How to Educate

Education can be a hot potato in politics, and temperatures are rising yet again with indications that Andy Burnham wishes to put practical and academic education on an equal footing, focusing on relevance to today’s world and its exigencies. A change in this direction marks a reversal of the Michael Gove traditionalist reforms of the 2010s, which took many schools out of local authority control, created the Academy system, and met with much opposition from education professionals. One result of Gove was to diminish further the availability of extra-curricular activities – music, arts, sports – and to increase emphasis on results obtained in public examinations, conducted by external examiners, for sorting students’ post-school trajectories.

The besetting sins of education in England and Wales have long been three: (1) the snobbery of ‘academic’versus ‘technical’ education (think back to the ‘Eleven Plus’ Grammar School/Secondary Modern division which ‘comprehensive’ schooling, Shirley Williams’ legacy, was intended to overcome), (2) the over-emphasis on examinations, and (3) underfunding. At the tertiary level, eliminating the distinction between polytechnics and universities – the John Major reforms of the 1990s – continued the effort to put academic and practical education on an equal footing, but had the paradoxical effect of making the former polytechnics, relabelled the ‘post-1992’ universities, strive to emulate the older universities, in some ways to the detriment of their practical and vocational remit - while under the surface of the renaming there persisted the preceding ‘more prestigious-less prestigious’ snobbery.

From Shirley Williams onwards, education policy in England and Wales has consisted in attempts at social engineering by moving the chairs around on deck. What is needed is a rerouting of the entire ship, premised on the answers to two questions: What is education for? and, How should we educate?

What is education for? Obviously, an education system that did not equip people to get jobs in the sectors need by the national economy would have failed both the people and the economy. So whatever else it does, the system must achieve this. But people are not only their jobs. They are also, or will become, parents, voters, neighbours, friends, colleagues, travellers, possessors of at least some leisure, with interests additional to what they do in the workplace. In a digital age in which eyes are funnelled onto screens that stand between the individual and the world, an ability to register the existence of the wider horizons of that world is needed also. In workplaces it is not just the ability to read, write, add and subtract that is required, but also the ability to communicate, work with others in a team, and contribute from individual creativity. There is a city, a country, a world, outside the walls of the office or factory; there is home, and other people. Education that only turns out narrow and parochial minds is not education, it is training in a limited set of HR-required skills.

So the answer to ‘What is education for’ is: it is for life, of which work is only part, albeit a large and important part.

How to educate? The best method of teaching is teaching that makes students want to teach themselves. Education is in the end self-education. Learning is done by the individual, so inspiring the desire to learn is the good teacher’s aim. That, in turn, requires the teacher to find the door to the individual student’s way of learning. We are all (pace The Life of Brian) individuals, each with our own best way of learning; each mind has its own grain, its own setting; we are each (so to speak) neuro-diverse, and what looks like a blank wall if taught one way can be seen as a meadow of flowers if taught in another way – the way that suits the student’s cast of mind. Anyone can learn anything if they are really interested in it. Capturing that interest, inspiring it, is the door to the student’s possibilities.

This latter entails two things. First, here have to be more teachers and much smaller classes. Second, it means educating by inclination and aptitude. Obviously, a good basic competence in the traditional three Rs is a must; they are the platform for everything else. Once acquired, let what follows be shaped by what young people find they are interested in, because that will be what they are good at. Some who have chosen practical courses will, later, find themselves curious about other things, perhaps ‘academic’ things, and will turn to them to find out.

This I know from fifty years of experience in higher education. After teaching at Oxford, which recruits students from among the academically brightest, I taught at Birkbeck University of London, and there my students were typically adults either in work or retired who, in or after careers as carpenters or taxi drivers, electricians, computer programmers or retail assistants, wanted to study philosophy a couple of evenings a week – for a university degree in the subject, note – and some of them were very good at it. In population terms they were a tiny number, and doubtless that will always be true; but one cannot help wondering whether that tiny number would be a little less tiny if there were more Birkbecks, more opportunities nationwide, for people who at any stage in their lives wished to turn to the exploration of ‘academic’ subjects – literature, history, geography, psychology, languages including the classics, what you will. Obviously, people wishing to retrain for a practical or vocational skill will be more numerous than these, and should be as eagerly encouraged and enabled to do so. Enablement is the key here. Colleges and universities should have an open admissions policy for adults of all ages – they should all be Birkbecks – and as a route into them the university extension and extra-mural programmes killed by Thatcher in the 1980s should be widely reintroduced.

This is not a new idea. Remarkably, no less a person than Winston Churchill advocated it in his autobiographical memoir My Early Life. Reflecting on his own failed school career at Harrow he says that, once equipped with the basics, children should do what interests them, and some of them will return later to seek education, as he himself did; his education, he says, ‘having been interrupted by school’, began when he was in the army in India reading Plato, Darwin, Gibbon and Macaulay in the intervals of playing polo.

There is nothing idealistic about a scheme for educational institutions at the secondary level offering a wide range of both practical and academic courses, letting individual pupils choose what interests them and in whatever combination (cue lamentations from those charged with timetabling), and an open-door policy at the tertiary level for people to return to study at any point in their adult lives. The only barrier is ‘money’, which is a synonym for ‘political will’.

Top universities, companies and the civil service alike could run their own testing of applicants in search of those they think apt for what they offer or need, rather than relying on the one-size-fits-all model of the current school exams system. They used to do it, and some still do. Students with an interest in a given direction will know this and prepare accordingly. Meanwhile what happens beforehand will align with the students’ own interests and capabilities.

Children up to the onset of puberty are sponges and will acquire the basics. Corralling adolescents into a linear progression through public examinations does not do them any favours: let them roam through their interests, go into apprenticeships (which could be run jointly by school and local companies), start the school day at 10 or 11 am, be released into their own choices. To have responsibility for making them, a degree of autonomy in the process, is itself a boost. Later in life many will want to know more, learn more – and if the doors are open to them to do it, they will do it.

Cynics will envisage secondary schools becoming overrun by gangs of louts smoking at the school gates. Well: they exist already, only inside the classroom, disrupting it. The gang will be smaller if some of its members are studying, by their own choice, what interests them.

It is an empirical datum that young people who learn to play musical instruments at school perform better in their other studies. The penny-pinching which has deprived so much state education of extra-curricular activities is a bad investment. In at least one respect Aristotle was right when he said, ‘We educate ourselves so that we can make a noble use of our leisure’ – rephrase that as ‘so that we can make a more fulfilling use of all aspects of our lives’ including work – for work enjoyed is not work.

‘Education for everyone at any stage, doing what interests them’ (after schooling, for here this term is truly apt, in the basics up to adolescence), is the desideratum. Turning the ship around might take half a decade at least – so, for the reorganisation of secondary and tertiary levels, the secondary being the most revolutionary, the first entrants would be those now entering school. But that does not mean leaving primary schools as they are. Here the big change must be: more teachers, paid properly. The ‘money=political will’ equation applies at all levels, but as the first six years shape all else that follows, there absolutely cannot be penny-pinching there.

I founded a higher education institution dedicated to the humanities because in the narrowing tendency of the employability agenda, the civilising aspects of education were being squeezed. I did not see a contradiction between that agenda and opportunities for those – a minority, true enough – who wished to immerse themselves in the study of history, literature, philosophy, the classics. Both society and the economy need to profit from all talents and interests, from what can be brought into it from the skills needed in our technologized world as well as the great conversation that humankind has had, over time and still today, about what matters in life and society. People will benefit if the artificial boundary between ‘academic’ and ‘practical’ is dismantled. Not one or the other, but both; and when the student – that self-educator – is ready and interested, and knows that she or he needs both, both will be acquired. We have a martialled, divided, snobbery-infected approach now that needs to be set free from these restrictions. I hope the Burnham ambitions will move our system towards just such a liberation.