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Crowther (1959) Volume I Report Preliminary pages (i-xxxi)
Part 1 Education in a Changing World
Part 2 The Development of the Modern School
Part 3 'Secondary Education for All'
Part 4 The Way to County Colleges
Part 5 The Sixth Form
Part 6 Technical Challenge and Educational Response
Part 7 Institutions and Teachers
Appendices
Glossary (506-513)
Volume II Surveys Preliminary pages (i-xviii)
Part 1 The Social Survey
Part 2 The National Service Survey
Part 3 The Technical Courses Survey
Index of Tables (237-240) |
The Crowther Report (1959) 15 to 18 A report of the Central Advisory Council for Education (England) London: Her Majesty's Stationery Office 1959
Volume I [page 391] 568. An observer of English education can hardly fail to be disturbed by the large number of able boys and girls who lose their intellectual curiosity before they have exhausted their capacity to learn. There are, of course, dull patches in every subject, but the distaste to which we refer goes much deeper than this temporary boredom. It is more akin to accidie, that deep-seated apathy which theologians class as one of the seven deadly sins. They may go on working; but it will be more for what they can get out of it than for what they can find in it. Is this inevitable? Where so many patently lose interest in developing powers they undoubtedly possess, and in which they used to delight, it seems to us that the fault must, in part at least, lie in the kind of education they are offered. We cannot afford to do without their talent. The country's interest requires that all who can profit from a full-time education up to 18 should have one; and the boys and girls to whom we are referring fall into that category. How can we restore their willingness and eagerness to learn? 569. The answer, we think, lies in an alternative approach to knowledge to that which has traditionally dominated European education. We are very far from decrying the academic tradition which inspires and is embodied in our grammar schools and universities. We could not have written of it in the terms we used in Part Five if we did not believe that there is no finer intellectual discipline and none more fitting to certain types of mind. It is not, however, the only road by which good minds can travel. If the country is to benefit fully from the intelligence of all its able boys and girls, it will be necessary to rehabilitate the word "practical" in educational circles - it is often used in a pejorative sense - and to define it more clearly. How in fact is it commonly used? There is a tendency today to say that science and mathematics are practical and that the traditional subjects of the arts side are not. There is another usage which classifies woodwork and cookery as practical, as opposed to science or French, which on this reckoning are both academic. Clearly, then, "practical" is an ambiguous and emotionally charged word. What does a boy mean when he demands a more practical education? He may perhaps just be complaining that he cannot see the point of what he is asked to do. He demands that the purpose of what he is taught [page 392] should be clear, and that it should commend itself to him as worth while. 570. Practical may have quite another meaning. This is especially true of the arts, where a boy or girl may be asking that he should be taught to do as well as to appreciate what others have done. He wants, perhaps, to play in an orchestra, and not merely to listen to one; to paint and not only to receive lessons in art appreciation. He stands in a tradition many thousands of years old, an educational tradition, though not historically a school or university tradition. It is a task of importance to make this other tradition of artistic or creative education (historically a matter of professional or technical training) as much a respectable part of the general educational system as the largely analytical tradition of the schools. It is right to add that some of the most encouraging educational achievements of our time have been precisely in this sphere. 571. A boy may, however, have something still different in mind when he speaks of a practical education. He may want to use his hands and his mind not so much to create as to invent. The boy with whom we are concerned is one who has pride in his skill of hand and a desire to use that skill to discover how things work, to make them work and to make them work better. The tradition to which he aspires to belong is the modern one of the mechanical man whose fingers are the questioning instruments of thought and exploration. He would readily understand and respond to the impulse which side-tracked Lord Kelvin for five years between the first and the second of a promised series of articles on the Mariner's Compass for the Victorian periodical Good Words because, once his attention had been directed towards the compass, he could not stop until he had revolutionised its design. There is always a risk that the practical approach may be written down as a second-best method for rather less able boys. We quote Lord Kelvin's example to show that this should not be done. The motor car engine and the radio set are to a boy of this kind an irresistible invitation to discovery. He will not be content with understanding one of them, but will want to explore both, and more machines as well of different kinds. His is not a narrow vocational interest, but a broad scientific curiosity. Fortunately this breadth of appetite is in line with the new demand for technical adaptability, and we can encourage his discursiveness. So strong is this mechanical inquisitiveness that today it drives many to educate themselves who yesterday could hardly be compelled to be educated. So new is it that it has not yet been able thoroughly to permeate the educational system. It is normally accompanied by a manual competence which, it is true, is not a common possession of all men: and which, even in those who have it, needs to be developed [page 393] by patient teaching. Sometimes the process may be reversed, and mechanical inquisitiveness may lead a boy on to acquiring skill of hand. But in whichever order it comes, the boy who sets out on this sort of exploration soon requires to add considerable theoretical knowledge, which he will undertake with determination because he now sees the need for it. It is clear that what we have been describing is not every boy's road to knowledge, let alone every girl's. It is not even every scientifically minded boy's, let alone every mathematician's. But for some it is the only way, and for many the most congenial. 572. The illustrations we have just given are drawn from engineering, and indeed it is the most obvious field in which to find examples. But the principle of a practical approach to theoretical knowledge is not by any means limited to this field. It is of wide application. We confine ourselves to two further illustrations. The first may be made by a quotation from the recent report of Lord De La Warr's Committee on Agricultural Education. In the last thirty years, the report states, "new varieties of almost every type of crop including grass have been bred to give heavier yields, and there are new methods of combating pests and diseases. New and more elaborate machinery has been produced, and British agriculture is now one of the most highly mechanised in the world. More scientific breeding and management of livestock is practised ... There is no longer a place for the unskilled worker". The second illustration is from the field of commerce. Here too, the scientific revolution is being experienced. Machines are replacing men and women and changing the kinds of skill that are in demand. Problems which used to be insoluble can now be solved by calculating machines, provided that the right questions are put to them. To do this does not involve a mechanical or electrical knowledge of how the machine works, but it does involve a real familiarity with what it can do. There is room for a new type of office worker, roughly in the technician range, who has an ingenuity in turning to the best advantage the power of the new machinery. On the other hand, there is a growing number of office workers who require less skill than their predecessors. This may be illustrated by the decline in the number of students taking shorthand in evening classes at a time when the number taking typewriting is still growing, and by the halving within six years of the numbers taking book-keeping. 573. There is still another way in which the need for a different kind of education can be seen. It is not simply a matter of the things that are taught or of the uses to which they are to be put when the pupil goes out into the world; it is often as much a matter of the way in which subjects - often the old familiar subjects - are taught. Different [page 394] kinds of minds must be approached in different ways. There is one type of mind which is readily attuned to abstract thinking and can comprehend the meaning of a generalisation. For these minds, the teacher can best proceed by first expounding the principle and then illustrating it, by teaching the rule and its exceptions, and then setting the class to work on examples. This is (in the main) the academic approach. But there are other minds which cannot grasp the general except by way of the particular, which cannot understand what is meant by the rule until they have observed the examples. Some minds are analytical; others can only build up. There is also the distinction between the mind that takes easily to verbal methods of expression and the mind that moves more easily by other means. We referred to this distinction in paragraph 543, where we quoted Dr. Ethel C. Venables' demonstration that the non-verbal mind, when its basic intelligence is assessed by a test appropriate to it and not by tests designed for verbal minds, is not so inferior to the academic mind as is sometimes supposed. It may be that a similar demonstration could be made of some of the other types of mind that we have been attempting to distinguish. Whether this is so or not, we feel confident that the "yield" of the whole educational system could be much increased if there were available a wider variety of forms of education and a wider choice of sequence in learning, so that every young person could find one that was designed to develop his potentialities in the most suitable way. 574. Hitherto in this country, there have been for most boys and girls at the age of 15 or 16 only two alternatives - the full-time academic route, for which they may not be suitable and which may not attract them; and the part-time route, which, for all its merits, has the disadvantages of requiring a prior entry into the labour market, of being rather narrowly vocational, of being very arduous, and of not being available at all to many boys and most girls. We think it should be accepted as one of the major tasks before English education to construct a new system of education for the years between 15 or 16 and 18 which would neither suffer from these defects of the part-time route nor be academic in the old conventional sense. This is what we have attempted to characterise as a "practical" education, recognising as we do how imperfect is the word. We are not here concerned (though we shall be in the next chapter) with the institutions in which this "practical" education should be provided. Our present purpose is to try to define the sort of education that is needed if a large part of the native intelligence of our people is not to continue to run to waste. 575. It is an essential part of our thinking that this alternative system of education should not be regarded as wholly, or even mainly, technical and still less as confined to the special needs of a narrow [page 395] range of occupations. On the contrary, we think of it as providing the widest range of instruction for young people who will be proceeding into a great variety of different employments; one of its incidental purposes would be to enable them to postpone their final choice of occupation until two or three years later than now, when they will be much better able to choose. At the same time, it is no less essential that the progressive expansion of full-time "practical" education for young people up to the age of 18 should not be conceived of as something that has to be done in isolation from, or even in rivalry with, the existing patterns of further education. On the contrary, the obvious need is for a converging movement. As technical education gradually moves (as we believe it must) towards a full-time basis, it should, so to speak, meet half way the growth of a new form of full-time "practical" education in which it can take its natural place. This is, indeed, the way in which we would attempt to implement the third of the principles that were laid down in Chapter 32 - the transformation of a varied collection of plans for vocational training into a coherent system of practical education. Our aim, in talking of an alternative route, is not to widen the gap between the grammar school Sixth Forms and the technical colleges by inserting still a third rival type of education between them, but rather to knit them together in a comprehensive system of alternative provision for the many different varieties of human nature and individual ambition. 576. An educational approach of the kind we have described as "practical" can be made either in school or in further education. Circumstances will determine where in any individual instance it is best made. Practical courses may be full-time in the sense that all the work, both practical and theoretical, takes place in an educational institution; they may be part-time in the sense that the practical experience (or most of it) is provided in employment. But we would insist that all courses designed for able boys and girls - those, let us say, who will rise at least to technician level or its equivalent in other occupations - ought to be full-time in the special sense that the whole of the student's time up to the age of 18 should be devoted to gaining relevant educational experience. If he goes out to work, it should be for the educational benefit that he derives from it, and not to play a part as a producer. We do not want to rule out productive work (indeed it can have very great value), but we would stress that the reason for undertaking it should be educational and not economic. 577. At the age of 15 or 16, then, there ought to be an effectively free choice for every young person of ability between two different routes [page 396] of proceeding, the one that we have labelled "academic"', the other "practical". It may be that the "academic" route would normally proceed through the grammar school to the university or the college of advanced technology, while the "practical" route would normally go through a college of further education. But this need not always be so; there is an increasing number of schools - grammar, grammar-technical, technical or comprehensive - which can offer the two routes within the one institution, and equally there is no reason why "academic" courses should not be offered by colleges of further education, as indeed they are. We are not arguing for one sort of institution as against another - though we repeat here our previously expressed opinion that part-time day release courses are no longer to be recommended as a proper method for the higher grades of technician, or evening classes for any form of sustained education for young people. These two systems ought no longer to be recommended because, as we have seen, they are wasteful and precarious and the education given must be narrowly confined by examination requirements. Nevertheless there will certainly be some who take them, even when they need not, for psychological reasons. In our view the way ought to be wide open for them to return at any point to the sandwich or full-time route where they should provide a group of students marked by especially strong purposefulness in their studies. 578. It is idle to pretend that an effectively free choice between alternative routes is at present universally available, or even generally so, for young people of 16 to 18. How many schools provide it? Many of the abler boys and girls who would benefit from a practical approach are in grammar schools. The curriculum of the grammar school below the Sixth Form was discussed in Chapter 20. The mere possession of a craft room or the provision of teaching time for craft subjects is, of course, very far from constituting a practical approach, but it is at least a necessary prerequisite. It may be sufficient then, to say here that, while science and mathematics are generously represented on the time-table of the grammar school, craft after the second or third year usually becomes an optional subject taken only by the weaker boys academically. Many of these schools provide only for woodwork; in only a small minority is technical drawing taught. In three out of twenty-one boys' or co-educational grammar schools on which full inspection reports were written in 1958 there was no provision for craft work; in one school only 15 boys, and in another less than 20, did any craft work after the second year. It is, we think, true to say that rarely in such schools is craft teaching the starting point for a technical education which reaches out into science and mathematics. To put things this way round would be contrary to the inherited grammar school tradition. On the whole then, the practical approach as we have described it cannot start for boys in these [page 397] schools until they transfer to further education. But it must be added that many grammar schools are changing their approach. 579. The position in modern schools is very different. There must be few boys who do not follow a craft course right up to their last week in school and usually with an increasing allocation of time towards the end. A beginning is often made with technical drawing and in a good many schools there is an approach to science through the study of machines. There is nothing in the short history of the modern school to stand in the way of its providing just this kind of educational approach and much to encourage it. The education that an enlightened modern school gives to its ablest boys may in fact be better fitted for many of the less able boys in a grammar school than the education they are getting there. After all, they are often very much the same boys, sent to different types of school by the hazard of an examination or by the chance of the district in which they happen to live. But, at present, the route through modern schools virtually stops at 16 and pupils must then either transfer to the Sixth Form of some other school or to further education. 580. If we want to see whether the kind of approach we have in mind is capable of providing a severe enough intellectual challenge for the Sixth Form, we shall have to turn to the secondary technical schools - soon to be reinforced by the technical Sixth Forms of the comprehensive schools. It seems to us that the technical schools have shown that it can be done. A practical approach need not fizzle out in acquiring the skill to carry out simple or complicated processes. An illustration may make the point clear. In one school at the present time a new electrically driven saw-bench is being designed and made. It is the job of the fourth-year boys to do the work, of the fifth-year boys to make the detailed drawings from which the fourth-year work, and of the Sixth Form to design the equipment and provide the sketches from which the detailed drawings are made. Here is an illustration of what we mean by a practical education making progressively exacting intellectual demands. 581. Those who follow a parallel road cannot hope to do all the things that are done on the older road (nor would they always wish to do so.) The practical approach, taken seriously, is a time-consuming one. Something of the traditional education will have to go. What should it be? No doubt different schools will decide differently, and we hope that all schools will allow as much latitude as possible to their pupils in selecting some at least of the elements of their curriculum. But we doubt very much, for instance, whether many schools using the parallel road will be able to spare the time for their pupils to learn two foreign languages. We would, however, feel that it is essential [page 398] that some time and care should be devoted to aspects of education other than the technical. In Chapter 25 we gave a good deal of attention to what we have called the "minority time" of the Sixth Form specialist. What we have in mind here is a special case of the same principle, and it is not necessary to develop the argument in detail twice over. One particular point, however, must be made. Boys and girls for whom this parallel route is the natural and appropriate one are often, as we saw in Chapter 33, those who find it relatively difficult to express themselves adequately in words. It is, indeed, one reason why they are at a disadvantage when they are asked to follow a traditional grammar school curriculum, and why we suggest a different starting point for them. It is, however, highly important that their education should not neglect the importance of words, or they will be at a disadvantage all their lives. They need quite as much English teaching as their bookish contemporaries. 582. Schools provide education that is full-time and not linked to the requirements of any occupation; but very little of it in the years after 16, is as yet "practical". In technical colleges, on the other hand, there is plenty of "practical" education but very little of it, in these years, is full-time or divorced from occupational requirements. There are, as we have seen, as yet hardly any sandwich courses for these ages. Day release courses are available; but, as we have also seen, they cannot be made broad and deep enough to provide a satisfactory education for able boys and girls of this age. In some directions, however, there is a good deal of full-time education which merits consideration. This is particularly true of engineering, building and nautical courses for boys, and in commerce, catering and pre-nursing courses mainly for girls. Some of these courses undoubtedly make comparable intellectual demands to those made by schools. 583. It is apparent, then, that we are advocating something that is as yet only in the early stages of development when we recommend full-time practical courses for able pupils from 16 to 18. There is fairly good provision before that age and there is getting to be good provision in many directions at a later age; but between 16 and 18 there is a gap where the only choices available to many boys and girls are the wasteful expedient of part-time education, or a full-time academic course which is not suitable for them. We wish to see this gap in the practical approach closed both in schools and in further education. Clearly the provision would take different forms in these two very different settings, but we believe the educational problems to be similar, and we should like to see them jointly examined. One of the tasks of such an enquiry might well be to examine the solutions [page 399] that have been found for similar problems in other countries, perhaps notably in France and Holland. Several of our members, at our request, visited some of these countries, and a note by Mr. H. A. Warren on the results of their enquiries is printed as Appendix III to this report. 584. We give two illustrations of the kind of problems which we think are unsolved. First, how is the programme of practical work to be designed so that the intellectual stimulus and the theoretical knowledge arise out of it? We suspect that too often, even when both elements are present, they remain separate. Secondly, how can the practical work and the intellectual value deriving from it best be assessed? Any education in England which aims at equipping its pupils for a professional status has to conform to an examination system designed in relation to an educational curriculum of which both the main subjects and the approach to them are academic. It will be apparent that it is not always easy to reconcile this parallel road with traditional examinations. Sometimes it can only be done with undesirable distortion. Some of the most valuable aspects of the education it can give would, we suggest, more naturally be tested by a scrutiny of work done during the course and by an oral examination upon it. We do not forget the recent development of examinations of practical subjects within the framework of the General Certificate of Education, but we do not believe that these provide a wholly satisfactory answer. New thought will indeed be necessary about the best way of appraising the standards of work done in this different approach. 585. We have not had sufficient time to carry out the detailed study which these problems urgently need and which we hope will be the subject of a separate enquiry. This study should not be confined to a professional approach from the point of view of the occupations which students are hoping to enter or to make their careers. It is true that professional requirements are important and relevant, but they are not the only matter of concern, nor in the final analysis are they at this stage the main consideration. Students of 16 and 17 are still boys and girls in need of a general education and, whether they are at school or in a full-time technical college course or at work, it is broad educational considerations which should be applied. They are in a stage of transition from school to work. We have devoted a large section of our report to the difficult problems that arise of necessity in the transition from school to university. We do not expect that the problems will be any easier, or ought to be, in the field with which we have been concerned in this part. 
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