Full review - Authority and the Teacher by William H.Kitchen

 
A review I posted on Goodreads for Teacher Appreciation Week

William H. Kitchen is well-read in philosophy and an experienced teacher. That's all the reader will garner from his book with reading the "About..." section and that's a good thing: the educational battleground is about minds, not egos. And make no mistake, there is a battle.

On one side are the left-wing progressives: holding the media, the state and the majority of schools in their grasp, enforcing "child-centred" education. Their system reduces the teacher to a facilitator (a "cheerleader" as Kitchen once says) of the class, allowing students to discover, learn and decide all by themselves. These same ideologists also push a growing movement against knowledge per se, in favour of "learning skills". This new progressive term describes the theory that knowledge now becomes outdated and obsolete so quickly that it's better to teach students how to learn rather than actually, you know, learn anything.

Kitchen (and I) believe all this to be utterly nonsensical, inoperable and extremely damaging to pupils. In this book, Kitchen articulately eviscerates the progressive arguments step by step. He does so with careful precision across three major sections.

First the author carefully removes ambiguity from the debate by defining the terminology involved. Most importantly he defines "authority"  as "recognisable and dependable", in the sense of: "Professor X is a leading authority on the subject of....." rather than the more common connotations of 'power' or 'punishment' that could misconstrue his entire argument. The author, then, is pushing for a recognition of the teacher as the leading knowledge holder on his or her subject in the classroom and recognition of such from the pupils, rather than the right to bring back the cane.

Kitchen also defines other terms before laying out what he so rightly calls the Teaching Paradox. Simply put, it asks: Why is it that the more money and focus we direct towards education, the less demanding it becomes? In a sense the question is rhetorical, as we already know the reasons for it (see my second paragraph).

The next section of the book is the largest as the writer explores three well-known philosophers (Polyani, Oakeshott and Wittenstein) and examines their arguments as they relate to teaching and authority. The arguments - and their inspection by Kitchen - are rich. The analysis shows that not only is authority crucial, beneficial and wonderful in an educational sense, but also the ideas of Rousseau-style "child-centred learning" or "learning to learn" are not only ineffective ideas, but utterly oxymoronic.

The final section of the book links 'knowledge' and 'certainty' to education and in all honesty it felt like a touch of overkill. However the closure was powerful as the author summarised by reviewing his main arguments and reiterating that far from being restrictive and dull as progressives would have us believe, the traditional system of teacher authority is not only efficient, it is by far the most emancipating and student-rewarding philosophy we have ever known.

It is here and only here I want to take a quick tangent. William H.Kitchen explicitly - and perhaps wisely - sidesteps the bigger political debate on this issue by clarifying that he is not attacking progressivism as a whole or its wider implications on discipline. This is for the best on his part for many reasons. However I will happily say what is actually made self-evident in Kitchen's book anyway: it is the anti-authority and anti-tradition progressive politics that has reaped this destruction of the western educational system and incurred the huge discipline problems that naturally followed it. Their hatred of tradition and values reaches so far they would rather tear down a useful, effective and proud system in favour of the current mess.

Returning to the book review, I have only one real criticism and that is the very high level of repetition of the author's core argument. Barely a page goes by without Kitchen reminding us: "The teacher and the student must trust each other" or "The teacher is working within his authority to emancipate the leaner", etc. The only reason I could imagine for this repetition is the writer wants to remind the reader how each section of the philosophies he analyses relate back to the core argument. Personally I didn't feel it was necessary to do so that often.

To achieve his goals (explained in a moment), Kitchen has eschewed humour and light prose in favour of directness and relevance. Overall though, this book was a highly readable and compelling argument in favour of a system that - if you don't know so already - will be clear common sense by the time you're done. At the outset of his work Kitchen states: "If you're a policymaker, I hope you pay close attention to this book. If you're a parent, I hope this allow you to envision a brighter future for your child. If you're a student, I hope this work will prevent you from being treated like a lab rat".  The book is good enough to achieve those goals.