Sir, – The letter (August 22nd) from Dr Shane Bergin (Imperial College, London) and Marguerite Hughes (Trinity College, Dublin) begins unexceptionably with a plea for a “radical overhaul of how we approach maths and science”, states the need of proper training for those who teach those subjects and then moves to assert what seem to the writers to be the paramount importance of children’s “solv[ing] problems in a logical and deductive manner”. Then argument gives way to uneasy mockery: “It is true that they won’t know as many of Yeats’s poems by heart or the words to Baidin Fheilimi after 15 [sic] years of education but they will be better trained to think” (my emphases).
That privileging of mathematical and scientific knowledge as uniquely valuable in training children to think and the implied marginalisation as educationally trivial of such activities as poetry and song, is, simply, epistemologically unsound in relation to what human knowledge is.
A rounded education – the only form worth aspiring to – involves personal discovery by the child within a range of exciting contexts – cognitive, imaginative, emotional, physical and spiritual – which good teachers help to create. On the road to that discovery mathematics, language, music, art, science, the physical, and history play mutually supportive, not mutually exclusive roles, particularly at primary level: one quickly comes to understand how positive is the phrase, “to learn by heart”.
Returning to the putatively reductive instance as given by Dr Bergin and Ms Hughes (Yeats, the song) it may be worth noting that, ultimately, their approach condones a loss to science and mathematics themselves as well as to poetry and song – for example, we count beats to a bar, the construction of the Baidin Fheilimi requires measurement and calculation, you can sail away anywhere in drama. If these are not “thinking activities”, I don’t know what is.
The "prose" of my argument is supported by Howard Gardner in his valuable Multiple Intelligences: The Theory in Practice(1993), the "poetry" by Charles Dickens in his invaluable Hard Times(1854), with its powerful and currently relevant questioning of the primacy of "facts". – Yours, etc,