It is difficult to escape the gravitational pull of the day-to-day realities of the world we live in, to ever look beyond. We are so conditioned by our experiences, our shared history and multi-layered narrative, lived within communities and institutions defined by behaviours and expectations, and the limitations of language. Held back by the inertia and conservatism that defines us, our vision is made myopic by the pragmatism, mundanity,and routine of daily life, shaped as it is by experience and memory.

The trouble with memory is it feeds on the past, and while it can inform the future, it is not predictive or capable of visualization. Nowhere is this truer than in education, where the bulwark of the state with its political machinations, driven by a carousel of secretaries of state with their own agendas, allied with the innate conservatism that is education, means that any progress is incremental. Despite societal pressures for schools and teachers to fulfil functions quite different to what they were designed or trained for, any change is always conducted within the paradigm, a mere stretching of the elastic, the essential shape and structure retained. Even the pedagogy stays much the same, albeit that the methodology is constantly changing through technology and other innovations designed to enrich the learning experience – or so we are told. And so, we go on, trapped in a world of jargon, full of nouns acting as straitjackets to our thinking: curriculum, subjects, assessment, lessons, discipline, education and so on, each with their own literal meaning but also with an inferred meaning, a history loaded with subjectivity, emotion, defined by their context, and implied meaning. And surrounding it all, an infrastructure so hidebound and an industry so self-serving and tied up in legislation, that any hope of reform from within is hopeless. 

To discover we are locked into a paradigm of education that is increasingly irrelevant to a growing number of children is no surprise. Our assessment system has long been creaking for those who, for all sorts of physical, emotional, visual, audial, and cognitive reasons, cannot respond to written tests in the way examination boards want them to. Examination boards, universities schools are all run by the accountant’s pen with no foresight or vision, no asking the question, ‘what is the societal cost of NOT getting this right, of not investing more’ or ‘how we connect and motivate children. And that is before we even begin to look at what they are learning and why, its relevance to them and to the lives they are going to lead.

Which is why everybody knows what is wrong, that the current paradigm of education is failing our children, but few seem able to see what transformational change would look like. Lockdown gave us a taste of education without walls, but that is not the answer, if we believe, as we surely do, in the social and emotional, physical, and communal value of education. In the meantime, schools play around with the length of their lessons, the structure of the school day, which examination board is best, their values and mission statements and how to market their exam results, pretending that they define success.

Then there is that elephant in the room: the curriculum. In 2018 Mike Burke and Mark Lehain wrote a paper on the jostle for curriculum content, that gathered up as many of the suggestions as they could find about what should be taught in schools (a total of 213 suggestions in 2018 alone) and the growing industry of curriculum dumping. Health issues accounted for 68 proposals, Finance, 24, Technology 22 with many unable to be easily categorised. While most came from interest groups or quangos pushing their own barrows or representing minority interests, many were valid and implicitly encouraging us to ask why we teach what we do. Amongst some of the recommendations were the teaching of architecture, recognising fake news, teaching first aid, and learning about obesity, bushcraft, gambling, sign language and aspects of finance, all sound enough. But where, in a curriculum already creaking is there room for any of these? The list also raised another question, that of who owns education: schools, colleges, and universities? The home? The community? The individual? The Internet? Private companies or the State? And who owns the examination boards? And who should deliver the learning and how should they go about it?

It is not easy to turn a system so entrenched in our day-to-day lives as education – akin to turning an oil tanker in a canal. But we must try. Some initial thoughts (a list which omits far more than it offers):

  1. We need to see education, the imparting of knowledge, in a much broader way than the transfer of information and requisite skills for the purpose of assessment.
  2. We need to look at the societal needs for schools to, bluntly, occupy children while adults’ work, and engineer our schools and staffing models accordingly.
  3. We need to ensure education starts on the inside and shapes attitudes and behaviours and focuses on well-being, on self-discipline and self-confidence. 
  4. We need to establish the best way to learn (and science is informing us); if adults can work from home part-time, or work a four-day week, could the same be so for children? What part technology? If blended learning works best, what is the recipe?
  5. We need to focus on the relevance, applicability, and value of what is taught and set high expectationsfor our children – they deserve nothing less. And let’s re-define assessment (fewer people in prison? Fewer people out of work or with mental health difficulties?)
  6. We should consider establishing primary and secondary learning groups (the first may include only written and oral language / mathematics / science and technology and the second group, everything else). 
  7. We need to ensure education does not just take on a utilitarian form, but that it provides the tools for life-long learning. A cliché, but like many cliches, a truism. 
  8. We need to look at what children need to learn to become balanced, healthy, and well-informed citizens. And then we need to design the curriculum to deliver the right outcomes to achieve those goals.

To start we will need a blank sheet of paper, simple language, and no mirrors. But the journey needs to build a new paradigm, not tinker with the old. We’ve done enough of that already.