Sir Chris Woodhead Blog: Teachers as Authorities not Facilitators
23 March 2015
I never met Theodore Zinn, but, reading his obituary a week or two ago, I very much wish that I had.
From 1950 to 1983 Zinn taught Classics at Westminster. The photographs accompanying the obituary show a man sitting at a desk in a book lined room, addressing a horseshoe of students. He was clearly loved by generations of those he taught and was, it seems, not only a scholar with a formidable intellect, but a kind and generous man with a sense of humour. He must have had remarkable charisma to persuade teachers and parents to sit watching plays performed in Latin when they did not understand a word of the language.
I do not think that there was ever a golden age in education, but reading this obituary I was left with a sense of what has now been more or less lost. There are, of course, dedicated and highly effective teachers in our schools. There may well be some who have the individuality and commitment of Theodore Zinn. Ours, however, is the age of relevance and accessibility and lessons which depend more on the technology than the teacher.
Zinn would not, I suspect, be a great fan of Firefly or iSams. I am certain that the impact of his lessons stemmed from the force of his personality and the love which he had for the language and the literature he taught. All great lessons depend upon these things. The rest is flim flam.
But it is not just a matter of lowered expectations and the worship of the great god of technology. That book lined classroom, with the teacher at the front behind a desk, evokes a sense of something I can only call deference. We don’t do deference these days, do we? What matters more than the substance of the ideas studied is the student’s personal opinion. If you want to know why things have gone wrong in education, here is the place to start.
You cannot have a true education without a proper sense of deference. Real education requires the student to submit himself to the mastery of new ideas and to respect the teacher as an authority in his or her subject. That respect has, of course, to be earned, but those who see the relationship between the teacher and the student as something which has to be outgrown as soon as possible are profoundly misguided. Many in the world of education believe that the purpose of education is to teach children how to learn on their own, to equip them with so called learning skills, and to offer them the joy of a curriculum which they ‘personalise’ in terms of their individual interests.
It is all nonsense. I imagine that Theodore Zinn must have contemplated this new world which emerged towards the end of his teaching career with some bemusement. The question is whether the scholarship he embodied has gone forever. Is there any way in which it can be rediscovered and brought back into our schools?
Professor Sir Chris Woodhead was formerly Her Majesty’s Chief Inspector of Schools from 1994 until 2000. He is author of Class Wars and A Desolation of Learning. His areas of expertise are education and leadership, accountability and the drive to raise standards; his research interest currently is the involvement of the private sector in raising educational standards. He retired at the end of 2013 from the chairmanship of Cognita, the international schools company he established in 2004.