"The creation of something new is not accomplished by the intellect but by the play instinct acting from inner necessity. The creative mind plays with objects it loves." (Carl Jung)
"The supreme accomplishment is to blur the line between work and play." (Arnold Toynbee)
We develop and refine our own models of reality by interacting with others, by checking out our own ideas and attitudes against those of our peers and our elders. This is mainly done through talk, conversation, discussion, and play, and the need for this is all the more urgent now that children are increasingly mesmerised by screens and monitors which detach them from interaction with real people in three-dimensional space with all the extra gestural and emotional cues which real contact with people offers.
Unfortunately, the rigidly prescribed content-heavy curriculum, narrow band of skills, and over-assessment favoured in certain Western school systems (the British National Curriculum, for example), do not foster a "talking" culture. I also know from my experience observing teachers that a climate of inspection and accountability leads to over-managed lessons which deliberately leave no room for spontaneous and unpredictable events, creative departures (including unplanned digressions) or lively discussions, which might "get out of hand" and be construed by inspectors as a breakdown of effective "classroom management" or loss of discipline. Again and again, despite pleas to teachers not to produce supposedly "model" lessons but simply to show their normal practice, I have observed lessons in which nothing is allowed to happen except the "delivery" of a specific "objective". Questioning is geared only to test that knowledge in conformity with the objective has been assimilated. Lateral thinking and divergent questioning is discouraged. This is playing safe, ensuring that the lesson will be at least satisfactory in the eyes of the inspector.
A specific example will suffice. On a training course for inspectors, one of our tasks was to evaluate a lesson on video according to a scale of 0-7, where 0 was excellent, 4 was satisfactory and 7 was very poor. The lesson was one on "creative writing" for a class of Year 5 pupils (9-10 year-olds). Every moment of the lesson was managed. The topic was chosen by the teacher. Every word the children were to use in their "creative" writing was chosen and written on the board by the teacher. When children tried to suggest ideas from their own personal experiences and words from their own vocabularies they were cut short and re-focused sharply on the "objectives" set out by the teacher. The whole lesson was entirely dominated by the teacher. There was virtually no discussion of the topic, no allowance for the alternative ways in which the topic could be approached. I gave it a grade of 6 ("poor") because it had manifestly failed to foster any creative activity or to engage the children through the medium of their own knowledge or experience.
The inspector leading the session commented on my judgment by saying that we had to give it a grade of 4 ("satisfactory") or better because it was a "well-managed lesson". We can see what is happening here: mediocre education is being promoted by the inspection system, because one of the criteria for success in an undisciplined learning environment is that a teacher at least manages to keep control of the class.
This process of strictly manageable objectives reflects a trend which is now increasingly evident even in the approach to "play" amongst very small children. This is the self-contradictory notion of play with "predictable outcomes", a managed kind of "play" in which the thrills of discovery and the unexpected are replaced by pre-determined "objectives" and "targets", and in which natural and infinitely varied objects like sticks and stones are replaced by plastic components. It is not play at all. It is a totally inappropriate transplantation of a rigid performance management culture. In Britain, teachers are now expected to "assess" pre-school children. Over-management is now a disease in the adult workplace, but to impose it on children in their play is a travesty of the nature of play. I dare to say that adults need to learn to play too.
Play relates to talk too, because playful talk is a creative activity in itself. Play can express itself through talk in a variety of ways: in joke-telling, riddling, parody, satire, repartee, dramatic enactment, mimicry, having fun with language - in all kinds of ways.
We need to foster high quality 'talk', including much oral interaction, questioning and discussion in the classroom. We need to facilitate orderly discussion work, including dialectic and debate, so as to foster confident self-expression, respect for alternative points of view, and receptivity to new ideas. The dumbing down even of science programmes on television (which are increasingly little more than special effects shows) means that students are not being taught how to develop and sustain coherent and extended explanations and logical arguments through the process of discourse (thankfully, the quality science programme "Horizon" still does it but it may not be able to hold out for much longer against the theatrical effects and epic music department of dumber programmes).
An Islamic education system geared to excellence needs to show how its methodology facilitates a vibrant culture of conversation and talk within classrooms and the wider school community.
Such a culture is an active learning culture, not a top-down instructional regime based on what Roland Barth calls the "Transmission of Knowledge Model" with its disproportionate amount of didactic teacher talk. Barth reports the estimate of John Goodlad and others that 85 percent of lesson time in American schools is taken up by a prevailing pedagogy based on teachers talking and students listening, occasionally interspersed with teacher-directed discussion.
As Barth points out, "one of the central reasons for the incredible persuasiveness and pervasiveneness of the Transmission of Knowledge model is that it allows learning to be evaluated and numbers attained" and, through these numbers students and teachers can be held "accountable". Einstein speaks of the way in which mere cramming of content undermined his love of science: "One had to cram all this stuff into one's mind for the examinations, whether one liked it or not. This coercion had such a deterring effect on me that, after I had passed the final examination, I found the consideration of scientific problems distasteful to me for an entire year."
A wide survey of British secondary schools has revealed that less than ten percent of teacher talk is concerned with the development of higher order thinking skills. Most of it is directed to mere control and management, including keeping order and giving instructions. The rest of it (apart from the paltry amount involved in getting students to think) is low-level transmission of facts and information.
In all of this, we must be true to our commitment to distinguish real education from mere schooling and instruction.
Salam
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