It is not my purpose here to
assess the usefulness of the Cambridge Certificate in Teaching English to
Speakers of other Languages (CELTA), except perhaps indirectly, or to analyse
this increasingly popular qualification from a business opportunity/cost point
of view; and neither do I want to recount my personal experience on the course
in any great detail, suffice to say I took the CELTA in June 2014 at a language school
in the UK. Rather I wish, as the title
of this post suggests, to try and put the CELTA in a critical context; my self-appointed task is to de-familiarise, or ostranenie, the CELTA, to critique it
from the point of view of an outsider looking in.
There is plenty of information
online about the CELTA and most of it does indeed talk about the course from a
judgemental/personal point of view. The
general thrust of this discourse seems to suggest that the CELTA is not easy, but
good for you: “Overall, it was a very positive
experience. It was pretty stressful, but also worth it…” and so on. Critical remarks tend to be
vague: “I found the CELTA to be overly prescriptive...It
is commercialised...” etc. Some remarks
are unwittingly critical: “They spoon feed you by those handouts, so embrace
them!” Then there the cynics, the jokers
and the misogynists, no quotes needed.
Overall, a serious critique of the CELTA is missing, and this says a lot
about the way the qualification has established itself as a respectable
norm. I believe we need some assistance,
some tools and a framework of analysis, if we are to make sense of what the
CELTA is really all about.
Ivan Illich’s critical/polemical
tract Deschooling Society (1971) is, I
believe, an excellent place to start.
Not entirely without problems, Illich’s ideas about schools and their
role in society are so lucid and compelling as to be impossible to ignore; he
puts the social and political back where they belong: at the centre of
things. Very briefly, Illich states that
universal education is not feasible, that all schools should be abolished, and
that the way education is conducted is a huge con trick, and worse that the
obsession with certificates and degrees is polarising. Illich’s arguments cover a lot of ground, and
are subtle and deeply philosophical in places, but a lot of what he says is
relevant to what I want to say about the CELTA.
Pertinently, Illich claims most
people do not learn a foreign language as a result of sequential teaching in a
classroom; they learn foreign languages as a result of odd circumstances, or
because they need to learn a foreign language for a practical reason; qualified
teachers are not needed. For Illich,
licenses and certificates are the means by which teachers are made scarce, a
form of market manipulation pure and simple.
Virtually anybody, with a minimum of informal training, could be a
language teacher at most levels. But oh
no, the school — in this case Cambridge — convinces people that they have the
“secret”; they know, and you don’t know, about teaching. Of course, the secret can be bought. And what secrets are we talking about here?
In my opinion, the CELTA is a cobbled together medley of techniques and
activities some of which are so divorced from the real world as to be
absurd. What, for example, is the point
of running around a room piecing together bits of a fragmented text? The CELTA’s compulsory attendance, unnecessarily long sessions, and
refusal to allow anyone to bring any real world experience to the table, are
typical of school courses everywhere and have nothing to do with successful
learning.
The CELTA mirrors undemocratic
and dehumanising mass education; it is both a symptom and cause of cultural
domination. The fact that some CELTA trainees, if not all trainees, feel
humiliated by this encounter with cultural power is a natural result of the assumed
asymmetric power relationship between trainer and trainee. The tears, visible or not, say it all. Anyone who thinks this humiliation is good
for them is suffering from Stockholm syndrome.
Oh dear, I just had to look up how to spell Stockholm — I must be stupid. Certainly, “There’s no excuse for an English teacher
to not get their spelling right...” But
if you are Shakespeare, we will forgive you for not being able to spell...A
discussion about how not to worry about misspelling words because we all do it
and because the English spelling “system” is totally barmy might be more
helpful here, but that would fly in the face of conventional wisdom, of common folk
beliefs, of established power.
The real point of the CELTA is
to create social division: henceforth there are two groups of teachers, one
“qualified”, and one “unqualified.” The
qualified teacher is the one who has been successfully indoctrinated in the
mores of school, who has accepted what John Fairbank calls the dominant
ideological formation of the institution.
In our case, we are talking about Cambridge. But who is “Cambridge”? And why can’t we ever
talk to them? In fact, one day, a Cambridge assessor did turn up at the school
where I was undergoing the CELTA indoctrination, and after a few pleasantries made it known
that she was not available for any critical discussion about the course; she was
only there to do her job, to assess.
Fair enough, but I had a lot of questions I wanted to ask “Cambridge”,
like on what basis was consecutive ninety-minute-in-the-classroom sessions
considered normal? Of course, you are
not supposed to raise such questions; you are expected to accept the norms.
The central problem of modern education,
as I tried to point out to one of my CELTA trainers on a sultry summer’s day
last year, is assessment. The obsession
with standardizing education by assessing it quantitatively is self-defeating because it creates the need for a pre-packaged curriculum and,
as any English teacher worth their salt knows, the pre-planned curriculum is a
dead end; it is a power wall on which your head inevitably comes to bang. As Ivan Illich points out in his brilliant
book, all of life itself should be considered an education and valued as such,
valued as much or more than any school certificate/s. The role of an educator should be to bring
people together, to help the group function socially to address unresolved
questions. Invoking the great Brazilian
educator Paulo Freire, Illich states that students fail to learn because they
are bound to the curriculum, course structure, and bureaucratic administration;
because the teacher is determining what words should be taught instead of
allowing discussants to bring their own words to class. Contrary to what Cambridge would have their
trainees believe, Illich insists that lesson-planning and record-keeping are a
colossal waste of time. Successful
education, believes Freire, is predicated on starting a process which must be
critical in nature, always questioning, and initiated
by the learner. It follows from this
that a student-centred approach to learning is entirely incompatible with
lesson planning! Language teachers often
get frustrated by the passivity of their students, but such passivity merely
reflects the fact that the political lessons of the hidden, or implied, curriculum
have been well learnt: the teacher knows, the students don’t know, and so the
students must keep quiet and listen.
In the UK today, it is hard to
do any sort of job without first getting, by which I mean buying, a certificate; it’s no use being self-taught. It is surely only a matter of time before
toilet cleaners will be expected to get a national diploma in public hygiene
before they are allowed to mop up our shit.
The saddest thing is not that janitors will have to do this kind of shallow
theoretical study, but that they will want to do it, that they will have been persuaded
that it is good to undergo “professional development.” Demand will be created, those under consuming
will be made to feel guilty, if not inadequate, and certificates will be sold creating
artificial scarcity in the marketplace. Getting
back to the CELTA, most English language learning does not need to be taught. Actually teachers should be guides who make
social groups, connect people to resources, and pose questions; a teacher
should be a kind of guide/philosopher/interlocutor. The CELTA is
too prescriptive, but the alternative would mean a lot of teacher trainers
would be out of a job, and Cambridge would be out of a nice little income flow.
Obviously, I would be a total
hypocrite if I ever tried to dissuade anyone from taking the CELTA course;
after all, I took it and gained clear social advantage from acquiring the
certificate’s symbolic sheen. The
difference between most trainees and I, no doubt on account of my age, life
experience, advanced degree in education, and still critical mind, is that I
never bought into the ideas on offer, I simply bought the certificate. Is CELTA training a complete waste of
time? Clearly, no...viewed critically,
the course is a wonderful experience, a perfect lesson in school life. For novice teachers, there are some real
benefits from getting in front of a class and having a go at teaching. For others, in a whole month you can’t help
but learn something, though what you learn exactly will depend to a large
extent on what you bring to the table.
Go for it.
