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By a ‘practice’ I mean a collection of different activities which are bound together by a common purpose and embody certain values; such common purpose and values make the different activities intelligible. Thus, teaching embraces a range of activities throughout the day or week. But what makes these otherwise quite distinct activities intelligible is the overall aim to get pupils to learn the values which are embodied both within the procedures adopted and in the selection of what is to be learnt. The teacher of history does many things to help the pupils understand the doctrinal differences between Catholic and Protestant at the Reformation, but that particular set of activities is intelligible within a wider set of understandings and implicit values concerned with the teaching of history in general and the Reformation in particular. Teachers are generally speaking selected, trained and appointed to further that practice. They are initiated into a tradition which embodies certain assumptions about what is worth learning and about how that learning should be brought about. In that respect, teachers belong to a specific social and educational practice – coming to acquire the values and purposes inherent within it, whilst at the same time contributing (through their constant reflection and critical appraisal) to its development. An ‘educational practice’ is necessarily a ‘contested area’ – embracing, as it does, a range of values over which there is not, nor could there ever be, a complete agreement.

Such a tradition both of what is worth learning and of how morally that learning should take place has in an important sense ‘a life of its own’. It is something which cannot be deliberately created anew. Its development arises from critical appraisal from within the tradition as much as from external pressures and regulations. Teachers, seeing the demotivation of alienated young people, will question the value of this learning objective for these pupils. They will reassess what it means to educate this or that child, given the particular economic and social circumstances. They will draw upon the cultural traditions they have inherited to make sense of the situation and to help the learners to make sense. In other words, teaching as part of an educational practice must include deliberation about the end or values of teaching, as much as it does the deliberation about the means or techniques.

It is, of course, the case that there is constant attempt to hijack such a tradition by government. The sort of people formed by an educational practice – the attitudes, understanding and skills that are learnt – are obviously of interest to those who are in positions of power and who assume responsibility for the economy and the social well-being of the citizens. Hence, there will often be a tendency for a government to try to dictate what should be learnt and even to influence how it should be learnt – that is, to intervene within the educational tradition and to redirect it. And new teachers, when such occurs, might well fail to comprehend their distinctive role within an educational practice, having been trained solely to know of and to reach particular targets. It was not always thus, and indeed there is something inherently self-contradictory in such an attempt by those in positions of power to redefine an educational practice. When appointed to the Central Advisory Council for Education (England) in 1947, Dr Marjorie Reeves asked the then Permanent Secretary, Reginald Maude, what the main function was of the members of the Council. His reply was that they must be prepared to die at the first ditch as soon as politicians get their hands on education. There was a belief then that ‘educational practices’ were too important to be controlled by politicians – indeed, something inherently incongruous about it. An educational practice is the range of activities together aimed at the improvement of the mind, the capacity to think, to understand and to appreciate. And what counts as ‘thinking’, ‘understanding’ and ‘appreciating’ is not something which politicians have the wisdom or authority to pronounce upon.

An educational practice, therefore, in which teachers are engaged, which they develop through their participation and for which they are appointed, is the product of years of critical enquiry and questioning. The ‘practice’ draws upon the intellectual and artistic traditions of enquiry, which they themselves develop through new discoveries and through criticism. The teacher is, or should have been, initiated into such traditions, and his or her job is to enable the next generation to be likewise introduced to them. The practice embodies certain values, requiring of the teacher particular intellectual and moral virtues. What we teach in schools cannot be insulated from what is discovered or developed in the intellectual and aesthetic life of the wider society, in particular the universities which have the responsibility for producing new knowledge and yet for guarding this distinctive tradition of intellectual enquiry and criticism. Such a critical tradition necessarily has a life of its own, changing through its own internal questioning and enquiry; and those educational practices which draw upon such a tradition must a fortiori have within them the power for self-development. Teachers, therefore, are the custodians of such a tradition. They have a responsibility to the learners certainly – and thus to protect those learners against the interventions of government when these no longer are in the interests of the learner; and they have a responsibility to those intellectual and artistic traditions upon which they draw.

The practice of teaching, therefore, since it seeks to bring about learning, depends upon the nature of that which is to be learnt. To teach physics requires putting across, in a way that the pupil will be able to make sense of, the key ideas which structure that kind of scientific enquiry. The teacher will himself have to have identified what those key ideas are. He needs to respect the structure of the subject matter, which is itself intelligible within a public and accessible body of knowledge, well corroborated within a tradition of enquiry and criticism. Teachers of literature are themselves inhabiting a tradition of appreciation and of criticism, a tradition which is selective of what is judged to be worth reading and understanding. It is that tradition which they are seeking to initiate the students into. The expertise and the authority of the teachers lies in their own understanding of those traditions, a recognition of the key ideas and values inherent within them, and an acquaintance with the important texts.

‘Learning’, therefore, is ‘learning something’ – a range of interconnected ideas or concepts, a way of enquiring, a set of principles, a mode of perceiving. And assessment of that learning – of its success or failure – depends on whether those ideas or ways of enquiring, those principles and modes of experiencing have been internalised. Not anything counts as having understood a theorem or as doing history. Of course, the nature of that which is to be learnt is never static. The way in which poetry comes to be written and appreciated evolves over time, through experience or changing circumstances or criticism and argument – as, indeed, does our understanding of the physical world. To understand and to appreciate a discipline of thinking and appreciating is, also, to enter into this very argument about what is valid, correct, or true. It is a form of knowledge, a way of experiencing, an engagement with ideas, a kind of dialogue or conversation with what others have said and done. The teacher is both the guardian of such traditions and the promoter of them. The classroom is not a place in which the teacher should convey his or her private opinions, however worthy those may be. The authority of the teachers lies in a public world of knowledge and appreciation, which they have access to and have mastered, and which they might convey to their pupils. The views of the teachers qua teachers should be disciplined by the nature of that which they are teaching – by the text or by the publicly agreed body of knowledge. And, of course, it thereby follows that the authority of the teacher is always open to challenge in the light of the learners’ understanding of the text or their grasp of that body of knowledge. In that way, the teacher participates in a way of life and a tradition of thinking which is independent of government intervention. Indeed, it provides the base upon which such intervention might be examined and criticised. One problem with educating people – putting them in touch with a world of ideas and with the ‘conversations which take place between the generations of mankind’ – is that such people have thereby the tools to think independently of the very restrictions others might seek to impose upon them.

Teaching, therefore, is essentially a transaction between, on the one hand, the ‘impersonal knowledge’ which is publicly accessible in books and artefacts, and, on the other, the ‘personal ways of thinking’ of the students or pupils. The art and the skill of the teacher is to make the connections between the two. The educational practice of the teacher, therefore, involves many different kinds of activities, different judgements and assessments, different kinds of competence and expertise. What brings all these activities, competences and judgements together is the conscious purpose of making these connections.

Such connections or transactions are permeated by values – the judgement that this or that knowledge or text has something of worth for these learners, the respect that is given to the learners’ knowledge and understanding (even where that is disagreed with), the importance attached to accuracy of judgement or to validity of argument or to the truth of the conclusion reached. And ‘accuracy’, ‘validity’ and ‘truth’ imply standards, against which our deliberations and reflections are assessed and yet which cannot be created or defined by particular people. The teacher, therefore, is concerned to impart not simply the answers to certain problems or the concepts through which those problems might be understood. He or she is concerned, too, to convey a way of valuing the truth in its different forms and the processes by which we approximate to the truth in our arguments and enquiries. This is not easy, for the very demanding standards of an ‘educational practice’ often go against the grain. It is not easy to stick to the demands of truth and accuracy where those appear to go against one’s own interest. It has often been thought that only certain sorts of learners are really capable of benefiting from educational practices and for whom therefore there should be teachers, in the sense I am talking about, rather than merely trainers and childminders. The Norwood Report (1943), which helped shape the post-war reorganisation of education on tripartite lines, based its proposals for three types of schools (grammar, technical and modern schools) on the need to match schools to the nature of the child. A few were capable of abstract thought and were interested in ideas; another group had a natural bent for applying ideas rather than for engaging in learning for its own sake; the majority were more concerned with practical activities and the sort of practical know-how associated with the immediately practical demands of everyday life and of finding work (either unskilled or craft-based). Hence, there was a need, so it was claimed, for quite different forms of education in quite different establishments. Even when the comprehensive system of education was introduced in many parts of the country after Circular 10/65, either these distinctions remained or the erstwhile modern school streams within the comprehensive school very often had to follow a curriculum which was dominated by ‘abstract thought’, ‘learning for its own sake’ and ‘interest in ideas’.

The problem arose particularly at the raising of the school-leaving age in 1972. There was concern that an extension of compulsory schooling for the group, which previously had been classified as motivated by practical and immediate interests, would exacerbate behavioural difficulties in schools. Therefore, it was thought by some that what was needed was vocational training – a practical preparation for the world of work. ‘Educational practice’, which I explained above, seemed to be quite inappropriate. Furthermore, much of that vocational training should be work-based – learning on-the-job. Utility, rather than engagement with the world of ideas, would help the young person to be more employable; it would also enhance the skill-base of a society which was endeavouring to survive in an ever more competitive world.

The tripartite way of thinking has survived through a long sequence of differential qualifications post-16 with General Certificate of Education (Advanced Level), General National Vocational Qualification (GNVQ), National Vocational Qualification (NVQ) and so forth. The last focuses upon specific competences, devoid of any engagement with the world of ideas, and the GNVQ, and then its successor sadly followed the same route.

There have, however, always been voices who have resisted this sharp distinction between types of child, between types of curriculum supposedly to match each type of child, and thus between education for some and training for others. In anticipation of the raising of the school-leaving age in 1972, there was developed an approach to the teaching of the humanities which recognises the capacity of all young people to engage seriously with the ideas embodied within a literature, drama, history, political discourse and religious enquiry. For what are these forms of thinking and enquiry at their best other than the exploration of what it is to be human? The Schools Council Working Paper No. 2 argued that the humanities was that part of the curriculum where the teachers emphasised their ‘common humanity with the pupils and their common uncertainty in the face of significant and personal problems’ (Schools Council, 1967). Properly taught, the themes of great literature and drama, the narratives of history, attempt to explain the human condition within religious and theological studies, the ‘embodied meanings’ within the different art forms, the accounts of society within political and social studies – all these are as pertinent to the interests of Norwood’s second and third categories of young people (those who are good at applying ideas and those who are good at practical things) as they are to those who feel at home with ‘abstract ideas’ and with ‘learning for its own sake’. The themes of great literature – the use and abuse of political power, sexual relations, the pursuit or abuse of justice, of the exercise of authority, ethnic relations and racial intolerance, jealousy, ambition and hatred, the use of violence to pursue political goals, high ideals and aspirations – are also the daily concerns of all young people, part of their thoughts and conversations, however inadequately understood or inarticulately expressed. The art and the skill of the teacher is to help them understand those themes more profoundly but in the light of how others have developed such themes within the various arts and human studies, and in the light of the very best evidence available. It is to introduce the young people to a world of ideas within which their own thoughts and aspirations can be articulated, challenged, defended, deepened, made intelligible to others and thus to themselves.

The text (the play, the poem, the historical narrative) or the artefact (the work of art, the building) is, if you like, the ‘impersonal’ reference point of several students. Of course, it embodies a particular meaning, but that meaning is constantly explored and challenged, as the learners ‘struggle to make sense’ or ‘try to understand’ or relate it to their own ‘personal’ meanings and understandings of themselves and of the social world they inhabit. The teacher’s task is to help bridge this gap between these ‘impersonal worlds’ of text and artefact and the ‘personal worlds’ of the learners as they struggle to make sense. And the end result of such a transaction cannot be predicted with any certainty. We come to differ and to disagree, but the important thing is that we do so in the light of what has been said and made intelligible by others and in the light of relevant evidence. Indeed, there can be no end result, because any conclusions reached are only provisional. Such conclusions are ever open to challenge in the light of further evidence, further insights, further argument and further reflection.

That, then, is at the centre of an ‘educational practice’ – the attempt to make sense of the physical, social, moral and aesthetic worlds which one inhabits in the light of the ideas which one has inherited. It is a ‘practice’ involving many activities aimed at helping the learner to make sense of his or her world, but knowing that there is no definitive sense to be attained. And, hence, an educational practice, led and promoted by the teacher, skilled in the conduct of such transactions and rooted in those intellectual and cultural traditions which feed into that attempt to make sense, is integral to a fully human form of life. Such a view of an ‘educational practice’ is not alien to the practice of many able and inspiring teachers. It was clearly most articulately reflected in the Humanities Curriculum Project and in Bruner’s ‘Man: A Course of Study’. But that exploration of what it means to be human (‘how did we become so?’ and ‘how can we become more so?’) lies at the base of the human studies – their rationale and their justification – however disguised that may be by the external purposes imposed upon intrinsically worthwhile pursuits.