Some time ago, Phillip Morgan, who teaches history at Welch College, sent me a link to an interview Peter Whittle did with Katharine Birsbalsingh on the British conservative website The New Culture Forum. The topic is K–12 education, and many of my readers will find it fascinating. Birbalsingh, a French language teacher who was originally from New Zealand, the daughter of a Guyanese father and Jamaican mother, spent most of her childhood in Canada until her father began teaching at a university in England when she was 15. She has lived, studied, and taught in England ever since.
In 2014, Birbalsingh started a “free school” (the closest thing in England to what we would call a charter school), Michaela Community School in Wembley Park, London. Her views on education have been profoundly influenced by E. D. Hirsch, especially his 1999 book The Schools We Need and Why We Don’t Have Them.
Hirsch has also had a great impact on my thinking, and this is the most notable thing that intrigues me about Birbalsingh (she also talks a lot about conservative intellectuals like Roger Scruton, about whom I blogged at FWBTheology.com a while back, as well as the economist Thomas Sowell).
I read Hirsch’s The Schools We Need when I was taking a course in pedagogy at Vanderbilt University several years ago. His views on education were a breath of fresh air compared to the progressive methods I was encountering from some professors at Vanderbilt (while other professors at Vanderbilt advocated charter schools and more-traditional teaching methods somewhat similar to Birbalsingh’s). It was no surprise to me at the time that Hirsch would advocate conservative views on teaching, because I had been heavily influenced as a young adult by other books he had written, especially Validity in Interpretation, which had been very helpful to me when I was wading through postmodern critical theory while in grad school at Yale.
Birbalsingh is an enthusiastic (you will see that when you listen to the interview!) advocate of the more-traditional pedagogical methods Hirsch advocated in his career. She has said that Hirsch’s The Schools We Need was the book that, more than any other, opened her eyes to the need for an alternative to the progressive educational methods that, in her own experience, she’d found simply didn’t work, and which seemed to her to be failing children in the educational system of Great Britain.
Whether you yourself are a teacher or simply someone who’s concerned about the problems besetting so many of today’s schools, I think you’ll find the interview interesting. You can find it here.