WHEN EXAM results, rather than class or family contacts or old school ties, became the main method for selecting who gets the best jobs, our leading public schools had to change the way they taught. Their answer was academic force-feeding — a response now also adopted by leading state schools. In 1972, for instance, fewer than half of Etonians achieved a B at A level. Today, the average Etonian leaves with three A grades.
But this academic force-feeding, this obsession with exam results, is counterproductive. Last week a study in Science journal demonstrated that primary school children educated using the progressive Montessori method do better, socially as well as academically, than ones subjected to the ubiquitous battery farming.
Even if one puts to one side the much chronicled harm that “hothousing” does to children’s mental health, a large body of scientific evidence proves that neither exam factories nor pushy parenting are the best motivators. Some 128 different studies show that encouraging people to prize-hunt — that is, to chase results and rewards — drastically reduces their interest in tasks and the way they do them. In one example, students were given three-dimensional cubes to play with; half were paid to do it, the other half were not. The paid ones lost interest sooner and were more likely to stop and read magazines that had been left lying about. Money — for which you can read exams or being top of the class — changed the focus. The unpaid volunteers said they played with the cube because it was fun or because they chose to; for the paid students the interesting, enjoyable, challenging aspect of the activity got lost.
Anne McDermott, the headmistress of Kitebrook House, a preparatory school near Moreton-in-Marsh, Gloucestershire, has not heard of this evidence, but for 50 years she has been putting it into practice. “I seldom think specifically about exams,” she tells me, and yet for five decades nearly all her girls have been passing into the top girls’ public schools. Her belief that “children need to feel secure to learn, if they feel anxious they can’t function properly” and that “it is their playfulness, love of challenge and hunger for new information that must be nurtured if you want success” is borne out by hundreds of studies.
Unless they have particularly pushy parents, until they go to school, children are blissfully unaware of their performance relative to peers. If you ask them if they are good at reading they will say things like: “I am the bestest reader in the world.” However, in most of the developed world, at around the ages of 7 to 9 they become acutely aware of where they stand in the pecking order. Then their confidence plummets, they become cautious in their mental habits and they are increasingly liable to dislike going to school.
These deficits are not universal. In nations where learning is child- centred, such as the Scandinavian ones, children throughout their time at school look forward to it and suffer no decline in self-confidence. In Denmark, there is minimal examination and tremendous efforts are made to encourage the children to find subjects that interest them — the Mrs McDermott method.
Because of this system the Danish economy is nearly always in the world’s top ten performers. According to Professor Alison Wolf, of the London Institute of Education, there is no connection in developed nations between spending on education and economic productivity or growth. Entrepreneurs are critical and many of the most successful left school before A levels. Our academic system does not create Richard Bransons (left school with six O levels) or Michelle Dewberrys (winner of The Apprentice, two GCSEs), it does its best to squash them.
The idea that you should use education to create good little consumer-producers — which seems to have been new Labour’s main goal — runs flat against what will be needed for future economic success. As Margaret Thatcher was at pains to point out, enthusiastic, individualistic originators add far more value to an economy than the merely skilled.
When children are crammed, they become disengaged from learning and develop a robotic “going through the motions” mentality. While some may still achieve good results, they feel little pleasure at doing so. But it’s not only schools that are getting it wrong.Parents who make their love conditional upon performance create children who are passive, angry and looking outwards for definition. Such children have downloaded parental dictates, like computers. But human beings possess volition and require the motivation of intrinsic interest, not instructional software.
Children who have actively and willingly adopted parental wishes, making them their own, perform much better. This absorption happens only if the parents have shown that their child’s best is good enough and that they love him or her whatever the results: children are much more likely to follow parental wishes out of love than fear.
Schools and parents who make humiliating comparison with peers’ performance are liable to create empty enactors of the meaningless. Their children will merely download their Latin and maths, and like the hypnotised, emptily regurgitate what has been ordained by someone else.
Many children leave school feeling like a failure and that is especially true of the highest achievers from privileged homes — 38 per cent of 15-year-old girls from the top social class suffer from a mental illness (depression, anxiety, eating disorders), far more than girls from the bottom one.
The reason is simple. Neither their parents nor their schools realise what Mrs McDermott has known for 50 years: that the lasting foundations of high achievement are security, joyousness and creativity, not fear and robotics. Education should set children’s minds free, not incarcerate them.
Oliver James is the author of They F*** You Up — How to Survive Family Life
