Ofsted should make chalk and talk teaching mandatory...

I mean, it's obvious. 

I have just read an article by Toby Young lauding the rightness of lecture-style teaching and how wonderful it is that we are returning to the safe haven of some yesteryear when we knew what we were doing, while he lambasts any attempt at getting the children to take a leading role in their learning because it is child-centred.

Ironically, or hilariously, depending on your viewpoint, the education you get at Oxford or Cambridge –the hallowed land of those who preach this reactionary idyll - is predominantly discursive.  You read your essay to your tutor and then discuss it.  The lecture, which seems to be Young’s preferred modus operandi for the masses, is not the dominant means of teaching.  So – is it one rule for the country’s intellectual cream and another for the dregs?

Learning is most effective when the learner is most fully engaged.  Showing a YouTube clip to a class and getting them to write questions on their mini whiteboards makes huge sense in the teaching repertoire.  All have to focus, all engage, all produce a response.  How different this is from the history A level classes I endured when the teacher literally stood at the front of the class and read out his notes, which we copied into our books.  Only when we wrote our weekly essays did we actually interact with the subject matter. 

Unfortunately, the ridiculous polemics that form the core of our political discourse today mean that you are either a rigorously demanding academic who teaches from the front OR you are a child-centred leftie who cares not a fig about standards, as long as you start from where the student is and work from there.  What a lovely simple world Toby Young inhabits.

Of course, if he felt able to put aside his desire for eye-catching melodrama, he would realise that our leading teachers weave together the rigour that he demands together with the engagement that is essential to learning.  Some might be a bit left-wing, perish the thought, but they will be no less rigorous. 

And some of the right wingers in the profession might think about what motivates each student and work from there.  How spineless is that!

Please let’s bring back rational, balanced argument – and not always feel that every sentence we utter has to contain the full dramatic mix of a Shakespearian tragedy.

And stop telling highly skilled professionals how to do their job….. please?

But, Toby, if I've misunderstood what you were saying, I apologise.  

Exeunt omnes.