What's wrong with Education?

Our parent school spent some years conducting a review of 'the way ahead' for its own development, grandly framed as seeking a blueprint for The Future of Education. Contributors were encouraged to indulge in 'blue-sky thinking', to be as wild and wacky and unconstrained in their suggestions as possible. Some of this 'new thinking' was amusing, and a little of it might be, at least indirectly, useful in some ways. But I fear most of it missed the point. (Well, they didn't ask me, did they?)

Before you can think outside the box, you need to recognise where the boundaries of the box are.

So, what do I think is wrong with education...?  (How long have you got?)

1) It is highly vulnerable to faddishness.

I think there are a number of likely reasons for this. Teachers - and academic educationists - tend to be people who have consciously 'dropped out' of the more workaday world, and thus often like to think of themselves as radical and subversive, unconstrained by 'conventional wisdom'. Schools themselves mostly operate somewhat outside of the usual economic forces that discourage reckless experimentation in the business world. And since it is so difficult - impossible - to verify the impacts of proposed initiatives in education other than by real-world trials, a lot of things get tried out; and if the early indicators of outcome appear even vaguely positive, these ideas can spread very rapidly, without having proven themselves to be of any real value (project-based learning, interactive white boards, laptops in the classroom all the time, etc., etc.). I am not at all against experimentation and innovation; but I think they need to be pursued with caution and discrimination - and in the education field, they are often adopted without such careful forethought, embraced for the thrill of novelty alone.

2)  Yet it is also fundamentally conservative.

This is unsurprising - because education policy, especially at the level of individual schools, is driven largely by the concerns of parents, and parents are naturally cautious about taking risks with their children's 'future'. Also, many of them tend to be unduly nostalgic for their own schooldays (sometimes, even, with an overlay of 'super-nostalgia' for an imagined earlier period - their parents' schooldays, perhaps - when things were assumed to have been even better). Though this might be changing with the rapid rate of technological and social transformation in our modern digital era, parents in the past have certainly tended to lag half a generation or so behind the contemporary world... particularly in regard to how their children should be educated. Parents - pretty nearly all parents, even the most progressive and enlightened of them - tend to be fixated on 'academic performance' (and on a rather narrow view of 'success' in life which will follow on from this): constant improvement, closing in on perfection, outdoing classmates; getting good exam scores, getting into a good university; getting a good degree, and, as a result, getting a good job with a good income. (Ultimately, though, I think parents pushing their children - and their children's teachers - to accept this template for progress through life might be perhaps relatively unimportant. The push to 'success' from the bottom end of the educational process is probably outweighed by [and subconsciously dictated by?] the pull from the top end: the perceived demands of the economy as filtered through the government and the universities - see my final point below.)

3)  Hence, it is too often a battleground of the uninformed.

The tension that I outlined in my first two points between 'trendy' educationists or teachers on the one hand and (mostly) fairly reactionary parents (and school governors, district school boards, etc.) on the other, the constant struggle between people who are seeking to innovate (though usually for no clearly thought-out reason) and those who oppose such innovation (for no other reason than their fearful gut instincts), tends to produce either stagnation or a violent see-sawing of policy. Schools - and national education systems - are unlikely to be well run until a more harmonious and productive synthesis can be found between these opposing tendencies. (Moreover, neither teachers nor parents are necessarily very insightful about the broader issues of education. Parents are too focused on their own children's performance; teachers are too focused on preserving their jobs - or on how they'd like to be able to do their jobs. That narrowness of viewpoint is not conducive to conceptualizing a 'big picture'.)

4) But worse yet, it is fundamentally institutional.

Both at the level of any particular school, and at the levels of there being an 'education sector' and 'education policy' - and 'educational theory', too, the very idea of education... well, it's all so self-important and monolithic. And I am wary of any kind of institution. I don't necessarily know what I'd want to put in its place, but I do recognise in myself a very powerful impulse to tear down most of what we have currently.


5) And the nature of the institution is profoundly collectivist.
I particularly dislike the sense of community identification that schools seem to foster - encouraging pupils to conceive of themselves in terms of their form or class group, their year group, their 'house', and then as belonging to the school itself. Schools all seem to promote the idea of community over individuality; and that really rankles with me. And kids spend so long in schools - so many hours in the week, so many years of their young lives - that they inevitably become 'institutionalised' by their school's culture, unconsciously conditioned by and dependent on it (just as long-term prisoners or career soldiers are affected by their habitual environments). It particularly worries me that there is a growing tendency toward single-site schools covering all ages, from pre-kindergarten through to university entrance: some kids are going through their entire education in one place, going 15 years without a change of scenery (or very much change in their peer group).

6)  The worst of this institutional mentality is that it is so excessively social.

The suppression of individuality becomes an even bigger problem because school occupies such a huge proportion of young people's time: they are forced into these artificial communities for so much of their waking lives. These problems no doubt become intensified in very large schools (witness the invariable film and television depictions of how rigid - and how wretched - the social stratifications in US high schools are). But even within the smaller sphere of the classroom, there is such a relentless emphasis on interaction - performing with and in front of your classmates, undertaking activities in pairs and groups and so on. This may all be useful and healthy up to a point; but it dangerously undervalues and marginalises the significant number of children who are averse to such enforced socialization. The introspective or socially awkward, the intensely private or 'quiet' child should not be alienated or demonized or overlooked, in the classroom or outside it - but that is what schools tend to do.


7)  And it is so obsessed with measurement.
The 'trendy' received wisdom has been for many years that 'assessment' is not an entirely good thing, particularly in terms of its psychological impact on children; and that it should therefore be de-emphasised. But this is a classic example of the hypocrisy or 'doublethink' that is rife in the world of education: most educators pay lip-service to this ideal of moving away from a preoccupation with assessment of performance, without attempting to confront the contradictions that.... schools (mostly; the private ones, anyway) want to have some measure of their success, to establish their superiority over rival schools; parents want to have some measure of their children's success, to be reassured about their 'progress' (and their prospects in life after school); teachers accept - and not all that grudgingly in most cases (I am a rare outlier in my distaste for constant grading) - their school's and parents' demands for all this measurement; and - sadly - the children themselves come to expect this too, even to need it and crave it, feeling confused and unsatisfied without it. People - parents, teachers, students, society at large, everyone - mostly turn a blind eye to the fact that all grading systems are inevitably superficial, crude, narrow; lacking insight into detail (it's impossible to define criteria that cover every aspect of a child's performance in a task) and unable to differentiate effectively between different levels of performance (it's impossible to distinguish between 100 children - or between 100 pieces of work by a small group of children - with a 10-point scale [on which, in practice, only 5 or 6 different marks will be awarded]; but broader marking scales soon become unwieldy, and will be more and more inconsistently applied - even by the same teacher, let alone a whole group of them); subjective and unreliable; of very little use even in charting a single child's improvement over time, and often little more than a lottery in rating children against each other. Marking is resented by most teachers for being tedious and time-consuming. And, for the most part, it isn't even capable of achieving what it is intended for. But the most insidious and objectionable aspect of education's obsession with marking is that (as the wonderful thinker John Holt, one of my great personal inspirations, once put it) it inculcates in children "the ignoble satisfaction of feeling that they are better than someone else".

8)  And, oh yes, it is riddled with sacred cows.
'Progressive thinking' about curriculum tends to focus on things like introducing more project-based learning, more extra-mural learning, or more inter-disciplinary learning. But such initiatives are usually still grounded in the long-established traditions of subject discipline distinctions and standardised content. You almost never hear anyone question, for example, "Why do we teach maths - at all?" Maths is, without doubt, the least practically useful subject taught in schools, for the great majority of students; I have never used anything that I learned in a maths class in the outside world. Basic numeracy, yes - that's very important. But you learn that from playing 'shop'; and later from counting your pocket money, playing darts and cribbage, etc. You don't really need to be taught any of that in school, not beyond the very early years. I wouldn't advocate abolishing the study of maths completely; but I do think the type of content it covers, and the way in which it is taught, needs to be drastically transformed. And, even more importantly, it needs to be dislodged from its central - and unquestioned - position in the secondary curriculum. Similarly, I would challenge whether it is really so very useful for everyone to 'learn' a foreign language - at least, for such a substantial portion of the timetable, throughout the secondary years. I'd prefer to see courses being offered in philology, teaching students how languages in general work, rather than harrying them to pursue a modestly high level of competence in just one additional language - which they may never use in earnest. Although there are issues of practicality, of course, I'd like to see students being given the opportunity to acquire a simple 'beginner's level' in perhaps four or five different languages, before exercising an option to pursue one or two of them to a rather higher level. With languages, I am sure that it is an awareness of comparative linguistics that is really important to a child's mental development, rather than attaining a modest competence in one particular foreign language. Unless you're really sure that a language is going to be useful to you - because of family connections, or a particular career path - studying one for hours a week throughout the whole of secondary school is a wasteful use of time; most students, rightly, find it unengaging and pointless. And history.... is neutered by hang-ups about studying more recent times (too politically charged, too uncertain??); when I was in school, we didn't dare venture beyond the origins of the First World War, some sixty years prior; even today, it's rare to find any topics approaching as near as the 1950s or 1960s. All the near-contemporary history I know, I had to learn from TV documentaries. I could go on and on: nearly all of the traditional school subjects have serious flaws (in syllabus, teaching style, narrowness of conception, excessive proportion of timetable allocated to them); while potentially far more engaging and important subjects - like economics, social psychology, engineering, electronics - are marginalized or overlooked completely.

9)  But the worst thing of all about education is that it's compulsory.

Modern schools - the better ones, anyway - espouse the ideals of promoting dignity and respect, enhancing students' capacity for autonomy and self-realisation ("student-centred learning", and all that). How does that square with the fact that the activities intended to facilitate this are all required? It doesn't. Being forced to attend school every day, and to follow a fixed pattern of classes and activities every day, necessarily erodes a student's sense of empowerment and self-worth. Alas, I fear that purely voluntary education just would not be practicable. But the more one insists on defining when and where children attend school, what subjects are available for them to study, and what assessments in these subjects they must undertake, the more one crushes the life out of the ideal of student autonomy.

10)  No, absolutely the worst thing of all about it is that it's such a sausage factory.

Radical reform of education is probably impossible, certainly very, very, very difficult - because education is enmeshed in a wider socio-economic construct. Education policy is formulated by governments, who largely depend on 'successful' management of the economy in order to stay in power. Governments generally listen to the 'leaders of industry' - rather than the electorate - in regard to what the economy needs to be successful. Thus, 'industry' - via the government - tells the universities how many doctors, lawyers, computer scientists, accountants, engineers, etc. the country is going to need in 10 or 20 years' time. The universities tweak their faculty budget allocations and admissions policies to try to meet those supposed needs for the output of certain types of skilled contributors to the economy in the coming decade. And schools - and exam boards - dutifully train their students to pass the right exams, to get into the right universities, to gain the right degrees, to get the right jobs.... to keep the good old economy sailing serenely along. The main limiting factor on the development of primary and secondary education is that, at present, primary and secondary education are almost exclusively focused on preparation for tertiary education - and on 'the world of work' beyond.

I don't think we can make education 'better' - a substantially more satisfying and valuable experience - even for those students who are sure they want to go to university and then become bankers or architects or whatever... until we can embrace the idea that not everyone wants or needs to go to university. And as working careers become increasingly fluid and varied, and as online learning becomes more and more widely available and adopted, the number of young people choosing to follow the university path could - probably should - decline very rapidly. 

I don't think anyone on our Future of Education think-tank said that.....