U turn if you want…

My comments about the grades fiasco precipitated if not a torrent of correspondence, then certainly more than usual. Most disagreed with my position. Yet here we are, with the desired shift to centre-assessed grades, a.k.a. teacher predictions – and lo, we have the predicted wave of grade inflation, worse at G.C.S.E. than ‘A’ level. Sixth forms now face the prospect of larger numbers of students on courses, who have miraculously become more intelligent overnight than their predecessors. Or maybe they will just struggle with the courses more…

Meanwhile, universities face the problem of accommodating increased numbers of students, while trying to maintain Covid-related safety. There is no guarantee that all those students are suited to higher education, and they may have negative experiences as a result. But the profession has got its way: more indeed did get prizes. Just don’t forget that that includes the teachers.

Conversations in the past few days with colleagues of decades’ standing, in whose views I have much confidence, agreed that schools tend to err optimistically with grade predictions – except perhaps with students who have been difficult, which is hardly an objective assessment of achievement either. Teachers are only human; the trouble is that they are now solidly invested in claiming otherwise.

A cursory look at corporate law will show that a company’s prime responsibility is to its shareholders. Customers and employees are merely the mechanism by which dividends are created, and it is by no means guaranteed that all companies will look after their machinery well. This is why self-preservation becomes important. It is worth saying again: the real culprit here is the transactional nature of almost everything in British society, the weaknesses of which Covid has unwittingly exposed. It is also worth repeating that this is not an inevitable situation, but one created by forty years of successive government policy. It has restructured Health and Education, and pretty much everything else, along quasi-market lines while encouraging people to think of themselves as customers rather than citizens.

The difference is important: customers are primarily self-interested, whereas citizens are less so.  Customers have little long-term interest in a relationship; citizens more so. In that situation,  the most aggressive players nearly always win; there is no room for sentiment.

I think it was this that also underpinned my being roundly criticised by a group of parents on a local parent-teacher social media group some days ago – for having the temerity to suggest that they might consider accustoming their children to wearing masks in case the requirements change as the number of Covid infections rises again. For my attempt at considered professional support, I was told this was “none of my business”. This is a typical customer-type reaction: very ‘interested’ when there is something to gain, and not at all when there isn’t. (A startling spin-off of this encounter was the almost total lack of expressed concern for the well-being of the teachers. Again, why would you care about the bod who served your burger, once you’ve bought it?)

The problem with such vested interests is that they are both short-termist and potentially deceitful. Feigning interest is just another ploy in the marketplace ‘game’, as is disowning vested ones. And short-term interests nearly always win out over longer term ones, as instant gratification usually trumps the deferred type – ably assisted of course by hype.

What’s all this got to do with exam results? Well, to my mind, this is exactly how the education system now works. It explains why schools are so desperate to maintain statistics (their share price). It explains why universities now have huge marketing departments with glossy brochures, appealing as much to lifestyle as study – and then allocate places based on internal economics rather than academic potential.

It explains why exam results have become so important in the first place: they have become a currency in their own right. And as in any inflationary situation, what ‘backs’ that currency has become less important than the amount of it you hold in the first place. The fact that predicted grades are little more than educated guesses matters little when you can – nearly – treat them as hard currency in their own right. Even what students learn has now become just the fuel of that system, rather than anything that might be useful or interesting in its own right. Why else would so many teachers balk at even passing coverage of things that are “not on the syllabus”?

And it explains why teachers have taken to squealing so loudly where they perceive “injustices”. I’m not suggesting for a moment that don’t believe they are genuinely concerned for their students’ well-being, and it is not they who chose to operate in this system. But I think the collective professional mindset has now been so utterly saturated by this economised, transactional way of thinking that many can no longer see beyond it.

Advertising is a means of maximising your capital in such a system – which is why professional virtue-signalling is also so widespread. It results, too, in the frenzied claims about the “damage” done by lost classroom time – despite emerging evidence from the past months that  high-pressure classroom regimes may be doing even more harm to some. Whose interests are we really serving here?

Many of the concerns I expressed in my previous posts have rapidly become reality. We now have students in up-coming years complaining that they will be disadvantaged when competing with those whose grades have been inflated. We have over-supply of students to the higher phases. Those given grades this year will always know that (though no fault of their own) they were never properly earned and are therefore eternally questionable as a real validation of ability. Inflating the grades will only have made all this worse.

Teachers have become proxy consumers of exam results – why would they not, when their annual appraisal and perhaps pay rests so heavily on them? This perhaps explains the satisfaction being expressed at the U-turn, despite the many other problems that will result, and the routine decrying of other views on the matter.

The answer to the unfair competition problem? Bump up the results even higher next year. Just to make sure the situation isn’t “unfair”. Just give prizes to everyone – then they will all be happy. The unfettered market mentality never did take a long view.

If I have a criticism of the teaching profession, it is not for protecting its own interests: that is in effect what it has been increasingly forced to do, jettisoning its impartiality on the way. But denying it is disingenuous; arguing for solutions that are, at very least little better than the original problem is irresponsible. All the more so when self-interest may be a significant factor.

Those in the profession should be taking a much harder look at this situation and reflecting on where they stand. There are still plenty of teachers, I believe, who see the situation and its complexity for what it is: who are still motivated by genuine educational purposes, and who understand that real student progress requires a significant degree of teacher detachment. They would still have argued for the recent issue to be revisited – though from another perspective. But they are not the ones who tend to be heard.

This is why, in my opinion, it is essential to de-couple teachers’ professional interests from those of their pupils once again. While teachers’ own interests align so closely with those of their pupils, they will never retain adequate professional detachment. The system we have has forced this alignment – and it has caused the neglect of the other responsibility of teachers: to be gatekeepers to educational success, to police standards even when that requires hard decisions to be made and disappointing outcomes to be accepted (so long as they are rigorous). Not just to be unthinking cheerleaders for young people come what may: the profession also has bigger responsibilities. We have been forced to see the exam boards and regulators as competitors, even the Enemy – when the profession should actually be supporting their work in calibrating the system as accurately as possible – and ensuring that educational rather than transactional values prevail.

In the past, exam grades were norm referenced – in effect an algorithm. It meant that a constant percentage of the cohort received a certain grade each year, and the grade boundaries were shifted – marginally – to achieve this. While this had its own drawbacks, it did allow for annual variations in for example exam difficulty. G.C.S.E.s replaced this with criterion referencing: anyone who hit a specified level received the corresponding grade, with no cap on numbers. Superficially this might seem fairer, but – coupled with publishing the criteria criteria – it was a huge driver of teaching to the test, and the transactional scrum that has come from the resultant grade inflation. I am not surprised that governments have tried to rein this in, even though they were its instigator.

In a sense, education has always been a market: access always was a matter of supply and demand, as was the allocation of qualifications. It is simply a fact of life that previously-scarce resources become devalued if they are given free to all. But at least this was governed by academic principles, rather than the merely consumerist self-gratification that fuelled the recent furore. 

The only way to remove this is to get rid of the competitive aspect of the education system entirely. That is still the situation in some countries – but it comes with its own set of difficult choices, of course. When the crunch came, it was the highly-economised model of education was the one that was found most wanting.

Unjust deserts?

It is noticeable that today, even that scourge of right-wing governments, The Observer, accepts what I suggested in my earlier comments, that the parameters used in the exam-prediction algorithm made theoretical sense.

But it is also now clearer that something went desperately wrong with the way in which the algorithm worked or was applied. One would have thought that there had been adequate time for the Government to test this to destruction before the grades were announced – but it seems not. Such things are so far beyond my expertise that I cannot really comment further.

My comments were not intended to justify the outcome we have seen, which clearly needs further investigation and (probably) amendment. But I stand by my other observations, namely that a lot of the current outcry is not so much to do with the imperfection of the algorithm as the indignation that teachers were not “sufficiently listened to”. We need to rise above this: moral indignation – whether politically motivated or not – is neither the right nor the best approach.

The claims that teacher predicted grades should have been virtually the only criterion still do not hold water. As I pointed out, these grades are very often wrong; I have now seen a figure of 79% inaccuracy cited in The Observer. That does not surprise me: if the teaching profession is claiming that it is somehow immune to Optimism Bias, then it is certainly and miraculously the only part of the human species that is. That is not to suggest that there is deliberate distortion going on, but to deny that teachers are subject to such things is disingenuous, and in my view, this alone justified other factors being taken into consideration.

Even in these days of publicly-available marks schemes and exam hot-housing, school-reported results are only ever a less-than-impartial interpretation of what the exam board is looking for. I know from my own experience, that there were times when one used grades “elastically” for motivational or ‘stretch’ purposes, particularly near grade thresholds.

It is true that one does acquire a certain “gut feeling” for students’ abilities – but it is not reasonable to claim it is much more than that – nor that horse-trading does not go on between teachers over formal predictions. Nor it is untrue that knowledge of students’ target grades can distort the predictions teachers make. Being human, it can hardly be otherwise, no matter how hard we try – especially when we know how high the stakes can be. Equally, there are plenty of reasons for the grades that schools formally predict, for optimism bias to be a significant factor. Yet there is no acknowledgement of this fact.

The language that is used in education about such things also troubles me greatly. In particular, the use of the word “deserve”. From a moral perspective, Desert is a difficult matter. What one (supposedly) deserves at any given moment is deeply imponderable. I think it is dangerous for teachers to talk about what their pupils “deserve” – most of all when addressing the pupils themselves. And particularly so in the casual sense that is often used, implying that all young people deserve to succeed simply for being themselves, for being young, or for being students. What about young people who made no effort whatsoever? Do they “deserve” to be included in such blanket statements – because I’m pretty sure this is what such phrases imply? What about those who were disruptive in school or who even commit criminal acts? Do they deserve the same outcomes? Do people of unequal ability “deserve” to be given the same rewards, even though that would effectively devalue them for everyone? This is a word that teachers would wisely avoid.

Likewise, I have seen it said that these are “not the results we would want our young people to have received”. Well no, of course not. Superficially, we would all like prizes for all – but that is not to say it is a wise policy. And this again betrays a critical conflation of the desired outcomes with the actual ones, even accepting the deep flaws in what has happened. No exam ever delivered what all pupils and all teachers wanted. The answer is not to capitulate and just award teacher-predictions to all, as one Conservative M.P. has apparently suggested. The matter is more complex than that, even allowing for the difficulties caused during the last academic year.

As I said before, the aim should be to achieve maximum consistency with what has gone before – and what will come after. The “potential” that so many teachers seem to feel has not been recognised is not the same as actual exam performance, when many other factors have always come into play, that meant the results were not someone’s maximum potential. Like it or not, that has always been part of the exam “game” – and we have, as a nation, chosen to set disproportionate store by that game.

The trouble is, this is opening a Pandora’s Box: which limiting factors are admissible and which are not? What is an acceptable time threshold for mitigating circumstances? The fact that someone was feeling ill in the exam room? (Possibly). Issues like dyslexia? (often – but I am far from convinced this is never abused). Parental maltreatment as an infant? The fact that someone had broken up with their boy/girl friend the day before? Or that the weather was bad? Where does one stop? My own exam results were lower that what I think reasonably in hindsight reflected my “true potential” – but that deficit was largely due to poor choice of subjects and normal teenage turbulence and disaffection in the years before them. Why should that not be factored in too? Not everyone experiences them identically. Nor should we be swept away by claims that failure to compensate for these things inevitable “wrecks lives” That, given the blanket certainty with which it is cited, is just brinkmanship, more foot-stamping.

And this is before we consider those yet to come. If this year’s students are given an easy ride, how will it reflect on  coming years’ students who do not receive such favours? They will eventually all be operating in the same higher education and jobs markets. Why should one cohort be given an extra-easy ride? They didn’t “deserve” the disruption from Covid (at least no more than the entire human race might) – but following cohorts don’t deserve to be put at a disadvantage as a result, either.

Some have observed that my earlier comments were unsympathetic. They were not meant as such – but I see no reason why the correct response to the current situation is indulgence. There are enough bona fide reasons not to trust teacher predictions 100% – without that implying acceptance of the shambles we have now.

This is why we must decouple teachers’ interests from those of their pupils. I don’t think it does the teaching profession any favours to be as invested as it is in a partisan stance: in the quest for fairness, I don’t believe that positive bias is any more acceptable than negative.  This is perfectly compatible with wanting the best for your pupils because achieving it by misrepresentation is not the answer. I know for a fact that a few generations ago – when my parents taught – the witch-hunts that can follow from a teacher producing low exam results in a particular year did not happen. Again, I am not justifying repeated under-performance: this is where real individual professional responsibility needs to come in (though this, too, has been removed). But it needs to remove the reasons teachers have for partisan talking-up of specific student outcomes. Professionals need more detachment than that, for their students’ greater good, let alone their own.

The real problem is the simplistic, mechanical and consumerism-driven model of education that we now have. On the one hand, this has led people to believe that there is a simple causal relationship between what a teacher does with their students and the results those students achieve, as there is between a business and a customer. It is not so: there are many more factors involved than that, some which are neither predictable, nor in a teacher’s gift.

On the other, it has led people to cry foul when they don’t then receive what they feel they “deserve” as consumers of the education system – whether in the wider perspective it is justified or not. In education, the customer is not always right. Furthermore, the spectacle of teachers making such complaints is a significant factor in students and their parents following suit, whether well-considered or not.

I’m not suggesting there should not be reasonable grounds for appeal, as there have always been; indeed probably more so this year than usual. But it is also true that schools and teachers have increasingly used that procedure to “game” the system for furthering their own vested interests. I know of some schools where appealing grades has been pretty much an automatic annual policy in order to improve the statistics. This is not what I understand by professionalism.

This is not to imply that teachers are bent. The vast majority act in good faith – but whether it is wise or appropriate is a different matter. The recent spectacle has come close to an unedifying stamping of the feet. Professionalism should raise people above that, even though the partisanship has, I accept, been forced on teachers by the processes by which they are now appraised.

I repeat: this is why we desperately need to return teachers to a position where professional disinterest is possible. That is all I have been advocating in my posts.

Indulging in metaphorical foot-stamping, while repeatedly denying the validity of points such as those raised above, is disingenuous, and does the teaching profession no favours. Rather than reducing the matter to simplistic shouting, we should be providing a more rational, nuanced and disinterested narrative for the sake of all concerned. Where there is cause for concern, it should be advanced primarily through reasoned argument, rather than subjective matters of “fairness”. Teachers of course wish for the best for their students – but that is not the same as crying foul every time they don’t get what they want.

That this seems to be neither seen, nor perhaps possible, is said in sadness not anger.

Incidentally, I have seen no discussion, either, of the legal right of people to request decisions made by algorithm be reassessed by a human being. That ought to settle it.

Sowers of seeds

Being a teacher is a strange job. You rarely see the results of your work – and even if you encounter former pupils in later life, it is almost impossible to identify with much confidence any specific effect that you had in them. The whole job of a teacher is predicated on the hope that you will have some helpful effect on the individuals you teach, even if you will never know what.

This is probably why ideology plays such a strong part in the educational profession: in the absence of anything more concrete, there is little else to fall back on to provide shape to our actions.

It is this problem that also leaves the profession exposed to so much idiocy. When it is almost impossible to prove anything much at all, anyone who claims otherwise can get in on the act without difficulty. So we are continually beset by the claims of ‘gurus’ bringing magical solutions, even though it means that education tosses and turns on a perpetual tide of contrary solutions, such is its yearning for answers to the unanswerable.

It is the same lack of agreed, provable outcomes that has made it all too easy for politicians to appropriate education for their agendas. It has been too easy for them to point the finger at teachers for being wrong-headed, unproductive, pointless. It has made it easy for them to impose conditions on education that attempted to twist it into paradigms derived from sectors where it is much easier to measure output. In doing so, they have turned education into a conveyor-belt industry, whose output is not educated individuals, but statistics published and boxes ticked; numbers of certificates handed out, no matter how little the real intellectual effect on the minds of those who received them.

You can’t be a teacher without having some faith in humanity – that it is possible to turn thoughts and behaviours to the good. You cannot function in a classroom without that unprovable belief that what you are doing is in some way important and beneficial. That is true everywhere: the very fact that to educate someone is to anticipate their future means that it cannot be otherwise. But the fact that education’s benefit is unprovable does not make it undemonstrable. Some countries seem to find systems that equip their citizens better for their future lives than others.

As with everything else, the pandemic has highlighted this. The responses by individuals from the most powerful to the most ordinary are the product of their thought processes – or lack of them. To some extent, that in turn is a product of the sum of the education they received, both formally and otherwise. How they reacted to CV-19 is an expression of that.

I have worked for many years in education in the same hope that I was helping to equip British people to be effective thinkers, to be able to take their opportunities and respond intelligently to their difficulties. I hoped I was helping to create a nation of thoughtful, responsible, cultivated citizens.

I always believed that education does have an effect, and that it was a positive and definite force, even if its specifics for any particular individual were unknowable. I never even considered that it was actually an exercise in damage limitation to contain the worst of human idiocy; this was just too cynical an interpretation for any teacher to entertain and still function. But the past few years have shifted my view on this out of all recognition.

In a national political plebiscite that required knowledge and informed thought, despite their so-called education, a majority British Public opted to side with prejudice, rumour-mongering or just ignorance. Or they abdicated their responsibilities entirely.

In the face of a known epidemiological threat, this was the response of a significant part of the British public yesterday:

It is no good just blaming the politicians: all of those people have brains of their own. It is what they (fail to) do with them that is the tragedy.

It’s not only what happens in formal education that affects such behaviour: much of the national attitudinal landscape is the product of home life, the national media and peer pressure. But the same is true in all countries, and yet responses – and responsibility – in similar circumstances have not been the same everywhere. The role of formal education is to equip people to know better.

It seems that in Britain life is so cheap that it is worth risking the death of oneself and many others for the sake of a pint.

Educating the British public: how did we get it so wrong?

Are you certain?

Maybe it really is me. Who has the problem, that is.

I’m in the early stages of preparing for a third contract at the College – starting in September, back in the Politics department, this time for the whole year. To be clear, I’m not in the least unhappy at this prospect – nor at working again with a team of excellent people, with whom I sparked last year.

I need to decide on the approach for this new situation. Particularly as a fixed-contract part-timer, how far should one expect just to ‘slot in’ – and how far to bring one’s own way to doing things?

I’ve always believed that the point of being a ‘professional’ is that one is meant to use one’s own judgement to deliver the best outcomes of which one is personally capable. I choose my words carefully – because that may not mean precisely the same thing for everyone. But a truly reflective individual (as I have always tried to be) is surely best placed to know how to play to their own strengths, and in the case of education to deliver something truly bespoke to one’s pupils.

I’m not talking about going completely off-piste, because it is of course essential that benchmarks are in place and that there is some consistency to what is done. But the education world now seems so in hoc to the Exam Specification that the prospect of even minor deviations from it seem to induce cold sweats in many. Once again, this seems to be the default I will encounter – because it is, everywhere. (To be fair, the department seems more relaxed than many).

But yet again I am finding that my own thinking makes it difficult for me to stay within the strict and narrow confines of an “approved approach”. I am fully aware of the fact that it was my insistence on retaining what others saw as an unacceptable degree of professional freedom that got me into hot water at my previous school. Maybe I am just terrible at being a team player – but as regular readers of this blog will hopefully know, I am no gratuitous maverick. All I ever try to do is think widely about the process of education, and quite often that leads me to conclusions that others seem to find challenging. But what is important here? The obedience and compliance of one’s employees – or the fact that that they individually deliver excellent education? (While I might hesitate to call myself excellent, there is plenty to suggest that I do not fail – except in the eyes of those who can’t cope with diversity).

When faced with an exam specification, my instinct has never been simply to start at the beginning and work through to the end. I have always treated such documents as a guide, a route-marker that defines what is ultimately required. But I have always felt that there needs to be room for creative interpretation – be that reorganising material in order to create certain connections or emphases, perhaps because of certain resources or activities one knows work – or because one feels that one can enhance one’s pupils’ understanding by doing things slightly differently. Were syllabuses ever meant to be the straitjacket that they have become?

As far as I am concerned, there is a very fundamental issue at stake here, one from which I always begin: what is the point of doing what I am about to do with my students? Is it simply to acquire a piece of paper with some grades on it? Is it to shove the school further up the exam league tables? Or is it to give the student a meaningful insight into something that they previously knew little about? To give them a shot of wisdom that might, in some as yet unknowable way, allow them to go on and lead a richer life? Regrettably, I have increasingly felt that the real answer is to provide clear-cut outcomes for those who deliver the education, thus creating an efficient conveyor belt.

It is Unknowability that is the problem. For me, both personally and in terms of what I provide for others, my assumption is that education is about tackling uncertainty, not the opposite. It is the means by which we recognise the imponderable nature of existence and seek to approach it in what we hope will be a meaningful and effective way. It means – even as a teacher – being able to admit to one’s pupils that there are things that you don’t know; that perhaps no one knows; that in many fields, answers are rarely black-or-white. To do that, we first need to be comfortable with the situation ourselves.

And yet I remember the stark advice from early on my teacher training course:

Never Admit You Don’t Know Something.

(Given what a progressive course that was, this always struck me as obscenely dirigiste, and perhaps set me (or those who accepted it?) off on the wrong trajectory right from the outset).

The present question concerns how to begin a course in what will for many students be a new subject, in a way that makes what follows meaningful. We often neglect the contextualisation of what we do with students – which may be why some fail to see “the point” of it. The advice has been just to launch into the syllabus; personally, I am more inclined to spend one, perhaps two sessions, doing some reflection about the purpose of politics (beyond its being something you get an ‘A’ Level in), and exploring the students’ prior conceptions and biases. I have some activities that can do this in a structured and defined way. I am working on the assumption that many sixteen year-olds won’t actually have much idea about what Politics really is or does – certainly not anything like as much as highly-expert specialists who teach the course might assume when they “just dive in”.

The question is whether this would be time well spent. Conventional wisdom seems to be saying more loudly than ever that anything that doesn’t appear on an exam paper isn’t worth doing. I struggle to accept that. It still seems to me that the route to the most effective learning, whether for an exam or not, is sometimes oblique; that going around the houses in a way that may seem to cost time can in the long run pay handsome dividends of motivation and insight. All my prior experience suggests that this is so; what it needs is the freedom for the individual to judge and devise how to do it in an effective way.

I’m inclined to do it anyway, as I did on my previous sojourn in the college, where I believe the approach proved itself once again (the feedback from the students when my contract ended after a few months suggests so…). The problem is, it immediately risks putting me in conflict with those who believe in sticking rigidly to the syllabus – and they tend to be the ones in charge.

As I said, there is a very fundamental division here. In recent decades, the education world has moved decisively in the direction of wanting certainty: the certainty of being told by others exactly what to teach and how to teach it; the certainty that what the exam syllabus says about a subject is the truth, and nothing but. The certainty that regurgitating same in an exam hall is the mark of being a successful and educated person. The certainty that exam results are the only validation of that process needed. Certainty is what the corporate world (believes it) needs: it is what organisations largely try to function on; it has little to do with the hesitant process that is real thought, or the real nature of the world at large. Coming to believe otherwise is the major flaw in allowing the corporate tail to wag the intellectual dog.

Yet like all education, it does work – if only in its own terms. It has certainly shifted the national perception of the methods and purposes of education and conflated it with what in my mind is the very respectable but entirely different process of Training. Namely the up-skilling of people in specific, known fields – but without much in the way of philosophical underpinning.

It has profoundly affected the mind-set of generations of people in this country, whose lives seem to require all sorts of illusory certainties in order to function and make sense.

The trouble is, my own education seems to have done the opposite: to have made me sceptical of those who claim to offer certainty, of the notion that there is only ever one answer, and that the direct approach is always the best. That divergence has only been strengthened by my repeated experience of what happens to people’s minds and behaviours when you start giving them the opportunity for critical, as opposed to uncritical, thought.

That, to me, is real education: the ability to deal with the uncertainty of our time on this planet, not stick our heads in the sand of the opposite. As if more proof were needed, the past few years have dealt the population of this country massive doses of uncertainty – and they still do, daily.

We are not, collectively, dealing with them well. When our illusory certainties come up against the uncertainty of the real world, the latter tends to win.

Nationally, we have coped much less well than many other countries, including ones to whom we might have considered ourselves superior. How much has the diverse nature of education systems had to do with that? Do systems that encourage introspection and philosophising have an edge when it comes to societal behaviour?

It seems to me that the widespread public inability to separate sometimes-conflicting ‘facts’ from patent fiction (and tendency to grasp at the latter if it seems more comforting), to identify sensible priorities and to make reasonable decisions in very uncertain times – not to mention the anxiety that the inescapable need to do so has seemed to have induced in many – is all the proof needed that desirable cognitive outcomes of our current educational approach are grossly absent. We may be packing people full of qualifications – but it seems to me that we still have a massive deficit of basic cognitive ability. If universal public education is about anything, it is surely about addressing such issues.

There is no syllabus available for telling you how to survive a pandemic.

Half-baked

“If you want to see what education does to a country, just look at one that has none”.

It was perhaps the most convincing argument I ever encountered for doing the job that has occupied the bulk of my working life.

It also provided the perfect justification why someone like me, not a particularly outgoing person and with no children of his own, might go into that line of work. While I was perfectly prepared to support individuals when they needed my help, I never really subscribed to the view of my role as a somewhere between a pal and a life-coach, that has become the mainstream view in recent years. The job of the teacher is to be more impartial than that – a mentor, a critical friend, not a yes-person.

That is not to say that the individual is unimportant: a happy society has to be produced, as far as is possible, from happy individuals – but there is another descriptor that one might use too: Balanced. We all need a well-balanced society, not one that is simply pursuing individual self-realisation at all costs; all the more so when it is equated solely with career and income. This, I am less convinced we are achieving.

A balanced society is perhaps Wise: one that appreciates the perpetual, inescapable and uncomfortable compromise between our own interests and those of others around us. It appreciates, too, the subtle point that even self-interest is not simply a matter of who acquires the sharpest elbows and the largest bank account. It hopefully also sees that many of the things that make life worth living are not a product of ruthless ambition, nor the status that may result.

Therefore my own motives for teaching were more concerned with the role of education in creating a civilised society for all – including those without their own children – and for the transmission of the cultural and intellectual capital that is the very necessary inheritance of all. Looking after the individuals was just a (very important) part of the bigger picture.

I grew increasingly uncomfortable with the view (of not only, but seemingly including many teachers), that the purpose of education was to pass exams, thereby progressing to the next stage of this supposedly pre-ordained, homogenous process until wealth and influence eventually landed in your lap. It is probably no coincidence that such views were peddled most strongly by those within the profession who had themselves followed that trajectory…

My discomfort reached a peak when I was being actively being prevented from teaching in a way and using materials that I knew enhanced understanding, on the grounds that they would not specifically appear in the exam. To me, this was the pinnacle of the narrow-mindedness that I always believed education was meant to counter: a view so limited as to believe that we should only teach things, and in ways, that would supposedly enhance exam performance – at the expense of precisely the breadth of understanding and insight that exams are intended to sample. If this is so, then it is indeed true that the whole thing has been reduced to a pointless exercise in hoop-jumping.

I could not escape my unease that this outlook, which reduced the essential, life-enhancing experience of wonder at, and learning about the world to little more than box-ticking. I could not ignore the sense that is also self-defeating, because when the acquisition of something as indefinable as Wisdom is reduced to such, it does indeed become all but meaningless. Wisdom, by definition is not something that can be either acquired or exercised according to a pre-written formula – as many of the exponents of the hoop-jumping approach unknowingly demonstrated all too well.

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These conflicts have been much in my mind again in recent times. First Brexit, and now Covid-19 have severely tested our resilience as a society, and revealed the strengths and weaknesses of different systems, approaches and mindsets around the world.

As everywhere, my own local community has been tested by this unexpected adversity. In the past weeks, people have been taking conspicuous care with social distancing, while a number of local support groups have sprung up, as one would hope. And yet it seems that a few weeks of this are as much as some people can support. There are growing numbers of people appearing in the streets; while our weekly market has done well from people shopping more locally, I find myself incredulous at the speed with which self-discipline seems to be breaking down.

It seems that now the initial shock of the situation has passed, people are increasingly cutting corners; that faced with the choice between immediate convenience and potentially fatal infection, more than I am comfortable with appear to choose the former. Perhaps they think they are invincible; I wonder how many know that we have had the virus here in this community of five thousand…

There are some here (as presumably in all societies) who seem to have a casual attitude to Risk, or who simply can’t be bothered to sustain previous efforts. This might not matter so much if the consequences of their decisions only affected themselves – but the cruel tragedy of this pandemic, is that careless behaviour is at least as likely to harm others as themselves.

I know that some of the local traders have noticed – and have not missed the irony, either, that many who are currently patronising them have never been seen before – and will probably never be seen again once ‘normal’ life resumes. Such is the superficial transience of some people’s behaviour – and, it seems, their ability to learn lasting lessons. It often seems to be the same people who show little awareness of others around them in the street, and who seem to think that social distancing means that everyone else needs to give way…

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There as an inherent contradiction within the idea of education: by cultivating people’s resourcefulness and potential, one makes it more possible for those individuals to stand on their own feet; to make decisions about their own lives and interests that are freed from the overwhelmingly-communal concerns that still govern less educated societies, ones where community really is an insurance against adversity.

Strengthening people’s minds really does give them more autonomy – but there is no guarantee that the result will be used in an enlightened way. The process that we in Britain currently call ‘education’ taps into very strong instincts for self-advancement, even greed: its singular emphasis on personal fulfillment has downplayed the interconnectedness of us all, which the current situation has temporarily re-emphasised. It has led people to become self-focused to the extent that they fail even to consider the impact of their behaviour on others – even it seems when that behaviour can potentially cause death. Not all restraint has gone – but a virus does not negotiate; it does not make allowances for human weakness or stupidity. In fact, it exploits them.

The problem with education is this: done well, it does indeed lead to a more effective, more ‘free’ society – and one in which people might be expected to acquire more than a passing attachment to the currently-required behavioural changes that exist for everyone’s benefit. Where people are wise enough to have a sensible perspective about the situation; where they actively take considered and responsible decisions. Where lessons really are learned.

But done badly, all it does is exaggerate people’s sense of autonomy – empowerment without the necessary wisdom to appreciate the subtle limitations on that autonomy. It leads to a determination to have one’s own way no matter what the consequences; eventually it becomes so habitual that people cannot do otherwise. First Brexit and now the pandemic seem to be showing that for enough of the population to cause a problem, it is indeed such attitudes that now hold sway. No doubt the same people will be the first with the hysterics should there be another spike in infections.

This is what education as hoop-jumping achieves: giving people an exaggerated sense of their own importance, even invincibility – and a diminished sense of the many ways in which that is nothing more than an illusion. They may lose dependency – but they replace it with half-truths. Half-baked education is only concerned with what superficially seems to be the ‘right’ answer – not the imponderable dilemmas and uncertainties that a truly-wise perspective can see. And it fails to equip people to know how to change their minds.

This is where my misgivings came from – for as has been said before, a little education is a dangerous thing.

Why I think the education system is to blame for our pathetic politicians.

It seems to be a rare point of national consensus that our politicians are failing us, even if we disagree on how. It might seem very unfair to criticise people who put themselves forward for the thankless task of trying to keep everyone on-side in a disparate nation of sixty-plus million individuals, but my views on this have changed, and I suspect many other people’s have too.

In the past, I accepted the notion that those in charge generally had the best interests of the nation at heart, even when I profoundly disagreed with their chosen means of delivering them. I am no longer sure that that is the case: we seem to have a generation of politicians who are rather too torn between doing their democratic job, and preserving the considerable personal benefits that derive from doing that within the British political system; it should not be a dilemma. That interpretation may well be excessively charitable: much of the impasse over Brexit and all that has followed seems clearly driven by personal and party interests, rather than those of the nation. That is hardly news – commentators all across the nation are saying as much.

I tend to exclude from this the dilemma facing those MPs whose personal inclinations over Brexit are in conflict with the way their constituencies voted on the matter, though even here, it is very possible that the resultant paralysis has as much to do with self-interest as anything else. I also can’t resist mentioning that I have yet to hear of a pro-Brexit MP who is beating themselves up because they represent a pro-remain constituency…

Be all that as it may, it may seem excessively harsh to blame the situation on the poor, unsuspecting education system – yet this has not prevented many people from attributing much of the country’s predicament to the failure to educate people properly. As a former teacher, I am hesitant at accepting such sweeping accusations, and yet having thought about it more, I am afraid I conclude that education does have responsibility here, if not in the direct way that those critics perhaps think.

First, the bit where I disagree: Brexit and the resultant attitudes are not the result of a failure to teach compulsory European Studies. At school age, such subjects largely go over people’s heads; I taught the subject at ‘A’ Level, and even then it was hard to make it resonate with many students. (In the end, I took them to Strasbourg, and sat them in the Parliament for a day. After that, their attitudes had markedly changed – but we cannot do that for all children.) Steering national attitudes is a much more subtle, gradual and difficult thing than that, in any case – even assuming it is a legitimate thing to attempt.

No, the failure of education is more profound than that – and also, I believe less properly-understood. A constant battle in my teaching career was my advocacy of “learning for learning’s sake”, against a considerable and powerful majority who saw it in much more instrumental terms – a confected process by which children were made to jump hoops that eventually might result in their getting a decent job, which by no coincidence happened also to provide cheap childcare for their parents, while delivering good career outcomes for teachers and their schools. One almost got the impression that any real cognitive development that happened along the way was little more than a fortunate side-effect.

But learning for learning’s sake is not the ivory-tower ideal that is often portrayed. It is through learning without ulterior motive that one’s intellectual powers are best developed, free from the distractions of how they might need to be ‘useful’. It is the only way in which learning can be the truly impartial process that comes close to the real meaning of the word ‘academic’.

What is more, it is only through such a process that the really important aspect of education can be maximised, namely its residue. It is what Einstein meant when he said “Education is what is left when one has forgotten everything he learned in school”. The message remains right: the really important thing about education is not the cramming of facts, the learning of skills, nor even the certificates one gains or the income it eventually delivers – and certainly not the league-table position it delivers to the school – but the state of mind it creates.

It is this that the education system has increasingly neglected. Such abstracts were perceived as meaningless against the seemingly more tangible matters of exam results, employability, let alone school league tables. As education increasingly became little more than the training in hoop-jumping that such exigencies required, something of profound value was lost – to the point that we now have entire generations that not only lack such a perspective but don’t even know that they do. Finishing my school education in the early 1980s, I consider that I myself caught little more than the tail-end of it.

When education is shorn of its higher ideas, it does indeed become little more than training: it produces people who, while they may be highly skilled in specific fields, lack – sometimes to a worrying degree – a larger perspective on the world. They also often lack qualities like patience, impartiality or empathy. Everything is focused on self-realisation. The general population’s role in the current political emergency comes from its propensity for woolly, self-referential thinking, restricted knowledge, egocentric perspectives, impatience with diverse points of view and a failure to accept that it doesn’t know what it doesn’t know. Those who become teachers then often perpetuate their own experience of mechanical teaching simply because they themselves lack the nuances that those abstract qualities cultivate – and so the cycle continues.

Such qualities are, however, no less necessary now than they ever were; one might argue even more so as the purely manual aspects of life have continued to decline. Somewhere in the shared subconscious, I believe there is a vague awareness of this void – but it is not something that a short remedial action can alter: it is something cultivated by breathing the air of a healthy educational environment (and I mean that in the widest sense, to include the home and other environments) throughout one’s early development, and indeed indefinitely.

The present education system has attempted to address this issue by focusing on window-dressing. In my experience, a major part of school culture involved learning how to talk oneself up, no matter how justified it was or wasn’t. I witnessed many school assemblies where pupils were exhorted to see life as a “challenge”, a competition to “win”. I witnessed examples of this where pupils were encouraged to “work on their personal brand”, to polish their personal statement to the point where they reflected more what the recipients were deemed to want to hear than anything accurate about the author.

In other words, for several generations now have bought into the world of hype – and they have encouraged the people of this country to believe that glossy marketing is more important than any substance that might lie behind it. What’s more, the teachers didn’t just preach this to their pupils; in many cases it seemed to be how they ran their own careers. I was chided on more than one occasion for “failing to play the game” because I stuck to my academic ideals.

The root of this deception is of course that the primary aim in life is to get what you want from it, no matter how one does it. The truth is an acceptable casualty in this race, as are personal integrity and any more subtle qualities that are hard to demonstrate. Yet it is utterly the antithesis of an educated state of mind, which tends to be restrained, tolerant, enquiring – and modest.

It is not fair to blame this entirely on schools, because in a way they have only been reflecting changes in wider society driven by new media and such like. But it is arguably the case that had education not failed to equip people with better intellectual foundations in the first place, such superficial tendencies might not have gained the traction that they have. The real failure of schools and education is not in specific matters – but in their willingness to endorse such matters and exploit them, rather than making a stand in the name of a more profound integrity. It is this that has brought the nation to a position where very many within it are profoundly ignorant of civic responsibilities, or understanding of how civil society works – politics and constitution included – so busy have they been polishing their own personal brands.

If we have produced a nation in which individual self-realisation is the over-riding aim – and I believe that the majority of the nation now really does believe it believes this – then it is hardly surprising that our politicians behave in the same way. Their duty to the nation is little more than an inconvenience on one’s way to Power and a stellar career; seen in this light, the behaviour of many of them makes much more sense. Personal weakness, ignorance or incompetence no longer need be an impediment to reaching the top in politics, any more than in the many other fields where powerful people make bad decisions based on the hubristic imperative of their personal brands.

I still can’t forget the occasion when I walked in on a local politician whom I had briefed to talk to my students about the principles of democracy and parliamentary representation – and found him telling them instead about how amazing a career politics can be for the ambitious individual.

That we (collectively) get the politicians we deserve is probably true, though the reasons why are subtler than they seem.

Truth being spoken at last.

At last, someone is talking about the elephant in the room.

Teachers held at gunpoint for meaningless data

What the writer underplays is the fact that some schools actively welcomed this approach, because it was what allowed their managers to big-up their careers and salaries. I worked in one.

You can only deal with the conflict between doing what you know to be educationally right and necessary and that which a gun-pointing system is forcing you to for so long before something has to give.

The more seriously you take your vocation, the more damaging the consequences of such conflicts are likely to be.

Faustus

It may have been a mistake to start reading Geert Mak’s painfully detailed 1999 history of Europe while my head still suffers from excessive emotional reaction. But never has it been clearer why we need to know our history to avoid making the same mistakes again. Reading excruciating accounts of how the Bolsheviks behaved in Russia 100 years ago , how the Nazis came to power in 1930’s Germany, and how the two World Wars began, hints of the trends repeating in our own age are unmistakable. I just hope that it doesn’t lead us to the same place…

Yet it is so easy for otherwise good people to be taken in by warped patterns of thought. I’m still in touch with a number of practising teachers; one told me recently how he, a deputy head, had been instructed to get tough with a number of un-favoured staff in his school. He objected to treating people harshly – and was told that “That is your job. This is the way it is now. There is no other way”. Admirably, he argued the case and made some headway – but has ultimately decided that he is unwilling to do that management’s dirty work, and has found employment somewhere else. I shivered with recognition.

The case I mentioned previously of irregular, even illegal practices in a primary chain elsewhere in the country continues to develop. The person concerned, the chain’s financial manager, is highly professional, and working for a small fraction of the salary they could command as a chartered accountant. But this person felt professionally obliged to report the malpractice being witnessed – and now they have become the target of the latest management firestorm, the good ‘framed’ once again to justify the deeply inadequate.

I became acquainted this week with the phrase ‘flattening the grass’ – which has also been picked up by John Tomsett and others. Apparently it began as a management euphemism for destroying all opposition to one’s regime. Shivers of recognition once again. But it appears that this is extending to the pupils – with assemblies being run, the purpose of which is to shame, humiliate and intimidate pupils into submission, supposedly in the name of improving discipline. I never witnessed anything like this, though I did see pupils being very heavily read the riot act prior to an Ofsted inspection.

One begins to see how ordinary circumstances are gradually subverted. It may even be that those perpetrating such acts do not see the full implications of what they are doing. But the slippery slope is there, and they are starting to slide increasingly rapidly. Faustus is selling his soul once again. The confrontational, evangelical politico-education system in Britain certainly creates incentives for such thinking – and of course, the country’s political madness is hardly majoring on compassion itself at the moment. It’s catching.

Little by little, we slip collectively further down that slope. We are vaguely aware of what is happening – but ‘accountability’ just leads us from one desperate thing to another – and we justify it to ourselves on the grounds that it can be no other way.

And so we end up with a situation where educational establishments – which promote themselves as the ultimate expression of societal good – can come to believe that it is quite appropriate to demonise their staff and humiliate their own pupils. All in the interests of the greater good, you understand.

People who make a stand, who try to stick to their principles and do the right thing themselves become targets, just as they did in 1930s Germany. Gradually all opposition is expunged. In the echo chambers that remain, those in charge only hear the reverberations of their own warped logic. And they are utterly blinded to the single most glaring fact: if this is the only way they can see to treat others, then the unforgivable inadequacies they correctly claim exist within the system lie not with their victims – but somewhere much, much closer to home.

I am just relieved I am out of the nuclear winter that is now the British education system – and unsurprised to hear that my own former school has lost its Outstanding grade in a recent Ofsted inspection. Too much mafia hubris; too many good teachers ‘disposed of’, and too few replacements available; a perfect storm – and reputations travel. I try to avoid schadenfreude – but maybe there is a glimmer of justice left in the world after all.

There is no other way. Quite correct: if you treat people badly, then you leave them no alternative but to turn against you.

But still the management Mafiosi continue their warped ways:

We must destroy these inadequate teachers. We must reduce these children to tears. It is all for their own good. There is no other way.

Thus is how vicious totalitarianism is ushered in.

But we all know what happened to Mussolini.

School bullies

News just in from an education ‘source’ elsewhere in the country described a situation whereby a member of non-teaching professional support staff was scapegoated, her life gratuitously made hell by senior managers until she eventually left her post. This in a primary school of all places. Perhaps the fact that it took place in an academy chain is not irrelevant. My source is so appalled that she too is considering her position.

Why does this still happen? The education sector repeatedly and understandably majors on the good it seeks to do in society. It claims to be a vocation that is devoted to positive outcomes in life. It champions opportunity, social justice and condemns bullying. By virtue of having the loudest voice, management is often in the vanguard of such crowing.

It is utter hypocrisy.

Because despite the above, it still does not know how to lead by example. It still seems to think that ruining the life chances of its own employees is acceptable. There is still too large an element in school “leadership” (I use the word here with caution) that seems to think that children’s life chances are best furthered by being as beastly to the people who work in that sector as possible.

I experienced it myself, in the way a situation was gradually turned against me because my face no longer fitted. It was nothing to do with competence – as so often. I was by no means alone: there are far too many reported examples of professional victimisation – and similar experiences seem still to be happening elsewhere in the country.

There is absolutely no justification whatsoever for this kind of treatment – and in my opinion, people who behave like this towards others are not fit to be in the positions of power that they often hold. It is not a reasonable excuse to claim they need to cut ‘dead wood’ from the system, or take ‘hard decisions’ on behalf of the children. It is not really about that: it is raw professional politics, pure and simple.

Even if someone has committed the most heinous professional crime imaginable, there is, I would argue, still a case for fair and balanced treatment, the retaining of the moral high ground rather than a primitive urge for retribution.

It is very easy to be disillusioned with the profession these days. It seems that the zealots and ideologues still hold sway – and they are ferocious against those who demur. For all the high-minded ideals we are no further from the partisan, cowardly and frankly puerile in-fighting and squabbling that has characterised the profession for so long. So much for the kids fighting in schools – if only they could see some of the adults! I cannot forget the county-council personnel worker who told me she was “well shot” of managing schools – “because they are too often utter poison”.

Many of those who claim to have children’s interests at heart should start by practising the behaviour they preach – towards their colleagues. Otherwise they are no better than the school bullies in the playground.

She’s done it again!

When Amanda Spielman was appointed as Chief Inspector of Schools at Ofsted, there were the predictable sniffy responses from the profession: what could a non-teacher know about the education profession?

Well, it turns out that an outside voice is proving to be just what is needed. Spielman is unexpectedly becoming the ‘breath of fresh air’ that the profession so badly needs.

In recent days she has observed that it is not reasonable to expect schools and teachers to address all of society’s ills – that parents and other agencies need to be responsible for their own impact too. And more recently still she has called on professional leaders to abandon their preoccupation with pedagogical gimmicks  (singling out Brain Gym as an example), and allow teachers to focus on the basics using tried and tested techniques that work for them in classrooms.

The teaching profession has always been prone to the distractions of gimmickry: the whole progressive movement is predicated on – as Spielman observed – the belief that the Holy Grail is waiting just around the next corner. It is not. The problem has only been made worse in recent years by school managements desperately plugging anything that they hoped might push their institutions up the league tables.

My only regret is that personally, Spielman has come a few years too late: during my career I was repeatedly bombarded with instructions to adopt such gimmicks by a few influential people in my school who saw this as the way to ‘lead learning’. Their influence was reinforced by rather more others in middle management who were reluctant to challenge them. It was made clear that disagreement was not permissible. It was my reluctance to comply with – and my willingness to challenge – such idiocy that first saw me marked by those who in reality were more interested in compliance that cultivating real professional excellence. Much of what Spielman is now saying formed the core of my own book on teaching and education.

There remain those for whom it seems imperative that education should dance to some all-embracing meta-tune. It is not unreasonable for the profession to seek some form of consensus over what works – but it should not be ideologically driven, and it is good to see Spielman in effect challenging this. As I proposed in The Great Exception, it is entirely possible to derive a model of good professional practice that is based in the realities of good classroom practice rather than the vanities and insanities of those who are always looking for the Next Big Thing.