| Professor Phillip Gammage |
The garden of earthly delights and other conceits
Using Bosch's famous allegorical painting of 1504 (The Garden of Earthly Delights), the speaker looks at some assumptions about formal education and its consequences. Typical of these are the notions of instrumentality and the 'good life' which is said to result from certain sorts of successful school achievement ('high performance schooling', as Fielding calls it). The connection between test results and the economy is challenged and various buzz-words or 'conceits' (to use the appropriate mediaeval term) are exposed. Examples are drawn from current political and educational terminology, such as 'development', 'standards', curriculum 'delivery' and 'childcare industry'. The talk is avowedly light-hearted and based on the forty five years of the speaker's prejudices as a teacher, teacher-trainer and policy adviser. He draws on his work for OECD and his experiences of some twenty countries; and ends with a more serious look at some recent work in Finland and Estonia, which attempted to categorise and expose different approaches towards cohesiveness and innovation/creativity within their political context. This last is somewhat exaggerated and theoretical, but is drawn directly from Estonian experiences during Soviet domination. Similarities between ones own country and the exemplars can, however, easily be espied.
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Philip Gammage is an old English man who plays the violin rather badly and writes awful poetry. He is also a professor who has worked in childcare, schools and academia in some twenty countries for forty years.
Recently the Finns gave him an honorary doctorate for services to Finnish education.
He works as Professorial Research Fellow in DECS for part of each year. He is a psychologist with strong interest in comparative policy and has published widely over the last forty years. His interests range from health education and drugs to attachment and socio-emotional development in the young.
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