British Council Cultural Claptrap

In an article for the British Council website, Ian Clifford asks two questions:

Do learner-centred approaches work in every culture?

Is it time to challenge Western assumptions about education, especially when it comes to promoting ‘good teaching approaches’ in the developing world?

I bet you won’t fall off your chair when I tell you that Clifford thinks the answers to these questions are “No” and “Yes”.

Clifford starts by saying that most Western educators think learner-centred education represents “everything that’s good and wholesome in education.” Just in case that sounds a bit blasé, Clifford gets more scholarly and says that learner-centred educational practice can be traced back to ‘child-centred’ education which

“draws on the work of 18th century philosophers such as Rousseau and Locke, who suggested that teachers should intervene as little as possible in the natural development of children.”

Unfortunately, this attempt at scholarship fails, since in fact Rousseau and Locke suggested the opposite. They were both pioneers in promoting child education where the teacher held absolute authority, and, in Locke’s case, children were expected to do exactly as they were told by teachers under threat of dire corporal punishment.

Clifford then asks “What exactly do these (learner-centred) approaches amount to in the classroom?” The answer to this important question is that some educators associate learner-centred approaches with group work, some think it means teachers let learners find out for themselves; and some can’t identify any method at all. You might think that this is not a very “exact” answer, but never mind, because the main point is to establish the different perceptions of learner-centred and teacher-centred approaches. While a learner-centred approach represents everything good, a teacher-centred approach is generally regarded as

“authoritarian and hierarchical, encouraging rte learning and memorisation, without any real understanding.”

Proceding with his absurd parody of the two approaches (in the West we blithely abandon learners to their own devices, while in the East learners bang away at drills and memorise things without achieving real understanding), Clifford cites Kirschner’s work,  which shows that

“leaving learners to solve problems for themselves leads to brain overload.”

Pretty persuasive evidence, don’t you think? And as if this scary brain overload weren’t reason enough to bury learner-centred approaches once and for all, Clifford goes on to give a skewed summary of two more studies. First, Clifford claims that a 2014 meta-study

“favoured ‘direct teaching’ over approaches that involved little teacher instruction such as ‘discovery learning’.”

Quite apart from the fact that “discovery learning” is not a method associated with ELT, if you click on the link and read the summary at the top for yourself, you’ll see that that’s not an accurate summary of the findings. Then Clifford cites Schweisfurth (2011) , who reviewed 72 articles about projects promoting “student-centred” approaches and concluded that they record ‘a history of failures great and small’. Clifford says that the “most important” reason for failure is “cultural mismatch.” He explains:

“Approaches to teaching based on a Western idea of the individual don’t fit well in cultures which emphasise group goals over individual needs. In such cultures, teachers are expected to be authoritative and learners obedient.”

This is a lazy, inaccurate, and misleading report of the findings. Nowhere in the entire article does Schweisfurth use the term “cultural mismatch”, nor does she say that cultural divergence is the most important reason for failure in any of the 72 cases studied. And of course she says absolutely nothing to warrant Clifford’s crude claim about the assumed roles of teachers and learners. On the contrary, she calls for analyses which “help to take us beyond the crude binary codes of Teacher-Centred Education versus Learner-Centred Education, or implementation success versus failure.”

Finally, Clifford gives “The case of Burma”, where, he says, various attempts to implement a ‘child-centred approach’ have failed. Who do you think have been called in to sort out the accumulated mess caused by the well-intentioned but misguided advocates of a learner-centred approach? Yes! The British Council – that hallowed institution famed for subordinating promotion of its own national culture to the greater mission of fostering global cultural diversity! Clifford proudly tells us that the British Council’s “English for Education College Trainers” project in Burma is going to

“support local teachers to do whole-class teaching more effectively and interactively and in the second half of the year teach techniques to get learners learning from each other.”

Isn’t that just peachy, as we say in Henley on Thames.

Coming through, loud and clear, through the poor scholarship, the cherry-picking use of evidence, and the reliance on absurd straw-men versions of learner-centred and teacher-centred approaches, is a clear message. The West has been duped by lefty-liberals into accepting a dangerous, learner-centred approach to education as its paradigm, and it’s now trying to hoist this approach onto counties whose cultures make its implementation doomed to failure. We need to reject learner-centred approaches and go back to traditional “whole-class teaching”. The message is what you’d expect from a spokesman of the British Council (conservative, cautious, resistant to change) and it typically gets everything wrong. Pace Clifford, the West is not in the grips of a learner-centred paradigm in education, and there must be very few professionals working outside the cosy confines of the British Council who nurture such a paranoid illusion. More specifically, a learner-centred approach to ELT is not widespread in the West; rather, as I’ve argued elsewhere, ELT practice is mostly teacher-led and coursebook-driven. And while there is undeniably cultural resistance in many countries to the full implementation of a communicative approach to classroom language learning, surely we should be looking for ways to overcome this resistance rather than using opportunistic interpretations of multiculturalism to perpetuate the problem.