78. TESTING OUR PATIENCE - Why Not Everyone Who Is Back At School Is Getting an Education

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I started this blog because Philosophy, as a subject at school, tied to A-level examination and the limited specification dictated by the exam board, is an impoverished version of what Philosophy should be. The blog arose after I began to run what we called “Philosophy Unleashed” lessons any time my classes had a spare moment in which we could squeeze in off-spec discussions about philosophical questions or thinkers that actually interested them. The philosophy was “unleashed” from the constraints of the exam boards.

This last week, I have been despairing at how all English education has become stunted because of the constraints of formal examination. Or at least all English education in the schools I have heard about, for those Year 11 and Year 13 students who returned to school on March 8th after the winter lockdown. As I sat registering my form of Year 13 students and preparing to go teach my Year 11s, I asked them how they were feeling about being brought back to school in a pandemic to not be taught anything new and just focus on revision for an upcoming series of assessments? Not a single one was happy about it. Not a single student felt they were being “educated” anymore. They were there merely to be prepped for probing, so that they could amass as many “data points” as the school needed in order to give them a final letter or number and rank their so-called accomplishments.

I have written on here before about how exams in general are a terrible indicator of ability (here and here) but after all the endless talk about “lost learning” and students “falling behind” because of COVID lockdowns it is an even greater kick in the teeth to see, now that those arguments have won the day and unvaccinated teachers and students are piling back into un-distanced and badly ventilated classrooms so that their education can continue without obstacles, that these two key year groups finally returning to school are finding themselves there only to be data-mined, rather than educated.

It’s not that I don’t understand the schools’ reasoning. Because the government failed to plan for the inevitable inability to sit regular exams in 2021 and come up with a workable solution which could have been in place since September, they have instead lumbered schools with an outsourcing of the job normally undertaken by the exam boards. “Exams are cancelled” we were told, but they haven’t been. Instead schools are running their own, but will be under close scrutiny to ensure what they do is fair and appeal-proof. And because we all understand exams and grew up in an examination culture - fair and appeal-proof means as close to exams as possible. So it means whole year groups sitting identical papers at the same time, even if there is some added optionality in the questions those students have to answer in order to account for individual discrepancies during this odd calendar year. It means crunching numbers and setting grade boundaries that can be defended when the inevitable questions arise about why someone’s child only got a grade X when they believe they deserved a grade Y. “Teachers not algorithms” said the Secretary for Education, Gavin Williamson…but what he seems to have meant was teachers setting algorithms. Weighting work to account for its value as a number based on whether it was done at home or in school, supervised or unsupervised, this year or last year, etc. Essentially teachers have been tasked with replicating the traditional flawed system of examination by finding a compelling narrative for existing data, and spending the next few weeks generating as much new data as possible. All so that the young people we have been teaching can have a box ticked somewhere and be filed away as an A*, a B, a 9, a 7, a 3, a D, etc… All so that they can be shuffled and sorted for the needlessly competitive sixth form and university admissions market in order for them to be ultimately arbitrarily ranked for the job market too.

I think of a possible world where on March 8th my Year 11 and 13s returned to school freed from the need for pointless examination and we found ourselves with a few liberated months where we could, at last, truly provide an education. Explore the ideas no one is telling us we must explore and be driven by the things we are truly curious about. Or even a few months covering the remaining content of the various exam boards but, without the limitations of that final assessment, free to take tangents and add content where currently it is missing. For example, in the AQA Philosophy A-level I teach I have had to include the following note amongst the first pages of handout our students are given:

The AQA A-level Philosophy course requires that you do a lot of reading and learn the arguments of many famous philosophers.  Unfortunately, its emphasis on “great” philosophers and the classic philosophical canon means that these are philosophers who, to coin a phrase, are “pale, stale, and male”.  Though there are some women to be found within the set-texts (Linda Zagzebski, Catharine Trotter Cockburn, Julia Annas, Cora Diamond, Philippa Foot, Mary Midgley, Eleanore Stump, Anita Avramides, Patricia Churchland and Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia) there is a distinct lack of colour across the entire gender spectrum.  Furthermore, most of the women included are presented in many cases as peripheral to the central issue articulated by men (i.e. commenting on Aristotle, building on Locke, developing Sosa, responding to Kant, etc.) rather than shining a light on their own significant contributions to their field of philosophy.

  In many cases this is not entirely the fault of the AQA.  We live in a society which is historically racist and sexist.  A result of that is that in history those voices which were recorded and taught – becoming the “greats” of philosophy – were more likely to be white men, with female voices or the voices of non-white thinkers ignored or dismissed.  For example, Afua Hirsch reports how Kant “on hearing a report of something intelligent that had once been said by an African…retorted ‘this fellow was quite black from head to toe, a clear proof that what he said was stupid.’”  As you can imagine, the structural racism and sexism we still have in society today was even worse in the past, when people like Kant could say such explicitly racist things or John Locke could run a slave plantation and participate in writing segregationist laws.  For women, unable to vote, not even philosophically considered “persons” in some conceptualisations of personhood, the story is much the same.

  However, the AQA cannot entirely place the blame here on history.  It is their choice to focus on historical examples instead of contemporary ones, knowing that doing so shines the light on dead white men instead of the many living contemporary women and non-white philosophers doing great work in all four fields covered by the AQA spec.  Or to exclude political philosophy from their list of topics, which understandably contains lots of brilliant philosophical work on gender, sex and race by female and non-white philosophers.  Likewise, it is their choice not to select a more diverse reading list to redress that balance.

  In a bid to do what the AQA have not done – and, being honest, acknowledging it is something that we in our own Philosophy department have not thought to do until 2020, because of our own blind spot on this issue, having been ourselves taught philosophy in universities impeded by the same structural sexism and racism which excludes female and non-white voices from the conversation – the following is a (non-exhaustive) list of female and non-white philosophers you should be aware of.  While you could start with the work of the female Neoplatonist Hypatia, more recent philosophers we suggest you explore the work of include (those in bold are non-white):

·       Angela Y Davis – political philosophy, specifically race, gender and prison abolition

·       Michele Moody-Adams – political philosophy, specifically morality and social justice

·       Martha Nussbaum – ethics, specifically the capabilities approach

·       Onora O’Neill – political philosophy, specifically global justice and Kantianism

·       Rebecca Newberger Goldstein – philosopher of science, specifically the issue of progress in philosophy (also wrote a great book on theology and rationalism)

·       Linda Martín Alcoff – epistemology, specifically issues of identity

·       Pamela Sue Anderson – theology, specifically feminism and gender in philosophy of religion

·       Sally Haslanger – epistemology and political philosophy, specifically gender, race and social construction

·       Hannah Arednt – political philosophy, specifically totalitarianism and its origins

·       bell hooks – political philosophy, specifically the intersection of race, capitalism and gender 

·       Wendy Brown – political philosophy, specifically power and the privatisation of knowledge

·       Kate Kirkpatrick – theology and existentialism, specifically the works of Sartre and de Beauvoir 

·       Sophie Oluwole – African philosophy, specifically Yoruba philosophy

·       Amia Srinivasan – epistemology and political philosophy, specifically feminism, and alternatives to liberalism and capitalism 

·       Ruth Kinna – political philosophy, specifically anarchism and utopia

·       Kathryn Sophia Belle – political philosophy, specifically feminism and black feminism

·       G. E. M. Anscombe – philosophy of mind and ethics, specifically work on virtue ethics

·       Mary Warnock – ethics, specifically public policy on the status of embryos, as well as euthanasia. 

    Some non-white male philosophers include:

·       Cornel West – political philosophy and cultural criticism, specifically intersections of race, gender and class

·       Frantz Fanon – political philosophy, specifically liberation and decolonisation.

·       Tommie Shelby – political philosophy, specifically black solidarity and black political thought

·       Jaegwon Kim – philosophy of mind, specifically mind-body problem and supervenience. 

·       Tommy Curry – political philosophy, specifically critical race theory

·       Kenneth Allen Taylor – philosophy of language, specifically semantics

·       Charles W. Mills – political philosophy, specifically the intersection of class, gender and race

·       Kwame Anthony Appiah – political and ethical philosophy, specifically identity and cosmopolitanism

·       Steve Biko – political philosophy, specifically the founder of the Black Consciousness movement in South Africa

·       Quassim Cassum – epistemology, specifically self-knowledge and perception

In my ideal world these final months with my students could be spent exploring some of the voices ignored on the current exam specification rather than drilling them on the stuff already learned and the various hoops they need to jump to master an AQA mark scheme lazy notions of “accountability” forces us to use. That would be education. Instead, we have schooling, our actions guided by institutionalised zombie-thought that grades are necessary and examination the only way to get them.

What would actually happen if all students graduating in 2021 were given the same grade? The top grade - A* or 9? If your answer is that the grades would become meaningless and devalued and no-one would know the student’s true ability, then consider the implications of such a statement: you are saying that we need an examination system which doesn’t allow success for all. If the universal A*/9 were legitimately earned in the exam, you would say there is a problem with the exam because it didn’t properly yield a range of results which ranked students. The implication being exams are not there to be passed by all, they are there to organise, rank and differentiate a social position (because exams do not test meaningful knowledge - they test memory, regurgitation, cultural capital, home life, economics and class, social background, etc.) We do not have a sixth form or university admissions marketplace designed to give everyone a chance - only one designed for those who come out of unfair examination processes “on top” and under the guise of a collectively agreed insistence that the exams are fair, despite the evidence.

I don’t know - it just seems to me a great waste of human potential to put all this time and effort into the utter nothingness of final assessments when we could be using this time together to learn great new things, solve important problems, or at the very least reflect on this difficult and maddening year.

There is so much more we could be thinking about than exams, even in this blog. A month that has brought up massive discussions about structural sexism, crime and policing with the Sarah Everard case; race and violence with America’s latest deadly shootings; race and royalty with the revelations from Meghan Markle; the one year anniversary of the pandemic and how we mark remembrance for something both terrible and ongoing - to name just a handful of things people have asked me to write something about in recent weeks, and yet, professionally, all anyone is talking about right now is teacher assessed grades and exams. And, of course, to mark all this stuff our other year groups will suffer some neglect, their own education diminished so that the diminished education of others can reach its sad conclusion.

It’s time we start talking seriously about what on earth we think we’re doing to our school children because, whatever it is, I don’t think it can be called education.

Author: DaN McKee

My book - AUTHENTIC DEMOCRACY: An Ethical Justification of Anarchism - is available HERE