All you ever do is criticise

Published in Woman Alive magazine, September 1998

"I’m at the end of my tether," Cathy said as she came into my lounge. "Why do my kids have to be so critical all the time? They simply won’t accept anything I say. They have always got to question it, and criticise it. They used to be so nice and easy-going. But, since they became teenagers, they have turned into a bunch of cynics."

Cathy has three teenage children. They are all getting on well at school. They are not a difficult or disruptive minority. In fact they are very average teenagers. And, like the average teenager, they do want to criticise everything.

Cathy is an intelligent woman. In fact she is a former teacher. But she clearly had no idea why her children had become so critical. She thought that, in some way, it must be her fault - she had brought them up badly. When she came to see me she was convinced that, as a parent, she was a dismal failure.

I made Cathy a cup of tea and sat her down in an armchair. I then spent the next quarter of an hour explaining to her the educational changes that have taken place in our schools over the past few decades. At first she couldn’t believe how on earth these would help her with the problem she faced with her teenagers. She clearly thought that this was going to have as much relevance as learning about the finer points of South Vietnamese glass blowing.

But then, suddenly, her face lightened. She looked up, with a smile. "Now I see." she said, "Of course, I should have realised. I saw these changes begin when I was still teaching. But I didn’t realise how much effect they would have upon today’s teenagers."

In the world of education, teachers don’t just teach in any way that they want to. Rather they follow a particular model or theory of education. Over the last few decades a major shift has taken place in the educational model that most schools and colleges use. Most educational establishments have changed from teaching according to the "didactic model" to the "critical method". This has had a massive effect upon the way in which teenagers think and act.

The application of the didactic model in education is sometimes referred to as "teacher-centred teaching". This assumes that education is a process through which knowledge that is held by the teacher is passed on to the pupil.

This was the style of education that I experienced throughout my time at school in the 1960s and early 1970s. Whether I was learning History, Physics or Geography I was taught a body of knowledge by the teachers, which I was then expected to learn and to reproduce in the regular tests and examinations.

Essentially, through this educational model, I was taught a set of answers and was later given a set of questions. However, a few years later, when I arrived at University I was given a set of questions for which I had not yet been given the answers. This came as quite a shock to me.

I remember, very clearly, that first week at University. My tutor gave me a book to read and asked me to criticise it. I wasn’t quite sure what he expected me to do, so I asked him to clarify his instructions. "I want you to read this book" he said "and then to tell me where you think the author is right and where you think he is wrong." That seemed very strange to me. I wasn’t used to this form of education at all.

Up until that point of my education I hadn’t really learned how to criticise. I knew how to listen carefully, how to learn information, how to organise it in my memory, even how to answer questions that tested my knowledge. But I didn’t really know how to criticise.

However, I soon learned. The University taught me how to criticise books, research results, theoretical papers. And I, quite naturally, transferred that skill outside of my studies. I learned how to criticise politicians, TV programmes, church leaders, other students, parents. In fact I became proficient in criticising anything and everything that dared to move. I was becoming skilled in the critical method.

The application of the critical method in education is sometimes called "student-centred learning". This assumes that education is a process through which the student is encouraged not simply to accept knowledge from other people but to find it out for themselves; to have their own opinions, to make up their own minds.

I, personally, experienced the shift from the didactic model to the critical method when I went to University in 1974. At the same time, however, the whole educational system was moving from the didactic to the critical method. Whilst I was at University, and in the years that followed, the grammar school I had left moved from the didactic to the critical. So did the junior school I had attended. And so did almost every school and college in the country.

The fact is that today’s teenagers have grown up in an educational world, both inside and outside of school, which is based almost wholly upon the critical method. And, consequently, they are critical. We have taught them how to criticise. And they have become very good at it.

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