2. AIMS & RESULTS
The aim of the English Block was to try to do only those things which benefitted the students' language and general learning and not do things which did not. This was to be achieved by focussing not on what the teachers were to do but on planning the experiences and activities of the students. The planning could be considered in part as a kind of cost-benefit analysis - referring to teachers' and students' time and effort rather than to money (at that time resources per student were much more generous than is the case today - an aspect of the fact that we were in transition from the elite minority education system to the present day mass system).

Of course the problem here is to know for certain what kind of activities do and do not help. The decisions about usefulness have to be made by judgement rather than from experimentally determined results. Detailed experiments may or may not provide usable information after a long period. But in real life, time is short. It is probably impossible, because there is not enough time, to learn everything we need to know about learning by the experimental methods of social science. Common sense or intuition or just experience has to play a large part in deciding what to do.

I think we showed in general that the conditions we provided for the students did not prevent them learning. The exam results (see Appendix 2) suggest that the method was at least no worse than the more common methods, in that many students did pass the external examinations. The fact that many passed suggest that the method was not a hindrance to them in learning the examined skills. It was the teachers' belief that, more than this, it also helped them more than the more usual methods.

There may be here some important underlying questions about the nature of knowledge, and about whether the apparently objective and quantitative knowledge provided by modern western scientific method is real, or at any rate the whole, knowledge.(4)

The English Block - and, in comparison, other methods - ought perhaps, according to the methods of analytical science, to be analysed with respect to time budgets, and each minute assessed as to its language impact on the student. But quite apart from the enormous difficulty of doing this for even a short period, this would involve a number of imponderables. Language learning owes a great deal to a learner's attention, a concentration of awareness. We can say that often a teacher talking from the front of a class causes a lowering of attention levels in the students. But we can't measure it unequivocally.

(4) See for example Henri Bortoft - Goethe's Scientific Consciousness (Institute for Cultural Research monograph) 1986.
"The science which belongs to the intuitive mind and the holistic mode of consciousness can reveal aspects of the phenomena of nature which must be invisible to the verbal-intellectual mind and the analytical mode of consciousness."