Shouting into the Void or Preaching to the Converted

MUSINGS ON 21ST C EDUCATION

A starting place: some contentious, opinionated and generalised observations on the current state of education along with a salute to those committed, reflective and professional teachers with whom I’ve worked in often challenging circumstances.

I guess I’m an odd hybrid: I’ve spent half my working life in the corporate and business world, schmoozing venture capitalists and shareholders, and the other half teaching English with a brief foray into educational research. And, if I’m honest, I’ve been happiest in the classroom enthusing young people about the merits of English literature and convincing them of the joys of learning. Likewise, I have enjoyed mentoring trainee teachers and galvanising teams of English professionals.

So, why am I no longer teaching or heading up an English department? Like so many others, I am increasingly dissatisfied with and disappointed by what education has become. In the thirty odd years since I started teaching, we have gradually become de-professionalised. If I were cynical, I may even suggest that this has been the intention of successive governments that wished to undermine teacher confidence and in doing so reduce the power of the teaching unions. Recently I bemoaned this fact to a friend in industry referring to the new artisan teacher. He corrected me, suggesting that the position has been further eroded and that teachers are now technicians training young people to jump through increasingly meaningless hoops. I certainly felt that that was what was expected of me and that I could stand the compromise of principle no longer.

In a ‘results at any cost’ culture, performance is now seen more as a measure of the school than of the individual students; in too many instances school managers are too out of touch and so more concerned with performance related pay than student well-being. Admittedly, this is not where most headteachers started, but as education becomes increasingly commercialised, with the proliferation of academy chains and free-schools, the idea of teaching as a vocation is being replaced by a fast track to management motivated by the misguided notion that, at best, it will improve both student outcomes and staff retention, at worst it will feed individual greed.

It could be argued that recent government initiatives and directives have ostensibly improved results, but we need to question what these results really mean and whether they are what the individual and society needs. In addition, despite high graduate unemployment and generous bursaries for trainees, teacher recruitment and retention is in crisis.

According to a decade of newspaper reports, universities are concerned that students lack skills; they know how to pass exams, but they are not flexible, resourceful, independent and resilient learners. In a rapidly changing world they need to be all these things, yet in schools we are encouraged to spoon-feed and mollycoddle students to boost “our” results. This just shifts the problem and passes the responsibility for meaningful education to others. Fact-based, rote-learning may have been appropriate in the 19th century, although Dickens’ creation of Gradgrind would suggest otherwise, but it is now neither enjoyable or fulfilling for the individual nor effective in developing young people who can make positive, creative contributions to society.

Students who did not enjoy the learning process will not become teachers and so schools are finding it harder to recruit good subject experts and so we need the “technicians” capable of mere delivery. Meanwhile subject experts, already in the system, are becoming disillusioned by the repetitive and mechanical approach apparently lauded during inspections and so encouraged by bullying managers in fear of their jobs.

So, what do we do? For me it has meant leaving teaching to research, to observe, to collaborate and to lobby for change. Change in terms of what we teach, how we do it, how the outcomes are assessed and what we, as a society, value for the individual and collective good. I don’t know if I can make a difference, but I want to try. I want young people to get the education they deserve, society to get the people it needs and for this to happen, teachers’ voices to be heard.

Over the coming months I want to read more widely about international models of education, talk to schools that are doing things differently, participate more in the work of the RSA and to listen to teachers who are making a difference. Ideas for future blogs include:

This list will grow – please contribute your ideas. info@otmoor.org