Colin Hannaford
British and Foreign Correspondence EducationNews.org

Last week I promised to write a second part of my report on the four-day Second International Conference of the Academy of Critical Thinking in New College, Oxford; and this is it.

On the whole, as I wrote last week, I found the experience invigorating, although not entirely as I expected. I made several attempts to begin that report. Eventually I realised that this time my irritation exceeded my elation; that I must first get rid of my black and yellow bile - my melancholy and choler - if the usual sunny balance of my humours was to be restored.

But these attempts also made me shamefully late for a meeting I had promised to keep,to watch an open-air performance in Headington Hill park of William Shakespeare's classic comedy of enchanted lovers: 'A Midsummer Night's Dream'.

The performance was magical, and I hope that most of your readers will know the story, for then I can now express much of my pleasure in the performances of the principals of the Academy by relating them to the principals of the play.

First: imagine the founder of the Academy, Dr Richard Paul: gently spoken but magisterial, with his grizzled white beard, and his long grey hair reaching to his shoulders. He is Oberon.

What better Titania than Dr Linda Elder: with her slim, vital figure, flawless complexion, perfect cheek-bones, fierce dark eyes, black locks - with the thrilling voice and looks of a true enchantress?

And for Puck? What about the tousled 21 year old Rush Cosgrove, a genius, as any Puck should be, of amazingly fluent and unscripted, impromptu, autoschediastic - now there's a word: try using that twice a day - articulation of his master's every will and wish. Before he met Dr Paul, Rush told me, he had been just another cocky 13 year old, whose school had rather overdone its duty in boosting his self-esteem.

And finally, in the very special role of Bottom, I would cast Dr Gerald Nosich. Here was the man who told me what I did not know but will ever treasure. His eruptive energy kept us spell-bound: partly - it can be said - by his wondrous store of experience and anecdote; and partly - it must be said - with a truly delicious expectation that at any moment he might levitate, explode - or even turn into a whole tribe of breathlessly expository Geralds, all talking and panting and whirling and jumping and shaking and gesticulating and losing track of their Vufoils. But his explanation of the value of fundamental and powerful concepts to illustrate and remember history will never leave me. The American Civil War? Remember: 'Change; Movement; Conflict'. Europe's 20^th century? Remember: 'the Versailles Treaty; the Depression'. This is pure magic too.

A wonderful cast; a good story; a little long, of course; a little repetitious. With characters like these it could have been half as long and still enchanting. And the midges and mosquitoes - of course, I mean on Headington Hill - had also taken their modest but stinging fees, as my companion and I noticed later that night.

But just how good is the Academy? Very good indeed. With principals like these, how could it fail? And is it failing? My guess is that it must.

This is not just conjecture. It is drawn from observation. Everyone who attended the Academy received a small library of books. Most contain optimistic declarations of the aims of education. But in Britain - and I shall restrict myself entirely to Britain - these aims are clearly not being met. A recent statistic is that the proportion of British sixteen year olds entering higher education - of any kind - is one of the three lowest of all developed societies. This is not just bad: it is catastrophic. No country can bear a burden of dependent young, when it must also support a burden of increasingly dependent old.

The purpose of the Academy was to explore the possibility of transferring the methods of the Oxford Tutorial - that is, weekly instruction by a university scholar of one, now two students, at a time: a very successful but also very expensive method of education - to other universities with classes of twenty, thirty, and even more.

The purpose of this effort was declared to be a 'better society'. This is admirable, of course. Who does not wish for 'better societies'?

But is it realistic? The strategy is seriously flawed.

The Oxford Tutorial system is the product of a class system which saw nothing wrong in those already privileged by birth and wealth receiving the highest standards of education: because they were destined to rule. The rest of society was only destined to know enough to obey instructions.

This is the strategy which the Academy wishes to extend to a greater fraction of young people: not so much privileged by wealth, but certainly selected for their supposed intelligence. It is progress of a sort: but this will only create a larger minority in higher education. And no minority, for any reasons: admirable or malign, sensitive or cruel, intelligent or stupid - can determine the standards of a mass society.

Only its majority can do that. It is therefore with the majority that the attempt to achieve a 'better society' must start.

And now perhaps you may see how extraordinarily fitting was that accident which took me from puzzling over the Academy to Shakespeare's magical play!

Oberon and Titania rule over the world of the fairies. But they rule over men and women too. Nowhere in their play - which, you will remember is actually a play within a play: a play of these higher beings with their bewildered victims; and within it, a rougher and far more boisterous comedy of Bottom and his friends - does it ever occur to these higher beings that they ought to use their powers to help those over whom they rule to rule themselves.

And this, it seems to me, has been a problem for democracies from the time of Socrates. Democracy in Britain began as another of these plays within a play: a rough and boisterous game of politics, of much noise and pomp and show - but never intended to challenge the higher powers, invisible when they wish to be unseen.

I started worrying about these problems over thirty years ago, when I found myself in a country where men and women, outwardly identical in every way, were killing each other, with a deep sense of justification, after going to different schools.

At these schools they had been taught almost exactly the same knowledge: but they had also been taught an opinion as truth: that those people in the other schools, were not good.

How can I help young people to realise, I asked myself, that no society can 'better itself' by licensing one fraction to rule over the rest, or by one fraction, whether the larger or the smaller, attempting to drive out or exterminate the others?

Clearly, I realised, this becomes more and more impossible the older people become, for the more they are then convinced that only their ideas are right. Clearly, I

knew, I must also earn my living. So I must start where I earn my living. I looked around my classroom, at my pupils bent over their work. I must start here.

And here, of course, I was teaching mathematics: my only recourse when I gave up being a soldier. Here I found the possibility of reversing the demographic inequality which will always defeat a minority's attempts to create a more unified and equitable society: a society that is at ease with itself, capable of intelligently directed and accepted change. We can teach the majority to think for themselves!

I found that mathematics can teach this easily. Essentially mathematics is all argument. But there are very serious dangers in the way that mathematics is usually taught. If taught mainly by instruction, the usual result is that the teachers will soon be rewarding far more pretended understanding and obedience than real comprehension.

But, one may think: this can't be all bad. What was ever expected of you as a soldier? Don't we need our soldiers to do what they are ordered to do without demanding lengthy explanation? This is how battles can be lost. If change is required, surely we should trust our leaders to tell us what to do, and then we should just obey!

But we are talking mass persuasion here. I will argue, admittedly from a limited experience, that the effect on youngsters of seeing pretended understanding and uncritical obedience rewarded - not rarely, but thousands of times - is to cause many of them to have a deep and abiding contempt for any moral authority. It leads many of them to have a sneaking admiration for two very different kinds of personality: on the one hand, of the slickest trickster in the class; on the other, of the one who derides authority most openly, but survives: the class buffoon. The first may be expected to win; the second is fun, but can to do no serious harm.

Look around you, dear readers. I am as worried as you are. Think only, please, of British democracy if you can, for I am only entitled to refer to my own country. I am arguing that, thoroughly bewildered by their education, thoroughly confused about what is honest, about what is true, about what is real and what is not, the majority of people will tend to vote - if they vote at all - for the slicker or buffoon.

These will be our leaders. They will make a mockery of democracy.

My solution was to learn to persuade my pupils to treat everything that they read in their mathematics textbook - or, increasingly, received as any instruction from me - as an argument.

Arguments are very different from instructions. I showed them that they could only properly understand an argument by arguing it out amongst themselves. In this way they, the majority, not only learn to respect different opinions; they also learn to respect those who produce them. This works for the majority before any of them decide or are selected to continue into higher education.

All of this has been my own experience. If, however, I am now allowed a surmise, it appears to me unarguable that if far more young people were to become accustomed to working and studying and thinking like this before they left school, far more would find higher education useful, far more would enter, and far more would succeed.

Colin Hannaford, Oxford, England,
Publsihed Spetember 22, 2008