Triggering the Outrage Machine

Stories that trigger moral outrage travel further and faster than stories that don’t.
 
So, if you have an agenda: whip up an emotional frenzy, pit a winner against a loser, instigate some argy-bargy and use a thesaurus to insert as much verbose language as you can possibly wedge into your word limit. Get involved, people – no one wants to be a loser, so join that conflict quick-smart, be outraged with the rest of us. Wait, what are we mad about, again?

Writer and activist Ed Coper has a term for this: Angertainment. In his words, it’s the monetisation of outrage. And it’s working a treat in a current debate about learning to read…
 
Learning to read? That’s a bit anti-climactic, isn’t it? When The Age published its third article in two weeks about the evidence-based teaching debate, we zoomed in. The headline this time?‘The reading wars are over. The learning wars are just beginning.’ Without rehashing the three articles, the third is slightly interesting – not so much for what it said, as for how it said it.
 
Reading Wars. Learning Wars. Education Revolution. The Science is Settled. Cultural Conflict. If we didn’t know the piece was based on teaching Preppies to read, if we were just judging by the terms used throughout the text, we might think it’s a political dispute...oh wait. 
 
Each of these terms’, peppered throughout, presses readers’ emotional charge button. They multiply and pile up until the topic itself – actual children, in actual classrooms, doing actual learning – is sidelined. Hardly mentioned, in fact. Replaced instead by important quotes from professionals, graphs! Clashes! Controversy and resistance. Battles are emerging, backlashes are growing and fresh troubles are surely brewing. Who’d have known that learning to read was such a wild ride.

‘Evidence-based’ is a term that has become synonymous with an educational, pedagogical approach – explicit instruction – to the point where the words no longer describe how teachers teach. It describes a position in a debate. This is battle talk.
 
The Age’s articles – it’s one article sliced three ways, really — aren’t specific about the phonics debate being about the mechanics of how young children learn to decode text. Early primary school: this letter, plus this letter, equals that sound. Like maths, really. And it is genuinely important. But if we all agree on that, then what will we do with all our spare time and fist-shaking? The Angertainment machines got you, don’t worry. First of all, you can rush out and buy tickets to their cynical public argument. And then, to keep the momentum up, there’s a new Learning War ready to take the baton, and this one can reach beyond reading, into all classrooms, in all year levels, across all subjects, in all the lands.
 
Victorian Education Minister Ben Carroll, when talking about the mandating of evidence-based teaching for all schooling, told The Age that ‘all the landmark reports, both here and overseas, have shown that explicit instruction hurts no one, and lifts everyone.’ Hurts no one seems like a low bar for a classroom. Maybe it carries more gravitas on the battlefield.
 
Governments are drawn to evidence-based teaching models in part because they are, well, measurable and the measurements are tidy. That is not nothing, nor is it everything. It tells us so little about whether students feel secure or genuinely engaged with learning. It tells us plenty about a graph with a squiggly red line moving in a generally upward direction.

There is a real and legitimate purpose behind explicit instruction, particularly for our youngest learners. It manages cognitive load by reducing complexity and carefully ordering content. As a part of their learning, it allows beginners to acquire the foundational skills they need without being overwhelmed. But for older students? Isn’t there some irony here – at the very same moment governments are mandating explicit, direct instruction across all year levels, Australian teenagers are recording serious declines in critical and creative thinking skills. Is it lost on anyone that these are conceptually opposing ideas? The capacity for our young people to ask why and how, rather than simply what, is shrinking down to the size of a sultana (note to self: consider kicking off sultana Revolution). Robert Hattam, emeritus professor of educational justice at Adelaide University, describes the ‘so-called’ evidence-based agenda as ‘one-size-fits-all nonsense’ built on ‘evidence’ that is ‘wobbly at best.’ He says, ‘The continued forcing of this narrow version of the world onto teachers is dumbing down the nation.’ He is not a ring-in in this debate, but a senior academic pointing to a realistic problem: the approach designed to scaffold beginners may be setting a ceiling for older learners who need more complexity, definitely not less.

Rod Davies, Deputy Principal and Head of Minimbah Campus at Woodleigh School, published his article ‘Beyond the Learning Binary’ recently. There was no outrage, unfortunately, so you may not have come across it. It was written at a desk rather than on a battlefield and had absolutely no promise of war (sad face). Just a good old balanced, grounded account of what teaching and learning look like when you have children at the centre of the conversation – not publicity, policy, graphs! Or kudos. Snore, Rodney. 
 
Rod wrote about real people and he asks what kind of learning actually serves children well across all the dimensions of their development. The man is a true renegade.

At Woodleigh, we’re all for evidence – but we are also interested in what questions the evidence is answering. As we have written about before, Self-Determination Theory tells us that the conditions which produce a clean upward graph are not always the conditions that grow curious, self-directed lifelong learners. Such findings don’t get much airtime in Education Revolutions! Cultural Conflicts! and Learning Wars! Because the teachers are busy doing that actual teaching stuff – explicit and inquiry, as the students and the moment require. 
 
Learning to decode words at age five is wonderful and necessary. But it is not the same as finding meaning in a story, building a world through words, self-identity, asking all the weird questions or developing empathy through a character whose life looks nothing like your own. There is phonics-reading and there is reading-reading. 
 
If we were to simply decode the letters in The Age’s headline and take it at face value, we might accept that one war is over, phew. But a new one is beginning, oh no! Add a touch of inquiry, and we can question the rage-bait, critique the technique and work out our own thinking: about this debate and about the tactics of angertainment. Or we could just ask ourselves what we believe education is actually for – and for whom.