Education is an admirable thing, but it is well to remember from time to time that nothing that is worth knowing can be taught.

Oscar Wilde

We start this chapter with a quick overview of the debate about education. The situation is confused, and the picture we’ll present is somewhat oversimplified, but we hope it will help you get oriented for when you get into more detailed discussions about school. In the public imagination there are, very roughly, three ‘tribes’ of educational opinion. They have different diagnoses of what is wrong with schools, and correspondingly three different sets of ideas about what needs doing to put it right. As we tend to meet these fairly frequently in the media, and in conversation, it’s worth arming ourselves with some clarity about their strengths and weaknesses. Within each camp there are people who hold the most extreme views, and many more who subscribe to more moderate versions. It will quickly become clear which tribe we belong to, though we will try to do some justice to the other positions.

Three educational tribes: Roms, Trads and Mods

The first tribe we will call the Roms, short for romantics. The stereotype of the Roms is that they believe in the innate goodness of children, and therefore assume that education should allow children to express themselves and discover their own talents and interests. Didactic teaching and adult authority are seen as impositions that cramp and quite possibly damage this inherent spirit. The most extreme Roms have a deep trust, not borne out by evidence, that if children are just left alone, all will turn out for the best. (They’ve obviously never read Lord of the Flies.) The patron saint, as it were, of the Roms, is the 18th century French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau who articulated this view in his didactic novel Emile. Famous exponents of the Rom philosophy include Rudolf Steiner (who did indeed have some fairly wacky ideas), Maria Montessori and, most notoriously, A. S. Neill of Summerhill. Real Roms tend to home-school their children or send them to small ‘alternative’ schools. The main characteristic of the Roms is that they are few and far between these days. There are almost none to be found in mainstream schools or in colleges of education.

The second tribe are the traditionalists, Trads for short. They tend to think that the ideal school is the good old-fashioned grammar school, with lots of chalk-and-talk teaching, strong discipline, conventional examinations (and plenty of them) and an emphasis in the curriculum on literacy, numeracy, timeless classics (Shakespeare, Beethoven) and difficult abstract subjects (grammar, algebra). To the Trads, teachers are respected sources of culturally important, tried and tested factual knowledge (the periodic table, the Tudors). Their job is to tell children about this knowledge and to make sure they have understood it well enough, and remembered it long enough, to pass exams in it.

These exams (especially A level) are vitally important and entirely fair and reliable, and they act as the gateways to the best universities (which, in turn, give access to well-paid professional jobs which will make you wealthy and therefore happy). After children have taken these exams, Trads seem to lose interest in the question of what this patchwork of factual knowledge actually enables children to do. It seems to them self-evident that mere acquaintance with facts is a good thing. Perhaps the implicitly valued capabilities are ‘the ability to hold your own at dinner parties’ and ‘to do well on televised tests of general knowledge’, such as Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?, Mastermind, Eggheads and especially University Challenge.

Trads believe that success in this educational obstacle race reflects the joint operation of a trio of entirely unproblematic factors: ability (which is fixed), hard work (which is under pupils’ control) and good teaching by the school. (We’ll come back to ability and effort shortly.) Trads believe that armies of Roms have for years been trying to take over the education system, and that all educational ills and disappointments of the last 50 years result from this infiltration. Any attempts to question this reassuringly straightforward picture is treated as ‘progressive claptrap’.

Core to the Trads’ world view is a belief that things can be divided neatly into twos, which means that anyone who isn’t a Trad must be a Rom. But there is a third very important tribe of people who are signed up to neither traditional nor progressive views, but who are trying to think more carefully about how schools can best prepare children and young people – all of them – to flourish in the real, turbulent world of the mid 21st century. We’ll call them the Mods, which is short for both modest and moderate. Mods know, when things are complicated, that patience and humility are required, and like the famous tortoise, they make, over time, better progress than the more doctrinaire hare.

Education is a prime example of a ‘wicked’ problem, one that is very complex and ill-defined, so Mods are painfully aware that quick fixes, appeals to nostalgia and rhetorical point-scoring don’t cut it. They are much more at home with the kind of intelligence that the great psychologist Jean Piaget described as “knowing what to do when you don’t know what to do”. Mods become pensive, they tinker and explore, while the Trads get more pugnacious and the Roms disappear to the margins. Almost everyone who works in education is a Mod. But because Mods prefer to tinker quietly than to bang big drums, it is easy to underestimate how many there are, and how much progress teachers, head teachers and their schools have been making.

It is one of our ambitions for this book that we can create a more confident and more unified Mod voice with which to challenge the naive polarisations of the Roms and the Trads. As you will have guessed, we are Mods, and a good deal of our working year is spent with thousands of students, teachers, parents and employers who know we cannot turn the clock back to an allegedly ‘golden age’ of grammar schools, and nor can we make do with simplistic quick fixes. We have to think carefully, debate respectfully, experiment slowly and review honestly as we go along. In this way genuine progress will be made.

Trad beliefs

Because Trads tend to be loud and confident, there is a risk of being swept away by their rhetoric, especially when you are feeling confused by all the different claims and counter-claims. So we need to look a little more carefully at the case they make for going back to more traditional styles of education.

Sometimes Trads assume that, as well as being of unquestionable value in its own right, the mere possession of ‘culturally valuable knowledge’ somehow bestows on the owner an ability to think rationally. Traditionally this assumption applied to the ability to read and write Latin, and there are still those who champion Latin as the ultimate training of the mind. Currently ranked a very respectable 6,339 in the Amazon best-seller list, Gwynne’s Latin claims, “What Latin, when taught in the traditional way, does is to train the learner’s intellect and character as no other subject can even begin to do. It trains the learner to focus and concentrate; to memorise; to analyse, if necessary with minute exactness, and to problem-solve; to be diligent; to be conscientious; to be persevering; and much more. Learning Latin in the traditional manner makes us better at every human activity.”1 Now, we wholeheartedly agree with Mr Gwynne that the purpose of studying much of the syllabus is not to master the subject matter per se. Most of it will be of no use to the majority of those who struggle with it. We manage perfectly well without remembering the French imperfect tense or the equation for photosynthesis. Its main purpose is to develop useful, transferable qualities or ‘habits of mind’, such as concentration, perseverance and analytical precision. The trouble is, there is absolutely no evidence that Latin, when taught in the ‘traditional way’, has any such effect. The thinking you learn by studying Latin does not transfer to other subjects in the way it was imagined it might.2

More recently, such claims tend to be made for the study of mathematics, and now it seems to apply to any form of knowledge that a traditionally inclined secretary of state for education deems to be a ‘cultural treasure’. Merely engaging with this subject matter in a way that enables you to recall it and manipulate it (in the highly prescribed ways required for exams) is thought to provide this training of the mind. But it doesn’t. All the evidence shows that learning any particular thing, be it Grand Theft Auto or Latin, makes you better at that thing, but unless you are taught in a very particular way (more on this later), the benefits do not automatically transfer to any other domain. In fact, this is true for every subject on the secondary school curriculum. If taught in the traditional way, they do not make you any better at general-purpose thinking. Harvard Professor David Perkins wrote a very good empirical paper on this way back in 1985, called ‘Post-primary education has little impact on informal reasoning’, which about says it all.3

Curiously, despite their apparent belief in the possibility of such general mind training, Trads often argue, when it suits them, exactly the reverse. The explicit attempt to cultivate ‘transferable thinking skills’ is doomed, they say, because any method of thinking is so tightly bound to a particular subject matter that no such transfer is possible. The high priest of the Trads is a retired American professor called E. D. Hirsch, who keeps insisting that any direct attempt by teachers to cultivate mental abilities, such as précising material or distinguishing between the main message and more subordinate messages, is not only doomed to failure; it is the main reason why many poor children don’t read very well and don’t do well in exams. As far as we can tell, Hirsch’s view is that simply knowing this venerable content – not being required to think about it, analyse it, distil it or use it to spark your imagination – somehow makes you an educated human being. We don’t quite understand why being able to write an A grade essay on the symbolism in Wordsworth’s poetry should make anyone a more competent and fulfilled human being. Throughout history, and across cultures, there seem to be a lot of people who have managed perfectly well without this particular accomplishment, and many others like them.

This emphasis on just knowing, and its associated feeling of being securely right, is deeply characteristic of Trads. They seem to greatly prefer knowing to thinking. They like to be certain, and to defend their certainty with any rhetorical tricks they can muster. Even though they hate to appear ignorant of anything, they are often deeply confused about, for example, the difference between being knowledgeable, being clever and being genuinely intelligent. While these three states are clearly different, Trads often seem to think that not knowing something – being ignorant – is the same thing as being stupid, and that both are causes of shame. Some of them seem to like to catch people out – for example, by taking little quotes out of context and subjecting them to ridicule. They enjoy debating and winning arguments, and will deploy selective and distorted evidence when it suits them. Trads also confuse the ability to retain and retrieve knowledge with ‘intelligence’. A definition of ‘intelligence’, endorsed by 52 leading experts in the field, specifically cautions: “Intelligence is not merely book learning, a narrow academic skill, or test-taking smarts. It reflects a broader and deeper capability for … ‘catching on’, ‘making sense’ of things, and ‘figuring out’ what to do.”4

It is perhaps not surprising that Trads are over-represented in the worlds of politics, the law and journalism, where skills in adversarial debating and point scoring are highly prized. Such sophistry is, of course, very different from real thinking, which is an often hesitant, difficult and slow attempt to get closer to the truth. Mods like to discuss and wonder, edging their way towards ideas that feel more solidly appropriate to the unprecedented challenges of the present.

* * *

Being busy defending an already espoused point of view leaves little time for real exploration. For example, Trads have tended to select the work of a few academics who support their case and ignore everything and everyone else. Two of the most revered and respectable American academics writing about the future of education are the co-founders of Harvard’s influential Project Zero, Howard Gardner, and the man we mentioned a few paragraphs ago, David Perkins. You would have thought they would be worth a look, but they are never referred to by the Trads: they don’t suit their case. As Trads tend to have exaggerated respect for ‘top’ universities, they can’t rubbish the well-respected work of scholars like Perkins and Gardner, so they just pretend that they don’t exist.

Likewise, a detailed, critical review of E. D. Hirsch’s work by Kristen Buras in the Harvard Educational Review, in which she carefully rebuts all of Hirsh’s claims, has gone unmentioned by many Trad defenders.5 Hirsch says schools and teacher training have been ‘taken over by progressive doctrine’: they haven’t. He says proper knowledge has been driven out of the curriculum: it hasn’t. He says ‘traditional subject matter’ is beyond question: it isn’t. He says the effort to memorise material produces understanding: it doesn’t. He says you have to have memorised swathes of ‘knowledge’ before you can engage with it critically or creatively: you don’t. And on it goes.

Because Trads like to keep things simple, they reduce knowledge to facts (and ignore the fact that most knowledge actually consists of webs of ideas that have withstood empirical tests). They reduce the subtle art of teaching to ‘knowledge transmission’ – just telling. They like to make assessment as rigorous as possible by making everything right or wrong – which, of course, ignores thinking. And they have a simplistic view of students’ minds which revolves around memorising: putting facts into storage and hauling them out on demand. This world view obliterates much of what is interesting and true about the mind as something which grapples with ideas, copes with degrees of uncertainty, interprets and muses – and sometimes improves – on what it has read or heard and, critically, is capable of getting better at grappling, interpreting, musing and, indeed, memorising.

Young minds are full of habits and processes that are capable of being stretched and strengthened by the right kind of teaching, but which are often not. A major study conducted by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Harvard and other partner universities found that students’ performance on tests is powerfully predicted by their level of these mental skills and habits, but that studying in the traditional Hirschean way does not develop these skills.6 They can be developed. It is extremely useful if they are developed. But, because this leads into slightly more complicated conceptualisations of young minds and how they may be taught, this possibility is often simply ignored or rubbished.

We have already noted Trads’ tendency to reduce the multi-hued world to black and white. So, there is content – stuff to be learned and mastered – and then there is process – the way it is learned. Trads define them as separable and set them in opposition. So they wrongly conclude that, if you are interested in the processes and skills of thinking well, that must mean that you have stopped caring about Shakespeare and algebra. This makes as much sense as saying that paying attention to the skill of hammering means that you no longer care where you are putting the nail. Duh!

Trads sometimes claim there are two kinds of people, novices and experts. Experts know enough to be able to think and solve problems. Novices don’t, so they have to be filled up with facts before they become capable of thinking. Which means the attempt to get children wrestling with problems they are not yet ‘expert’ about is ‘progressive nonsense’. But both understanding and skill grow precisely by working at the limit of what you currently can do or know. Knowledge is not like a pile of bricks which, when it becomes big enough, magically turns into a house; it is like a tree that grows by daring to put out shoots into the unknown. Put four 6-year-olds around an internet-enabled laptop, give them 45 minutes to find out as much as they can about a difficult question (What would happen if all the insects died? Why do people dance?) and just see how much they learn, and how they stretch their abilities as researchers. Any parent knows that children’s most powerful learning tools are questioning and thinking, not memorising and regurgitating. Duh!

This apparent inability to count beyond two, and the consequent tendency to turn every issue, however complicated, into a Punch and Judy show, means that debate in education makes agonisingly slow progress when it is dominated by Trads. Although there are not very many of the most rabid Trads, they unfortunately make up for scarcity with volume. And they get in the way of precious, faltering attempts to think carefully about what a 21st century education could and should really be like.

Because they can only see in black and white, Trads try to persuade the world that all moderates are really romantics: that anyone who questions their regressive nostrums is a ‘trendy liberal’ who would turn all children into illiterate, uncultured savages. Academics like Robin Alexander at Cambridge or Andrew Pollard at Bristol, innovative head teachers like Sir Anthony Seldon at Wellington College or Tom Sherrington at Highbury Grove School in London, or thoughtful ex-teachers and administrators like Sir Tim Brighouse, who have spent decades thinking about schools and trying to improve them, are lumped together and treated like airheads. As we’ve said, some high-profile Trads have dubbed all academics who disagree with them ‘The Blob’. They think millions of intelligent, well-informed teachers and parents are so gullible that they have become ‘Prisoners of the Blob’.

Parents need a more honest and accurate picture of what the Mods are up to, and how their work over the last few decades, far from ruining schools, has been quietly laying the foundation for an education that is of real benefit to all young people (and not just the half that will go to university).

Speaking up for the Mods

It is time, we think, to encourage teachers, parents, employers and children themselves to hold hands and speak up. Parents worry about exam stress and the loss of their children’s joy in learning. Teachers know that controlling crowds of bored teenagers, or squeezing a few extra children across an arbitrary assessment borderline, is not what lights their fire. It is not why they wanted to become teachers in the first place. Employers know that being able to knock out an essay on the causes of the First World War or solve quadratic equations is no guarantee that youngsters are ready for the world of work. University admission tutors want to know if applicants can think on their feet, and not just trot out well-rehearsed answers to anticipated questions. And children themselves want to feel that what they are doing in school is really preparing them to be confident, capable, learning adults. All these causes for concern are deep and real and valid, and not to be pooh-poohed by those who cannot see beyond the status quo. Millions of us know that the examination game cannot be the be-all and end-all of education, that there has to be another way of ‘winning’ at school. This ‘other game’ is what we are going to describe in the coming chapters. It is about how we can help children and young people to get a really good start in life from their schooling even if they didn’t do well on the tests. And it is about why high achievers need this other game just as much.

There may be a number of reasons why opposition to the Trads is not more vocal. Teachers need to know that their concerns and ideas are welcome in their staffrooms – but not all head teachers are ready to hear it. Parents may think it is ‘just us’ or ‘just our family’, without realising that dozens of people in the same street are dealing with very similar misgivings. They may not quite know how to put those feelings into words – parents are often intimidated by schools, especially if their own experience as a schoolchild was not happy or successful. Some parents may feel that school is more or less the way it has to be, and lack confidence in their ability to challenge and suggest. Some may be well aware of their and their children’s concerns, but feel that they have no option – if they are to do their best for their children – but to tell them to knuckle down and ‘suck it up’. To play the game as well as you can and hope to get a place at as good a university as possible seems like the only sound advice they can give, and so they stifle their doubts.

John Watts, a wise head teacher in the 1960s, said that “parents, however much they have suffered at school, or even if they left with a sense of failure, usually attribute the shortcomings to themselves rather than to the system, and thus find it difficult to envisage school in any form other than the one they themselves experienced”.7 So they sit on their hands.

Exam fodder

There is another Trad myth that says that everyone can do well if they try hard enough – except, sadly, for those who, when the brains were being doled out, were at the end of the queue and got small ones. This means that, if you did poorly in your exams, it was either because you weren’t bright enough or you were lazy. This turns out to be another of those pernicious over simplifications.

First, exams like GCSEs and A levels are competitive. Not everyone can be a ‘winner’. There have to be a good number of ‘losers’ in order to make success worth having. If everyone got four As at A level they would be of no use to employers or admissions tutors, would they? Here’s a thought experiment. It is the morning when everyone gets their A level results letter, and your daughter is waiting anxiously for the post. She opens it and finds that she has got her four As. She rings her best friend, Rachel, and is (mostly) pleased to find that Rachel has got four As too. They go down to the school and are surprised to discover that everyone in the school who sat A levels that year has got four As. And then, on the news that night, it is reported that every single candidate in the country achieved four As. Just imagine her emotional trajectory throughout the day, from delight, to pleasure (tinged with a bit of competitiveness), to puzzlement, to dejection and despair! In reality, examination boards (and politicians) are constantly tinkering with pass marks and grade boundaries to ensure that nothing like this fantasy can actually happen. A lot of children have got to do badly at the examination game; it’s a statistical necessity. It’s deceitful to claim that everyone can win if they try hard enough.

On the traditional view, intelligence is something that neither you nor your teachers could do anything about: it was largely decided by your genes. A lot of children come to believe, from pretty early on, that they are destined to be the losers – and it is because, in Jack Dee’s words, you are just thick. But we know this isn’t true. Children’s performance at school depends on a host of other factors, such as whether they are worried about what is going on at home, whether they have a good teacher, whether they like their teacher, whether they are willing to devote their intelligence to things that seem pointless, whether their experience has taught them that trying hard is usually worthwhile, whether they much prefer practical and active learning to academic and sedentary learning, and so on. If your child is struggling at school, one thing is certain: it is not because they are stupid.

The importance of beliefs

One factor that makes a huge difference to how well children learn, in school and out, is what Stanford researcher Professor Carol Dweck has called a growth mindset.8 Over decades of painstaking analysis of pupils, Dweck has been able to show that there are two broad categories of learners. One she calls ‘fixed mindset’ and the other ‘growth mindset’. Some children have picked up the idea that their intelligence is basically limited to however much ‘brains’ they were born with. If they can’t do something easily, they quickly conclude they just haven’t got what it takes, and that’s that. By contrast, there are other children who believe that their brains are more like muscles; they get stronger and smarter through exercise. So they like it when they have to think and try hard, because they see this as mental exercise and an opportunity to get smarter. They see their ability as expandable rather than predetermined. Here’s the kicker: children who have growth mindsets consistently outperform their classmates on public examinations and are generally better at doing all the things that successful people tend to do (e.g. managing their emotions, coming up with creative ideas, having a go at new things). It is not just how clever you are (as measured by some kind of IQ test) that matters, but how you think about ‘ability’ itself. Those who believe that they can get smarter normally can, if they try. Which of these two groups would you want your child to be in?

Can you move someone from a fixed mindset to a growth mindset? And if so, how? The answers to these two questions are ‘yes’ and ‘by helping them to think differently about the reasons for their successes and failures’. The best way to help someone develop a growth mindset is through the way he or she is given feedback after any activity. For example, if you write an essay and your teacher simply says to you, “Well done, Luke, you’re good at English,” or even, “That wasn’t so good, Anna, I don’t think you’re cut out to be a writer,” all they are hearing is some generalised praise (or criticism) that applies to them as people. Feedback like this is known as ‘person praise’; that’s to say it focuses on the individual rather than on what they have actually done to contribute to the grade achieved.

As a teacher or a parent it is easy to give this kind of feedback in the belief that we will be motivating the recipient. We’ll be encouraging Luke if we keep telling him how gifted and talented he is. But we are not! We may even be damaging his likelihood of success. The most useful thing that parents and teachers can do is to give learners accurate, specific feedback on things they have done, especially noting where they have shown particular initiative or spent extra time on some aspect of an assignment. How you praise children really matters.9 Growth mindset learners make more mistakes – and more interesting mistakes – than those with fixed mindsets. Why? Because we learn most when we are pushing ourselves, not merely staying within our comfort zone, but exerting ourselves to try something more challenging or adventurous.

It follows that schools which understand the power of a growth mindset will, paradoxically, see making mistakes (interesting, not just slipshod) as something to be encouraged. If you visit such schools, as we do, you will see some subtle differences. For example, in assemblies, as well as celebrating the successes of the First XI, groups of students who have gone the extra mile and really put in effort are routinely acknowledged. In classrooms it is common to have work in progress – warts and all – on display, as well as beautifully mounted examples of final ‘products’. If you are a designer, engineer, musician or actor reading this you will perhaps recognise these as the prototypes or drafts which are essential to eventual success in the real world. The willingness to venture and tinker are as vital to real-world achievement as any innate talent or intelligence you might possess. And these attitudes of tinkering and trying are learned. Schools either strengthen or weaken them.

We’re creating a fear culture within education – if you don’t achieve results you have failed. Teachers working in that fear culture narrow their curriculum to achieve that one objective. Leaders working in that fear culture hammer the creativity out of teachers if what they do doesn’t lead to that one objective. And the people in charge then look for culprits in terms of school leaders who aren’t doing what they want. I’m not the only head who’s resigned; there are lots. This fear culture is preventing people from developing children and staff to full capacity. If you create fear in a culture, people will do what the people above them tell them to do – nothing else.

Neil, primary head teacher, Manchester

Some traditionalists are very strongly attached to the fixed mindset view. They are likely to think the previous paragraphs are so much ‘wishy-washy liberal nonsense’ and sneer at the research – because it is inconvenient for their world view. They like the idea that intelligence is fixed because it justifies a segregated education system, traditionally based on IQ. They will say that we need to sort out the sheep from the goats, those who have what it takes from those who don’t. Schooling is expensive so, of course, there needs to be a separate stream for ‘the brightest and the best’ – thus defined – that runs from grammar and independent schools through to Oxford and Cambridge. But the static, fixed view of intelligence or ‘ability’ on which this reasoning rests is wrong. Children’s apparent intelligence varies hugely from context to context, and depends on all kinds of factors – like their beliefs about intelligence – which have nothing to do with any innate ability.10

The lure of Big Hard Data

To get to where schools need to go, we have to question the importance of standardised tests and the numbers they generate. Although they give the appearance of objectivity and reliability, these kinds of tests can hold back innovation if important things that cannot easily be quantified are discounted. One set of figures, produced by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) is especially influential at the moment. Let’s have a look at them.

The OECD was set up in 1948 to run the Marshall Plan which was designed to rebuild a Europe ravaged by war. Today, more than 60 years later, it promotes policies to improve the economic and social well-being of people around the world. In terms of education, it is perhaps best known for its PISA (Programme for International Student Assessment) tests. Every three years it tests 15-year-olds across a range of subjects to see what they know and what they can do. (Remember the ‘what they can do’ part of this sentence because we will be returning to it, and it’s very important.)

Politicians across the world are scared of PISA results because they operate as a very public examination of every country’s education ministry. Countries are ranked according to their performances. Here are the top three countries/cities in each test followed by the highest ranking European country followed by the UK’s position using the 2012 results:

Newspapers love these league tables too because it makes for easy journalism to print numerical rankings such as these. Journalists from countries whose students appear in the top 10 write pages of copy praising their country’s education system and schools. Those who feature much lower down the list like the UK (and the USA) scratch their heads and criticise teachers and schools and incumbent politicians. Employers use the PISA results as a chance to make statements about their country’s respective global competitiveness. You can see why politicians are scared of PISA!

But what about parents? What do they think? Most of them are downright confused. How can the UK be so far down the list when we have so many world-class engineers, scientists, architects and writers? How is it that we have so many Nobel Prize winners in science and medicine? How come we have so many wonderful universities? At a local level, parents may draw comfort (or concern) from the performance of their own child’s school which seems to be better/worse than the UK’s showing in PISA. For many parents, high-stakes test results like these can contribute to a sense of unease about what their child’s school is or is not teaching.

A few determined parents go online, look at the OECD’s website and find out more about the tests. They quickly discover that the rankings are based on the results of two-hour paper and pencil tests. Some begin to wonder how reliable such tests can possibly be as a judgement on an individual’s subject knowledge, let alone as an indicator of ‘what they can do’. Those parents who keep searching quickly discover that the OECD is itself concerned about such limitations. To counter them it introduced a new creative problem-solving test in 2012 (the UK came eleventh in this new test). The creative problem-solving test is “an assessment of student performance in creative problem solving, which measures students’ capacity to respond to non-routine situations in order to achieve their potential as constructive and reflective citizens.”12

Sounds interesting, you may be thinking. But read on and you discover that this test is entirely computer-based. You are left with a slight niggle that, useful as computers are, screen-based performance may not always be a reliable indicator of real-world problem-solving.

But you’ve got the OECD bit between your teeth by now and you keep searching. Surely, you think, such an important organisation as the OECD must have done some more nuanced thinking about what it is that children need to learn today? You type ‘OECD’ and ‘what children need to learn today’ into your search engine and, lo and behold, you discover some discussions about the purpose and future of education (much more interesting than those simplistic league tables) which have left you wanting to know more. You happen upon a fascinating blog by Charles Fadel on an OECD site promoting discussion about what students should learn in the 21st century. His questions really make you think:

Should engineering become a standard part of the curriculum? Should trigonometry be replaced by more statistics? Is long division by hand necessary? What is significant and relevant in history? Should personal finance, journalism, robotics, and other new disciplines be taught to everyone – and starting in which grade? Should entrepreneurship be mandatory? Should ethics be re-valued? What is the role of the arts – and can they be used to foster creativity in all disciplines?13

At the weekend, you find yourself having dinner with friends and conversation turns to the schools your friends’ kids go to. As it happens – for the convenience of this imaginary example – one couple sends theirs to a private school, another to the local state one and a third to the latest example of a new kind of school in England. Let’s call it a free school.

Questions breed more questions as the wine flows. How much history do you need to learn? Are you stupid if you can’t recall the date of the Great Fire of London? Is Google dumbing us down? Is Google opening up a brave new world? Should all children be taught how to spot bias online? When do you need to know Newton’s laws of motion? Do you need to know Newton’s laws of motion at all? How is your daughter taught to do long multiplication or long division? Is it better or worse than the way you remember learning how to do it? And so on.

Later, you go back to your internet search and find out some more about the author of that OECD blog. Charles Fadel, it turns out, is also at Harvard, where he is thinking about how we can change the way we design the curriculum of schools. You light upon a helpful paragraph of his (which seems to be reflecting our experience with the Trads):

Conversations about education abound with false dichotomies, and absolutist views, that must be transcended.

The lack of a balanced conversation leads to many OR debates; for instance:

● Knowledge OR skills.

● Science/Technology/Engineering/Math (STEM) OR Humanities/Arts.

● Didactic OR constructivist learning.

● Formal OR informal learning.

● All technology OR no technology.

● Character developed at school OR at home.

The balanced reality is that these are all AND propositions, working in concert with each other, and reinforcing each other, in a judicious, impactful feedback loop.14

These kinds of tensions, and the questions they generate, are exactly the kinds of issues we need to be grappling with. We’ll be adding some more of our own to this list as we go through the book. But it isn’t easy.

The Sabre-Tooth Curriculum

But before we go any further let’s deal with a question that seems to us to be one of the most important of all:

Should we expect the curriculum to change significantly as the world out there changes, or are there some things that we just have to know and just have to be able to do whatever age we live in? (And is this really an and?)

And related to this:

To what extent should we teach things just in case they might be useful at some unknown time in the future, rather than at the time we need to know them in order to get something done that matters to us? (And is this an and too?)

Let’s approach these questions via a story from the earliest beginnings of education. In 1939, an American scholar called J. Abner Peddiwell published an article about the earliest known form of education. He traced it back to the Chellean period, about half a million years ago, and specifically to an innovative individual called New-Fist-Hammer-Maker, or New-Fist for short. New-Fist thought children’s play should be directed more purposefully towards the acquisition of useful skills. These included grabbing fish from the nearby pools, clubbing the little woolly horses that grazed on the edge of the forest for their meat and leather, and using firebrands to scare off the sabre-tooth tigers that came sniffing around at night. The village agreed, and so the first curriculum was born.

All went well with the Sabre-Tooth Curriculum until, gradually, over hundreds of years, the climate became wetter and colder. The ponds became cloudy so it was no longer possible to see the fish to grab them; they had to be caught using a net. The land became marshy, and the slow-footed woolly horses migrated east, to be replaced by much fleeter antelopes that could not be crept up on, but could only be shot with bows and arrows. Sabre-tooth tigers too moved away and instead came fierce grizzly bears that were not at all afraid of fire, but had to be trapped in camouflaged bear-pits dug on their trails.

One of New-Fist’s descendants, Shoe-Stitcher, took stock of the situation and realised that the children’s curriculum needed to change. Instead of grabbing fish with their bare hands, they should learn net-making. Instead of horse-clubbing, they needed to learn how to make bows and arrows and shoot straight. Instead of making flaming torches, children needed to learn how to dig the right size pits, and how to disguise them with branches and leaves. But the Board of Education strongly disagreed. The minutes of the critical meeting record the chairman as explaining that these new abilities were mere technical skills, whereas the traditional curriculum developed properly educated bodies and minds. In rather patronising language, he explains:

But Shoe-Stitcher was not to be shut up so easily. “Can’t you see that times have changed?” he said in exasperation. “Why could we not develop those generalised qualities by teaching the children something really useful?” At this the chairman became even more pompous and hectoring:

If you had any education yourself, you would know that the essence of true education is timelessness. It is something that endures through changing conditions like a solid rock standing squarely and firmly in the middle of a raging torrent. You must know that there are some eternal verities – and the Sabre-Tooth Curriculum is one of them!16

This modern fable was actually composed by a bona fide, though mischievous, academic professor by the name of Harold Benjamin. What do you think? Are there eternal verities which you would want your children to learn? Or are there things which your children are learning which seem to you to fall into the category of ‘fish-grabbing’? If so, what are they?

It seems to us that the Trads are often unable to say why we should not be teaching net-making, archery and bear-pit-digging (or, in our case, computer-coding, internet-mental-health-protecting and public-figure-lie-detecting). We suspect that Mods, on the other hand, would find much enjoyment, as well as food for thought, in this parable. It will chime with their doubts about whether all children today really need to learn how to add fractions, solve quadratic equations and tell a sine from a tangent or a gerund from a gerundive. There will always be a minority of children who might go on to use these skills and knowledge in their professional lives, and a slightly larger minority who will simply enjoy mastering the rules of micro-worlds such as algebra and trigonometry. But there are millions of youngsters for whom these subjects are just a pointless grind, and there are a thousand other topics one could argue for with equal justification: Sudoku, crossword puzzles and Minecraft, to name just a few.

The belief that calculus, for example, is an essential part of the preparation for life for all young people is just that, a belief, not an established fact. There is no evidence that youngsters who are made to study trigonometry lead lives that are any more fulfilled or intelligent than those who are not. And there are lots of good free courses online (e.g. from the Khan Academy) that will get you quickly up to speed if and when you need it. (If you are not a teacher, when was the last time you needed, in your real life, to solve a quadratic equation? Or recall, without recourse to your iPad, the capital city of Mongolia? Or explain the difference between a terminal and a medial moraine, or a breve and a minim?) The question of what is really worth knowing, in the Google age, is wide open, and one we will return to in Chapter 4.

School and real-world learning

If school is meant to offer young people a powerful preparation for a successful life (and not just for university), why isn’t it more like real life? The way learning is organised in schools seems, in many respects, very different from, or even at odds with, the experience of learning that people have in their homes, workplaces, playgroups, sports and athletic clubs, online chatrooms and meditation retreats or when watching gardening or cookery programmes on television.

One of the classes that I teach are Year 11, the very bottom class, not doing GCSEs because it’s thought that they’re not capable of it. Instead they’re doing a BTEC qualification in science. Teaching them essentially becomes an exercise in getting them copying stuff off the board, out of textbooks, off the internet. Absolutely no learning is going on at all. Their understanding is no greater than before. It is entirely an exercise in filling in loads of paperwork to get them a qualification. These are kids who are mostly very vulnerable, they have really complicated special educational needs. Pushing them through the system to get this totally irrelevant qualification, that’s got nothing to do with their lives, is a complete waste of their time and a complete waste of my time. It’s completely insane, and doesn’t help anyone. There are so many more important things that we could be doing to prepare those kids for the world.

Kate, trainee science teacher, West London

Nearly 30 years ago, Professor Lauren Resnick, then president of the American Educational Research Association, gave a presidential address which was entitled, ‘Learning in school and out’.17 She pinpointed, on the basis of a wide variety of research, some key ways in which learning in school frequently differed from learning in these out-of-school situations. First, real-world learning is often collaborative whereas learning in school has traditionally been predominantly solo. Even where schools do lots of group-work, come exam time everyone has to revert to individual pieces of work for which they alone can be held responsible. Educationalists are beginning to devise ways of assessing collaborative endeavours, but they are in their infancy as yet.

Second, assessment in school is usually based on the ability to explain, describe, analyse or compute something. It is based on products that mostly involve manipulating symbols on paper or screen. In real-world learning the hallmark of success is usually practical: did the baby get to sleep? Did the bridge stay steady when people walked across it? Did the painting get accepted for the show? Do people come back to the restaurant? In a music exam or a driving test, you may have to do a bit of theory, but the acid test is visible in the way you actually do something. Real-world learning is about getting things done; in school it is about generating ‘performances of understanding’ for the sake of showing that you can. People who are good at doing, but not very good at explaining, are massively handicapped in school by this difference.

Third, in the real world we learn because we want or need to – in order to achieve a goal that we ourselves consider worthwhile. Learning connects directly with the work or life situations in which we find ourselves. In school, by contrast, you are required to take on trust the idea that, someday, all this will make sense and turn out to be really useful – but not yet. And the timetable of what you are learning is dictated by someone else. The reason you are learning this now is because it is the next lesson in the teacher’s scheme of work, not because you and your friends have stumbled on an interesting question that you feel motivated to pursue, or because your iPad suddenly won’t connect to iTunes. So the motivation is quite different in school and out. And not all youngsters are willing or able to mobilise their full intelligence if they do not value what they are being asked to do. Many of them are mistakenly judged to be ‘less intelligent’ because of this.

Fourth, learning in the real world is very often accomplished with a whole array of tools and resources that are marshalled and drawn upon as necessary. In the real world we are mostly ‘me plus’: me plus my computer, me plus my iPhone, me plus all my notes and books, me plus all my contacts, me plus my mug of coffee. A plumber is completely hamstrung without her socket set and her mobile phone. When she meets an unfamiliar boiler and needs to call her contact in the parts department of the manufacturer, nobody would dream of calling that cheating. School traditionally tries to strip down learning so that it becomes the manipulation of words, numbers, chemical symbols or algebraic equations by a solitary mind.

Sugata Mitra, one of the most interesting and renowned educational thinkers in the world right now, has said that he could transform education with a single change: simply allow everyone to take their smartphone or their Wi-Fi-enabled tablet into the examination hall. Why create this artificial barrier? It’s like taking Ronnie O’Sullivan’s snooker cue away and saying, “Now show me how good you are.” (There’s more about Mitra in Chapters 4 and 7.)

Fifth, real-world learning is often physical. It involves the body in a variety of ways. Cooking, hairdressing, caring for young children or old people, wiring an electric circuit and playing netball all involve bodily activities such as bending, kneading, touching, listening and smelling, as well as taking care of your implements and materials. In school, subjects assume importance in inverse proportion to the amount of bodily activity they involve. If you can stay clean and still while you are learning, that is good, so maths and English come out at the top of the pecking order. Traditionalists can’t wait to introduce students to the pristine abstract worlds of subjunctive clauses and Pythagoras’ theorem. History and geography are a bit messier. Art and music are pulled down the hierarchy by their essentially sensory natures. Media and business studies are tainted by association with the real worlds of television and commerce.

And down the bottom of the pecking order come dance, drama, design technology and PE. Cookery, dressmaking, woodwork and metalwork are so shamefully reminiscent of old-fashioned trades and crafts that they cannot be spoken of directly; they now inhabit a shadow world of food technology and resistant materials. Instead of learning how to bake Mary Berry’s amazing tiramisu cake, you study ‘nutritional properties’ and ‘packaging and labelling’, the curriculum being designed to drag students back from the ghastly brink of real physicality into the safe, clean – and, it has to said, often cheap – world of categories and issues. Youngsters who are best at thinking while they are doing tend to drift down this hierarchy of esteem, not because they are less able but because they find it difficult to master the peculiar trick of detaching cognition from action. It may be a worthwhile trick to master, but, because of the simplistic ‘folk psychology’ that underpins much of education, students are not helped to do so.

* * *

Why are schools designed in this dysfunctional way? Because when they were being developed in the 18th and 19th centuries, they were built on a false view of the human mind. They aimed to develop a general-purpose, all-round educated person by making school a place separate from life where there were no specific goals to which learning could become attached. This meant knowledge and skills would be represented in children’s heads in a generic, free-floating way, waiting to be ‘hooked’ by any relevant need or circumstance that subsequently came along. School learning was made to be ‘off the job’, so to speak, so that what was learned would be retrievable under all appropriate circumstances.

But sadly the mind doesn’t work like that. Every experience we have is indexed in the neural memory store in terms of the context in which, and the purpose for which, it was learned. What was going on? Where was I? How was I feeling? What was I up to? Did it work well? Everything we learn is automatically tagged in terms of these markers. We need these tags to tell us when to retrieve something we know and activate it. So there is no off the job; wherever we are, we are noticing our surroundings and our own priorities, and what we learn is registered and recorded in that context. School is definitely not off the job. It is not an absence of those cues and concerns; it is a very particular, and in many ways peculiar, constellation of cues and concerns. The miracle is that some of what we learn in school does stay with us and comes to mind when it is needed in the outside world. Sadly a huge amount of school learning does not.

This doesn’t mean that we can’t help learning to become gradually more generic or disembedded. We can. The point is that the broader relevance and utility of what you are learning has to be discovered. Transfer is also a learning job, and it is one often neglected by traditional teachers, carrying a naive theory of mind, who vaguely assume that if you have learned something ‘properly’, if you were ‘paying attention’, then transfer ought, magically, to happen. It doesn’t. If you want your students to develop those more general-purpose learning skills and attitudes you have to work at it by, for example, varying the contexts and the tasks, and explicitly getting them to discover for themselves which of the habits and procedures they are developing apply when.

If your child is struggling at school it may well be because of the peculiar nature of school itself, not because they are ‘low ability’ or ‘unmotivated’. These labels simply conceal all the deeper questions that need to be addressed. We hope that this discussion might help you to shift the conversations you are having with teachers on to a more productive plane.

When I was in Year 8, I sat next to a very quiet student in my English class. One day I caught sight of her cutting her wrists with the point of her compass. It was in plain view during our lesson …

Several people missed terms at a time for feeling depressed, and some were admitted at eating disorder clinics. I myself had an eating disorder between 13 and 17. Norms are powerful at school, and it just so happened that one of the norms at my school was to have a thigh the same size as your calf. I never told my school, and my school never suspected anything – it was the norm so I was no anomaly. I think I felt out of control and anxious about being valued. Maybe this was a symptom of the systematic disempowerment of young people at school, although there were definitely other factors aside from school.

The academic pressure is ridiculous. I was once told by my statistics teacher that I was spreading myself ‘too thin’ and that if I wanted to carry on with maths the next year, I needed to stop doing so many extra-curricular activities. This was despite me scoring 94% average. People have totally lost sight of what learning is about in the first place!

Natasha, undergraduate, previously at an
independent secondary school

1 N. M. Gwynne, Gwynne’s Latin: The Ultimate Introduction to Latin Including the Latin in Everyday English (London: Ebury Press, 2014).

2 Edward Thorndike was the first to discover the lack of transfer effect and a quick Google will show you many more contemporary studies in a similar vein.

3 David Perkins, Post-primary education has little impact on informal reasoning, Journal of Educational Psychology 77(5) (1985): 562–571.

4 Linda Gottfredson, Mainstream science on intelligence, Wall Street Journal (13 December 1994).

5 Kristen Buras, Questioning core assumptions: a critical reading of and response to E. D. Hirsch’s The Schools We Need and Why We Don’t Have Them (essay review), Harvard Educational Review 69(1) (1999): 67–93.

6 See Amy Finn, Matthew Kraft, Martin West et al., Cognitive skills, student achievement tests, and schools, Psychological Science 25(3) (2014): 736–744.

7 John Watts, The changing role of the classroom teacher. In Clive Harber, Roland Meighan and Brian Roberts (eds), Alternative Educational Futures (London: Holt Education, 1984).

8 There are many books you could read here, but perhaps the most accessible is Carol Dweck’s Mindset: The New Psychology of Success (New York: Random House, 2006).

9 See Po Bronson, How not to talk to your kids: the inverse power of praise, New York magazine (3 August 2007). Available at: http://nymag.com/news/features/27840/.

10 If you still need to be convinced, try reading David Perkins, Outsmarting IQ: The Emerging Science of Learnable Intelligence (New York: Free Press, 1995); Keith Stanovich, What Intelligence Tests Miss: The Psychology of Rational Thought (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009); or Robert Sternberg, Beyond IQ: A Triarchic Theory of Human Intelligence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984). They are all very accessible.

11 See http://www.oecd.org/pisa/keyfindings/pisa-2012-results.htm.

12 See OECD, PISA 2012 Results: Creative Problem Solving: Students’ Skills in Tackling Real-Life Problems (Volume V). Available at: http://www.oecd.org/pisa/keyfindings/pisa-2012-results-volume-v.htm.

13 Charles Fadel, What should students learn in the 21st century?, Education Today (18 May 2012). Available at: http://oecdeducationtoday.blogspot.co.uk/2012/05/what-should-students-learn-in-21st.html.

14 See http://www.thefivethings.org/charles-fadel/.

15 J. Abner Peddiwell (Harold Benjamin), The Sabre-Tooth Curriculum (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1939). We have adapted and abridged the original to save space.

16 Peddiwell, The Sabre-Tooth Curriculum.

17 Lauren Resnick, The 1987 presidential address: learning in school and out, Educational Researcher 16(9) (1987): 13–20.