Introduction

CONTENTS

Introduction:  Large Educational Issues in the '90s

• The Report's Methodology
  • Chapters 1-3
  • Chapter 4

Literacy:  Developments and Requirements

• Basic Skills
  • Introduction
  • Practical Efforts
  • Historical Background
  • Present Needs
  • Spalding in Practice
• Other Language Arts Issues
  • Functional Grammar
  • Teaching Writing
  • Literature for Young People

Citizenship Education:  What Schools Need

• Background
• Civic Issues Over Time
• Australian Practice
• Curriculum Development

Ethics:  From "Values" to Virtues

• Broad '90s concerns
• Contemporary Moral Barriers
• Larger Horizons and the Media
• Broad Vision and the Reading Habit

Productivity And Schooling:  A Case Study of the Tangara School for Girls in Cherrybrook, NSW

• Introduction
• History and Philosophy
• The Role of Parents
  • Group Meetings
  • Individual Meetings with Tutors
  • Involvement in Extra-Curricular School Activity
  • Pared Family Focus
• Personnel and Curriculum
  • Basic School Design and Atmosphere
  • Professionalism in Practice
  • A Final Word About Replicability

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LARGE EDUCATIONAL ISSUES IN THE '90s

In the 1980s and early 1990s, in a world affected by change so rapid that even the most informed social critics acknowledged their inability to cope with it, the needs of schools received a great deal of public attention.  Of the large educational issues then requiring scrutiny, the most pressing in Australia were teacher selection, the content of the school curriculum, pupil assessment, and structural change in the face of devolution. ⁽¹⁾  These issues remain.  But there are now others, springing from them and from the broader cultural difficulties confronting people everywhere, which demand careful analysis.

Of the problems facing governments, the most pressing have been economic.  Over the past decade Australian governments, faced with the challenge of internationalisation of the economy and Australia's declining economic status, have turned to education for solutions to unemployment and other major vocational problems, or they have imposed their own utilitarian views on universities and schools in an effort to lift the country's economic performance.  Some of the more widely publicised educational initiatives pursued by Canberra in an attempt to make Australia more competitive have failed miserably.  Perhaps the most conspicuous failure has been a push for national standards conceived in terms of narrow, mechanistic skills, competencies, and "outcomes", ⁽²⁾ and expressed in Statements and Profiles widely regarded by experts in the core disciplines as hastily designed, structurally flawed, and lacking in intellectual rigour. ⁽³⁾

Last year in New South Wales, the newly-elected Carr Government initiated a review of the school curriculum designed to discover whether, or in what respects, the National documents have undermined the quality of existing syllabuses, and to ensure that programmes which satisfy an expert understanding of essential content in every core discipline are in place.  This understanding is expected to come through a more thorough, ongoing consultative process than was relied upon by the designers of the Statements and Profiles. ⁽⁴⁾  Critics of the National documents naturally welcome such a process, since one of the more striking features of successful syllabuses has been their slow and careful development over many years through the cooperative efforts of classroom practitioners with a firm grasp of the complex, discipline-dependent nature of skills acquisition. ⁽⁵⁾

Even with excellent curriculum material, individual differences in children and teachers affect the pace at which skills can be mastered in school classes of 25 or more.  Such essential variables as native ability, interest, and developmental maturity influence pupil performance in every core discipline, as do the nature and extent of personal, individualised expressions of attentiveness and concern on the part of their teachers. ⁽⁶⁾  Unfortunately, the broad general skills required in Humanities subjects like English and Social Studies -- that is, reading, writing, speaking, listening -- cannot be mastered unless a very precise, complicated, and distinct series of component skills and learning strategies are also in place.  Syllabus designers need to be much more aware of cognitive considerations of this kind ⁽⁷⁾ than some of the well-intentioned but pedagogically inexperienced members of politically appointed committees have shown themselves to be.

An additional, vital consideration in curriculum design, neglected in the Skills/Competencies/ Outcomes Movement, is the place that must be given to the exploration of ideas and values.  So that their minds and characters are suitably developed, children need more than coaching in essential skills acquisition.  They need, as well, to engage in well-organised whole-group discussion, ⁽⁸⁾ carefully structured small group or one-to-one teacher-pupil conversation, hands-on activity in the expressive and manual arts, individual projects organised around scrutiny of a serious concept or concept, ⁽⁹⁾ and extra-curricular activities such as debating or play production, which require an imaginative engagement with social and cultural issues.  Equally, they need a school climate informed by a love of truth and a respect for individual dignity which will not brook back-biting, put-downs, or other cruel and destabilising acts common in institutional settings.

Increasingly around the world, educators have understood the connection between reliable, stimulating learning environments and productivity.  For this reason they have pressed for changes in school structure and pedagogy which encourage genuinely critical thinking and problem-solving, applied to the intellectual and social spheres.  Sueh innovations as teaching philosophy to older primary and secondary students regardless of their native ability, encouraging final year "exhibitions" within a community setting, ⁽¹⁰⁾ requiring students to amass portfolios that are unmistakably theirs, making regular use of museums and other local exploratoria, ⁽¹¹⁾ and involving older students in community service projects ⁽¹²⁾ have featured strongly in proposals for standard classroom practice which have received serious attention over the past decade.  One feature of an international reform effort has been research designed to replicate the best current practices known around the world. ⁽¹³⁾

Yet because there is still confusion among teachers and policy makers about replicable models for helping children and youth to employ their minds and hearts as they should -- to be more conscious of the needs of others, better able to function well with family, friends, and colleagues, and much more aware of the connections between civic virtue and the creation of a humane culture -- there must be more informed public discussion about the nature of rational inquiry itself.  Virtually everyone agrees that sound school programmes encourage the growth of a robust civil society, but we are far from agreed about such pressing matters as the essential components of courses in English or Social Studies, ⁽¹⁴⁾ the place and the effects of sophisticated technology in the classroom, or the best ways of fostering a love of truth and a suitable respect for human persons in children whose family backgrounds are not only exceptionally diverse, but sometimes painfully dysfunctional.

In 1987, in his controversial best-seller The Closing of the American Mind, Alan Bloom argued that higher education had impoverished the souls of impressionable students.  Four years later, in Illiberal Education, Dinesh D'Souza elaborated on this theme, maintaining with chilling cogency that the source of the poison infecting university life was Political Correctness.  The contention of both these scholars that we have lost a proper regard for timeless continuities and perennial values will be difficult to displace unless we are more attentive to the habits formed by children from the very beginning of their school life.  To be informed citizens and decent human beings, youngsters require environments which show them that lifetime learning is attractive, and which encourage them to seek solutions to genuinely demanding, personally compelling questions.  To date, schools have had difficulty creating and maintaining such environments.

In the first years of schooling, there is a continuing need for a more effective approach to literacy -- not least, because sound reading and writing habits, acquired and consolidated early on, deeply influence subsequent achievement and encourage both the wide reading and the interest in broad general knowledge which, for at least a decade, have been playing second fiddle to such staples of popular culture as film, rock music, and electronic games.  From kindergarten onwards, there is also a pressing reason for giving young Australians an understanding of those essential democratic beliefs and habits which build a nation's self-confidence, and which foster a humane and productive way of life.  Arguably, this cannot be effectually done unless programmes are in place which encourage a beneficent nexus between home and school, and between training of the mind and formation of the character.

Bearing in mind the necessary connections, in each and every mature and balanced person, between functional and "higher" literacy, civic virtue, a capacity to function competently at home and at work, and an awareness of the basic requirements of the moral life, we have focussed in the pages that follow on each of these large concerns of modern schooling.  Chapter 1 concentrates on literacy;  Chapter 2, on effective citizenship education;  Chapter 3, on moral education.  Chapter 4, consolidating the large issues discussed in these chapters, and elaborating on others related to them, explains how and why one Australian school which opened its doors to us in 1988 -- Tangara, in Cherrybrook, New South Wales -- has managed within a period of only 13 years to be strikingly productive.

There can, of course, be no last word on matters as important to turn-of-the-century schools as the ones discussed in these pages.  But there can be progress.  Three years ago, in Educating Australians, we noted that debate in Australia about educational issues has often been insular.  With the advent of the Internet, and of other remarkable technological advances in the world's developing nations, there are possibilities for growth in our entire school population which are genuinely global.  Not the least of these is the prospect of interactive conversations about timeless intellectual and moral issues, held among children separated from one another geographically by thousands of miles. ⁽¹⁵⁾  Already through the electronic media, here and in many overseas countries, pupils are engaging in discussions which are enlarging their imaginative horizons and serving as a spur to further reading, writing, and hard thinking.

THE REPORT'S METHODOLOGY

Chapters 1-3

A word about our approach is in order.  As with our last report, Educating Australians, we have tried to offer a readable text, uncluttered by reams of scholarly reference, to a non-specialist audience.  Our focus is on issues requiring attention, rather than on the large data base which supports our arguments.  Our serious thinking on literacy, moral education and civic virtue began as we wrote and spoke about these key educational areas, and doing related hands-on work in schools.  As part of our usual routine, we spent significant time in primary and secondary classrooms, and in lengthy meetings with teachers, school heads, and educational policy makers.

Chapter 4

Because the structure of a case study of an individual school is necessarily very different from the structure of discussions of large educational policy issues, our discussion of Tangara is markedly different in look and feel from the chapters preceding it.  It is important to stress, however, that the work done at Tangara proceeded from impulses identical to those responsible for the very differently ordered chapters in this Report on literacy, civics, and ethics.  We wanted to know not simply what works well, but why it works well;  and we felt that we could not speak about productive schooling with genuine authority unless we had done close, prolonged work on the terrain under consideration.

Although there are a number of outstanding Australian schools whose operations would have repaid the close analysis fundamental to a case study, we chose Tangara because more extensive teaching and staff development work had been done there over the past seven years than had been possible in other Australian schools.  Writing about the discoveries we had made on-site during this period seemed both a natural consequence of that work and -- because of Tangara's emphasis on the inseparability of proper training of the mind and formation of the character -- appropriate to a Report with key chapters on Ethics, Citizenship Education, and Literacy.  As we go to press, Tangara is discussing the prospect of establishing a regional literacy centre in its geographical region, with the help of government funding, so that work begun with us can continue.

In 1991, when our staff development project at the school began, the consultative methods we employed were those used in Australia by such faithful observers of schools as Barry McGaw of the Australian Council of Educational Research (ACER), Brian Scott of the Committee bearing his name in New South Wales, and overseas academics working in such highly regarded structural reform Networks as Paideia and the Essential Schools Coalition. ⁽¹⁶⁾  These methods included attendance at classes, candid conversations with individual teachers and members of the school executive about pedagogical and curricular matters, meetings with the entire staff, informal social interactions with people everywhere on the school premises but especially the staff common room and the main office area, and close observation of a range of school activities including extra-curricular offerings for parents and students.

The product of almost five years of close association with teachers, parents, and the Pared Board was a staff development plan for Tangara cooperatively designed and implemented.  That plan is still being elaborated and fine-tuned in response to inevitable changes in the school population and new national and international developments in schooling.  At the moment, a course is being taught on Literature and The Good Life to parents and teachers over three terms.  A staff development day on Early Literacy is also being planned.  As well, knowledgeable teachers and parents associated with the school have volunteered to help with a broadly based Citizenship Education project which will be under way as soon as funding is forthcoming.

Since many readers of this Report will be unfamiliar with the most recent research formats used by educational policy makers working closely with school personnel, it is important to note that case studies of the type that constitute Chapter 4 are produced, not by relying on carefully constructed designs using systematic methods of data collection or existing data bases, but by ordering impressions acquired over a long period through ordinary, direct, everyday involvement in school activity.  Generically, our study of Tangara has less in common with the empirical documents produced by natural or social scientists than with the writing of biographers, novelists, art historians, and film critics who have lived in long, close, unhurried proximity to their subjects.

Nobody, Dr Johnson once remarked, can write the life of a man but "those who have et and drunk and lived in social intercourse with him".  A similar statement could be made about the chief requirement for producing lived case studies of individual schools.  Such studies, rendering complexities without the constraints imposed by predetermined fixed plans, develop in response to immediate circumstance.  Because they bear a family resemblance to all authentic classroom learning, and to imaginative activity more broadly, educators have come to see them as an important source of information about the things that matter most in schools.  One of their obvious advantages is intellectual flexibility.  Another is a responsiveness to the surprises, challenges, and tough immediate demands which are a commonplace of school life in the '90s.

In the conduct of research in the social sciences, there is nothing new about analytical work which proceeds in response to immediate and developing needs rather than in accordance with a carefully detailed research design.  What is genuinely new is the application of this method of analysis to staff development in uschools.  In the conventional staff development model used in the early decades of this century, mandated top-down change was urged upon teachers by outsiders who came into schools to "help" them, or who outlined for them new, set policies at in-service courses.  Typically, recommendations made in this way were either so poorly understood or so resented by school staff that they were not adopted.  As a result, social psychologists like Seymour Sarason of Yale began to do thorough research analyses of structural change itself, and to propose ways of transcending an in-built human resistance to the creation of new, ostensibly threatening, professional prograrnmes. ⁽¹⁷⁾

One immediate consequence of significant research in the 1970s and '80s on the nature of social change in schools was the rise of Networks of reformers who were determined to do on-site staff development work alongside outstanding school heads and their teachers in order to secure large, authentic, replicable structural improvements in schooling.  Such visionary groups as the National Center for Restructuring Education, Schools, and Teaching at Columbia University (NCREST), the Essential Schools Coalition (for secondary schools only), Harvard's Project Zero, and the James P. Comer Home/School Community Group, working for the first time in concert, were aided in their efforts by grants provided and school projects organised at the behest of businessmen and philanthropists. ⁽¹⁸⁾  Through articles disseminated in widely read journals like Phi Delta Knppan or in-house newsletters like Horace, and through trips overseas which followed immediately from them, leaders of these groups began reaching a much wider international audience. ⁽¹⁹⁾

In their writing and in visits to Australia made, respectively, in 1993 and 1994, Professor Ann Lieberman of Columbia University and Professor Theodore Sizer of Brown University suggested to teachers and policy makers that in-site ventures, planned and implemented step-by-step by outside experts working cooperatively with teachers, with everyone profiting from one another's knowledge and experience, work very much better than top-down staff development models widely used in an earlier day.  By this time, perhaps as a result of the "butterfly effect" which has been much in the news of late, we were already involved in our own staff development project at Tangara, and was implementing views about structural reform complementary to those being disseminated overseas by the Essential Schools Coalition, NCREST, and other reformist bodies.

More by fortune than design, the research methods employed to produce Chapter 4 of this Report, and many of the observations made within the Chapter about how significant educational change comes about, are entirely congruent with the work of leading educational reformers overseas.  Like Ted Sizer in some of the towns and cities in which the Essential Schools Coalition took root, and like Ann Lieberman in the New York City schools in which she did the staff development work to which she alluded when she visited Australia, we learned almost everything that we know about on-site school reform by working side by side with teachers, parents, clerical staff, and pupils whom we did not know at the start.  They taught us far more than we have been able to record in these pages.

We began our work at Tangara as an outsider.  We had not met a single person at the school on site.  We had become acquainted with Tangara's Director of Studies through an interview for the magazine Perspective, taped at our home, which resulted from her interest in articles we had written about literature in Quadrant and the daily press.  We were not Catholic, and our contact with practising Australian Catholics had been extremely limited.  We knew nothing about Pared's philosophy of education.  We had not met a single priest of Opus Dei, the prelature of the Catholic Church that supplies Tangara's chaplain, nor had we met anyone else in "The Work" (the name given to Opus Dei by its members).  From the very first day, we found people at the school so engaging that we wanted to know how they had become so.

Without working on site with staff whose religious formation was much more solid than our own, and who were prepared to teach us through personal witness things about the virtues that we deeply needed and wanted to learn, we would not have been able to appreciate fully an essential argument about reform dramatised in a film to which we refer briefly in Chapter 3, Dead Men Walking.  In this movie one of the larger points made is that when a person whose intellect and will have been trained well, and trained together, works alongside an untrained person in conditions of genuine equality, all kinds of good things happen whatever the obvious differences in their situations and backgrounds.

The nun who is the protagonist of Dead Men Walking (Academy Award-winner Susan Sarandon) gets somewhere with a disadvantaged young man on Death Row who has been found guilty of murder and rape because she lives among the poor, shares their material and spiritual suffering, and knows intimately how they tick (the Mother Teresa principle); ⁽²⁰⁾  and because a favourable outcome depends upon (1) mutual risk-taking when the stakes are very high, (2) great (mutual) moral danger, and therefore (3) mutual cooperation.  No predetermined plan generates success in a venture of this kind.  Alert, flexible openness to possibility, from moment to moment and day to day, when time is very short, affirms and preserves life.

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ENDNOTES

1.  We discussed these issues at length in book-length documents (for example, Educating Australians and What Should My Child Read?), in many articles in Education Monitor, Review, News Weekly, Quadrant, and other journals, and in speeches at national and international conferences.

2.  On the major limitations of the Skills/Competencies Movement, see especially the special section on this subject, "The Vocational Push in Education", in Education Monitor, Vol. 3, No. 2.

3.  On the limitations in the National Profiles and Statements, see, in particular, "Maths Problems:  Recent National Developments", Education Monitor, Vol. 4, No. 2;  "The Demise of the National Curriculum", Education Monitor, Vol. 4, No. 2;  and "Knowledge and Control", Education Monitor, Vol. 5, No. 1.

4.  One feature of this consultative process is the work currently being done on the HSC syllabus in New South Wales.  A Green Paper, recently released on this subject, examines existing requirements and options for senior students in the State.  The person responsible for it is Dr Barry McGaw, the head of the Australian Council for Educational Research (ACER).

5.  On syllabus development and skills acquisition, discussed in Education Monitor, see, for example, in Vol. 4, No. 1, articles on cognition (a special section called "The Latitude and Longitude of the Mind"), and an article on changes in the teaching of Ancient History ("Process Versus Content") in Vol. 6, No. 2.

6.  On the importance of understanding and providing for individual differences, see "The Dilemma of Gifted Children", Education Monitor, Vol. 4, No. 2, and "Integrating the Disabled", Education Monitor, Vol. 4, No. 1.  See, too, "Home Truths:  A Reflection on the Demidenko Affair", Quadrant, October 1995.

7.  Recent visits to Australia by overseas educators with expert knowledge of precise links between cognition and basic skills -- staff of the Spalding Literacy Foundation in Arizona -- have dramatised inadequacies in syllabus design and existing texts in the Humanities in many English-speaking countries.  Typically, widely-used resource materials across the school curriculum are pitched at levels which are cognitively inappropriate for vast numbers of students.  An immediate example at the senior school level is the Science and Technology section of the two most widely-used HSC General Studies texts in New South Wales.

8.  We have written a great deal about the importance of whole-group discussion, properly conducted.  See, for instance, pages 19-21 and page 86 of Educating Australians and "Philosophy in Schools", Education Monitor, Vol. 6, No. 1.

9.  The international reformer best known for his discussions of projects organised around scrutiny of a serious concept or concepts is Theodore Sizer.  See, for example, "Essential Change:  A Conversation with Ted Sizer" in Education Monitor, Vol. 5, No. 2, or "A bundy doesn't work at home", The Australian (May, 1994) on Ted Sizer's view of serious projects completed outside the classroom.

10.  Theodore Sizer, Horace's School (Boston:  Houghton Mifflin, 1992).  Sizer has discussed this concept in countless other articles published in Phi Delta Kappan, Education Week, The New York Times, Horace, Network News & Views, and other highly respected journals.

11.  On exploratoria, the best-known international proponent is Howard Gardner, who has written widely on the subject (for example, in Frames of Mind).  Closer to home, we have discussed it in "The Launceston Preparatory School", Education Monitor, Vol. 5, No. 1.

12.  See a reference to Tangara's special project in the Philippines in Chapter 4 of this report.

13.  On the best replicable practices of outstanding teachers, the SBS series "Teachers Around the World", discussed in Education Monitor, Vol. 5, No. 1, is a representative case in point.  On the best practises of schools, Robert Larson's "Changing Schools from the Inside Out", reviewed in Education Monitor, Vol. 5, No. 2, is another.

14.  Lately, public attention has focused more fully on Social Studies issues discussed by the EPU over the past seven years (for example, boring repetition and gaps in the curriculum:  see "Black Holes:  Gaps in Primary School History and Geography", Education Monitor, Vol. 4, No. 1).  A front-page article in The Sydney Morning Herald on 29 March 1996, discusses student boredom with material done to death, year after year, and student ignorance of important historical events and issues.  A research study at the University of Western Sydney (reported on in this same issue of the Herald) has confirmed views put by us during the whole of the EPU's eight-year existence.

15.  See further Bill West, "The Latest on the Internet", Education Monitor, Vol. 6, No. 2.

16.  See the discussion of Barry McGaw's massive 1992 report on quality schooling, "Making Schools More Effective", in Education Monitor, Vol. 4, No. 1;  Brian Scott's recent update of the Scott Report, Renewing Schools, in "Good News About School Renewal", Education Monitor, Vol. 5, No. 2;  and the relevant portions of Chapter 4 of Educating Australians.

17.  Seymour Sarason's best-known study of structural change is The Culture of the School and the Problem of Change (1982).  On the nature of school change, large and small, see Judith Wheeldon's review of Bob Larson's Changing Schools from the Inside Out in "Small Wins", Education Monitor, Vol. 5, No. 2.

18.  Perhaps the most widely reported overseas grants from business groups to schools are those provided through the Edison Project, the New American Development Corporation Project (see "Around the World", Education Monitor, Vol. 4, No. 1), and the Annenberg Foundation at Brown University.

19.  On the subject of effective staff development in schools, and the importance of grass-roots efforts made by teachers, school executives, and outside education experts working cooperatively, see especially Ann Lieberman, "Navigating the Four C's:  Building a Bridge over Troubled Waters", Phi Delta Kappan, March 1990;  Ann Lieberman and Lynne Miller, "Restructuring Schools:  What Matters and What Works", Phi Delta Kappan, June 1990;  Linda Darling-Hammond, "Achieving Our Goals:  Superficial or Structural Reforms?", Phi Delta Kappan, December 1990;  Ann Lieberman and Milbrey W.  McLaughlin, "Networks for Educational Change:  Powerful and Problematic", Phi Delta Kappan, May 1992;  "What Works, What Doesn't", Horace, Vol. 9, No. 2;  Robert L. Larson, Changing Schools from the Inside Out (1992);  and Patricia Wasley, Teachers who Lead (1991).

20.  On the Mother Teresa principle, see further my review of Navin Chawla's authorised biography, Mother Teresa, in Quadrant (July/August 1993).  This is one of the principles responsible for successes we have witnessed in outstanding disadvantaged public schools in the US (referred to elsewhere in this Report), most notably Katherine Brennan in New Haven and Goldblatt in Chcago.  It is also the underlying principle responsible for the success of the Spanish schools, Pineda and Tajamar, which inspired Frank and Virginia Monagle to start similar schools in Australia (see Chapter 4 on Tangara).