Why I do what I do – Part I

I work for an organisation that tried to help schools become better at their purpose. We help teachers in the classroom to be better teachers, and we help teachers in management roles to lead better organisations. So, better at what? We should be clear on the purpose that we believe schools should have before we can presume to improve them. What is our education system for? Effectively this is a curriculum question, in the broadest sense – with what knowledge, skills and values should our schools ensure children leave them?

The first and most obvious answer is – those that enable a child to prosper in society. This is the “instrumental approach” to schooling: at its best, the aim of giving the child freedom to follow their ambition. It has been the dominant policy theme at least for the last generation, increasingly involving two priorities – a focus at primary on basic skills, and at secondary on a body of “core knowledge” and a breadth of skills.

Basic skills seem uncontroversial. Since the origins of the universal school system in the nineteenth century, society has decided that a child’s ability to read, write and do basic mathematics should not be left to chance. The importance of enabling children to read, write and do basic maths is worth noting only insofar as our education system is still a long way from ensuring these skills are genuinely universal.

But the idea of a subsequent body of “core knowledge” is much harder, with no equivalent consensus on what should not be left to chance – what curriculum is needed to enable all children to prosper in society. There are broadly two schools of thought. One tries to anticipate what the next generation, and the country, will need in future, and to teach it directly. To maintain our society’s economic prosperity, schools needs to produce more innovators, more creators: a population with twenty-first century skills – be they behaviours such as teamwork or skills such as coding. Or more prosaically, we should learn more from Germany’s approach to technical schools and apprentices.[1].

The second focuses less on vocational content, and more on content that is useful to the child with their professional peers. This approach to “core knowledge”, best articulated by E.D. Hirsch, prescribes a traditional curriculum shaped around the dominant culture in society, thereby to ensure every child is given the “cultural capital” – a familiarity with the art, literature and history references that will enable them to achieve their ambitions even among the elite for whom that culture is a necessary entry point.[2]

Despite the conflict between the two schools, they share an assumption that the purpose of education is to enable children to fulfil their ambitions; such ambitions taking the form of social or economic success. This ethical underpinning is a respectable one – that children at the bottom of our unequal society deserve every chance to secure their future.

But what does it miss? The second broad purpose for our education system would think more about the development of society, not just of individuals – the “social approach”. It might still recommend a “traditional” curriculum, but its definition of core knowledge would be the broad understanding of our society’s geography, its histories and its varied, complex cultures necessary for the child to navigate their way through life with understanding and perspective. It would be less elitist than the cultural capital model; not concerned with providing a stock of capital for individual success, but with breaking down barriers; with giving every child a shared understanding of who we are as a society, where we have all come from and an empathy with those around us.

It would also complement that body of core knowledge with an explicit narrative about the values children should grow up with. This is rare today – either from a weariness about trying to teach values in class time or from a nervousness about making value judgements. The response to the idea of teaching citizenship or “British values” ranges from casual deprioritisation through cynicism to resentment. An instrumental approach has nothing to say about the values children should be taught. Yet it must be important that children leave school with a basic sense of empathy, self-awareness, responsibility to others and duty to society; taught not through PSHE but through geography, history, literature, art. And importantly, between the core knowledge and the values it teaches, this social approach must not just reproduce society – as schooling is often accused of doing – but critique it and encourage children to question its assumptions.

Seen in this light, the purpose of education is not just about the curriculum but about the school in society – not just about what you learn but with whom you learn. Exclusive communities – private schools, grammar schools, faith schools – which can perhaps be justified in an instrumental approach as being in some sense better for the ambitions of one group of children or another are all inimical to this social approach in which commonly shared experience, knowledge and values are of prime importance. Schools can neither aim to perpetuate or exclude any group in society.

Our first approach helps children achieve their ambitions but does not engage with what those ambitions could be. It also glosses over that not all children can fulfil every ambition – a fact that is the fault of our society and our economy, not of our schools. An education system with that purpose alone will continue to leave many children learning to labour – learning a pattern of behaviour for a future workforce but with no other benefit from their years at school.

Our second helps children understand and improve society. It is probably the best starting point for our education system today, given the risks around us – in the UK, in Europe, in the US – of an ever-more fragmented and mutually incomprehending society. But it says little about a child’s own place and identity in that society – how they reflect as they grow up on who they are, what they enjoy – and it remains instrumental in its approach to knowledge.

So there is a final possible perspective, which needs to complement the second. An “intrinsic” approach values knowledge for its own sake and for its ability to help us reflect on who we are and how we want to live. A love of learning is the thing – knowledge is enriching and enjoyable in itself, and as Alan Bennett’s dictum runs in the History Boys, “pass it on” is sometimes all you can, or should, do. Matthew Arnold wanted to hold up to children “the best that has been thought or said”, not as a store of cultural capital but for their enjoyment, to expand their horizons, and to help them understand themselves better. A child from any part of our multifaceted society deserves this. Education should give all children the breadth of knowledge to be free not just to achieve their ambition, but to choose their own identity and enjoy a wealth of knowledge of the world around them whoever they go on to be.

 

 

[1] A couple of challenges can be raised: either that we can’t really predict what skills will be needed; or that schools can’t effectively teach them, because teaching “skills” absent content is meaningless or that schools are the wrong place to teach workforce-based skills.

[2] Interestingly both approaches take a similar view of the importance of a science curriculum, on the assumption that to prosper in society, many children will want careers grounded in the sciences and that grounding needs to begin at school.