael Sokolove, the genial but sharp-eyed author of a compelling new book called Warrior Girls.It explores the same terrain that I look at in the Sports chapter of Under Presure, but in greater depth (it’s a whole book on the subject, after all) and with the focus on girls. Our insistence on treating children like professional athletes, with punishing training regimes, long seasons, win-at-all-costs competition and early specialization is taking a heavy toll, but in some ways the damage is worse for girls because their bodies are simply not as robust. Less testosterone means less muscle and more oestrogen means laxer ligaments. That makes girls more prone to chronic knee pain; shin splints; stress fractures; ankle sprains; concussions; hip and back pain. They are five times more likely than are boys to rupture an anterior cruciate ligament (ACL). Just look at the roll call of female athletes hobbled by over-training in their youth. Katharine Merry, the fastest girl in the world at 14, was laid low by a series of knee, achilles and foot injuries. Martina Hingis hit the pro tennis tour at 14 but was forced by foot and angle injuries to retire at 22. Foot trouble ended Anna Kournikova’s tennis career at the same age. Of course, sports are wonderful for girls and we should be encouraging more of them to take part. But this needs to be done in the right spirit – that means without turning sports into a fight to the death. Like boys, girls need to learn to push themselves hard without pushing themselves over the edge.

Summer’s out…

Another thought to add to my May 24th post about the demise of the summer vacation. One of the rites of passage for teenagers used to be working a summer job – usually something menial like washing cars or bagging groceries. I waited tables, worked on a construction crew, ran a photocopying shop and mowed lawns. None was ever going to be a career choice but I had fun and learned a lot. Today, though, teenagers are turning their back on the dead-end summer job in record numbers. Manydon’t want to work – and don’t have to because their parents are happy to keep paying their credit card bills. Others prefer to burnish their résumés by attending summer school and college-prep programs or by doing volunteer work. Some are setting up their own businesses. All of these are worthy pursuits, but maybe something is getting lost along the way, especially for teenagers from affluent families. Though it may not glitter on a résumé, a menial job can teach some important lessons – that not everyone is as rich as you,that life can be tough and unpleasant, thatsometimes you have to keep on working when you’d rather stop. In arecent article inUSA Today,leading CEOs explained that doing menial summer jobs in their teens gave them a solid grounding for later success. As parents we want to give our children the best of everything, which tends not to include flipping burgersat McDonald’s or cleaning out the toilets at the mall. But maybe it should. After all, nothing punctures that sense of entitlement, that feeling that only the best is good enough, more than getting bossed around at a dead-end job. Instead ofgetting our kids accustomed to the best of everything, perhaps we should be helping them to learn a much more useful skill: how to make the best of what they’ve got. I hear Burger King is now taking applications for the summer…

Postcards from the edge…

I’m in the US right now touring forUnder Pressure, which means a parade of interviews with radio stations around the country. I love the call-in shows especially because I get to hear from parents, teachers, social workers – all those people on the front-line of child-rearing. And it really seems that there is a growing consensus that we have collectively lost our bearings. Callers often share amusing and/or horrifying examples of hyper-parenting. A few minutes ago someone in Milwaukee said that a friend in New York has sent her infant to mastication classes because she’s worried he’s not chewing well enough. Another story: When a child in Chicago uttered his first word, his mother called in speech therapist to accelerate his language development. Or the parents who papered (literally) their hotel room with bubble-wrap to prevent their toddler from hurting herself. I could go on but I have to go give a talk now….

Too much of a good thing?

Just back from a conference in Newcastle, England called Thinking Digital. It was a glimpse into the extraordinary ways that technology is going to reshape the future, revolutionizing every aspect of the way we work, play and live. It may even alter what it means to be human, as artificial intelligence catches up with the real thing and more and more gadgets – think medical nanobots patrolling the bloodstream or computer chips boosting the brain – are installed in our bodies. The most vivid picture of this sci-fi future was painted by Ray Kurzweil, the futurist and inventor, who appeared on stage as a ghostly apparition inside a slab of glass. He was thousands of miles away in California yet we could see and hear each other as if we were all in the same room. I found the crystal ball-gazing in Newcastle exhilarating, but also a bit troubling. It seems to me that as the rate of technological change accelerates, we urgently need to slow down and answer some crucial question, starting with: Do really want everything that technology can deliver and will all the advances be benign? Even as a technophile, I have some doubts. What happens to memory, patience and the journey of discovery when all human knowledge is instantly accessible from anywhere? What happens to human relations when you can download the full profile of anyone you meet and read it on a Terminator-like screen on your contact lens before speaking to them? And who gets to write that profile? Above all, what happens when we are constantly connected to the Internet and no longer have any time or space for silent, solitary reflection?

One reason for the global obesity epidemic is that our bodies were designed for a hunter-gathering society and are therefore highly efficient at storing excess calories as fat. Today, when calories are permanently on tap and there is less call for burning them off hunting and gathering, our waist-lines are ballooning. As I sat there in Newcastle, with my own waist expanded from the buffet lunch, it occurred to me that maybe the same analogy works for the high-tech revolution. We are hard-wired to be curious and to want to connect and communicate with others – and those are wonderful instincts. The trouble is that in a world of limitless information and constant access to other people, we don’t know when to stop. Just as we keep on eating even after our bodies have had enough food, we keep on texting, surfing and wilfing long after our minds have reached a frenzy of stimulation and distraction. The truth is that no matter how fast the technology becomes, the human brain is always going to need slowness. To rest and recharge. To think deeply and creatively – every artist, designer and inventor knows that deceleration is essential for the act of creation. We also need to slow down in order to look into ourselves and grapple with the big questions: Who am I? How do I fit into the world? What is life really for? Nor is this a concern voiced only by monks and meditation gurus. Even the most gung ho geeks are starting to warn that being “always on” may not be the best thing for the human brain. Dipchand Nishar, the man in charge of wireless technology at Google, has said: “We had Generation X and Generation Y. Now we have Generation ADD.” And other high tech companies, including Hewlett-Packard and Microsoft, are coming to similar conclusions.

Yet this is not a call for a Luddite backlash. Technology is not evil; on the contrary, it has mind-blowing potential to make the world a better place. But as we enter the era of what Kurzweil calls “exponential growth in technological advances,” the need for circumspection is greater than ever before. That means thinking hard about how best to apply each new technology rather than just automatically adopting it. Or put another way: As the pace of change quickens, we need to remember that some things never change, starting with the fact that we are human beings. And human beings will always need to unplug and slow down.

In praise of summer holidays…

A new reportfrom a leading think tank in Britain draws some intriguing conclusions about the future of education. First off, the authors warn that the modern obsession with academic learning in primary schools is backfiring, that pushing the three Rs earlier and earlier is failing to produce a generation of children who are more literate and numerate than before. Their prescription: promote overall well-being in the classroom and clear more space for kids to learn through play. “Improving results can’t just be about focussing on maths, English and science,” the report argues.”Schools need more support in developing healthy and happy young people.” Amen to that. Let’s just hope that the politicians take note. But the report contains a second conclusion that is harder to interpret: that the long school holiday should be abolished in favour of a series of two-week holidays spread across the year. The argument is that children forget too much of what they learn during the academic term when schools shut down for a long summer break. But is this really the case? I’ve read mixed research on the subject. Some argue that children need a long break from school in order not only to recharge their batteries but also to let the academic learning sink in. And what about the sheer joy of a long vacation? Surely that is the time when children can see a world in a grain of sand and hold infinity in the palm of their hand – it’s certainly hard to imaging William Blake campaigning for shorter holidays for the young. One of my happiest memories of childhood was finishing school at the end of June and knowing that I had two months of play and freedom ahead of me. Do we want to lose that? Especially when nations with very successful education systems (eg. Finland) allow their kids a long holiday in summer. If academic gains really are eroding during the warmer months in Britain, maybe the real reason is not that children are taking a break from school; maybe it’s that they are getting the wrong kind break. For many kids, the summer holiday is no longer a time to play freely, to roam the neighbourhood without adults butting in or to explore the world on their own terms; it’s just an extension of the rest of the year, a treadmill of structured and supervised activities. Perhaps that is where we are going wrong. Instead of abolishing the long summer holiday, we should be finding better ways to spend it…

More stranger danger

Yesterday I did a radio interview with a station in Newfoundland in Canada. Before my segment, I listened to a report of how local police had street-proofed a city there. You heard a voice repeatedly saying “Never do this” and “Don’t do that.”I felt afraid just listening on the phone from the other side of the ocean.Then you heard children talking about how they would run a mile from any strange adult. It was chilling, and depressing. Is that really the message we want to send to our kids? That every grown-up is a potential abuser? That you can’t trust anyone unless you know them personally and they have been formally approved by your parents? What kind of society does that create? And how will children ever learn how to distinguish the very tiny minority who are a threat from the rest of us? Anyway, it made me think again how timely is the Safer Stranger campaign just launched in Britain (see blog post May 7).

Testing times

Around the world, exam season is switching into high gear. Months of studying, training and sweating are all coming down to a few lonely hours in a testing hall. But will children emerge from their exams better equipped for life in the real world? Maybe not. Over the last generation, many countries have put standardized testing at the core of their education systems so that kids now sit more exams than ever before. English pupils, for instance, take a whopping 70 national tests while at school. The trouble is that the obsession with targets and measurable results is backfiring. Instead of inspiring pupils to learn, teachers end up teaching to the test. The curriculum narrows. Children learn how to serve up oven-ready answers rather than how to think outside the proverbial box. What exams do better than anything else is tell us how good a child is at taking exams – and how useful is that? Of course, testing has a role to play in education – it can spur children to work hard and it can help measure their progress. But it’s folly to make exam results the sole measure of a child or a teacher or a school. That is why pressure is building around the world to reduce the emphasis on testing. A couple of days ago, a parliamentary committee concluded that testing is now doing more harm than good in England. Read morehere.