Education's secret revolution

Peter Hitchens' column today includes, as side issue, the following:

"So millions of people can’t do simple sums? Of course they can’t. This is because so many snotty teachers, who think proper education is ‘authoritarian’ and ‘learning by rote’, refuse to make children chant their times tables.

I am no mathematician, but got every single one of the test questions right with ease, simply by using my tables."

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Re times tables: children ARE now taught to recite times tables - but in a different, and much less useful way. What follows may seem a little petty but there are, I think, wider implications.

In the bad old days, if asked "six sevens?" you'd reply "forty-two" straightaway, because the times table chant included the line "six sevens are forty-two". Simple association: say "Ant and..." and you get "Dec".

Now, the children I see have been trained in a sort of stepladder routine, climbing laboriously up all the rungs: "7, 14, 21, 28, 35, 42". Not only does this take longer, but they only have to misremember one of the rungs and it'll become "... 29, er, 36, er, 43". Or not infrequently, a petering out into a defeated silence.

This is partly to do with not enough practice: the item will have been ticked off the teacher's planning (as in  "we cover the apostrophe in Y4 Spring Term Week 5 Day Three"). God forbid you should bore children with dull, repetitive learning. But without anything else to link to, it's just a list of numbers with no obvious connexion - it may as well be the combination to a safe.

The child may also sometimes climb correctly but go past the required answer because in this painfully slow recital he's lost count of how many rungs you've asked him to climb.

I'm not certain why we didn't simply reinstate the ancient method, but I have a suspicion that it might be something to do with not admitting that we've been wrong about this since somewhere in the 1970s; like phonics, grammar exercises, precis, comprehension and so on. Whatever is brought back is reinstated not only late, slowly and grudgingly, but in some revised form so that crusty teachers and grandparents can't say "I told you so."

I know of one case in the 70s where a departing secondary Head of English burned the department's coursebooks in a skip in the playground, to ensure that the bad old ways could never return; and I've heard of two others who did the same. We have had a revolution; and the revolutionaries (many now leading lights or self-employed consultants) are just now beginning to fade from the scene.