Education

Photograph by Islay McLeod

Would Leonardo have passed?

Thom Sherrington

In my staffroom, the most controversial issue and source of debate is undoubtedly the implementation of the 'Curriculum for Excellence'. The Scottish education system is undergoing a radical overhaul with teachers being asked to think anew about our professional values and practice. Our goal is to nurture young people who are motivated to achieve excellence in their personal, social, academic and civic lives.
     What has any of this got to do with Leonardo Da Vinci? As a teacher of history, when I am asked to think about the future of Scottish education, my mind immediately leaps 560 years into the past: to 15th-century Florence and to the life and career of 'the man who wanted to know everything'.
     It is perhaps worth recounting the achievements of Da Vinci – the world's greatest ever polymath and the archetypal Renaissance man: painter of two of the most iconic artworks of all time; producer of astonishingly accurate anatomical diagrams; prolific inventor, conceptualising designs for a helicopter-like flying machine, a parachute, a tank and even a submarine; physicist; botanist; philosopher; engineer; mathematician. Da Vinci is an expert in so many varied fields that art historian Helen Gardner has described him as having a 'mind and personality [which seems] to us superhuman'.

The question I have chosen to reflect on, therefore, is would he have achieved excellence today? The answer to that question must surely be 'Yes'. Genius is genius and is undiminished by time and place. However, would he have achieved excellence in such a diversity of fields? The answer to that question would sadly be probably not. This is due to what I perceive to be two major obstacles standing in the way of pupil learning and the successful implementation of the 'Curriculum for Excellence'. To illustrate these barriers I have used two examples from Da Vinci's own experience as a metaphor.
     Da Vinci conceptualised a machine that can be described as a tank. We teachers are sometimes guilty of treating our classrooms like tanks. We armour ourselves against the rest of the world, repelling salvos from other parts of the school and, if the situation demands, firing upon anything that jeopardises our precious results. We doggedly crush any obstacles that stand in the way of our progress towards the inevitable and menacing prospect of the final exam.
     The problem with this approach was aptly demonstrated on the battlefields of world war one where tanks often got stuck in the mud, and were stressful and unpleasant places to inhabit. In teaching, by focusing solely on the target of the exam, relentlessly trampling whatever might get in the way, we run the risk of losing sight of the value of the journey. While technological advances mean tanks are now a workable philosophy for war, it is not a philosophy fitting to the principles of education.
     As a student of military engineering, Da Vinci would have been familiar with the tactic of grapeshot, where hundreds of grape-sized pellets were stuffed into a cannon, and fired indiscriminately towards the enemy. Most pellets would miss but some would hit. This approach was undoubtedly effective when used by the Redcoat army against the Jacobites on Culloden Moor in 1746, but as a basis on which to write a curriculum it is inappropriate. We are simply trying to teach too much, leading to the situation in my school where I have only four and a half weeks to 'teach' world war one: the most economically, politically, socially and culturally transformative event of the last millennium. Instead of taking the time to get to grips with one topic we fail to do justice to several.
     The massive pitfall with a grapeshot approach is that it stifles creativity, reinforcing the idea that history is only about reading books and remembering 'facts'. We should make time to discuss history as part of our cultural evolution, developing a process of understanding that helps pupils to interpret the impact of humanity on the world. As a historian I am deeply committed to the principle that I should be able to show that history is inextricably linked with art, music and language, science, sport and sex, politics, place and people. Sadly however it is these areas – which interest pupils most – that are cut to ensure maximum curricular coverage. The core curriculum has become abstracted from the complexity, and reality, of the world we seek to educate children and young people about. As the writer Julian Gough commented: 'Trying to turn children into literate, creative, flexible free thinkers by adding things to the national curriculum is like trying to transform witches into Christians by piling ever-heavier rocks onto their chests'.
    
Back to the future of Scottish education: the lesson that I believe we can learn from Da Vinci is that we teachers need to get out of our tanks, and abandon grapeshot for something more substantial. We should be confident to teach fewer 'facts' and schemes of work, in order to free ourselves to engage with our students in the study of our subjects: in greater depth and in collaboration with other teachers in the school. In this way, we can offer rich and varied learning experiences, and imbue pupils with a love of learning which will inspire them to seek out and learn about subjects of their own interest.
     To succeed in inspiring Da Vinci-like excellence we must use the opportunity provided by the 'Curriculum for Excellence' to make time for a broader and less cluttered curriculum. It is our responsibility to coax our colleagues out of their tanks. Da Vinci pushed boundaries and achieved unprecedented success in ways in which no contemporary could have expected. We must aspire to follow Da Vinci's example and lead innovation with the aim of achieving the goal of nurturing and inspiring excellence in young people. By teaching less, but in greater depth, we will unlock pupils' potential genius. Like Da Vinci, they will be confident to experiment and excel. They too will 'want to know everything'.

Thom Sherrington is a history teacher at Aboyne Academy. He is Scottish Schools' Young Thinker of the Year in a competition organised by the Scottish Review and made possible by a generous individual donation