“When I think back to when I first started teaching A-level 15 years ago, I realize that my lessons were a great deal more creative and exploratory and, as a result, fostered more intelligent, original and crafted responses.
In recent years my lessons have consisted solely of exam practice: training pupils to answer the question. Of course my results have become far better, with half the class now gaining A grades. I taught the students to make the points that would meet the ‘assessment objectives’, rather than trying to shape an original argument for themselves. This objective-driven approach now characterizes all A-level teaching because it is how the exams are graded. But I could clearly see that it was closing my students’ minds, exhorting them to produce gobbets of information and failing to persuade them to shape individual arguments.”
This sort of thing practically writes itself. The “fostering” of originality has ceded to the “training” of closed minds; “original” and “individual” responses have been replaced by the rote reproduction of “gobbets of information”; instead of “crafting” essays and “shaping” arguments, students now mindlessly regurgitate factoids…
A word or two is needed, here, about ideology.
The mind that “crafts” and “shapes” is the mind that possesses Coleridge’s “esemplastic” power, his “shaping spirit of imagination”. This power is predicated upon ownership: it is an image of the power of the rural landowner to order his estates. One might object that an artisan also shapes and crafts, working with his material rather than seeking to dominate it. That’s true, but it’s not what Coleridge has in mind; his is an image of imaginative freedom which is opposed to constraint, in which the mind exercises a spontaneous mastery over nature and invests it with meaning. The mastery of a master-craftsman is mastery of a craft, not of nature; it is not defined in opposition to training and repetition, which are the means by which mastery is obtained, and “originality” and “individuality” are not its cardinal virtues.
The problem with Romantic pedagogy is that the qualities it opposes to Gradgrindian utilitarianism are themselves ideological abstractions (of which Gradgrindian utilitarianism is itself a mirror image, in caricature). It does not have a positive image of creative discipline; instead it judges pupils based on their ability to mimic the attitudes of a wealthy, cultured elite, producing “original responses” to cultural stimuli. It is actually not difficult to be original - no more difficult than being wrong. What is difficult is paying attention.