In defence of intellect – a culture of academic rigour

Teachers should believe their subject can change lives. No, let’s go further: teachers should have a sweetly dewy-eyed belief in their subject’s potential to change the world; that a deep knowledge and understanding of their discipline opens the door to a better future for humanity.

Sounds extreme? Maybe. But if you are not a music teacher who believes music is the highest and most vivid expression of our culture; if you are not a history teacher who believes a comprehensive understanding of the past permits us to make sense of the world today; if you are not a science teacher who believes the methods of science are the only valid route to the truths of the universe; if you are not an English teacher who believes language is the hallmark of our species and its culture, that it is the enabler of abstract thought, and that exploring its form and expression is the very best way to spend your time; or a maths teacher who cannot take an impassioned view on the pure elegance of  to name a few, then your students deserve better.

We are optimists by trade; to expect students to be born into a hopeless world is to make our own role redundant – but none of us teachers act like this. So, taking as a given that students have some promise, it follows that they deserve the highest academic rigour. Should we fail to offer them that, we do our students a disservice, we do society a disservice, and we undermine their aspirations for their futures. Students whose parents can afford to send them to private school do not have a monopoly on academic rigour. Those students should not be the only intellectuals in our society. Sometimes, even among well-qualified teachers, a sneering view of intellect comes out: a view of knowledge as only necessary for passing exams and learning beyond the curriculum should be feared.

One of the most depressing things I’ve heard in my career, and it has stuck with me when I’ve moved schools, was from a fellow science teacher. This teacher relished the idea ‘I’m a teacher of the GCSE specification, not a teacher of science.’ Good grades from our students may well reflect favourably on us, but if this becomes the prime motivator, we should be ashamed. We teach the breadth and depth of our subjects – everything we know about it, our students should have access to. The curriculum guides us but is incidental to where we can go with the material. Taking the view that the spec is ‘all they need’ is an affront to our students that codifies holding them back into our practice.

So, if we’ve decided that academic rigour, or a high challenge curriculum, however you like to put it, is a right for all students, how do we get there?

Firstly, we are the role models who should embody academic rigour. We teachers should never be ashamed of our own learning or talk down our expertise in our subjects. And if we feel we were low achievers, then we should talk up what we have done to fill in any gaps we may have left in our past. Around the school, we must be totems of intellect, be unabashed of our passion for our subjects, and unapologetic for their demands.

Flowing from this talking the talk, if you will, should be the walking the walk. I’ve written about the centrality of teacher subject knowledge in an earlier blog and how we aim to return it to centre stage. Crucially, we must never denigrate knowledge, and always be open to developing our own. No teacher, no matter how many years you have under your belt, knows everything about their subject. So, we must embrace and model the idea that none of us are the finished product: we always have more to learn.

Secondly, teachers must be free to go way outside the curriculum as they see fit. The national curriculum, our GCSE specifications, or our KS3 key performance indicators, are the bare minimum. When teaching key stage 3, give students a dose of GCSE material, or A-level content. When teaching GCSE, push it to A-level and beyond. See how far you can stretch it: I am often surprised by where the students will go with the depth of their understanding. Every lesson, they should be sweating and dangerously mentally fatigued, emerging the other side exhausted but triumphant.

Thirdly, we must actively encourage the development of connections between different areas of our subjects; indeed, the connections between different subjects. This is how simple information, or basic facts, spawns broad and deep knowledge. We often complain that students are bad at synthesis – problem solving with many steps, recalling disparate areas and putting them together, finding links between topics. They are bad at it, but only insofar as all people are bad at this. The only solution is regular, deliberate practice at doing synthesis. It should be commonplace for students to be made to recall learning from many lessons ago in their current lesson, and use that knowledge to help them today. When we neglect this, we become teachers of a series of topics, or teachers of the specification like the individual above, rather than teachers of our subjects in all their interconnected glory.

Let us give students what they deserve, and expect them to rise to it: a curriculum and lessons of academic rigour. Anything less is pandering to mediocrity and succumbing to the little voice that sometimes says to us ‘But these students can’t cope with this!’ May we never insult their intelligence again, and don’t hold back.