Trivium 21c E-Book

Martin Robinson

• Herausgeber: Independent Thinking Press
• Kategorie: Bildung
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Beschreibung

From Ancient Greece to the present day, Trivium 21c explores whether a contemporary trivium (Grammar, Dialectic, and Rhetoric) can unite progressive and traditionalist institutions, teachers, politicians and parents in the common pursuit of providing a great education for our children in the 21st century. Education policy and practice is a battleground. Traditionalists argue for the teaching of a privileged type of hard knowledge and deride soft skills. Progressives deride learning about great works of the past preferring '21c skills' (21st century skills) such as creativity and critical thinking. Whilst looking for a school for his daughter, the author became frustrated by schools' inability to value knowledge, as well as creativity, foster discipline alongside free-thinking, and value citizenship alongside independent learning. Drawing from his work as a creative teacher, Robinson finds inspiration in the Arts and the need to nurture learners with the ability to deal with the uncertainties of our age. Named one of Book Authority's best education books of all time.

Leseprobe

Praise for Trivium 21c

Martin Robinson sets out on a quest to discover the kind of education he wishes for his daughter and we all learn a great deal in the process. I love his writing: wise, well informed, provocative, thinking-out-loud. Robinson engages his reader from first to last. A terrific feat.

Melissa Benn, writer and author of School Wars: The Battle for Britain’s Education

Part reflective autobiography, part educational manifesto, Trivium 21c is both a richly erudite and engagingly relevant exploration of the purposes and philosophies underlying the enterprise of education. From ancient Greece through to contemporary controversy, Robinson draws resonantly on his experience as a student and a teacher to demonstrate that the ‘trivium’, the ‘triple way’, of grammar, dialectic, and rhetoric, still lies at the heart of a ‘good education’, albeit in new forms. With refreshing realism, he recognises that teachers in their work in the classroom often transcend many of the political storms about education. Citing almost every contemporary protagonist from our own era, he advances an approach which he describes as ‘progressive traditionalism’. Trivium 21c is essential reading for all educators and observers of the seemingly endless public debate about education who wish to go beyond simplistic polarities and find a way to integrate and relate in a historical context seemingly contradictory approaches.

Ian Bauckham Head Teacher and President, Association of School and College Leaders (ASCL) 2013-14

In schools today, a focus on contemporary relevance too often trumps educational depth. Martin Robinson makes a compelling case that turning instead to the tradition of the liberal arts can open the minds of a new generation.

Marc Sidwell, co-author of The School of Freedom, Managing Editor City A.M.

This is a charming book which is fun to read; it is contemplative and self-reflective and at the same time it is well-researched, informative, and genuinely scholarly. What the book does very well is to unpick the tensions between educationalist progressives and traditionalists and it attempts to identify differences but also importantly to seek common ground. Indeed it is a historical tour de force examining the origins and development of the ‘liberal arts’ from the early Greeks through Shakespearian times to the present day. What makes the book so readable is that it is a journey of self-reflection on what it means to be educated from the point of view of the author as a schoolboy, a teacher, and then a parent seeking an appropriate school for his daughter.

The early part of the book looks at the author’s own schooling and the frustrations he experienced. Learning appeared to be chaotic and many pupils were apparently left to ‘fail’ by not being equipped with the skills necessary to succeed at school. The book then traces his later employment and his experiences as a schoolteacher and how he changed the way he taught to make learning more meaningful and authentic for his pupils. His journey is one of becoming a teacher who adopts innovative approaches to teaching: teaching for meaning, values, and deep learning.

The argument of the book is for a ‘trivium’ of grammar, dialectic, and rhetoric. The three elements of the trivium would be developed simultaneously, and once mastered it is expected that a student would have acquired the knowledge, the reasoning skills, and the ability to communicate well, which would stand them in good stead for a good life. What Robinson is asking for is the building blocks for thriving at school, the underpinning principles of learning that many teachers assume that pupils already possess but which many do not. I am not convinced that this book will unite traditionalists and progressives in a mutual quest of school improvement, but for the open-minded reader there is much to learn. I agree with Robinson that for students to acquire a sound blend of knowledge, questioning expertise, and communication skills (i.e. the trivium) is the basis of a great education.

Dr Jacek Brant, Head of Curriculum, Pedagogy and Assessment (CPA), Senior Lecturer in Business Education, Institute of Education, University of London

Martin Robinson embarks on a highly engaging personal quest to discover what matters in education. By drawing not just on lessons and frustrations from his extensive experience as an educator, but also on the hopes and anxieties that he feels as a new parent, he transcends the often stale trench lines of many arguments about education between ‘traditionalists’ and ‘progressives’, recognising that rival important insights about the foundations of learning and knowledge need not be polar opposites. Robinson’s own synthesis offers an ambitious vision of how to pursue an educational ideal as a practical project. Anybody interested in education, citizenship, or how we want our children to learn would find this a thought-provoking read.

Sunder Katwala, Director of British Future, the independent think tank

For Lotte

In 1842, a young Karl Marx wrote:

‘It will become evident that it is not a question of drawing a great mental dividing line between past and future, but of realizing the thoughts of the past … it will become evident that mankind is not beginning a new work, but is consciously carrying into effect its old work.’

In a letter to Arnold Ruge

Foreword by Ian Gilbert

It’s difficult to read the news these days without seeing some story on education being played out in governments, think tanks, conference rooms, staff rooms, classrooms or even streets somewhere in the world. And rightly so. Education is both a mirror of society as it is now and also, crucially, a reflection of what that society will become. What we do with the minds of our young people today will come back to help us – or haunt us – for decades to come.

Or, in the words of Christa McAuliffe, the teacher on board the ill-fated Challenger space shuttle expedition in 1986: ‘I touch the future … I teach’.

Often, though, when education is being talked about there is no agreement as to what, specifically, is actually being discussed. For example, when teachers talk about education, they are more often than not referring to a process in which they teach and children learn. All being well. When the politicians and strategists talk about it, however, they are often referring to the system within which that teaching and learning process operates. Parents may mean something else altogether, one perhaps more related to discipline, employment chances, and life skills. And the young people themselves? Well, often they never get the chance to voice an opinion about just what exactly they are spending the major portion of their first 20 years or so doing.

Yet beyond the world of processes and systems – or maybe underpinning them – there is another debate too, one that goes on often unnoticed and has vexed some of the greatest minds for millennia. It is the question of what we want schools and schooling to achieve for our children, of what having ‘an education’ entails, of what ‘being educated’ actually means?

It is a debate over which the ancient Greeks battled and that still fills the letters pages of national newspapers and the comments sections on news websites and blogs today. And it is a debate that is very much at the heart of this fascinating and important book.

Through a combination of extensive historical research, face-to-face dialogue with some of the main protagonists currently in the debate and his personal experience both as a teacher and as a parent, desperately trying to find the right sort of education for his daughter, Martin weaves a complex and compelling story. It is a journey that stretches back to the ancient Greeks and the ‘fork in the road’ they encountered that evolved into the Trivium of the medieval world and that rages in the 21st century educational diaspora of academies, charter schools, free schools, national and common core curricula, standardized testing and assessment, and practically every aspect of educational policy and discussion worldwide.

If you are involved in education in any fashion – from teacher to parent to governor to educator to inspector to policy maker – and you have an opinion about what ‘an educated person’ should look like, then you have joined the debate. What’s more, that opinion means you will have taken sides, whether you know it or not. This book will help you make the right choices for the right reasons and, who knows, may even help us create the sort of consensus that will bring all sides together. In doing so, we can all help forge an education system and an education process that genuinely does what we want it to do – bring the very best out of, and put the very best into, every child.

Ian Gilbert Hong Kong

Contents

Title Page

Dedication

Epigraph

Foreword by Ian Gilbert

Introduction: An Unexamined Life is not Worth Living

1 A Trivial Pursuit?

2 The Trivium

3 Our Dramatis Personae: The Grammarians, the Dialecticians, and the Rhetoricians

4 The Liberal Arts: A New Curriculum is Born

5 The Rise of the Rational: The Fall of the Trivial?

6 Trivium: A Clash of Cultures

7 A Crack in Everything: The Imperfect Arts

8 Grammar: From Rules of Language to Cultural Capital

9 Dialectic: Logic, Dialectic, and Logos

10 Rhetoric: Communication, Citizenship, and Community

11 We Have a Montaigne to Climb

12 The Professors

13 The Grammarians vs the Dialecticians

14 The Contemporary Trivium

Postscript: A Bit of Trivia

Acknowledgements

Bibliography and Reading List

Index

Copyright

Introduction

An Unexamined Life is not Worth Living

It is our moral obligation to give every child the very best education possible.

Archbishop Desmond Tutu

It has often been said that history is written by the winners. The same could be said about education. Articles, books, exams, courses, academic studies, textbooks, books on pedagogy, and even policies, are usually written by those who have a clutch of worthwhile exam results at secondary, university, and post-degree level. This, of course, makes a great deal of sense, but it does mean the system has a flaw. The voices of those who have not benefitted from schooling are not usually heard in the great education debate. If real change is going to happen, then those who have struggled in the system need to be heard; their experiences and ideas should be at the centre of the debate and not ignored at the margins.

I was what you would call a school failure. Yet somehow I ended up as an advanced skills teacher and an assistant head in East London. This introduction is not the story of how I arrived at those dizzying heights, but some background detail that explains why I have written this book.

Failure

My parents moved house when I was 12 and I took the opportunity to reinvent myself. My first year at secondary school in a large comprehensive on the outskirts of Oxford had proved instructive. I had been a good student: I did my classwork and my homework and I played the violin. In 1974 this was not a good combination and I had been marked out as an easy target for those who, shall we say, had a slightly more philistine view of the world. Although they were not outwardly violent, the threat was sufficiently compelling to force me to cut the horsehair of my violin bow and to acquiesce to having my exercise books ripped to pieces and thrown out of the window of the school bus. Even though this wasn’t the reason my parents decided to move house, I was glad that we did. I started at my new secondary school, a rural Oxfordshire comprehensive, with one thing on my mind: I did not want to be the target of any vitriol due to a love of learning and playing a musical instrument.

Grammar School for No One

Luckily for me I wasn’t challenged in my new school to do much study. It was 1975 and the school had recently become a comprehensive: a girls’ grammar had amalgamated with a boys’ secondary modern with predictable results. This traditional ‘grammar school for all’ hadn’t bargained on the ‘all’. The senior management team were almost entirely drawn from the girls’ school and had no idea how to cope with boys, let alone those who’d had their expectations shaped by being confined to a second-rate education. It was glorious, awful chaos. As I was a new boy, untainted by any particular history, I was immediately put in the bottom set for everything, until they realized that perhaps I had ‘potential’, and I was then immediately moved into the top set for everything. Even though I had missed out a couple of months learning, no one thought to help me catch up. I didn’t care anyway; I had already ingratiated myself with some of my fellow bottom-setters; two in particular had already asked me for a fight. One of them I dispatched with relative ease in the school washroom, and the other, who had challenged me on the staircase, foolishly from a lower position, was easily toppled. This was going to be easy!

The chaos of the school continued in the classrooms. Teachers who could hack it were OK; those who couldn’t weren’t. And there was never any backup for those in need. When it came time for the headmistress to retire, the school staff made it very clear what they wanted: a traditional, disciplinarian head who could sort out the boys. I was, by this time, coming up to my O levels and hadn’t done much apart from cultivate a rebellious nature, so that when the new head arrived we were not destined to hit it off.

I was not the sort of rebel who would burn down the school; I was far subtler than that. I started a school newspaper, I set up a debating society, and I was trying to set up a branch of the National Union of School Students. In lessons I would ask questions and challenge what was being taught. I was most probably a proverbial pain in the posterior. Despite being put in detention on occasion, and even whacked with a slipper, no one seemed to worry unduly about my incomplete classwork and lack of homework. I sat my O levels and got three at grade A–C and one CSE grade one, which was an O level ‘equivalent’. I stayed in the sixth form to do A levels and to resit some O levels; I achieved two more in November 1979. However, my attitude wasn’t liked, my refusal to wear the newly introduced school uniform for sixth formers wasn’t going well, and when I was told off for not wearing the new tie, I turned up the next day wearing the tie but no shirt. I was sent home.

Rock ’n’ Roll

This was all very wearisome, both for the school and for myself, but the roots went further back. At no point had I seen the purpose of this poor ‘traditional’ education I was being offered. Perhaps, had I arrived at the school five years later, the more ordered atmosphere that was being brought in would have inspired me to be the academic student I needed to be, but I shall never know. After a meeting with the headmaster at the end of 1979 I left ‘by mutual consent’. I had five O levels and one grade one CSE. This was my winter of discontent. My education was to be found in the pages of the NME, the lyrics of the Clash, Ian Dury, Elvis Costello, and the theories I had come across while researching David Bowie, piecing together learning based on a left-field look at the arts, resistance, and pop culture.

Away from the world of sex ’n’ drugs and rock ’n’ roll, I worked in Oxford Polytechnic Library, then spent a year trying to get A levels at the college of further education, a place where ‘progressive methods’ held sway in the arts and humanities. Looking back, I see another wasted year. I was incredulous at the behaviour of some of the lecturers who thought nothing of luring their young female students into bed. I even had the wife of one of these lecturers trying to do the same with me, though somewhat unsuccessfully.

My social life at 17 was far more important to me, so when I got a job at a market in the middle of Oxford selling joke items and novelties, this seemed to me to be far more useful. I worked six days a week, had money in my pocket, and was having fun. The stall’s turnover doubled, as did the stall. I discovered I had a gift for retail and stayed there for two years, only leaving it for a job as a window salesman! Again, I was a success, and quickly promoted. However, I knew this wasn’t the career for me, so I set up my own business promoting bands and, in between times, being a parcel delivery driver for Securicor.

University: An Act of Belonging or Subverting?

Although I was often in Oxford, my only firsthand experience of the university had come from attending a party at a college where an acquaintance was studying. This was quite eye opening. A student came up to me, ‘Where are you from?’ I said, ‘Oxford.’ ‘Oh,’ he replied, ‘which college?’ ‘Er,’ I said, ‘not the university, I am from Oxford.’ If looks could kill – he stared, incredulously, ‘Oh …’ And at that he walked off without so much as a by-your-leave – the town versus gown atmosphere of Oxford in the 1970s and early 1980s was so marked. My vision of what a highly educated person looked like and sounded like was shaped, indelibly, by seeing them walking around town as if they owned the place – maybe some of them actually did!

It was at this time that I saw an advert in The Face for a degree course at a polytechnic in London, a course called cultural studies. It seemed tailor-made for me. The course director took a punt and enrolled me onto the course despite my lack of qualifications. At the age of 23 I was studying again, for the first time since I was 11 years old. I struggled at first: because I had no academic grounding to fall back on, I had no way in. My poly was an old cigarette factory in Stratford, East London. This was education that didn’t look like education; this was education as subversion – just the sort I liked. Miraculously, I got a 2:1 BA honours degree, something I never thought would happen. In my spare time I set up an arts group with others, called The Big Picture, and we wrote, produced, directed, and performed in plays, including a punk musical I wrote that went on to be performed on the stage of the Theatre Royal Stratford East. Now, I was waiting for the world to open its arms and invite me into its inner sanctum. As it turned out, I became an advertising salesperson at Marxism Today.

Working in the hub of the Communist Party of Great Britain was fascinating, especially as I was the ‘capitalist’ wing. I loved the dichotomy. I sold more advertising space for the magazine than anyone else had done before. Strangely, Marxism Today seemed to be employing the same Oxbridge types I had come across before, only these were lefty ones. I realized that no matter what your politics were, it was your education that held you in good stead. Yes, I could sell advertising space, windows, and novelties, but being a salesman wasn’t going to satisfy me sufficiently; I needed to do something more positive. I was headhunted by a national newspaper – the sales manager had heard I was good at selling. I met him in a pub in London’s West End, dressed as poorly as I could, looking like the worst sort of lefty nightmare someone in advertising could come across. It worked; I had broken my ties with that world. I resigned from Marxism Today and applied to take a PGCE in that most subversive of subjects, Drama.

Teaching

I did my teaching practice in what was called then a ‘sink’ school in Canning Town. I did well as a teacher and, at the end of the course, I got a job and spent the next 20 years of my life as a drama teacher. Early on, I also doubled as an English teacher, not that I knew how to teach English. In drama I was successful, becoming a head of department, head of faculty, advanced skills teacher, and assistant head teacher. Ofsted always judged my work to be outstanding. Yet, as I continued teaching, I became more aghast at what was happening to education. It had become the opposite of the sink-or-swim experience that I had grown accustomed to during my schooling.

Now, the whole system was so controlling of knowledge that pupils had become totally dependent on their teachers. Data followed each child; if any were in danger of getting a D they would be tracked mercilessly. The exams changed and became exercises in writing only what was deemed acceptable by the exam board. It was the awarding body who told teachers what they wanted to see, and who sold them the textbooks they had produced in order to do it. Successful schools seemed to be those that best played the system. Alas, the children who seemed to do well were those who acquiesced the most. I didn’t want spoon-fed factory fodder. I wanted a flicker of rebellion alongside the ability to traverse within society as full citizens. I wanted creative sparks who could also contribute.

Parenting

Then I became a father. Having seen what was happening in education, I now was wondering: what kind of education do I want for my daughter? Certainly not the one I’d had, and also not the systematized schooling that we educators are churning out now. Was there another way?

This then is my aim: I want my daughter and other children to have an education that will enable them to live ‘a good life’ and attain the necessary wisdom that will equip them for the challenges of the 21st century and yes, though it seems a long way off, beyond.

The Quest

The purpose of education is to change people’s lives. How it can best do this is the subject of this book. The question is: how do we want to see our young people change? This book examines some of the history of education to find out what is still valuable and explores how we might use the rich tradition of the trivium to help understand the roots of great teaching and learning. I hope that readers of this book – whether you are students, teachers, or parents – will find something of interest between the covers.

In the process of writing this book I found myself reading books I wish I had been directed towards at an earlier point in my education. I have explored philosophy, classics, art, science, literature, European studies, linguistics, logic, politics, and cognitive psychology, as well as revisiting areas from cultural theory, theatre, and pedagogy. I have been extraordinarily lucky on my journey to be able to count on people with real expertise in all these areas, who were most willing to enlighten me with their knowledge and thinking around the issues I was encountering, many for the first time. Without being able to talk things through with them, I would not have been able to attempt the book and my quest would have remained unexamined.

Chapter 1

A Trivial Pursuit?

Ringmaster: (with a monkey dressed up as a man) Roll up, ladies and gentlemen. Examine this beast as God created him. Nothing to him, you see? Then observe the effect of art: he walks upright and has a coat and trousers …

Georg Büchner, Woyzeck

Drama Teacher

Those who can, do; those who can’t, teach. With that hoary old adage ringing in my ears, at the age of 29, I entered the teaching profession. Good grief. What was I, an educational failure, doing here in the very profession that had managed not to educate me all those years ago? But here I was, employed as a teacher of drama and English. I quickly went about ensuring I got my classroom survival sorted out: not smiling before Christmas and negotiating that bizarre relationship between one adult and 30 teenagers, based on ‘Somehow, together, we have to get through this’ and, well, generally, we did.

One thing became clear to me: my main subject, drama, was not really a subject in the usual sense of the word. Somewhere along the line it had become ‘educational drama’, a methodology for exploring sociological issues. On my PGCE I had been introduced to schemes of work covering homelessness, drugs, suicide, and all sorts of other explorations of the seamy side of life. This was drama as social commentary. I was introduced to ‘freeze-frames’ – where social relations between the powerful and powerless could be explored, and ‘conscience alleys’ – where two lines of children would watch the protagonist walk between them and they would call out what was in the protagonist’s head (usually some utterance about misery due to homelessness, drugs, or suicide). It was deadly and strangely uncreative, and I struggled with this approach during the early stages of my teaching.

In the GCSE drama exam children had to work in groups to prepare, through improvisation, a devised piece of original theatre. I went to see what work schools were producing for these final exams. There would be many chairs, with kids sitting on them, talking of misery. Every now and then a character would die, usually at the denouement, and there would be much wailing and gnashing of teeth. Drama education seemed to be firmly stuck in the black-and-white social realism of the 1960s. Paradoxically, it was also extraordinarily unrealistic and it did not move me; its inauthenticity shone through. I decided then and there that this was not what I wanted to be teaching.

Creative Liberation

My first move was to ‘ban’ chairs – a ridiculous act, but a liberating one. This was the time when physical theatre was all the rage and I wanted to embrace that energy. Instead of issues, I wanted physicality; instead of talking, I wanted activity. Theatre is a physical subject; I summed this up with the phrase ‘Movement First’. Our drama lessons were physical because acting is the art of doing. In discipline terms, this became problematic so I introduced stillness too: the act of ‘centring’ where the actor stands still with their eyes closed for a period of time. This then became the beginning of lessons. I would wait until every participant had centred before the lesson would start. We were all actors, so we all had to ‘act’. I got rid of unnecessary homework: writing about misery and colouring in pictures of misery, and replaced it with a notebook in which kids would be expected to collect fragments of writing, experiences, dreams, stories, poetry, lyrics, history, theory. You name it, they got it.

Method in the Madness

This was to be the beginning of the work, ‘Fragments of Movement and Fragments of Text(s)’. We would look at what we had to make sense of – the symbols, the text, the verbal and the physical ideas that seemingly had little connection – and we would try to ‘sense’ what connections there were. Both the students and I would search for links, no matter how abstract. We were alchemists. There might be connections of sound, physicality, coincidence, or juxtaposition, but mostly we would look for an emotional connection, for the sublime, the beautiful, the surprising, or the funny. We would delay knowing what the final piece would look like for as long as possible; we were looking for ‘what the play is trying to say’, in the same way a sculptor chips away at a piece of marble before determining its final form. This then was summed up with the word ‘Emotion’. We would then use the idea of connecting up ‘framed moments’ and collect as many moments as we could. We would then perform them slowly, quickly, forwards, backwards, in differing orders, at the same time, or separately. We would then interrogate the piece that was beginning to emerge, looking for logical connections or arguments.

Once we got to know our pieces, then characters and a theme (or themes) would emerge. This we summed up with the word ‘Intellect’ – this was our thinking about the piece. We would research thoroughly, finding out about what we had and then finally we would pull the process together by honing it as a performance for the practical exam. ‘What is your play trying to say?’ became, ‘If in doubt, spell it out!’ We would then refine our pieces for performance. This then became the process: Movement, Emotion, Intellect, and Performance.

Each lesson began to take this basic shape, and then this shape was practised over increasingly longer periods of time, over days and weeks. But the mantra was there at its core – Movement, Emotion, Intellect, Performance – and the material transformed from fragments to connections. This became the clothesline on which the lessons were hung. We used this ritual, we used it repetitively, and the results were extraordinary. Firstly, literally, the results were extraordinary, but beyond that, and far more importantly, the exam pieces were at their best ‘great art’, as precise and as moving or funny, as Pina Bausch, Théâtre de la Complicité, or Peter Brook.

Tradition

It was at this time that I launched an A level course in theatre studies, which became an altogether more difficult step for me. I had developed a ritual, a way of working, that was successful for devised theatre, but would it work for an A level? Indeed, the A level included a devised theatre piece, but it also included scripted work. Most challenging of all, there were two three-hour written papers on play texts, theatre practitioners, an ‘unseen’ piece, and a review of a play.

The results weren’t great for the first cohort. I had to do something else, so I went about echoing the devising mantra: we would explore, research, and learn about the texts and practitioners; we would learn the language of the discipline; we would ‘give Caliban his language’ through the ‘semiotics of theatre’. I had absorbed linguistics – how we understand theatre – and developed a shared language to ensure we knew what we were talking about. I then fed this language into the GCSE. Gone were freeze-frames and the concepts of the drama GCSE bubble; instead, in came terms from the rich history and traditions of theatre. We would go and see lots of theatre, from a wide range of performers, practitioners, and authors. I refused to take students to see things they would ‘normally’ see, so we never went to Blood Brothers; instead, we went to see Beckett, Berkoff, and Bausch. We saw Greek tragedy and comedy, Brecht, Complicité, and a writer and a play I fell in love with, Büchner’s Woyzeck. Here was a moment of inspiration; this play had so much to offer it would become central to my teaching.

Woyzeck: Where Three Paths Collide

As part of the A level course we were expected to teach one practitioner. In those days there were no exams in Year 12 so I took the chance, and we began the course by teaching three practitioners under the general heading of ‘Truth’. Each practitioner wanted to communicate their truth in very different ways: Stanislavski in a naturalistic way; Brecht wanted to communicate social truth; and Artaud – well, Artaud wanted a metaphysical truth based on the idea of the energy of life, necessity, or what he called ‘cruelty’, that we are most ‘alive’ when we realize our own mortality. Stanislavski helped hone the language of drama and acting; Artaud took my work to another level, the discipline of the art, of the physical, which became even more important; and Brecht helped refine the argument, the dialectic, not only in theatre but in our understanding of how to teach, learn, and challenge by seeing the world in a different ‘scientific’ way.

We looked at the works of Freud, Marx, Socrates, Saussure, Darwin, Gramsci, Breton, Chaplin, and Büchner to supplement our understanding of these approaches to truth. Artaud and Brecht both cited the play Woyzeck as being of great importance, and the implicit naturalism in the play also encompassed the ideas of Stanislavski. Therefore, in Woyzeck, the three great practitioners, with their conflicting ideas, had a place where they could ‘agree’ to congregate, to commune, to argue, and it is this that gave even greater significance to this play and to our studies.

Socratic Method

Other influences came in from the texts we were studying: Sophocles, Shakespeare, Chekhov, and Dürrenmatt. These were weighty subjects; this was not dumbing down. The approach I took was: we would find our language, research our texts, look for ways in, and understanding(s). We would then take an unashamedly Socratic approach: questioning, arguing, and prompting. The kids would do the same with each other, which made our sessions lively and challenging. Finally, we would look at how to take our approach into the written exam, and also the viva and notebook which, at the time, were integral parts of the assessment. The exam was a celebration of our exploration; not a ‘jumping through hoops’ approach to getting grades. We had found a way to bridge the divide between practical and theory. That year I was told the A level results were among the best in the country, as were the GCSE results.

Creativity

This approach became the basis for my involvement with education in a wider sense. Professor Ken Robinson was working on bringing ‘creativity’ into the curriculum, and I was invited along to the launch of his report. From this I was asked to become part of a delegation to Chicago to see how a form of ‘creative partnership’ was being used to educate ‘downtown’ kids in schools. This was a very odd experience: it was great to be in Chicago, but odd to see what comprised ‘creative’ teaching. Four actors were teaching science to a very unimpressed group of kids. The lesson was about energy transference and this involved actors pushing kids over (not all the way, Health and Safety …) and, I kid you not, that was it. There was no need for this to be done by ‘actors’, but I’m sure it ticked a box somewhere: yes, we were creative in science because we got actors in. This was a warning: creativity is neither the sole preserve of artists nor are all artists necessarily creative.

I began to take workshops in other schools and countries in what I was now calling ‘creative drama teaching’. My work was controversial, especially in those drama departments where many of the teachers continued with their still images and social work themes. In 2004, The Guardian described one of my sessions thus:

‘This work is in the tradition of the kind of fragmented or cut-up expression associated with the work of William Burroughs,’ he [me] explained as he armed delegates with ‘statement cards’ and invited them to find the person with the words that complemented theirs. Of course, there were no obvious pairings and we were off on an afternoon of free association and creativity that would have us dancing, moving, chanting.

Robinson explained how his preferred working practice was to encourage students to remain as intuitive as they could for as long as possible. He described how his students have become used to researching and bringing ideas, actions, music and other stimuli to their group’s work while at the same time stalling the desire to define the work in hand for as long as possible. ‘In the end, there always comes a time when we have to pause and say, what have we got here? And it is then that they can move on to create something formally for presentation and assessment.’

It was clearly a challenging session for some especially since, as Robinson explained, it relies entirely on the co-operation and commitment of his students – who are required to take wholehearted responsibility for their work. ‘It is a sure-fire way,’ he emphasised, ‘of avoiding clichéd drama work. Of course, preparing the ground so that students are receptive and not alienated by such an approach takes time. But it is worth it – you don’t get pastiche EastEnders after several weeks of this kind of exploration.’ (Monahan, 2004)

Advanced Skills Teacher

I was now an advanced skills teacher and being asked to use my skills to work with not just drama teachers but with teachers in a wide range of disciplines. The stated aim was: how can we get our staff and the lessons to be more creative? I had visitors to my lessons from Japan, the Czech Republic, and a number of organizations looking for hints about how to be creative. Looking back, I’m not sure that the creativity in lessons movement in the UK was after quite the same thing as I was producing. I think many in the educational establishment basically wanted their teachers to be more entertaining because they thought that teachers were boring the kids. However, my view is that creativity is a disciplined process and can be quite contemplative and even boring at times. This difference in position meant that I was sometimes regarded as an outsider even in the creative education movement. No matter, I carried on developing my approach.

Independent Learners

A visitor from the Good Schools Guide sat in on my lesson, a Year 11 class preparing for their GCSE. We chatted and watched as the 28 kids came in, centred, got into their groups, and followed the ritual of Movement, Emotion, Intellect, Performance. I said nothing, I didn’t even acknowledge the kids; they were working, I was chatting. I learned a lesson that day: the mantra had allowed the kids to be truly independent, not at first, no, but by the end, when they needed to be, they were. I had never done this before and, though I didn’t show it, I was just as amazed as the visitor from the Good Schools Guide who watched that lesson. We stayed there for two hours before I uttered anything, which was a ‘well done’ to the class. When the Guide came out later that year there was a special mention for the ‘excellent’ drama lessons. University professors came to watch my classes; they too mentioned how unusual it was that the methodology I had stumbled across had, in the end, enabled me to step away and for the students to work, successfully, in a manner that showed their ability to be truly independent.

Constraints Can Lead to Creative Freedom

At this time, various gurus were all the rage in education land – and they were talking about how to be creative. These included the aforementioned Ken Robinson and the Six Thinking Hats and Lateral Thinking of Edward de Bono, amongst others. Some teachers interpreted creativity as an example of 1960s-influenced progressivism and the idea of free thinking, which was all about allowing freedom and the ethos of allowing a thousand flowers to bloom.

Although I could see where that was coming from, I was working with the great and eccentric theatre improviser and practitioner Ken Campbell, who had pointed me in completely the opposite direction. Creativity is about constraints, he would tell me. This became part of my mantra; limitations were indeed important, whether you were engaged in a piece of improvised theatre, trying to compose a symphony or a tune with the same eight notes, or making a cake with a list of ingredients. Ken was right: constraints are an essential part of creative expression and freedom. Other drama teachers asked me how we came up with such bizarre and varied work, because whenever they asked their pupils to think of an idea they always came up with the same old clichés.

Competencies

A number of education theorists came to the conclusion that the way forward was to develop competency-based curricula, in order to cultivate within pupils a ‘language of learning’. This was fascinating to me, as someone who had developed a mantra in his drama teaching that had enabled students to take control of their own learning; there was something in this. When I was at school I had never really thought about what was lacking in my own education. I just thought that I was belligerent or stupid and that academia was a locked room. I was attracted to competency-based curricula because I knew what it was to be incompetent. So perhaps competencies were the key.

However, there were so many different approaches on the market, all peddling different taxonomies, that it became difficult to know which one to choose and why. Schooling was changing rapidly. We were now examining kids in modular formats. We seemed to be examining and testing them all the time. We were being told to have lesson outcomes and objectives, and to assess them against these objectives. The exams began to define in detail what are called ‘assessment objectives’, which stated almost exactly what students were expected to write. This was a utilitarian approach to learning, allied to league tables, where departments would compete with each other to drain their pupils of the very fibre of their souls in completing coursework, mock exams, exams, tests, practicals, and controlled assessments. After-school activities became exam oriented, levels were all the rage, and C/D borderline kids were targeted to ensure they became C-grade kids. Against this very uncreative backdrop, I was being asked to look for creativity.

QCA

A new curriculum was on the cards and I was invited by the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority (QCA) to help in the assessment of Personal Learning and Thinking Skills – a kind of language of learning that had grown from the competency-based approaches of key skills and other formats. This I did, but I was suspicious of what lay behind it and of the language that was being used – the language of the committee and the bureaucrat. Surely there was something more?

Customers

Most poignantly I was beginning to see the results of the changes in education: kids were more focused on exams, grades, and learning how to pass, and as a result were becoming less independent and less creative. My methods were going against the tide. This new breed of students were customers demanding a service, and the school was delivering this service to them. These customers sat at the table getting fat on the courses they were being fed, some of them force-fed. No longer were the students expected to enter the kitchen; rather they chose from a menu and expected it to be served up ready-cooked. This is the problem with spoon-feeding: the whole process devalues the making and concentrates on the service.

Prospero Parenting

In 2006 my wife and I became parents. As a father, I did not want my daughter to become a ‘customer of education’. I did not want to be regularly updated on what level she had reached, how globally aware she had become, or how good at teamwork she was. I wanted her to be able to talk about the things that matter; not to ignore the latest ideas, but to allow those ideas to emerge from an engagement with great works of culture, art, science, and the historical and literary achievements of … for example, Maurice Sendak, Lewis Carroll, A. A. Milne, and Greek mythology.

I began to consider a ‘classical education’ – having her engage with the works of the great and the good. But at the back of my mind was this nagging doubt: how do I give her a language of learning, a way of taking control of the process? Is this akin to me, as a parental Prospero figure, imposing a language on my Caliban of a child? Yet it is Miranda, not Prospero, who teaches Caliban to speak. This makes a difference because she has innocence, an ethereal quality, and a far more gentle approach to life. Caliban complains that she has, ‘… taught me language, and my profit on’t is, I know how to curse.’ Will this always be the relationship between teacher and pupil?

The utilitarian education establishment wants my daughter to develop the language of skills for the workplace. But surely there must be something greater than the language of the committee and the aspiration of middle management. If I look at language as representing culture itself, and if I consider all the great works from the past – those great creative, artistic, and scientific achievements – then there is a way into this which offers a key that I can give to my daughter so that she can unlock the door and continue to discover life’s richness and complexity, long after I have fallen off my perch and shuffled off this mortal coil.

Mantra

There was a clue to be found in something I had discovered in drama improvisation and in teaching theory. This was an approach to learning that could help my daughter process knowledge, relate to truth, and have the freedom to express herself. I began to search for constraints – a mantra that would assist her in her learning and allow her to develop her own voice. It was an attitude to learning that is at once based in knowledge, argument, engagement, belonging, and the capacity to make a difference. I needed to go back to the beginnings of learning inherent in my own conventional schooling. This was a tradition that had failed me because it was taken for granted that I had the key. I didn’t.

But here I found it – a key that I only wished I had known about long before: the trivium.

Chapter 2

The Trivium

O, had I but followed the arts!

Shakespeare, Twelfth Night

So says the character Sir Andrew Aguecheek in bemoaning the quality of his education. The arts he refers to would not have been the subjects that we would think of today as the arts, but the seven ‘liberal arts’ that were the mainstay of a grammar school education in Shakespeare’s time. The seven liberal arts were divided into the quadrivium: arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy, which were more about number and content; and the trivium: grammar, dialectic (or logic or logos), and rhetoric, which were more about language and ways of doing things. The three arts of the trivium would be developed simultaneously, and once mastered it was expected that a student would have acquired the knowledge, the reasoning skills and the ability to communicate well that would stand them in good stead for the further study of the quadrivium.

If there were three ways underpinning my education I was blissfully unaware of them. I was not taught any meaningful grammar; I argued the toss but was not taught how to use dialectic, nor did I understand the purpose dialectic had as an integral part of the learning process; and, aside from a couple of performances in school plays, I was never taught how rhetoric – the need to communicate well whether in written or spoken form – would help me in my future. Perhaps I can join in with Aguecheek’s anguish. I can only conclude that the trivium had passed by the teachers in my school.

The fact that in most of my 20 years of teaching I knew nothing of the trivium also makes me wonder why it disappeared from the curriculum. I was attracted to the trivium because it was a mantra, and I had found that a mantra can really help students work independently, creatively, and in a focused way. I was also drawn to this mantra because it was not devised by some learned professor with money to make. No, it was rooted in tradition. Some of the finest minds had learned through the trivium; it had been tried and tested. But – and this is a big but – it had also, obviously, been abandoned. This set me wondering: how and why did the trivium come to prominence in the first place? Why did it stop being the basis of our curriculum? Is there anything from the trivium that survives in our schools today? Should I consider it as the basis of education for my daughter?