The roots of my curious, scientific mind or…

The Freedom of my early childhood.

 

 

For today’s #DailyWritingChallenge on #Freedom I am sharing a previous piece of writing. Between 2016 and 2018 I wrote the first seven autobiographical chapters to a book titled, “The Accidental Scientist.” The first chapter is titled “Freedom.”

 

The catalyst behind writing the book was the very apparent disconnect between the semantic underpinnings of science education and the character, personality and intellectual traits which made me accidentally fall into a seventeen year long (first) career as a scientist.

 

I strongly believe that it was the freedom of my early home life and schooling which triggered my innate propensity for curiosity and imagination, perhaps coupled with my cognitive development via the medium of education in Latin, History and Maths that made me a scientist: a creative and analytical thinker and not the content of the science curriculum.

 

I acknowledge that the curriculum content enabled conversations and a common language in science but I don’t think for a moment they enabled my capability, creativity nor even my cognition as a scientist.

 

For a daily post of recommended 500 words this is somewhat indulgent (at over 5000 words), but I encourage you to read it, for it contains, what I believe to be a valuable reflective insight into what the freedom of childhood can make possible. When dreaming of a renewed, refreshed and re-vitalised education system in a post-Covid-19 world it may offer some clues to the direction we should be headed in; or it may just reveal the roots of another floaty, directionless, creative and Nomadic dreamer!

 

Having not read what follows for over two years, prior to my immersion in #eduTwitter and all the recent discussions about semantic and episodic memory, about knowledge and imagination, about cognitive load theory and all that gubbins…I hope this helps to explain where my obtuse and convoluted thinking comes from on all this.

 

I will, more conventionally and concisely, explore Freedom as a concept in juxtaposition with the Loyalty theme in the #DailyWritingChallenge tomorrow. For the time being please enjoy immersing yourself in the roots of my free thinking mind, my freedom and how this freedom has shaped what I have become. I hope it triggers some reflection of your own.

 

 

The End (beginning of the preface to “The Accidental Scientist”) – to place chapter 1 on “Freedom” in context…very brief…

 

2400 scientists filled the cavernous, modern, three tiered space of the Campus gateway – a statement of multinational financial success and prestige. The global head of Research started speaking. He skipped through a few corporate slides from his powerpoint presentation. Then he said it, “Pfizer intends to exit from the Sandwich site.” Despite years of warning, there was an audible gasp in the room.

 

That was the moment – 1^st February 2011 – when I ceased to be a scientist. The beginning of the end of seventeen years in industry. Fast forward eight turbulent years and I’m settling into a second career as a science teacher. After a brief period in the wilderness, my journey into teaching was planned. Mapped out. Considered. And now I’m teaching some enthusiastic young minds, I feel compelled to write this book, to try and work out how, why and when I became a scientist in the first place; for this is considerably less clear than the aforementioned life-changing endpoint.

 

It is my hope that the reflections on my journey into, through, and out of my time as a scientist, offer some insight for the young minds I teach, their parents and many of my teaching colleagues, into the real world of science; way beyond a school science lab, Bunsen burners and multi-coloured powders with strange names.

 

Freedom – chapter 1 of “The Accidental Scientist”

 

Unless something seriously weird happened, we all tend to think of our childhood as normal. Everyone else’s is alien. This sometimes becomes apparent when we spend Christmas with our partner’s family for the first time. Looking back, my early childhood was idyllic, blissful and happy yet far from normal. In comparison with my own children, I had more freedom, I was more socially privileged, I was far less integrated with my local community and I was (subconsciously) trapped in an isolated, bucolic paradise.

For my father, I was child number six and the first product of his third marriage. His life was far more worthy of biography than mine: born in 1917; son of a vicar; boarding school; Cambridge – kicked out; Wye agricultural college; 2^nd world war – Italy and North Africa, a Lt. Col in the Royal Artillery; 1^st marriage – 2 boys, wife committed suicide just after the war when one was 3 years old and the other just 3 weeks old; new wife – three more children; a pioneering and much respected farmer in Devon; sold the dairy herd and experimented with intensive pig farming, failed, sold farm; invested in a failed golfing contraption; separated from second wife; long affair; played lots of golf; spontaneously married my Mum, 24 years his junior, where we pick up his story, because it is mine too.

For my mother, I was child number one of two in her first and only marriage. She left her London life behind to marry my father, following an apparently spontaneous decision to ditch her affair with a married man. They bought a ramshackle North Devon farmhouse with some semi-derelict, disused farm buildings and seven acres in May 1971. I appeared in August 1972 and a younger sister joined us, as my childhood sparring partner, in October 1974.

Until I was four, my Dad worked as secretary and head green-keeper at the Royal North Devon Golf Club; after that he grew vegetables – at home – for local hotels. In the early 1980s when I was about 10, he started growing flowers for drying and my parents set up Withacott Dried Flowers, a small local business. Initially it was a small, sustainable project but it soon spiralled into quite an enterprise, in fear of the never-ending school fees my parents chose to pay. He worked bloody hard. He was out in the garden, or the barns, from dawn to dusk, except for the 1 o’clock news and his afternoon nap. He was a farmer; a grower. He was an ideas man. Apart from his army days in the war, and two years managing a farm for someone else before he bought his own, he was his own boss and a free spirit. He wasn’t a businessman. Before I went to boarding school at twelve, he was always at home. He was a constant presence in my early childhood, yet he was somehow distant as well.

While my father was busy doing, my mother was everywhere. She was the dominant figure in my childhood and she did everything for us. Our home life was informal, with TV suppers, and a constant throng of activity around the Aga in our rustic farmhouse kitchen. She drove my sister and I fifteen minutes each way to school, to the beach on sunny days, and for occasional visits to friends’ houses. We spent a lot of time in the car. Our cars were third hand old bangers. Our biennial holiday was a visit to an old friend of my Mum’s in the Wiltshire countryside for a weekend in May. Our food was simple and not lavish. The only thing my parents spent money on was private school fees. My Dad received a small private income (inherited from rich spinster Aunts) and made some pocket money with his various enterprises. Family heirlooms were sold and money was borrowed against the fantastic – yet flawed – dried flower business.

I started school immediately after my fourth birthday at St Joseph’s infant and junior school, the junior school to Stella Maris convent in Bideford, North Devon. It was very similar to a traditional primary school, with thirty children in a class, generally a fairly matriarchal female class teacher and a small playground (which seemed plenty large enough at the time) but it was heavily subsidised by the Roman Catholic Church. Most of us were not Roman Catholics. So it was a private school, but the nearest I ever came to going to a local school with my local(ish) community. I don’t remember studying any science at St Joseph’s at all. I remember learning some natural history, particularly focussed upon the extinct Sabre Tooth Tiger (for reasons I’m not entirely sure of); learning why Thursday was called Thursday; I remember wincing when I had to read an excerpt from a Peter and Jane book to class; and I remember being in class full of Sarahs!

I particularly remember Sarah Norburn, the very clever daughter of a local dentist. With hindsight, most of the children in my class were either from the professional classes (there were several Doctors’ and Dentists’ kids), the more affluent local farming community and some local businesses. So while the school was far less socially elitist than my subsequent schools, there was an underlining of academic elitism in comparison with the wider North Devon demographic. Socially, I was not a big fan of school. I think I was quite a Mummy’s boy. I never knew the correct answer to which football team I supported, a question I still don’t know the answer to today. I wasn’t a typical boy. After school, we never went to play in the park, instead we drove eight miles home to our rural paradise, coincidentally the exact amount of time it took me to eat a packet of Frazzles.

Though I didn’t realise it at the time, I learnt a lot at St Joseph’s – mastering long multiplication and learning to read proficiently, though not lovingly. My mathematical foundations were particularly strong. Aged 8, I moved schools to a prep school called Buckland House School, five miles from home. When I started in September 1980 there were about 120 children, mostly boys including about 12 girls. Some of the girls were more like boys than the boys. There were over 100 full time boarders and about fifteen of us were day boys, or “gay boys” as we were (un)affectionately known.

I don’t remember loving Buckland House, but I liked it a lot. It was a pretty magical place. The main building was a Regency mansion built in the shape of an F, by the Fortescue family. The classrooms were in the old stable block and it had a wonderful science laboratory, with a beautiful oval window. There were 8 classes. Class 1 and 2 had a fixed class teacher and classes 3 – 8 had subject specialists who rotated around the classrooms. I joined the school in class 2 with Mrs Wingate-Something or other; she is particularly memorable for incorrectly correcting my spelling of combine harvester to combined harvester. After three weeks, it became clear that we were not destined to be together, so I was elevated to form 3. While the classes were by default organised by age, we were accelerated or held back depending upon ability.

The following year I moved to class 5, jumping a year. I was one of the younger pupils in this class, so found myself with an abnormal amount of prep, at least half of which my Mum did for me – copying out Bible stories, or analysing complex books like Laurie Lee’s Cider with Rosie, or most bizarrely – and this put me off reading until my late twenties – 1984 by George Orwell. I always did my own Maths preps. Mum could not help me with these. Dad was good at maths but he’d had far too many children to see the worth in doing my work for me! Once I was rock solid on my times tables, maths was a constant diet of arithmetic, fractions, decimals and algebra – with a lot of geometrical constructions too – a fusion of maths and art that is now dying out in the computer age. I didn’t love it, but I was good at it; and this I mostly attribute to Barry Hocking, probably the best teacher I ever had. He wore sandals, had a straggly black beard and he had an incredibly accurate throwing arm: he could land the board duster just a couple of centimetres from your hand, if you temporarily lapsed into a daydreaming state.

Neither of my two science teachers were particularly inspirational. Commander McFarlane was about eighty and rather doddery. He was a charming old chap. After him came Mr Barron, who was Commander McFarlane’s apprentice and very much taught according to the physics, chemistry or biology text book. The most memorable part of my science lessons were long visits to the school lake – looking for (and finding) water boatmen; pond skaters; dragon flies; tadpoles and red water mites which I always called red water spiders. We seemed to spend the whole summer down there, and it developed my observation skills and helped to embed a deep love of nature. Before I was twelve, I remember lots of demonstrations and quite a lot of practical activities. I remember seeing mercury poured on the bench, I remember a fractional distillation demonstration and I remember learning about density and the different packing arrangements of atoms in metals. To attribute my later interest and specialism in materials science and the X-ray diffraction of molecular crystals to this moment is perhaps rather tenuous, but being exposed to real science, and learning science in a real lab from the age of nine definitely left an indelible imprint upon my mind.

Another subject I enjoyed at Buckland House was Latin. Mr Manning was fairly terrifying but I liked learning all the grammar rules, and the vocabulary. Many argue it serves no purpose in the modern world, but considering we forget the vast majority of what we learn at school, that is missing the point. Latin trains both language and mathematical skills, it exercises and develops the mind and provides a lot of the root words in scientific vocabulary.

While academic learning predominates during the school day, it is what we learn outside the classroom that we cherish and take with us through life. This is what I remember Buckland House for. Before lunch, we had a daily 35 minutes of playtime, but it was no ordinary playtime. It was called “smocks and jeans” because, yes, you got it, we put on our smocks and jeans. No one played sport during this time; we went out and explored. Some played hide and seek in the trees, some climbed trees (right up to the top), some built camps, some of us swung from the “flexi branch” and for a period of time, some of us built dams, across the stream feeding the lake.

There was a lot of Sport in the afternoons, which wasn’t really my thing except for cricket in the summer and the famously enjoyable sports day obstacle course. I now look back with warped fondness for running the torturous Ruston Rectangle, an unfeasibly long, muddy and painful cross country run, in a running vest during a hail storm. At the time, I wanted to die. There was one afternoon a week when we went into the woods to build dens, or play freely in the “avalanches” – an old muddy landslide that amused us for hours. My love of the outdoors was nurtured here and there was time to imagine, to invent and to play, without any material gadgetry for (concentration or daydream sapping) stimulus.

Two other activities were particularly important to me: Photography club and Woodwork club. In the former I learnt how to optimise aperture and shutter speed; to develop 35mm film and then to enlarge and fix my photographic prints. This outmoded process was deeply rooted in chemistry, and though I didn’t necessarily embrace the deep scientific principles behind the art of photography at the time, I loved diluting and mixing all the photographic chemicals. I used to find breaking the heat seal on a new plastic bottle exciting, and the smell too – especially the fixer. Mr Cowgill, the French teacher and deputy headmaster, was a great mentor here. Photography club may have been a more important scientific seed than any number of school science lessons.

As an adult, I have very few discernable practical skills: my wife can attest to this. I am not the man to paint a wall, put up a shelf, or repair a broken appliance. My lack of practicality has tripped me up in the lab on numerous occasions, and I am living proof that there are lots of ways to be a scientist other than the development of practical skills, on which there tends to be an over-emphasis at school, as it offers some variety from sitting behind a desk and learning stuff. Anyway, from the age of 9-12, I made bookshelves, bowls and chopping boards in woodwork club and greatly enjoyed the practical creativity. Two of the bookshelves are still going strong over thirty years later.

With hindsight, it was at Buckland that I established that I had a good memory. What do I mean by a good memory? I suppose I mean the ability to retain information that I have been asked to learn by rote; or – in great contrast – to remember facts about things I’m interested in. My perennial 100% in the Hamilton spelling competition is testament to my ability to be able to remember stuff. I was never an avid reader as a child, so most of the vocabulary I never used or encountered; and teaching reading via the medium (and tedium?) of phonics hadn’t been invented in the early 1980s! So I repeated these words to myself: words like phenomenon, Autumn, embarrassment, assimilate, and remembered them for life. A well tuned working memory, that helps lock stuff into our long-term memories is a very useful pre-requisite to school learning. Since spelling and times table tests, I have put my memory to use in remembering laboratory notebook references of original product formulas in industry; friend’s telephone numbers before the advent of mobile phones; I have remembered what people did or didn’t say in meetings and I have an uncanny knack in remembering set lists from favourite gigs, or the sequence of my favourite albums’ track listings.

If memory skills are genetic, then I inherited them from my mother who has an almost infinite store of people’s birthdays in her mind, including those of some very minor members of the Royal family! The only useful thing her memory skills have been applied to was passing her French O level in 1958! I sometimes wonder how helpful a good memory is. It can make us overtly nostalgic, or obsessive with facts and detail. In industry, the more senior in rank that people were, the more readily they seemed to forget – perhaps strategically. When trying to push a company or department forward, being shackled by your memories of the past can be a handicap; so while fantastic memory skills offer a great advantage in the heavily regurgitated environment of school testing and exam curricula, I’m not sure how helpful they are in life – unless one becomes a detective, a barrister, or an analytical scientist.

Two of my children have dyslexia, with an information processing impairment, while still oozing plenty of natural curiosity and intelligence. I also teach a few dyslexics and while they are now much better supported in school, the increasingly one-dimensional nature of schooling must be immensely frustrating for them. Conversely, I teach some children with fantastic memories and no processing impairment. They sail through prescriptive curricula and achieve high grades and percentages. But present these latter children with a creative task, a multi-faceted problem to solve or an open question and they often don’t know where to start, or they give up quite easily as they have become far too acquainted with instant success early in their school careers.

A great memory is a definite advantage at school. It has the potential to make you feel successful. But one needs something more than a good memory to lead a successful, happy and fulfilled life: imagination. As Blaise Pascal, the seventeenth century French mathematician and philosopher once surmised, “imagination decides everything.” His was a rather scathing analysis of imagination, of how our minds are corrupted by our imaginations in place of pure reason. By the time of Einstein, over 250 years later, imagination was described thus, ““At times I feel certain I am right while not knowing the reason.  When the [solar] eclipse of 1919 confirmed my intuition, I was not in the least surprised.  In fact I would have been astonished had it turned out otherwise.  Imagination is more important than knowledge.  For knowledge is limited, whereas imagination embraces the entire world, stimulating progress, giving birth to evolution. It is, strictly speaking, a real factor in scientific research.”  [From A. Einstein, Cosmic Religion: With Other Opinions and Aphorisms, p. 97 (1931).]” Taken in isolation, Einstein’s famous quote (in bold) has quite a different meaning to the full context regarding the importance of imagination in scientific research.

Yet, there is still a juxtaposition regarding Einstein’s famous quote. Imagination is not possible without knowledge. With no base data stored within the billions of connections within our minds, we cannot imagine. It would be impossible to imagine a tranquil scene with trees, waterfalls and multi-coloured birds flying in the perfect blue sky if you did not know, or had never encountered a tree, or a bird, or a river, or water. Prior observations and descriptions are required to make sense of everything around us, in order to imagine a scene, or a character, or a story, or make a scientific discovery, or a technological innovation. But Einstein is right in that piecing discrete pockets of knowledge together requires a leap of imagination; and that the pure sanctity of knowledge is not enough if we want to invent, improve or understand things in more detail.

School and universities trade in knowledge, often requiring the memorization of facts and concepts. Yet, life requires understanding. Understanding and application have knowledge as their foundation but they are built on experience. It is in fact possible to argue that true knowledge cannot be acquired without experience, and that knowledge without experience – some form of direct or indirect grappling, unpicking and re-assembling of knowledge – is merely information. The world, the internet, books, encyclopedias and our minds are full of information, but information with no true knowledge or understanding of it, is – in itself – useless. Below, I attempt to create some abstract and approximated word equations connecting information, knowledge, experience and understanding.

 

Engagement               =          Active and enthusiastic involvement with a task

 

Memory                      =          Information

 

Time                            =          Age in years or Total Working Hours (relating to

specific task, subject or topic)

 

Experience                  =          Time x Engagement

 

Knowledge                  =          Information x Experience

=          Information x Time x Engagement

 

Understanding            =          Knowledge x Experience

                                    =          Information x Experience²

                                   

Innovation                   =          Understanding x Imagination

 

So, we are all exposed to information. We can experience that information in a myriad of different ways, which will then gradually turn into stored knowledge. Further experience and knowledge leads to understanding. That is enough for most of us, and perhaps further than many of our fellow humans attain in an information rich, but understanding-lite world. An open mind; some patient, inspirational people and lots of varied experience lead us through knowledge to understanding; but for some scientists, engineers, technologists, mathematicians and philosophers understanding is not enough – we want to discover new theories, invent new materials, machines, products and processes; or improve our collective experience of life on this planet. To do this our understanding needs to combine with imagination; for discovery, invention or innovation to occur.

But where does imagination come from? How can we learn it? Is it genetic? Nurtured through early childhood experience? Or does our environment play an important part in it? Is knowledge always a pre-requisite for imagination? Is the imagination required for scientists to make new discoveries or inventions the same wide-eyed imagination that a young child has, when trying to piece together multiple new experiences and information for the first time? I don’t know the answers to any of these questions. And I don’t know why I have such a vivid imagination. I don’t know why I am – seemingly naturally – curious about many more things than a lot of my fellow human beings. But I do know that my curiosity, my instinct to find out and explore and want to properly understand things is what made me a fairly decent scientist. And I think this aspect of my mind and character – my imagination – was, and is, far more important as an attribute of a scientist than the ability to learn academically and remember information; to acquire knowledge. Which is where modern schools, universities and department for education secretaries have drifted so far off the mark. In this pseudoscientific diversion into my attempt to define imagination, it is easy to pinpoint the roots of the knowledge I have officially and technically required to become a scientist; but the roots of imagination, or creativity, are harder to define. My suspicion is that time and freedom were fairly key to this.

I have touched upon the freedom and exploration I experienced at Buckland House School from the age of 8 – 11, amongst all the traditional academic rote learning (which seemed to suit my memory and brain function quite well). But, I think it was my time outside school, at and around home, where I experienced complete freedom, and where my imagination, creativity, and characteristics were embedded into my mind. School was undoubtedly an important tool in preparing me for adult life, but I think my broader childhood experience and environment may have been the greater root cause of my accidental journey into science.

At home my imagination had time to run wild. I was not over-entertained like the middle class children of the 21^st century (mine included): there was no Saturday morning football, or dance, or Sunday morning rugby, or cricket, or hockey; no foreign holidays; no trips to theme parks, zoos, bowling alleys or indoor play centres; no Centre Parcs and no Disney; no local museums or National Trust garden visits to enrich and embed my articulate and cultured bourgeoisie; not even trips to the local park; only rare cinema visits. On the best of the summer sunny days we went to the beach and sometimes we played garden games but most of the time, I entered my own private imaginary world. There were seven acres and several disused, old farm buildings dating back to the seventeenth century to explore and stimulate my mind. I built camps in the barns; contraptions from old prams and wheelbarrows, set up obstacle courses and did stunts on a series of dilapidated second hand bikes. I carved my name into trees, or doodled in the shade. I named one of the barns, “the chocolate factory” inspired by Roald Dahl’s Willy Wonka, named that way because of the old silted up water trough adjacent to it – the source of endless potions and mud pies. But most of the time I pretended to be a farmer, with my younger sister cooped up indoors as my (imaginary) long-suffering farmer’s wife.

Farming was all around me. Not much else happens in rural North Devon. Initially my fascination with all the agricultural activity going on was due to a boyish obsession with wheels and machinery. There is something innate in most boys (and some girls) about machines that make noise, or wheels that go around, or vehicles that seem to do extraordinary things. Next door to our house was a working farm. From about the age of six, I would wander over to see what was going on, stirred by the rattle of an old Massey-Ferguson 135 engine. I would watch tractors in action, talk to Brian the farmer, or David his son, about what they were up to. When I was a bit older, I would cycle off down country lanes and sit at the foot of buzzing hedgerows watching haymaking, silage making or harvesting. The scent of fresh hay, or combine dust, or damp summer evening cow infused air always takes me back to the endless summer evenings of my youth. I was free to observe, explore, dream and understand the environment and livelihoods of the people around me.

I would talk to my Dad about farming, and I longed for him to still have his farm. While he was clearly passionate about the land and farming, he was no longer doing it and I couldn’t get quite so excited about his small scale horticultural activities as I could about cows, milking parlours and lots of live tractor action! From the age of three to thirteen, I wanted to be a farmer. To be honest, I still want to be one today, but I acknowledge that it is an unrealistic romanticism for the freedom and fresh country air of my childhood; but there is something about farming which really resonates with me. I think it is a connection with nature, and a simpler way of life than the materialism of our post-industrialised and computerised world.

I learnt a lot in those long school holidays, summer evenings and at weekends and it embedded a lifelong interest in how our food is produced, and how the rural economy is a very different beast to industry and the financial markets. Farming is not a job, it is a way of life and in many ways it has a lot in common with teaching – a thought I will explore further towards the end of the book. So all the farming, food production and nature going on around me whetted my appetite for some applications of science from an early age; and the time to explore with the absence of a strict routine nurtured my imagination. As I stated earlier, when I wasn’t seeking out farm or countryside activity, I was playing at home – inventing games and role plays with my sister – or alone – that seemed to consume days and probably whole months of my childhood.

Was this imagination, and curiosity for the working countryside environment around me innate or was it something I learnt or developed because of the circumstances I grew up in? I have read books by psychologists firmly in the nurture camp and books by geneticists more strongly in the nature camp, and the science behind who we are and what we become, while advancing at an exponential rate, remains unclear. Clearly we have a genetic code that shapes our bodies and their function, the hardware of our senses and enables both our primal and social instincts. But what of the nebulous software of our minds – how much of a template for curiosity, or imagination, or creativity, or intelligence is there? Or how much are those traits developed by the information programmed into our minds – via our senses – during our formative years? And what of motivation and drive, is that innate or something that is triggered by the environment around us?

It all comes down to cause and effect. Am I a curious, observant and imaginative person because of the freedom I had at home – and at Buckland House – as a child; or am I simply wired that way because of the approximately 25,000 genes I have inherited from my parents, therefore hardwired to be naturally curious about people and my surroundings anyway?

Of course, aged 12, I spent no time whatsoever considering any of this; instead I was seduced by the rattle of a tractor engine; drifting happily amongst disused barns, in my own imaginary world; winding up my irritating younger sister, or attempting to perfect my photographic technique at school. The idea that I would grow up, become a scientist and then decide to teach children was not on the table. No way near it.

 

The Spider in the Bathroom by Toby Payne-Cook

 

There was a spider in the bathroom this morning. One of the small bodied and unfeasibly long, spindly legged variety. Like Robert Bruce in his cave I watched it for a while. It descended the wall to my right and found itself behind the sink where I was about to shave. It then proceeded to make several failed attempts to climb up the slippery, frictionless tiles behind the sink. After about ten attempts it made it the underside of the cabinet, scuttled to the right hand edge and then scampered back up the wall. It never gave up. The spider in the bathroom was the eternal optimist.

 

After shaving and leaving my new pet spider to go about its business, I descended the stairs and entered the kitchen. My tentative footsteps were detected by Boris the big yellow Labrador and Ziggy the small, fluffy Cocker-poo. The daily ritual of squeaks, the incessant wagging of tails, the whole body shakes, the jumping up at the stable door between kitchen and utility, the licks and the barely supressed barks flooded, irresistibly, over me. I opened the stable door and was attacked by joyous wave of delight, a tsunami of optimism, the excitement for a long walk through the empty fields and woods of rural Kent.

 

I think of optimistic Spring lambs bouncing in fields. I think back to 2007 when our third child (Anna) was born and I was almost completely in charge of Ollie and Jemma, then just four and two: their relentless energy, their irrepressible joy de vivre, their unquestioned happiness, their sense of puppyish fun; their adoring smiles, massive cuddles, their “Dad, Dad, spin me around again, again, Again. Again. AGAIN.” Their impossibly joyous zest for life, their relentless optimism.

 

I think of myself aged 21 in 1993: a chemistry undergraduate, in a mass spectrometry laboratory at SmithKline Beecham in Tonbridge, Kent.   Meeting and learning from the late, great Dr Duncan Bryant – probably the most inspirational person, beyond family, in my life. My insatiable thirst for applied knowledge, my optimism for all things analytical science, my future career and interests unfolding enthusiastically before my eyes. I was the same aged 23, starting my first graduate job as a formulation chemist with Zeneca.   I was still largely the same at 29 when I moved to Pfizer as a pharmaceutical scientist. I was full of optimism for the possibilities of science, of marriage, of corporate work life.

 

I think of the brilliant and lovely colleague, Ellie, who works with me in the Science department at school. She joined us as a year 4 teacher, aged 23, just under four years ago. She co-teaches science with me in year 5 and 6. She loves teaching and sees the positive in all the children. She is relentlessly optimistic.

 

Providing we have had a happy and stable upbringing, I think most of us are optimistic for most of our twenties. Our professional and personal responsibilities are on the low side, our enthusiasm for our still relatively new found profession untarnished, our energy untainted; our cynicism under-developed; our salaries quite cheap for employers but still exciting to us unhampered by mortgages, kids and keep up with the Jones Middle England mentality of midlife. Our freedom outside school and work significant. The roaring 1920s correlates with our twenties. We are young adults with so much to look forward to but still living in the moment, having fun, respecting our elders and – in the most part – relentlessly optimistic.

 

I’m 47, heading towards 48. I’m really looking forward to my sixties! In the modern world, I think our 60s are the new 20s. Providing we have our health, we again have less responsibility at work and at home and perhaps the strains of elderly parents, parenting adolescents, difficult management or leadership decisions at work have dissipated. Perhaps we have fixed and repaired our damaged relationships; or broken up and become contented, free-roaming Nomads or found deep, everlasting love for the second time…the relentless optimism of youth may return.

 

Jonathan Rauch wrote about this in an interesting book called the Happiness Curve, suggesting that we are at the trough of the wave in our late forties and early fifties. Indeed there was an article in January in the Daily Hate (the Daily Mail, or Daily Loo Roll if you prefer) and widely reported in the press, suggesting that 47 was the worst possible age to be. I certainly feel less optimistic, less positive; less relentlessly shiny about everything than I did through the joys of gigs, music festivals, chemistry, love and young children in my twenties and thirties.

 

I am a positive person. I have written evidence of this. In about 2010, aged 38, and in my penultimate year with Pfizer we were all encouraged to take the Gallup, “Know your Strengths” survey.  Gallup, an American organisation, have identified 35 five “key strengths” including things like: Competitive and Futuristic. My top five (having answered a comprehensive multiple choice survey with no personal bias whatsoever at all of course) came out as: Communicator, WOO (win others over), Positivity, Ideation (made up word meaning coming up with ideas or being a creative thinker) and Activator (likes to start things, impatient). Obviously, I think these are the best five key strengths and that they make me pretty damn cool!

 

When you analyse them more closely they are a millstone around my neck: I love coming up with ideas, starting them, telling every poor bugger willing to listen about them (and quite a lot of people who don’t want to listen as well), trying to charm everyone into liking me and being relentlessly bouncy and enthusiastic in the process. On the flip side: I never finish anything. I am distracted by EVERYTHING. I talk way too much. I write about anything and everything and particularly love talking about myself. I am loud, irritating; way too enthusiastic about EVERYTHING. I massively over-communicate and all my brilliant ideas get lost in the noise.

 

The real flip side about being such a relentlessly excitable, enthusiastic and positive person is that if one is surrounded by negativity, excessive caution, a stifling relationship, a suboptimal management team then my positivity, my desire to be heard, my need to share can quickly flip from positive to negative, from optimism to pessimism.

 

By the time I left science based industry aged 39, my corporate angst was kicking in. I’d not played the internationalist science career game very well: saying no to international business trips, skipping late meetings and always getting home for (my kids) bath time. I was beginning to see the dark side of being part of the machine. Changing career into teaching in my forties temporarily halted all my cynicism. It was a breath of fresh air, but something was missing intellectually. I missed the curiosity and creativity of science, so I started reading books. Not escapist fiction, but philosophy, anthropology, popular science and some psychology. Existentialism kicked in. The writing of Yuval Noah Hariri started to intrigue. I stumbled across the transcript of the Munk Debate from November 6^th 2015 titled, “Do humankind’s best days lie ahead?” I found the pessimistic arguments presented by Alain de Botton and Malcolm Gladwell much more compelling than the fawning sycophancy at the wonders of humanity argued by Matt Ridley and Steven Pinker. I was intrigued by the article in the Ethics issue of New Scientist circa 2017/2018 considering whether we should stop doing science. I even wrote a debate argument which I presented to Year 8s at school (and was countered unsuccessfully by a parent and former NASA remote sensing archaeologist) titled “I believe in a moratorium on new science and technology until 2050” included in italics below. Like John Lennon sang in Julia on the Beatles White album, half of what I say is meaningless – but I like to provoke and challenge mainstream thinking…read at the end if intrigued!

 

As David Mitchell (the comedian, actor and writer, not the novelist) once wrote, “Thinking about it only makes it worse.” This is the curse of being human. The fact that we can think about things means that we can dwell on the negative, we can easily become glass half empty pessimists rather than glass half full optimists. The relentless optimism of the spider, my dogs, young children or fresh, wide-eyed graduates unburdened by the bollocks of modern life can soon dissipate amongst the egocentric entrails of middle life.

 

The cheeriness of youth and the naïve, and of the false sheen of management can become something to rail against.

 

The global Covid-19 pandemic has exacerbated the frustrations of the modern world and I, like many #DailyWritingChallenge contributors, am hoping for the dawning of new, more environmentally, mental health, wellbeing and community aware society; one less measured and tracked; less selfishly and economically driven. We are optimists, dreamers; hopeful positivists.

 

I hope we are right but I suspect we are wrong. The forces of capitalism, materialism, greed and selfishness cut deep into our society.   The devil has the best tunes, the news is depressing, darkness creates the best art – we all need something to rail against. If we lived in a world of vacuous empty pop music; of shiny, perfect celebrity; of cheery news stories and of insipid happiness all day long we would no longer be British…relentless optimism would change our culture (for better or worse) beyond recognition.

 

But then, let’s end on an optimistic note. The beginning of love actually is true. Love is everywhere. The community spirit being unearthed through these dark times is a joy to behold. There is hope, there is love. We should be optimistic for the future, after all, it is a wonderful life.

 

The spider in the bathroom doesn’t know it is a wonderful life, but it lives as though it does.

 

We know it is a wonderful life, yet we live as though it isn’t.

 

Afterblog…

I believe in a moratorium for new Science until 2050. I am not proposing that we stop learning current or historical Science, or stop using science as applied to existing products, technologies or principles; I just believe it is time to put the brakes on; not to stifle human curiosity or ingenuity; but to give the majority of the global populous the chance to catch up; to become more rational, more empirical and more sceptical – essentially more scientific. Just as a rock band is only as good as its drummer; globalised humanity are only as advanced as their most ignorant peoples. I am proposing a pause to technological advancement, to allow humanity to catch up.

 

Before I begin, I should say that I love Science; it has been a major part of my life and that I am a trained scientist, who used and applied Science for many years before entering the teaching profession. My esteemed friend and opponent this afternoon will accuse me of heresy; he will also spend some time explaining how Science is inextricably linked with the economic and military might of Western civilisation; and how the ongoing development of new technology is humankind’s – and indeed Planet Earth’s – only chance of survival. His arguments will be compelling; and far more likely to pan out than my idealised prophecy; but I ask you to carefully consider what I say.

 

“Humans are just animals wearing clothes, pretending not to be animals.” That is a quote from the TV sitcom outnumbered, which underpins part of my argument this afternoon. As living organisms, humans are indeed of unparalleled complexity and adaptability; in the last 500 years we have discovered an almost infinite array of scientific theories to help explain the world around us, and in the last 200 years we have used the exponential growth in scientific understanding to develop awe-inspiring, life extending and ingenious technologies: electricity, the internal combustion engine, space travel and satellites, modern medicine, genetic engineering and the internet to name just a few. These have revolutionised and changed our lives beyond the recognition of our ancestors.

 

While all of us take these technologies for granted, and they have undeniably made our lives easier; it is hard to ascertain if they have made our lives better. Obviously we are living longer, healthier lives than our ancestors but there is no evidence that modern humans are any happier than our ancient ancestors. Yuval Noah Hariri – a Professor of History in Jerusalem and former Oxford postgraduate – has made this very point in his groundbreaking book, ‘Sapiens’. He argues that our forgaging forefathers would have had more leisure time and less stress than modern humans. I am not suggesting we should all turn the clock back 12,000 years, before the dawn of farming; but I raise this point to highlight three ways in which humans change: Evolutionary. Culturally and Technologically.

 

Evolution is slow. We don’t really know how slow, but it occurs over several tens of generations. For humans we can describe a generation as 25 years. So, perhaps recognisable, evolutionary, genetic change in humans occurs in small increments approximately every 1000 years. Biologically our Anglo-Saxon ancestors from 1017 wouldn’t be significantly different to us today.

 

Culture advances much faster than evolution can adapt to. This is particularly true of the last 200 years. Your great grandparents experienced a vastly different country and culture 100 years ago. The western world in 1850 was remarkably different to how it was in 1750; and think how different those growing up in 1950 would have found it if the they were taken back to 1850, before cars, electricity and the telephone. And now imagine the leap from 1950 to 2050, whatever that may bring…but the point with cultural change is that modern humans have some chance to adapt to it. We can say that it changes unrecognisably at least ten times faster than evolution – every hundred years or so; but each new generation adapts to the change, while alienating the oldest surviving generation. This is why we so frequently, and mistakenly glorify the past; assuming the technology and culture of our formative years (our teens, twenties and perhaps thirties) to be the golden age of humanity.

 

But now, since the invention of the computer, the internet, smartphones and social media; technology is advancing apace. Watch a classic eighties or nineties film and the technology in it is unrecognisable. Technology advances at least 10 times faster than culture. Every ten years there is a step change. And culturally we don’t know how to adapt. So now we have to contend with cyber bullying; information overload and the rise of fake news and pseudoscience. And frankly we are making a pretty big hash of it. Because we conserve mid 20^th century values of society in our culture, with technology running amok amongst it. I give you a school relevant example. It has been known since Victorian times that children can be really quite unpleasant to each other while going through adolescence. Schools have introduced all sorts of doctrines and processes to minimise this pain from most of our lives; but with the smartphone, technology has fallen into the wrong hands and great harm is being done, with complete loss of parental and societal control. The convenience of superfast Broadband was not invented to nurture teenage hate campaigns.

 

The fields of Computer Science, communication technology and Space exploration have been developed primarily with the military in mind. The Space race was a decoy for the military advances of the cold war, and the respective power of the USA and the former Soviet Union. Newton stood on the shoulders of Galileo while Einstein further developed Newton’s ideas about gravity. Einstein’s theory of relativity and Bohr and Rutherford’s model of the atom underpinned the science of the Manhattan project which led to world’s first nuclear weapons which ended the second world war.

 

Things change and humans adapt. But change does not always equate to better. Nuclear weapons are an incredible feat of science, but is the ability to destroy ourselves; and desecrate our rich and resourceful environment really something to be proud of? We have little or no time to work out how best to use or apply new technologies; no time to assimilate or understand the cultural advantages or disadvantages to these changes. No time to regulate, monitor, license, control or tax them. We just blindly accept them, embrace them let them perniciously take over our lives.

 

I am not suggesting that there was ever a perfect time to be human, or that there ever will be. I’m not suggesting that humans have passed their peak; or that permanently freezing science and technology in 2017 would cure all the ills of global society. What I am suggesting is that the world, science and technology has got pretty complicated. The internet, social media, TV and newspapers are fantastic weapons for social misfits, cranks and terrorists. So we are all drowning in information overload; not knowing what or who to believe; and we have grown tired of authoritative scientists and experts.

 

A book I was given for Christmas, called the Angry Chef, writes about how health fads and scientifically unproven dietary advice grow in the cracks among the truth. Because the truth is that real science, in its curious and restless pursuit of the truth is full of uncertainty and randomness. Humans want certainty in their lives. This explains the roots of most religions. But most modern, western humans have torn themselves from the security of faith in an all knowing and all loving God; and have sought false prophets instead: dietary fads, detox, clean eating, maintaining a shiny Instagram or Twitter profile, amassing wealth and possessions, even Science has become a new religion for some in the 21^st century.   All these false prophets are designed to give us the perception of health or happiness or both. We want certainty in an increasingly uncertain world.

 

Stephen Hawking – a brilliant scientist; has claimed that there is no longer any need for Philosophy, as Science now has all the answers. I disagree. I think we need big, open, philosophical thinking more than ever before. Modern humanity is drowning in information, choice and expectation; and we all need to step back, pause and reflect upon the meaning, if there is any, of life; or if there is no meaning then at least finding a tangible sense of purpose for our time on the planet; rather than the misguided sense of entitlement, so many of us seem to feel we deserve.

 

As I’ve mentioned Philosophy, let’s just pause to see what some of history’s great thinkers have to say about Science and Technology. Let’s start with Henry Brook Adams in 1907: “Nothing in education is so astonishing as the amount of ignorance it accumulates in the form of inert facts.” Aldous Huxley in 1937, “Technological progress has merely provided us with more efficient means for going backwards and finally Martin Heidegger in 1954, “Everywhere we remain unfree and chained to technology, whether we passionately affirm or deny it.”

 

My personal favourite, useful, controversial and potentially hugely beneficial advance in technology is biotechnology: genetic engineering and modification; whether in the field of medicine, human understanding or food production. The global population is growing, so we need to grow more and it seems like GM food technology is the most plausible option. There is some fascinating science advancing rapidly in labs, greenhouses and fields all over the planet. But isn’t the real problem that many of us consume too much? Supermarkets pump us full of cheap donuts. We light up our homes and cities and overheat our houses. We buy endless amounts of stuff to give us the mirage of happiness.  

 

Scientific and technological advances have been spurred on by economics. Ideas which potentially end in a profit are pursued and researched rampantly, while ideas which seek to undermine, or correct, our economic greed are ignored, or left unfunded.

 

I genuinely believe that greater understanding of cultural behaviours and beliefs; not misrepresenting science for economic or money making purposes and seeking to reduce consumption (including air travel, car travel, size of house, food miles, out of season raspberries, and donut special offers) would help to sustain a more purposeful, fulfilled and happier human populous on Earth than us constantly marching backwards into a technological and economically driven abyss.

 

I have two final points and both are sensitive and controversial:

 

• What about cancer and dementia, I hear you say. We are led to believe that more people are dying from cancer, or suffering from dementia than ever before. Yes they probably are. There are a lot more of us. Incredible, amazing technology allows us to identify and diagnose cancer much more readily than ever before, so we know much more about it.   But crucially, people – on average – are living a lot longer; and in the rich, developed, world most other major diseases and causes of death (except for heart disease) have been eradicated. It is of course brilliant that we live so much longer than our ancestors, but is it not living rather than life which truly matters? Would you aged 12; take 60 happy, purposeful, stress free years on the planet; or prefer 120 years with extended periods of stress, confusion and uncertainty?

 

  

 

And finally, Space is great right? Absolutely fascinating. An expensive playground for intellectuals and the rich. And the Hadron collider with its unfathomable funding, computing power, data storage and complex physics is delving deep into some huge questions about matter and the universe. And one day humans will probably colonise Mars. Wow! Incredible, exciting, whizz bang cutting edge big news science.

 

But I ask you this? If we, modern humans, can’t find happiness, purpose and a collective, sustainable existence in harmony with nature on this beautiful, green, richly resourced little planet; isn’t it evidence that the human civilisation project has failed?

 

That is why I propose a pause to the rapid advance of Science and technology. For us to spend more time figuring out what we all really need, rather than what some of us really want.

What is family?

 

Family is a photograph album from summer 1976:

Daisy chains, climbing frames and ladybirds on the pebble ridge.

 

Family is a trip to the beach. To Westward Ho!

Of the blessed tote bag; of egg sandwiches, sun tan oil and Hocking’s Dairy Ice Cream.

 

Family is the freedom of an isolated home, of garden games and imagination:

Of derelict barns becoming chocolate factories; prams turning into tractors; the iconic beech tree.

 

Family is Sunday roast chicken: Dad peeling the veggies; Mum making the gravy; of perfect roast potatoes; my sister gorging on meringues: perfect white icebergs cooked in the bottom oven.

 

Family is bucolic bliss: of walks down the lane, staring at cows over wooden gates;

Of the sweet smell of haymaking while sitting at the foot of buzzing hedgerows.

 

Family is a farmhouse kitchen: huddling around the Aga;

Of fried breakfasts, playing cards and talking endless shit!

 

Family is a TV dinner: of Top of the Pops and Tomorrow’s world;

Of Findus Crispy pancakes and boil in the bag cod in parsley sauce.

 

Family is Mum in charge. The cooking, the driving, the beach; forever the beach.

The energy, the music, the fun, the freedom and the love.

 

Family is Dad in the garden; in the potting shed. The 1 o’clock news, the afternoon nap; Grandstand; The football pools, the final score. The gurning, the swearing at garden invading bullocks, the love.

 

Family is the delivery men: Mr Vanstone the greengrocer; Mr Bromfield the butcher; Robin the fish; George the Baker and the Tuesday ritual of the telephone order to Mr Toogood of the village shop!

 

Family is the family silver on a special Sunday; of filling the ice bucket; of Cinzano and soda;

of Granddad visiting in his Renault; of Dad being a vampire and drinking the blood from the beef.

 

Family is running away with Dad and Sis while Mum temporarily implodes.

Family is Hartland becoming my special place, my link to Dad, my nature, my refuge.

 

Family is not attending the village school, of not going to church.

Family is driving miles to visit friends and talking in other farmhouse kitchens instead.

 

Family is going to boarding school aged 12.

Family is coming home.

 

Family is outsourced adolescent parenting.

Family is daily worship in the beautiful abbey.

 

Family is my housemaster saying, “It’s happened.”

Family is coming home and weeping buckets. Family is hugs. Family is gone. Family is there.

 

Family is Dad dying when I was 16. Family is broken, bound and then broken again.

Family is shit at an all boys’ boarding school.

 

 

Family is another family called the Mackenzies; their parties and pissed there with them again.

Other families can be family too.

 

Family is getting to know five elder half-siblings once I’ve left home. Family is complicated. One person is many people. My Dad is their Dad, yet their Dad was different too.

 

Family is a comfort blanket. Family is unconditional love.

Family is tolerance and empathy.

 

Falling in love is joining another family. Another family is a foreign country.

Similar on the surface, yet so different underneath.

 

Family is a great big family wedding. Family is long lost cousin Mildred being more important than the friend you’ve been pissed with every Friday night for nearly fifteen years.

 

Family is performance. Family is showing off. My family is better than yours.

Family is a family wedding photograph to stick on your future great grandchild’s wall.

 

Family is a pre-nuptial agreement.

Family is I fell in love with your daughter not your money.

 

Family is territorial. Family is unspoken war between wife and mother-in-law.

Family is tension. Family is choice.

 

Family is setting up home, nesting and having kids.

Family is going for the first family walk together in the pushchair: Mum, Dad, baby and dog.

 

Family is joy, family is exhaustion, family is intense.

Family is plastic toys and birthday cake.

 

Family is in the garden. Family is watching mother-in-law play happily with her grandchildren.

Family is stories and painting and a never-ending obstacle course.

 

Family is a visit to Granny: of cards in the kitchen; of broken routine;

Of joyous overlap with cousins.

 

Family is a walk in the woods, of sticks in streams.

Or a bike ride to a bridge, a quick snack and then home.

 

Family is a holiday cottage somewhere different.

Family is exploration. Family is joy. Family is love.

 

Family is another National Trust tea room; the great outdoors. Kicking leaves and building dens;

Feeding fish, climbing towers; playing hide and seek; come on Dad, another game of chase!

 

Family is building enormous sandcastles and jumping waves.

Later family is surfing, kayaking, paddle boarding or a BBQ on the beach.

 

Family is a music festival in summer at WOMAD or Wilderness: playing xylophones, weaving a basket or learning a new dance; a rowing boat; a wild swim; a cheeky sip of cider.

 

Family is Landy trips in summer: meandering along byways, stopping at country pubs;

Of standing up in the back, with the roof off, singing songs and feeling free.

 

Family is isolated during lockdown. Family is now adolescent.

Family is house party, tiktok, instagram and Fortnite.

 

Family is thankful for the garden (of England): The Cabin, The hot tub, Swinging pods of daydreaming and nothingness, Croquet, Table Tennis (and daily dog walks in the fields).

 

Family is isolation Friday night pub nights in. Of Pizza, pool and playlists.

Of Guinness, Lager, Cider and necking pints with Rugby boy son. And Darts.

 

Family is blood.

Blood is thicker than water.

 

Family is they fuck you up your Mum and Dad, the poem by Phillip Larkin.

Family is not just our genes or our childhood environment, it’s our emotional and cultural inheritance.  It is way more powerful than school.

 

Family is, according to David Cameron, hard working families.

But what is family?

 

Family can be the Krays, the Mitchell brothers, Dallas or Dynasty.

Family can be royal, can be rich or can be poor.

 

Family can be pushy.

Family can be wild.

 

Family can be close.

Family can be broken.

 

Family can neglect.

Family can over-protect.

 

Family can be school and can be work, but those things are transient.

Family is not transient. It is always there.

 

Family was simpler. Family was integrated with community or church.

Family was everything.

 

Family has become a political, economic and marketing entity.

As we have moved around the country and the world, family has become fractured and fragmented.

 

We have been tricked into a world of self-actualisation, a world of career, of money, of friendships and of fun. All of this has weakened or broken wider family.

 

Family was never meant to be so insular; never meant to be so competitive;

never meant to be so alone. Family was part of a small tribe.

A tribal elder or a distant cousin could be more important than your Mum, Dad or sibling.

The cult of the modern family as a single political, economic or social entity is damaging to humanity.

 

Family is always there.

Family loves you for who you are, not for who they hope you to be. This is family.

The Nomadic Dream by Toby Payne-Cook

 

I was captivated by Raynor Winn’s book, The Salt Path, about her journey with her husband along the South West Coast Path. They had lost everything beforehand and had nothing to leave behind. They wild camped and lived on £20 a week. It is one of the most uplifting and transcendent stories I have ever read.

 

Most of our lives are full of commitments: family, work, school, appointments and a modicum of leisure. Some of the time those commitments bring us pleasure, occasionally they bring us meaning and if we’re lucky they are driven by a sense of purpose. Yet much of the time they are consuming time; treading water; keeping us busy.

 

Family, friends and work matter deeply to me, yet I feel shackled by them much of the time. As Rousseau once wrote, man is born free yet everywhere he is in chains. Freedom of thought, freedom of movement, the freedom to write and freedom to explore – both places and ideas – make me feel alive; feel part of life’s rich tapestry: a temporary, interdependent blip diffusing amongst the diverse nature of mother Earth…

 

The opportunity to meet new people and discover new places brings me great joy. I have often expressed the view that getting to know people is better than knowing people. We need a handful of constants in our lives: two or three human rocks, a special place or two; a transcendent book or piece of music but apart from that we are nomads, keen to discover new lands, new views, new people, new experiences. This nomadic instinct has become embroiled in tourism, in bucket lists, in the mass marketed leisure industry and all over our narcissistic – look at my wonderful life – social media profiles.

 

This is why I was so transfixed by Raynor and Moth’s journey around the coast, passing through the brutal, raw, undiluted nature of the Hartland coastline that I love more than anywhere else on Earth. They knew where they were going and, my word, was it a struggle, but it was the journey that mattered; they were free of all other commitments, all the chaff of modern society; all the stifling human constructs which extract us from nature and time, time did not matter at all.

 

I am fortunate to share a 1993 soft-top Landrover Defender with my brother-in-law. I am fortunate that he is not a teacher, that he has much younger children than me and that his wife is considerably more urban than mine. This means I have over 90% of the use of this iconic machine. Landy is my most treasured material possession. Over the last few summers, I have taken the opportunity to drive it from it Kent to Devon; young adolescents clinging on while meandering along empty B-roads, stopping at village pubs, exploring the byways of Salisbury plain, Cranborne Chase and the West Wiltshire downs. The freedom to roam, to explore and discover huge, empty tracts of our green and pleasant land is always the highlight of my year. But there is always the ticking of time: the pre-booked pub dinner, the holiday cottage key to collect, the farming friends kindly cooking us lunch, the pending term to plan for or the impatient wife – travelling by more salubrious means – to rendez-vous with at a National Trust tea room.

 

I don’t think I could do what Raynor and Moth did. But, when freedom returns, I dream of the opportunity to jack in all in, to drive, walk and explore every inch of Britain’s coastline, to meander from pub to tea room to coffee shack meeting new people: grumpy old wurzels, weather beaten fishermen, hippies and dropouts, eccentrics, Ed Finch playing his ukulele somewhere, writers, artists and all the people who’ve run away from the cities, from the rat race, from the corporate claptrap, from the stale old boring status quo, from the chains which entangle us. To listen to the birds and the wind swishing amongst fields of barley; the rustling of the trees; to be hypnotised by the ancient rhythms of the tide, the raging of the sea and the delicate sloshing of water against boats in safe harbours; in and out of sheltered rock pools.

 

The opportunity to have no fixed abode, no timetable, no determined end point. The opportunity to roam, explore; to see, to discover; to meet; to listen; to learn; to feel.  The opportunity to be free from the shackles of routine, commitment, status and the curse of expectation.

 

And then, the opportunity to write all it all.

 

Oh, the nomadic dream!

Thursday morning Thunks with Year 5:  possibly the highlight of my teaching career, thus far.  

We’d always kick the day of with a thunk or two; the ensuing discussion frequently took unexpected turns down myriad avenues of confused thought.  One of my favourite discussions was around the question (I don’t have the precise wording to hand), “If all the children and their desks are moved into a nearby field, where is the school?”

To begin with the children associated the school buildings, the classrooms and all the other facilities with the idea of school (even if they were empty) but after a few moments everyone soon agreed that the school was where the children were, in the field. 

Back then, in 2014 or 2015, the agreed idea of children and of their daily inhabitation of classrooms and school buildings as the conjoined concept of school didn’t cross our minds for too long.  But this week and for several more months, in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, there are buildings across the country, across the world specifically designed for use by “school” children which lie empty.  Or virtually empty.  The schools have closed.  They are just empty classrooms, empty corridors and disused buildings now.  They are not schools anymore, because the children have gone.

So, this begs the question: what is a school?  Until Friday 20^th March 2020, most people had a reasonable and accepted answer to that question.  But now, everything we know, everything we take for granted, everything we expect to happen, every little ritual of our advanced, capitalist society is up in arms.  Everything we thought of as normal, as sacrosanct, that gave us meaning and purpose and routine:  it has been taken from us, for some time. 

It will come back, of course.   It will probably come back the same.  We will remember the dark days of Spring and Summer 2020 forever but we will quickly forget the questions this pandemic raised, the upheaval it caused and all those things we said we’d never take for granted again we will indeed take for granted.  [I am about to use the long word beginning with u and containing a soft c.]  In these unprecedented times, it is tempting, perhaps even alluring to dream of all the long-term changes to society, to the economy and to education that it could affect.  Philosophers, writers, journalists, provocateurs and dreamers like me will become reflective, curious, hopeful, idealistic and utopian about the more environmental, more sustainable, more equitable, more honest, more clearly evaluated and re-purposed economic, political, healthcare and educational systems we create in the wake of the chaos and catastrophe of COVID-19.

The compliant tide of unquestioned convention and normality will return. 

How do I know this?  Well, I can’t be sure but I can cite two personal and quite powerful examples.  A diversion in italics.  Feel free to skip this bit. 

The first dates back to Christmas 1988 when I was sixteen.  My father had died a month earlier after a protracted demise from colon and hepatic cancer.  I had some history GCSE holiday work [I liked history at school, my history teacher was probably the best teacher I ever had].  I couldn’t concentrate on it.  I got stressed.  My Mum said something like, “You are grieving, Tobes; you are numb; you are angry; don’t bother with it.  I’ll write a note to Mr Wood, he’ll understand.”  I couldn’t understand then that he would understand.  He was a strict history teacher for chrissakes, what would he care?  [Of course I now understand that he would have understood, because I now understand that most teachers teach because they care about children but as a confused adolescent I had no idea of this now frankly blindingly obvious fact].

Anyway, in the aftermath of all this petty history holiday work crap, in the aftermath of my losing my father aged 16, I vowed never to get stressed about school work or exams again.   At the time this was logical.  I had suffered a huge loss and all the day to day petty shit we get stressed out about could surely never stress me out again.  Wrong answer.  The amount of petty squabbles, niggles, miniscule little tasks and deadlines that have become huge great clunking stress balls in my mind over the last 31 years are far too numerous to mention.

My second example was the only time I have ventured out of the affluent West, when I went to Nepal with Amanda, my wife in 2002.  This was to be our last – and only – big pre-parenthood adventure.  While mountains, stupas, temples and elephant safaris blew my mind it was the people I remember most.  They were so welcoming, so friendly, so – seemingly – happy.  They welcomed us into their simple homes and we visited a school too.  Some children walked 2 hours each way without shoes to get to school.  Classes contained 80 children and many children didn’t have pens or paper.  We saw village children playing with old, broken bicycle wheels.  No electricity, no plastic toys, no computers.  They were so radiant, so happy and yet they had none of the creature comforts, the multi channel TV, the books, the electric light we had; there was no evidence of materialism whatsoever.  Their lives were simple, happy and purposeful. 

I, naively, vowed to attempt to (future) parent in a non-materialistic way.  I like to think I have, in part, achieved this but just five years later, in 2007, our house – just as every other affluent, middle class English home – was full of twenty tonnes of plastic shit; Fisher Priced up to the rafters with two kids and a baby colourfully adorned with cool outfits from Gap kids and Boden!  So, while I’m hopeful that we’ll see some post-COVID cultural change, some major educational reform and a major check to our overtly capitalist, consumerist ways, I suspect it will be a (major) hurdle, a dark time, a future GCSE history essay in our lives.

So, what is a school? 

A place of learning? 

Where education happens? 

The place you study for exams and qualifications? 

An exam factory? 

Where you learn the three Rs?   

One long episodic memory? 

A never-ending sequence of semantics? 

A transformative hub of cultural infusion? 

A social conditioning factory? 

A socioeconomic status entrenchment facility? 

A social club for parents?

A gang recruitment facility? 

A jingoistic cult? 

A cacophony of confused and directionless adolescents? 

A LEARNING COMMUNITY?

A community?

A refuge?

Well, it depends on your perspective.  But I’ll settle for, “A LEARNING COMMUNITY.”  First and foremost a school is a community.  It is the reason I work in one and it was the sense of belonging to a community that learns and grows together that I look back on and value most from my own school days.   

A school has various functions but it is not just a curriculum, a pedagogy, a building full of classrooms, an educational establishment – it is predominantly a community, a place where we have a sense of belonging and hopefully a place we can feel safe.

The culture of the concept of school is complex.  We all think we know what a school is because we went to one ourselves, our children and our grandchildren may go to one, or have gone to one.  Schools are all over the newspapers and the media.  When a newsreader says, “Schools…” in a news report we all have a fairly clear idea of what they mean.  School as a concrete noun is a place: it is the buildings, classrooms and playground (ideally filled with children) from the aforementioned “Thunk.”  Yet school as an abstract noun – in the media, in our memories, in our experience, in conversation – is a nebulous concept. 

A three year old’s definition of a tree in their mind will be quite different from a “typical” adult definition of a tree which may be different to a GCSE biology student’s definition of a tree which will in turn be quite different from a biology teacher’s definition which could be different from a geography teacher’s definition which is also different to a writer’s description of a tree; an artist’s (arborealist) interpretation of a tree; or an arborist’s (tree surgeon), arboriculturist’s (tree farmer) or a Professor of Botany who specialises in certain species of trees.  And that is just a simple tree. 

A school is far more abstract with multifarious definitions, experiences, feelings and perspectives.

For example, my experience of “school” is as follows (you can skip this bit, but it might be useful to reflect on your own personal insight and experience of “school” as it will undoubtedly affect your perspective of what a school is).

1974 – 1976: Play school – crying a lot, no actual memory of this – just my Mum’s version of events.

1976 onwards: Not going to the (tiny) village primary school in Langtree, Devon – automatically segregated from my local, rural, farming community.

1976 – 1980: Going to St Joseph’s infant school 8 miles away in Bideford.  A Roman Catholic (I’m not RC) subsidised primary school.  A semi-selective school mostly populated with the children of local professionals. 

1980 – 1984: Age 8, going to a local boarding prep school (~120 pupils aged 8-13, mostly boys) (Buckland House, now a manor house for holiday rental) as one of only 12 day pupils. School day 8:30 – 5:30pm with Saturday morning school.  Some great teachers, especially maths, history & latin. Hated all the sport but loved summer biology lessons by the lake, photography (including Dark room), oval window in the science lab, woodwork and roaming freely through surrounding countryside.

1984 – 1986: Aged just 12, after Buckland closed down, moving 35 miles south, to the edge of Dartmoor to board at all boys boarding prep school (Mount House school, now Mount Kelly).   Went home once every 3 weeks.  Teaching uninspiring (English good, Science awful) but Dartmoor on the doorstep was inspiring (but hard work).  Canoeing on the lake.  Tennis. Golf.  Cricket.  Still scared of rugby. 

1986 – 1991: Gaining an academic scholarship to Milton Abbey School, a small 13-18 boy’s boarding school set in a beautiful Dorset valley with the most magnificent Abbey; formerly described as a school for “posh thickoes…”  Went home once every three weeks.  From 1988-1991 my sister went to a nearby (an 8 mile [illegal] cycle ride) girls boarding school.  Loads of outdoor stuff, didn’t do CCF, went farming instead.  A lot of fun.  Academics not taken seriously, but A level chemistry & biology teachers were good.  Enjoyed the theatre and drama.  A crap place to be when Dad died.   Boarding housemaster was eccentric, flamboyant and wonderful during this time. 

1991:  Not following the herd into the army as an officer or a land agent for Savills; not becoming an entrepreneur, nor joining Daddy’s business or snorting a trust fund of white powder but instead, having failed to make the grade for medical school, going to study Chemistry at Kingston poly and wilfully kicking against my happy but socially elitist and very socially (not academically) privileged schooling…thus meeting and becoming friends with loads of “normal people” from the 93% of the population I barely knew existed.

1993 – 1994:  While working for SmithKline Beecham in Tonbridge on an industrial placement I was inspired to become a scientist by the most brilliant of humans, the late Dr Duncan Bryant, a former giant intellect, proper leftie; Alexei Sayle, Queen, Sibelius, Dub reggae and pub quiz aficionado; expert in molecular spectroscopy (the Royal Soc Chem have an award named after him) who wrote in my leaving card, “despite the obvious behavioural concerns, a vindication of a public school education!”  There I helped organise the sixth form young scientists day for children from local grammar schools in Kent.  (I didn’t know what a grammar school was then).

2002 – 2010:  An active “STEM ambassador” while working for Pfizer as a pharmaceutical scientist:  visiting schools in Kent (a mixture of independents, grammar and secondary moderns) to give careers talks, science lectures, design and run workshops and mentor A level chemists.  I used to love leaving the corporate, minted, ivory towers of Pfizer for a day in the “real world” as I referred to schools at that time.

2008 – 2014:  One, then two, then three of my children attend Marden Primary School in Kent.  Ollie, my eldest, had a punt at the 11+, without any tutoring or practice, passes the maths and non verbal reasoning but fails on aggregate score.  He is later (at his next school) diagnosed with dyslexia.   (The girls leave the school at the end of year 5 and year 3 respectively).

2009 – 2013:  Parent Governor at Marden Primary School.  On selection panel for a new head.   Being exposed to this process was the final catalyst that inspired me to become a teacher, then with aspirations to become a primary school head.  By now, I am well aware of the haves and have nots in society; of the stereotypical pushy middle class parent; of the Mums and toothless Grans smoking in their slippers at the school gate; of the hugely broad socioeconomic demographic; of the divisive nature of the grammar system; of the burgeoning tutoring industry outside school.

2011 – 2012:  Following compulsory redundancy from Pfizer become a Director of a small educational charity (SETPOINT Hertfordshire) offering STEM brokerage to schools in a variety of guises in Herts, Beds & Bucks.  I visited a lot of schools, spending a lot of time being inspired by children in some amazing, leafy, Hertfordshire comprehensives.  There are no comprehensives in Kent.  Grrr.

2009 & 2012:  Rejected by a Kent Grammar school and a Kent Secondary modern respectively from joining a GTP (School direct) course into secondary science / chemistry teaching.

December 2012:  Gain a place at Canterbury Christchurch University as a student teacher. 

Jan – Jul 2013: Teaching assistant in a year 5/6 class at Kingswood primary school, Nr Maidstone.

2013 – 2014:  PGCE (7-14) with Science specialism.

2013:  Secondary placement at Homewood School, a secondary modern in Tenterden, Kent.  The largest single campus secondary school in Kent, I think.  360 children per year from Y7 –Y11.  That is more than my entire senior school aged 13-18!!  I liked the school, late evenings in the staff room and the wider team.  I, inevitably, struggled with my behaviour management.  I was astounded at the lack of scientific subject knowledge in the then Head of Science when I observed some of her lessons.  The second in department was awesome.

2014:  Primary placement in Y6 at Goudhurst & Kilndown primary, a leafy, one form entry CofE primary school in Kent.  19 out of 30 children passed the 11+ (3 on appeal, I think).  This class was buzzing.  In every way.  I loved teaching them.  My mentor (an experienced and brilliant teacher) didn’t like me.  I probably didn’t make it easy for her.  She put me off becoming a primary teacher.  A shame.

2014 – 2020 (present):  Science and maths teacher at an independent prep school in Kent, teaching children from Year 5 – Year 8.  Head of Science since 2017.  Curriculum design lead working with the Assistant Head Academic since 2018.  About 40% of the school go on to grammar school at 11 or 13.  The remaining 60% go on to senior independent schools at 11 or 13.  The school is non-selective but typically is high achieving including academic scholarships to very high end public schools like Eton, Tonbridge & Brighton College.

2019 – 2020:  Member school of the PSB (pre-senior baccalaureate) involving visits and collaboration with other independent prep schools across the south east of England.  

2016 onwards:  A parent of one then two and soon to be three children at the truly excellent and thriving local independent senior school, Sutton Valence, nr Maidstone in Kent.   Ollie in is Y12 and Jemma in Y10.  Anna will join in Y9 in September.

2003 – 2020:  A parent in Kent with a broad demographic of friends and kid’s friends who attend or have attended a very broad range of schools – including high falutin’ uber-elitist independents, “local” more understated independent schools; academic hothouse grammar schools, more down to Earth grammar schools; secondary moderns and primary schools.

2018 onwards:  A keen purveyor of the best (networking, wisdom, a plethora of Edubooks, #BrewEd) and worst (false dichotomies, intentional provocation, pointless twitter spats, self-promotion, personal brand construction, transmit mode, sorry I’m not receiving mode) of #EduTwitter!

March 2020:  The Coronavirus pandemic strikes a (temporary) blow to conventional schooling in the UK.  Existentialist teacher crisis beckons…

So all that is compressed into my definition of a school.  It is a multifaceted and confused set of influences and insights, as I’m sure are yours.  It is worth thinking about.  There is no “typical” school, though there are some generic stereotypes.  I’m sure my worldview, my non-conformity, my outsider perspective, my belief in everything we do (or don’t do) in schools would be different if I’d gone to my local primary and secondary schools in Devon and entered the teaching profession straight after university.  Now, at 47 and twenty five years into the profession, I would probably be even more cynical than I am already; or burnt out; or in my second headship; or sacked and discredited; or a national education leader; or a policy buff, or just a contented, tweedy, affable, mildly eccentric science teacher.

So, my version of what a school is – or should be – is highly likely to be a bit different to yours.  This is true at a policy level, at an ideology level and at a national psyche level too.  And of course those perspectives can change throughout our lives and depending upon our role, if we work in a school.

What is clear is that our current model, or idea of schooling was not specifically designed this way.  It has evolved.  There are of course many new “free” schools with culture built from scratch but these are still based on a one teacher and class of children model of schooling.  There are only a handful of very alternative school constructs (e.g. Steiner schools, Sudbury schools, Summerhill school in Suffolk and to some extent Bedales in Petersfield, Hants) but these are in the minority. 

So while a classroom may look and feel very different today than they did 100 years ago, the construct is the same.  Children sitting (mostly) in a room with tables or desks, a pen or pencil in their hand and a teacher – if not at the front – roaming around controlling the activity of the room.  Whether right or wrong, education is undoubtedly the slowest moving professional sector in terms of cultural change.  The presence and role of the teacher is dominant; the capital infrastructure of classrooms that contain approximately 30 children hasn’t appreciably changed bar the odd experiment.  If we wind the clock back 50 years and fast forward 50 years in any other sector things look remarkably different.

Imagine a factory production line in 1970, today in 2020 and in the future, in 2070.  Imagine the employee to product ratio, the robot to product ratio and the employee to robot ratio.  This applies to the manufacture of anything from simple products to highly complex technology. 

Imagine a hospital or a laboratory in 1970.  Now.  And 2070.

Imagine farming in 1970.  The smaller fields, the smaller machinery, the amount of physical strength and manual labour required.  The number of agricultural employees.  Compare with the huge beasts of tractors and combine harvesters today.  1 person can farm 2000 acres of arable today with one or two casual labourers during harvest.  That would have been well over 10, perhaps 20 in 1970.  In 2070, there will be even more automation, perhaps a reversal to smaller, more specialised robots; fewer people still.

Meanwhile, with the exception of surface superficiality, schools looked pretty similar to today back in 1970 and could, quite easily – assuming Nick Gibb is STILL schools minister – look fairly similar in 2070.  We tinker on the surface of here today, gone tomorrow initiatives, between traditional and progressive pedagogical approaches but we still occupy a similar proportion of the nation’s workforce, schools still have very similar capital infrastructure, loads of kids, one classroom and one teacher; exams in the summer at 16 and 18.   

On top of this, the school year still honours a long summer – to help bring in the harvest (?!) and has a school day (contact hours) out of sync with the rest of the working populous from 8:45ish until 3:30ish.  As the outside world shifts towards flexible living, those of us working in schools are still struggling with the concept of flexible working.  Changing direction in education and schools is like turning around an oil tanker in a stormy sea relative to the agile, nimble hummingbirds in other sectors.

Of course it may well be that our slowly evolving schools have already hit upon an optimal genome.  It may be that schools in the UK in 2020 are absolutely perfect, completely fit-for-purpose and that it is a complete waste of time to try and imagine a better, fairer, tangible, more clearly purposed school system.

But at times of international crisis such as these, everything we thought we understood, everything we took for granted, everything that was normal to us before the virus, everything is suddenly thrown into question.  So the coronavirus closure of UK schools suddenly gives us pause for thought.  This thought piece could go on forever, so I’m going to vow to write the following nine exploratory evaluations afterwards, thus allowing the rest of this essay to focus on schools and not become distracted with many other abstract nouns entwined within them.

1.          What is a school?
2.          What is a teacher?
3.          What is a child?
4.          What is a parent?
5.          What is an exam?
6.          What is education?
7.          What is culture?
8.          What is society?
9. What is the economy?
10. What is work?
11. What is freedom?

In order to consider what a school is today, we need to reflect on their history – very briefly – as I am not a history of education expert.  Schools in some shape or form existed in some of the ancient civilisations, but these were by no means universal or compulsory.  The oldest school in England is King’s School, Canterbury, founded in 597.  From then up until the 19^th century (1800s) the church schools mutated into the public schools (our elite senior independent schools) of today.  The roots of schooling were predominantly educational, albeit a narrower, deeper and predominantly religious education than we receive today.  Schools were founded as places of education to provide future leaders of society.

Elementary schools started to grow throughout the 19^th century but only the rich could afford not to have their children at home working.  In late Victorian times there was increased political will to extract all children from the home environment; from their toil and labour and to universally educate the nation.  By 1893 elementary education (primary education) was compulsory to 11.  There were two driving forces behind this: 1) to extract children from the labour of the home and 2) to create a more literate (better educated) society and meet the burgeoning needs of industry.

The Fisher act of 1918 raised the school leaving age to 14.  The Butler act of 1944 paved the way for the tripartite model of secondary education:  grammar schools, secondary moderns and technical colleges.  As I write this, it is fascinating to be reading The Librarian by Salley Vickers, set in the late 1950s, filled with talk of the local grammar.   Butler aspired to raise the school leaving age to 16 though that did not become universal until the 1970s.

Schools were expanded and designed to meet the needs of a rapidly growing population, the fast changing economy and to educate children, ready for them to join adult society.  Until the 1980s, there was a lot of education which happened outside school – the majority of households had a single income, so there was frequently a parent (normally Mum) at home.  Many more people were active churchgoers, with Sunday schools and Christianity still a significant part of education well into the 1980s.  So, for the first 100 years of schooling there was invariably an adult carer based at home and a lot of ancillary education and strength of local community outside school.

If I was writing this piece at any point up until 1980, I would suggest the definition of a school was clearer then and that we could probably agree that a school is a place where children go to be educated.  So school and education were inextricably linked.  Of course, this could be my rose-tinted nostalgia for simpler times, for stronger local communities and for a slightly less divided society with a gap, but a smaller gap between rich and poor.   I think my opinion here is very open to counter-argument.

I believe that the current closure of schools due to the required measures to protect our NHS and save lives during the COVID-19 pandemic, opens up the rituals of schooling, parenting and society to greater scrutiny than we have previously cared to (collectively) explore.  Questions about the logic of GCSE exams across a broad range of disciplines at 16, when education is now mandatory until 18 will – rightly – come to the fore.  Questions about tutoring, about flexible working, flexible living, about the efficiency (or inefficiency) of education, about the use of technology, about virtual lessons, about personalised learning, about what exactly should a school, a parent, a child, an education system be in the 2020s and beyond. 

My questions are not just about the flip flop, 5 year, short-termist, political system induced curriculum or pedagogical thinking, about exams or teacher assessment, about inclusivity or selection, about community or freedom of choice; my questions are deeper:  how and why did we end up here and what, if anything, should we do about it?

While an awful lot of education occurs inside the school gates, I believe the COVID-19 school closure exposes the mirage that a school is a place especially designed for education.  It exposes and makes explicit that schools primarily exist to enable the economy and adult society to function.  It also exposes the huge importance of schools as social care institutes. 

At the moment schools are only open for the children of key healthcare workers in the frontline of the COVID-19 pandemic.  This is enabling essential, live-saving, healthcare to happen. Nothing else matters right now.   In ‘normal’ circumstances school is open for all children enabling their parents or carers to go to work, or to work from home: to enable the economy and society to function in the only way we know how.

At the moment schools are also open for the most vunerable in society.  Schools are open, as they are normally on every school day or every school week of the school year to look after, to protect and to care for those who may not be cared for very well at home, or whose parents and carers may find caring for children too much or too challenging due to illness or disability, or to care for SEND children where the school system is better equipped to meet those children’s needs than the home environment – however loving and supportive – can be.

Meanwhile most children are at home.  Not at school.  They are not being home schooled.  A home is not a school.  They may be being home educated – by a combination of an online or virtual teacher and a supportive parent or carer at home.  They may not be.  They (and their parents) may choose to do very little study over the next few weeks and months, they may not establish a routine or a timetable.  They may ignore daily bombardment from Google classroom or Microsoft teams.  They may tell those Twinkl worksheets to piss right off.  They may miss out on 3 months of formal education.  They may not read or write or talk very much.  This may be a travesty.  It may not. 

Some may talk a lot – multi-generation talk a lot.  They may watch a never-ending stream of documentaries, BBC teach clips, specialist BBC education programmes, they may seek out educational videos online, they may search and trawl the internet, they may read twenty books.  They may be way better educated in those three months than any amount of specific, prescriptive, timetabled, online tasks can educate them.

Teachers (I know this because I feel it sometimes) may be extremely worried about the gaps which grow in children’s cognitive and intellectual armoury over the coming weeks; just as little Billy’s blessed drum lesson always seem to fall in MY FUCKING SCIENCE LESSON which is clearly way more important than the NOISY SHIT ARSE DRUMS.  Or Mildred’s persistent absence due to bloody CHOIR rehearsals for the Christmas concert.  Or term always starting on a Wednesday, meaning that 7y2 always miss two science lessons each term relative to 7z2 who have their lessons on Wednesday and Thursdays making me, the 7y2 teacher, look really bad because I am so immersed in the minutiae of pupil progress tracking and being measured on the children’s assessment scores and my curriculum is full to bursting and my subject IS WAY MORE IMPORTANT than your ART or your LANGUAGES or your la di fucking da DRAMA. 

You see what I’m saying?  Children miss stuff at school all the time.  When they miss something they are generally gaining something else.  When they are at school for 14 LONG YEARS did that drum lesson really matter?  Did those 3 months during those dark COVID-19 times: learning to cook, inventing garden games and talking to Mum and Dad about all their favourite books, experiences and childhood memories, about history, about – wow – is that Venus in the sky?  Did they really matter?  Did they really miss out?

Many teachers – understandably – have a slightly over-inflated sense of how important they are in sculpting future lives.  Sure, there will be the 10 – 30% of children who light up in your lessons, or your subject, who you enthuse, inspire and that incandescent joy and purpose of teaching radiates the room.  There will be the 5-10% of children who go on to choose your subject for GCSE, or A level, or degree, or career because of YOU.  And there will be, however shit hot a teacher you are, 20 – 30% who hate you, your subject or the poxy school system you are obliged to teach in.  So there are between 40% and 70% in your classroom who will forget you, forget most of your subject and can’t freakin’ wait for the holding zoo of schooling to release them into the wild, shiny freedom that is adult life!

I am veering into describing children, teachers, education, culture and society now which are the subjects of subsequent COVID-19 school closure inspired thought pieces.  Much has already been spoken about school closures leading to a widening of the gap.  The gap has always existed.  It will always exist.  While it shouldn’t exist in the ideal world, it does.  This doesn’t mean we shouldn’t do anything about it.  Many are writing and working their socks off to close the gap.  To create a more equal set of education attainment figures, we need to create a more equal society and if we want to do that we need actively punish or de-privilege the upper quartile of society and “raise the standards” of the lower quartile of socioeconomic backgrounds.  Tricky.  As Harry G. Frankfurt says in his little book “On inequality” our focus should be on eliminating poverty not on creating equality.  Equality of wealth is an unattainable utopia.  Affluence does not, of course, equate to academic intellect or capability but it helps.

While schools’ priorities are rooted in education with a gradual evolution towards economy enabling and social care functionality over time, another significant change of the last 30+ years is the move towards measuring school education.  There were grades, qualifications and university entry requirements before that but school league tables and school data comparing pupil attainment, progress, teachers and schools themselves have shifted the concept of “an education” (a foundational, personally enriching, opportunity increasing, horizon broadening, society enabling construct) to “education” (a measureable thing in itself). 

This has completely shifted the emphasis on schools from being individual and societal enablers to being a measurable entity obsessed with outcomes.  So now we have nine hundred trillion terabytes of school data based on outcomes at 11, 16 and 18.  This has completely devalued, in my opinion, the cultural infusion, the off piste meander, the creative curriculum and the foundational, nebulous but life-affirming nature of “an education” and shifted school education towards a systematic measurement of acquired knowledge.  So a great teacher, or a great school is no longer a person or an establishment which develops someone’s mind, their ability to think, broadens their horizons, identifies talent or enhances opportunity they exist purely to get them the grade, to meet the target, to provide an easily measureable outcome. 

There is now an obsession with evidenced based education or research informed education but much of the measureable outcomes of the research into improved curricula or teaching methods are about increased attainment in exams, tests or assessments at a specific age, rather than any longitudinal studies deep into adulthood.  I think research and evidence have an enormous place in improving education, but research and evidence into improving educational outcomes basically improves educational approaches towards “teaching to the test.”  This is all driven by short-termist electioneering and political ideology.   A government can say it has improved education but what it actually means is that it has improved educational outcomes.  The two are not necessarily the same.

The improvement of educational outcomes basically means more measurement of education and powers our obsession with an exam orientated education system in our schools.  I will explore this more in detail in my future essays on what is education and what are exams?

So where does this leave us?  It leaves me with lots more to ponder.

It leaves me concluding that a school’s primary aim is still to provide all children with an education.  What that actually means is open to scrutiny and much greater analysis.  Moreover, this exploration of what a school actually is highlights that schools have become pre-occupied with measured outcomes and that as wider communities and wider influences over ‘the child’ (family, parents, religion) have perhaps diminished over the last four or five decades a school as a social care hub, or childcare centre rather than an educational establishment has gained greater traction.

Perhaps, more than anything, a school is an institution that enables the rest of adult society to function.  And if that is the honest, primary function of a school then I think we could design and think about what happens inside them quite differently.  Understandably there is very little political will or time to do this now, or in the foreseeable future – but that shouldn’t stop those of us who like to think deeply about schools, education, teaching and curriculum from doing so should it?

There is much that happens within schools (currently, when not closed) which warrants further introspection, reflection and evaluation but for now I’m going to leave you with my three final thoughts on schools:

1. They are a modern day, cultural rite of passage: much maligned, misunderstood and sometimes misappropriated too.

• Schools “make” about 30% of people, “break” maybe 10% of people and for the other 60% are just a holding zoo that enables adult society to function.

• Schools are all about relationships and connectivity.  Take the relationships away, separate the teachers from the children and there is no school.  And that makes me a little bit sad right now.

Next:

What is a teacher?

I am not just a teacher: an introduction to essays and thought experiments catalysed by the COVID-19 pandemic.

by Toby Payne-Cook

The UK government’s response to the global COVID-19 pandemic is triggering enormous – hopefully temporary – economic and social change to all our lives. 

Our freedom and culture are becoming unrecognisably transformed, shaking up our routines, rituals, purpose, identity, communities, employment, health and mood.  This is not normal.  Normal has been taken away.  This will affect all of us in very different ways and it will be tougher physically and mentally for some than others. 

I am a teacher and a gregarious, highly socialised extravert.  My feelings of having the spontaneity of human contact; of human energy taken from me are quite dark.  I have a job to do online and perhaps on rota in school too.  But it certainly isn’t why I chose to do the job. 

The only reason I teach is to make connections with people, to share my knowledge and experience and to bounce ideas around, to revel in that awesome collective force of humanity in all its conflicted glory, love and selfishness.

I am not just a teacher.  I am a Dad.  My children are growing up in a privileged (but I hope, open-minded, egalitarian and gracious) family and section of society, but they are children of the 21^st century:  over-indulged, over entertained, over socialised and over-connected (those online connections are powerful & fortuitous now). They are growing up in a world of celebration and reward; of glitz and sheen.  Their middle class, affluent lives have been full of cultural and social enrichment; of “what are we doing today?” or “not another (fucking) National Trust garden and tea room?”.  They have not had time set aside to find their inner selves, to drift aimlessly around town or countryside, to fire their imaginations; they have not endured endless hours of boring, sedentary sermons or droning, uninspiring lessons; or of books on candlelit evenings.  [Boredom is good for the mind].   While Netflix, social media and online gaming are going to suddenly seem like society enhancing innovations, our adolescent kids with their sport; their parties; their school culture; their break times; their high street menace; their self-conscious connectedness to their peers and their complete aversion to “quality” family time are going to make this indefinite period of isolation and social distancing very hard for them.  Maybe they will find out the hard way that boredom is good for the mind.

I am not just a teacher.  I am a husband.  My wife is going to find this hard too.  She loves being busy, being active; playing hockey, tennis (still a possibility?); of local sports club culture; of flitting around our lovely village chatting to anyone who passes by; of supporting children as a teaching assistant at the village primary school.  She loves me but not when I’m around all the time!!  We will adjust and adapt and we will enjoy cooking for each other more, enjoy the garden, enjoy walking the dogs in open countryside away from other people, and enjoy comfortable silences reading books, watching TV and working in different parts of the house.

I am not just a teacher.  I am a son.   Despite her off the scale gregariousness my 78 year old Mum, a widow of 31 years, is used to isolation.  She lives in a ramshackle old farm house in North Devon, in a tiny hamlet, 1 mile from a tiny village, 5 miles from the nearest tiny little town (Great Torrington).  She was supposed to have a big operation on Monday in Oxford, near my sister.   It was pulled at the last minute for obvious reasons.  She has been waiting for this operation for some time.  We have no idea when it will come.  She is scared and she is perpetually lonely.  Unfortunately the Daily Mail and 24 hour news about Harry and Meghan are her best friends.  She is with my sister and her family in Buckingham.  We need to convince her to get back down to her normal isolated existence in Devon as soon as possible.  Obviously I am worried about her.  Ironically, as isolation is the norm for her, she is now – I think – rather petrified of long-term isolation.  She lives for seeing her grand children and being part of the hustle and bustle of our (former) lives.

I am not just a teacher.  I am a nephew-in-law.  I’m seriously fortunate to be a nephew in law, as my wife’s Aunt was a successful business woman in the advertising industry.  She, 78, and her husband, 84, are affluent, generous, recently frail and vulnerable.  They have a wonderful second home in beautiful, isolated, coastal south Pembrokeshire, West Wales.  They can’t get there as they want to be near to (but distanced from) trusted medics and friends in East Sussex.  So, we as a family, are self-isolating down in their second house, away from our social and community network but still online with Wi-fi (what a wonderful invention that turns out to be – imagine this crisis just 20 years ago; 30 years ago; 50 years ago…).  Staring at the sea and walking on an empty beach makes self-isolation rather easy.  It also inspires thinking and writing.

My Aunt-in-law is the most social and restless person I know.  Her whole life has been based on being busy.  Endless travel, holidays, cultural and social events, charity committees and dinners, volunteering, a retired advertising executive, a former nurse too.  She is wonderful and has been fighting cancer for 14 years with an almost inconceivable energy.  She has spent her life running from herself.  So, now, she is vulnerable.  She never had kids.  She has her husband.  He finds a sedentary home, book and garden based existence easier to come to terms with.   Everything that drives her has been taken from her.  We will call her twice or thrice daily.   What else can we do?  The response to the COVID-19 pandemic risks causing a far greater secondary mental health pandemic.   We need to start hearing some government guidance on this too, I think.

I am not just a teacher.  I am a brother too.  My late father’s family is large and complex.  My eldest half sibling is nearly 76.  Suddenly the good old-fashioned telephone seems like a wonderful invention.  It is good to talk. x

I am not just a teacher.  I was a scientist.  (I am a scientist).  I have an analytical mind.  I am curious.  I am interested in philosophy, social history and the human condition.  I also love large, empty, outdoor spaces;  I love raw, undiluted nature untouched by humans (except for the gently trodden path through it); coastal walking: looking, seeing, feeling, dreaming, thinking.  I can still have all that through this unsettling, society rattling time.  I am lucky.  Despite my extraversion, I also love my own company, my own thoughts, of wallowing in the canyons of my mind; of dreaming up a better world; of creating an edutopia:  a third way in education; a bottom up approach to science education.  These thoughts and ideas are bubbling up in many minds as a consequence of many of the government responses to the devastating COVID-19 pandemic.   Now is probably not the time to criticise and unpick our previous (as of only 1 week ago) status quo, but time alone and time at home is bound to trigger reflection in many of us.

I am not just a teacher.  I am a reader.  I am an amateur researcher.  I am an amateur polymathic generalist.   I will channel this part of me into reading around my subject and future topics I will be teaching (online, or in school) – I will deepen and broaden my subject (and inter-connected subject)  knowledge.  It will be nice to have the time to do this.  While teaching is a skill, some say an art; a great teacher has great knowledge – not just two pages ahead in the text book but a wealth of cultural and historical contextual knowledge relating to their subject (some call this the hinterland)…now is the time to indulge your inner cultural hinterland teachers!

I am not just a teacher.  I am a writer.  I am a very amateur philosophical thinker.  And this is why I am writing now.  This is the introduction to my pending set of essays catalysed by the COVID-19 pandemic.  Over the coming days and weeks I intend to write essays (or exploratory thought pieces) titled:

1. What is a school?
2. What is a teacher?
3. What is a child?
4. What is a parent?
5. What is an exam?
6. What is education?
7. What is culture?
8. What is society?
9. What is the economy?
10. What is work?
11. What is freedom?

As anyone who attended the last, great edu-event for some time – #BrewEdNorthLondon just last Saturday – only a week ago in conventional time but and edu-lifetime ago in terms of school leadership, purpose and planning – will know I am a “Yellow” communicator, getting my energy predominantly from others and far more people-orientated than task-orientated in my approach to work and life.  This means I am not a completer/finisher.  I am an energetic ideas person.  I flit, I enthuse, I fuck off.  This means that I am not likely to complete my list of essays above (nor the book I am writing about decisions, nor any other shitting project which springs into my mind, nor the box-tick planning I’ve been asked to do for online teaching in the summer term) but hey, that is what I intend to do.  At the moment. 

Obviously my insight and perspectives as a teacher of seven years will be all over the essays, but so will my insights as a primary school governor of 4 years, a parent of 17 years, a husband of 20 years, a son of 47 years, a scientist of 17 years and as an obtuse, argumentative, provocative, sceptical and sometimes cynical non-conformist for longer than I care to remember.  They will challenge my thinking and hopefully yours too.  I hope you get something from them.  They will not be right.  But they won’t be wrong either.  Once, and if, I’ve written them I may get back to work on creating my edutopia.

Finally, I am not just a teacher.  I am a human.  A silly, west country bred human with a sense of the ridiculous.  I like to laugh and be ridiculous.  I think that is going to be important in the coming weeks and months.  I think TikTok videos, wurzels’ pastiche from bedroom windows or balconies and some black humour may just get us through this.  Singing badly online is the immediate future.  Please look after yourselves, your loved ones and your communities (at a distance).  Please follow government or public health England (PHE) advice.  But please don’t take yourself or this wonderful – yes wonderful – life too seriously!  Laughter may just get us through.

Freedom, isolation and privilege by Toby Payne-Cook

The unprecedented (peacetime) economic and social impact of the COVID-19 virus has only just begun.  These are deeply unsettling and uncertain times for all of us, to varying degrees, on many fronts. 

For me personally, the response to this pandemic [the closed schools, the cancelled exams, the cancelled national and international events, the decimated travel and leisure industry; the irreparable malaise on the high street; the cleaner air; the social and celebratory gatherings on indefinite hold; the strengthening of local communities; the tightening of the family unit] stirs the neurons and brain chemicals of my meandering, existentialist and philosophical mind.  This could lead to a lot of thought experiments.  And a lot of blog posts.  Sorry.

We do not know exactly what in our economic, educational and healthcare systems will irreversibly change after this pandemic has passed but we do know that this extended period of uncertainty and national segregation provides us with an unintended period of reflection.  A pause.  A period of reflection where quietly supressed questions may come to the fore, questions like, “What is a school?”,  “What is a school’s primary purpose?”  “Do we really need exams?”  “What is the most effective medium or place for learning; for education?”  “What is education for?”  “What should everybody learn, when and where should they learn it?”  “What do we really need?”  “What makes us happy?”  “Why have we given the global free market economy such a free reign over the last half-century?”  “Why are we so surprised this pandemic has happened?”  “What is freedom?”  “What is social responsibility?”  “Does this crisis provide us with a clearer path forward through the climate crisis?”  “Does this crisis accelerate our pathway towards universal basic income?”  “Will this crisis irreversibly change our culture?” and finally, “Do the advantages of the internet & the smartphone now greatly outweigh the disadvantages?”

Back in early January, I wrote a blog titled “Preservers, Disrupters and Dreamers” about my internal conflict between preserving the status quo, disrupting the system and hiding from mainstream society in a perpetually dreamy, philosophical and literary state.  Well, how quickly things change:  there is no status quo to preserve (everything is up in the air), the virus has well and truly disrupted the system in an almost completely unforeseen manner so I am left with only my favoured dreamy state for solace and contemplation.  For this I am fortunate.  My interest in books, ideas, philosophy and a potent mix of analytical and creative thinking are symbiotic with the enforced isolation, social distancing, school closures and simpler lifestyle this crisis demands. 

Many are so rooted in our relentless 24/7 culture of entertainment, of instant gratification, of frequent cheap travel, of the modern urban existence and of busy social lives (both personally and professionally) that there is a real risk of a secondary mental health pandemic.  My beloved 78 year old Aunt in law is feeling this.  She is relentlessly restless; her whole world built upon being busy, being social, never ever being in one place for more than 10 days.  She is deeply shaken by this.  She has a lovely husband of 84 but will still feel lonely.  We will call her daily, twice daily, we will keep her spirits up but there is a real risk that her psychology will consume her.  Perhaps half the population are like this?  We have routines, rituals and perceived freedoms taken from us that risk rattling our mental states to the core.  Singing online, calling up old friends and relatives, singing from balconies, humour – sometimes black humour – and idiots singing wurzel songs from bedroom windows will all help to raise our spirits but ultimately freedom is a state of mind, so we have to dig deep to find out how to free our minds, to let them wander and imagine, to let them dream and think creatively, to read, to write and to play games, to draw, to paint, to learn an instrument and –  yes  – to make inane TikTok videos.

Only last Saturday – almost a lifetime of news away – did I attend my first #BrewEd gathering, the brilliantly organised #BrewEdNorthLondon, full of lovely people with an inclusivity theme.  I think I fitted in, I think I offered something, I know I loved participating, listening and learning but everyone else there was much more transparently driven by the social care, social justice, the more egalitarian, more inclusive, the less privileged elements of school and education as a force for good, a force for improving society.  I was humbled by this, working as I do in an independent prep school and teaching Science in KS2 and KS3.  The awesome Penny Rabiger (@Penny_Ten) got us all to check our privilege, and I am – undoubtedly – a privileged, affluent, white, middle-aged man.  I was born with a pewter spoon in my mouth and my kids through marriage have been born with silver spoons in theirs.  But privilege is not something we can eradicate:  I cannot help that MY Dad’s sperm met MY Mum’s egg; I cannot help that I was sent to private schools; I cannot help that I went on to university riding a tide of social engineering and intellectual curiosity; I cannot help that I fell in love with chemistry and was influenced by working for three huge great whopping multinational corporations.  I CAN help that I choose to teach in an independent prep school.  If universal middle schools existed in our educational system I would jump.  I may jump anyway.  I may have to.  Or I may just keep on keeping on, creating a fantasy edutopia in my mind and waiting for someone else to share my eureka moment and say, “Hey Toby, you’ve got this.  Your time has come, let’s redesign this clunky beast of an education system and mould it in your image!”   That time may come sooner than anticipated in a post COVID world.  But that is the subject of a future blog(s).

So we can’t un-invent privilege (but we can check it) just as we can’t uninvent electricity and all its consequences.  We can’t uninvent the motor car.  We can’t uninvent money, nor the desire for it.  But we can – it seems – uninvent freedom.   We have to temporarily reduce freedom to secure hospital care for those who most need it, to protect the vulnerable and to curtail this blessed, tiny yet mighty little virus thing.

Freedom is a curious concept.  Rousseau said that, “Man is born free yet everywhere he is in chains.”  We’re not really free.  We are socially conditioned onto an economically driven path through life.  A few of us renounce that economically driven path and stick to an older, more tried and tested, spiritually or morally guided path but we are all – to varying degrees – seduced by the trappings of economics.  We need money to live, we need money for social status and we need money for most forms of modern leisure activity.  So we are not really free because there are numerous unwritten conventions to how we live our lives and how we conform to society.  In post war, predominantly affluent, Western societies we have become richer and that has bought us more (perceived) freedom.   

As GCSE & A level exams being cancelled this summer is a hot and complex topic for schools and Y11 and Y13 students to grapple with, let’s go back to 1951 when A levels and O levels were first introduced.  Back then exams were entry tests for university courses or for sixth form courses.  They weren’t the modern clunking beast of league tables, school data, comparative data, measurement of learning or whatever they have become.  They mattered but they weren’t the huge cultural phenomenon they are today.  There probably weren’t pictures of smiling kids and their certificates on the front page of the Daily Mail. 

What would the summer after those exams have been like for those students?  Full of work on farms, in fields, in factories, in pubs and in cafés.  There may have been an end of year party, one or two perhaps.  But there wouldn’t have been Reading festival or Glastonbury; a week in Ibiza or Ayia Napa with your mates; a summer of parties; there wouldn’t have been sexual freedom; of vodka red bull or mild narcotics.  There wouldn’t have been TV, Netflix, Fortnite, Instagram, Snapchat or TikTok.  No gym, no multiplex, probably no car or no mates with a car either.  No Costa, no café in the basement philosophy section of Waterstones, not even any rock and roll (quite yet). 

I don’t mean to be a retrograde luddite, but school was just something you did, work was something that happened after school, holidays were still largely multi-generational for one week a year to a thriving British Seaside resort, if you were lucky.   Our pleasure seeking, consumer culture had not really kicked off.  Life was undoubtedly harder work but maybe not harder, because there was less freedom, therefore less choice, therefore greater acceptance of the status quo.   

Since the early 1950s our culture has been transformed.  I – as with many readers – have greatly benefitted from this.  The contraceptive pill, rock and roll music, cheap flights, the ubiquity of the motor car, pubs, clubs, bars, global cuisine, television and music festivals – especially music festivals – have greatly enriched my life and my faith in the collective seething mass of humanity.  Nowhere have I felt more a part of humanity than standing in a field in Somerset with 100,000 others, collectively worshipping in the euphoria of live music.  I am so sad for Glastonbury that they have had to cancel their 50^th birthday party.  I am sad for football fans looking forward to the Euro 2020; sad for our culturally rich, diverse and predominantly inspirational celebration of human determination and sportsmanship that is the Olympic games and I am sad for all those planning parties, weddings and smaller gatherings which will have to be put on hold.

My son in Year 12 had the most ridiculous celebration of post GCSE life last summer which this year’s cohort may not have.  My daughter in year 10 is looking forward to the climax of all she finds challenging, boring and exciting in school next year.  My kids have the most wonderful freedoms and opportunities in their privileged schooling.  They are the over entertained and sometimes trophy, project parented generation.  They are wonderful people but lest us not forget that all they see, all they know is on a plate; taken for granted.  Their lives are full of consumerist, cultural adornments. 

We all need something to look forward to: a gig, a cinema trip, a holiday, a music festival; cheap hostel hopping around Europe.  I will be gutted if the two festivals I plan to go this summer are cancelled.  But this relentless entertainment, or escape from the day to day is no way to live.  If our lives are driven by FOMO, or supercharged by materialism when THIS happens; this huge, society shaking pandemic comes for us we will feel like it is the end of the world.  There will be hardship, illness and loss but in the most part there will be a brief (for several months) sacrifice of our freedom.

This is where I feel most privileged.  While I am the product of social elitism, while I am an affluent, white middle class, middle aged man my childhood was isolated, bucolic and blissful.  Simple too.  No holidays abroad.  Simple food.  Old bangers for the family car.  For whatever reason my parents sacrificed all other creature comforts to privately educate me – I have no idea why but they did because it was done to them beforehand; it was the culture bestowed upon them.  I grew up in rural, sleepy North Devon, most of my school friends over 100 miles away.   I grew up in fields, at the foot of buzzing hedgerows.  I grew up in the outdoors, roaming mostly alone.  I grew up appreciating nature and my part in it.  I lost my Dad at 16.  I understand what it feels like to have a parent taken from you.  I’ve seen suffering, I’ve felt loss.   I was privileged because I found myself early in life.  My independence, my imagination, my nature inspired curiosity were shaped by my early childhood experience. 

Since my mid thirties, (I’m 47 now), I’ve discovered a love of reading, a fascination with the human condition, with philosophy and with writing.  Despite my love of live music; of pubs and social gatherings, of watching my kids play sport being temporarily taken from me, I’m quite happy with a book; a word processor; in my garden; playing games and talking with my immediate family, and walking in our green, pleasant land.  I’m lucky.  I’m privileged.  Freedom is a state of mind.  

This difficult episode in our lives will challenge us in many different ways but I hope that it teaches us all to appreciate the simple things in life, to build our happy place around books, gardens, nature, love and true friendship rather than a constant quest for pleasure seeking, or fear of missing out.

Finally we have each other.  Perhaps the greatest irony of all this is that our global connectivity both caused this pandemic and it will help us to get through it in a positive frame of mind. 

Take care everyone.

Next:  What is school for?

On Subject Knowledge.

This week’s blog is on the subject of subject knowledge, triggered by a Tweet from Michael Tidd (@MichaelT1979) and various ongoing threads in the #edutwittersphere.

There are many greater knowledge theorists than me out there, so this is not a blog post about powerful knowledge, substantive knowledge, disciplinary knowledge, knowledge rich curriculum design or any of that other important but overly jargonistic eduzeitgeisty stuff.  It is – primarily – about the importance, or not, of the subject knowledge of teachers in primary schools.

Now, first let me caveat everything that follows.  When I write about teaching and education, I write with a Utopia in mind, a utopia which cannot – probably – ever exist in a country pre-occupied with economic growth as a measure of its success and importance, pre-occupied with short-termist political point scoring and pre-occupied (as are most modern economies) with comparing ourselves with others based upon short-termist, easily measurable (and frequently meaningless in the greater scheme of things) data.  Also, I write cognisant of the many brilliant, dedicated, exceptionally hard working teachers out there in all sectors and phases whose practice may be stifled or hindered by the educational system we work in, or whose practice is a subconscious victim of the system they grew up in, were trained in or now work and lead in.  Ultimately, we have to conform to the whims of our paymasters, our SLT, Ofsted and our beloved DfE if we want to work in education.

A couple of other matters:  1) Subject knowledge, or lack thereof, is not just an issue in primary schools.  It is a massive issue in secondary schools where the recruitment and retention of science and maths specialists – in particular – presents significant challenge for the profession.  In my very personal experience being a highly knowledgeable teacher of science is not the same as being a highly pedagogically skilled teacher of science.  Those who are both deeply learn-ed about their subject specialism and awesomely talented in the pedagogy of their subject are rare gems indeed and the profession must find a way of rewarding these people AND keeping them in the CLASSROOM.   Being able to teach chemistry well because you have deep (theoretical) knowledge does not mean you – automatically – will be able to teach physics well.  Teaching physics may put off a great chemistry teacher, just as teaching RE, Art, Music, PE or Science might put off a primary teacher.

2)  I teach Science to children from Year 5 – 8 in an independent prep school with children from age 3 – 13.  The prep school sector is similar to the middle school sector in that secondary subject specialists teach in Year 7 & 8 and in years 5 & 6 there is a fusion of the primary and secondary model.   If there were a national middle school system from Year 5 – 9 introduced tomorrow, I would dive in like a shot.  The cliff edge transition from nurturing classroom generalist to subject specialist from primary to secondary is clearly bonkers. 

I chose to teach 9 -13 year olds to avoid the relentless, narrow, overly specialised treadmill of exam focussed curricula in secondary.  I chose not to teach in a primary school because I know that I am not best placed to teach RE, English, Music, Art or French with any great subject expertise or talent (and I like teaching year 7 & 8).    My ideal teaching job would probably be two days a week in Year 5 and two days a week teaching post graduates!  Cut out the holding zoo of those adolescent, rebellious exam years! (I have three adolescent children aged 13, 14 and 17 before you castigate me for this throwaway comment).

Prior to Michael’s tweet, I have spent a lot of time thinking about this.  And I am working on developing a bottom up approach to science education from 7 – 14 versus the clunky top down system (whether academia or employment focussed) we live in today.  I will be speaking about this at #BrewEdNorthLondon on 14^th March in a talk titled, “Re-imagining the Science Curriculum” and I will keep talking and writing about it for a good many months and years to come, I’m sure!  Some of my ideas are ill-formed little experimental nuggets in my mind at present; while I may touch on them here, they require greater exploration and explanation elsewhere.

So let’s return to subject knowledge before I go off on one about science in primary schools.

I think there are five forms of subject knowledge that a teacher can have:

1. Subject content knowledge.
2. Subject pedagogical knowledge.
3. Subject disciplinary knowledge.
4. Subject inter-disciplinary knowledge.
5. Subject linked cultural, philosophical & ethical knowledge.

Number 1 is easy.  All teachers have this for everything they are asked to teach.  And if they don’t have it, they should be sent on CPD to re-learn it, or shouldn’t be asked to teach that subject.  This is the classic “stay two pages ahead of the kids in the textbook” and you’ll be fine.  This is knowledge of the precise knowledge of the content you are asked to teach in your curriculum.  This is knowledge of exam specifications, of summative assessment specifications.  This is memorising and understanding the course content as presented in text books or those lovely rainforests full of CGP study guides on the shelves of WHSmith.

Personally, as a former materials scientist (physical chemist) in the pharmaceutical industry, a formulation & product development scientist specialising in colloids (physical chemist) in the agrochemical industry and a mass spectrometrist (analytical chemist) in pharma with 17 years experience in total, I sometimes find number 1 rather challenging.  Our desire as educators to make complex science make sense to young people is admirable, but our desire to make complex science age relevant and testable basically means that we inculcate a load of misconceptions at best, outright lies at worst, just to make our wonderful, awe inspiring subject testable at 11, 14, 16, 18 and even at 21 or 22. 

Yes, of course we need to teach some simple science (prior knowledge) to hook further, more complex stuff on to in the future and of course we can’t teach the concepts of thermodynamics, entropy and that glasses are super-cooled liquids and not solids at all to 9 year olds but why oh why do we have to teach so much abridged, overly simplified science to children so young?  As a former scientist my subject content knowledge is corrupted by knowing more and more about less and less (as all experts do) and by being an applied scientist who knows that scientists, engineers and technologists in industry (where there are a lot more than in academia) do a lot more maths, art, reading, history and coffee drinking than they do science. 

As a former scientist, I also know that it’s not what you know that matters but knowing who to ask – i.e. knowing who knows more than you, hunting them down, chatting to them (over lots of coffee) and learning faster than you ever could when someone was standing in front of you subliminally saying, “Just learn this complex shit, OK?  Even though you don’t want to and don’t care, just learn it.  PLEEEAAASE?”

Number 2, subject pedagogical knowledge is teaching.  It is hard.  There are many people with much more knowledge of many subjects than many teachers.  But they couldn’t teach them.  Subject pedagogical knowledge is knowing how to pitch the subject content, how to explain it to 6 year olds, 9 year olds, 11 year olds, 14 year olds, 16 year olds, 18 year olds, 24 year olds.  Knowing how much stuff you can get through in a lesson, and – if you have setting – knowing how much you can get through with a set 1 Vs a nurture group.  Knowing when to go deeper, faster, slower, shallower; knowing when to move on and when not to move on. Knowing when to repeat a lesson.  And again.  Knowing when never to teach that lesson again!  The pedagogies, lesson structures and teaching gimmicks are different for different subjects.  Under the age of 8, I’m fairly happy with the idea that if you are a great teacher of English you can probably teach Maths, History, Art or Science reasonably well but this “teacher of children” argument becomes problematic over the age of 9.  The structure, pace, techniques, noise levels, amount of independent Vs collaborative, directly instructive Vs discussion Vs group work Vs enquiry based learning will and should vary greatly between Maths, Art, English, History, Science, Drama and Music lessons.  So a skilled teacher in science pedagogy may not be a skilled teacher in art pedagogy or history pedagogy or maths pedagogy.  They can probably acquire this skill with practice, time and desire. 

Number 3, subject disciplinary knowledge, is rare in Science in primary schools.  Probably rare in maths too.   There aren’t many graduates in maths or the sciences who think, “Having grappled with this complex, specialised shit for years and finally begun to master it, I know, I’ll go and teach kids who – mostly – find it really challenging in secondary” instead of becoming a scientist, engineer, accountant, auditor, city trader, banker, researcher, computer programmer, science writer or communicator let alone become a primary school teacher. 

And next controversial statement:  I don’t even think many science graduates have particularly deep disciplinary knowledge.  Science degrees are predominantly passing on the immense volume of knowledge amassed over the last 500 years, especially the last 100, creaking under the weight of substantive factual and conceptual knowledge.  Most of the practical work is still illustrative and not investigative (i.e. chemistry undergraduates are learning how to assemble apparatus, how to follow instructions, how to carry out experiments but not how to plan them, or how to interpret data to enable scientific decision making).  That either comes in industry or on postgraduate degrees.  So, even at university, undergraduate students are still learning science rather than learning how to be a scientist.

So I think disciplinary knowledge is useful to the teacher but not essential.  It can give you extra gravitas with students, parents and other teachers but in our very content heavy curricula in geography and the sciences, I’m not sure there is huge benefit in huge swathes of disciplinary knowledge, routinely, in the classroom.  However, in the ideal world, there could be a lot more.  Having scientists guiding pupils in investigative work, or journalists and writers developing writers, or artists teaching art can only be a good thing?  Can’t it?  One of the rarely discussed but most important reasons – I suspect – that it is so hard to persuade real practicing scientists, engineers, artists, musicians, mathematicians, writers etc into the classroom  (on a permanent basis) is their disenfranchisement with the over reliance on examined knowledge, their frustration that their wonderful knowledge and skills rich subject is compressed and distorted into a written exam specification.

When I first started teaching aged 40, I mistakenly thought it was my job to teach everyone to think like a scientist; to ultimately become a scientist, engineer, doctor, dentist or vet.  I still think it is part of my job to inspire interest and future purpose in the sciences; to identify and encourage talented scientific thinkers.  So I thought disciplinary knowledge, the knowledge of how to be a scientist, of how scientific discoveries are developed and of how to think like a scientist was most important.  It is still important but I think it is more important, certainly for those under 14, to gain deeper cultural insight into the importance of science to society and the development of human civilisation.  I also think teaching children to be bullshit detectors via the medium of science is important – increasing their scientific literacy – to realise that it is advertising’s job to sell stuff, not to tell the scientific truth; and that it is the media’s job to sell newspapers or TV programmes, which may sometimes involve scientific accuracy but frequently drowns in sensationalist, fabricated hyperbole.

Which brings me on to number 4:  Subject inter-disciplinary knowledge.  Now this is arguably the most controversial and most important form of subject knowledge for primary school teachers.  Much scorn has been poured on cross curricula topic work in the foundation subjects within primary.  Some of it is fair.  The most famous examples are the Ancient Greeks or the Romans.  History is obviously the dominant subject in such a topic, which can bulldoze over the emphasis on Geography, Science, Maths, Art and Philosophy.  Art ends up as a craft activity to make a shield that cannot really be described as art; Geography is distilled into map work with opportunities missed to explore the importance of geological features to the development of empires (rivers, ports, harbours, transport, resources, population, climate).  And the pioneering mathematicians and philosophers of Ancient Greece are given short shrift.  English, maths and science lessons are not sufficiently integrated with the topic and do not make as much of the Pythagoreans, Democritus, Aristotle, Eratosthenes, Archimedes and Ptolemy as they could.  Equally in Maths, much is made of Roman numerals but how much time is dedicated to their absence of zero and its later discovery in the Arabic world; how much is made of the pioneering Babylonian number system based upon 12 and 60?  And the history of time measurement? 

Subject specialisation has its place at A level and degree level but it can all become rather confusing when teachers are asked to teach the same concept in Science and Geography at different times and using different, subject specific vocabulary in KS3 or KS2.  Great teachers of Science, Geography, History, Art, Maths and English need to know when their subjects overlap, when it makes sense to connect their concept or facts to those of another discipline.  In the modern world of commerce, industry, science or the media, subjects rarely exist in a vacuum.  In the past, before the invention of A levels and O levels in 1951 and GCSEs in 1988; subjects were more connected; teachers had had broader and deeper educations themselves.  The discrete segregation of subjects into easily testable curricula is a fairly recent phenomenon in human history.

I am not advocating killing school subjects but teachers and their pupils greatly benefit from learning, or knowing of the overlap and connectivity between subjects.  This is generally a great strength of the primary generalist but they may only be aware of the subject content overlaps, and not aware of the bigger picture.

There are many advocates of more specialist teaching in upper primary (Years 4, 5 and 6) with a consequent reduction of topic work.  I understand this logic and the curriculum intent:  when they get to secondary in year 7, they are going to study subjects in discrete timetable blocks from subject specialists (up to a point), so we need to prepare them for that.  We tangibly gain focus on subject specialism and improving grades at GCSE, but we probably lose something less measurable, something intangible but no less important.  We lose connectivity.  We lose seeing the science of art and the art of science; we have denigrated the polymath in our education system.  Yet most of the transcendent scientists, leaders, artists, explorers, writers and mathematicians we learn about in school were polymaths:  specialists in more than one field. 

We must be honest with ourselves:  most of our students don’t have the intellects or memories of Daisy Christodoulou. I’m not writing anyone off here.  But most people don’t go on University Challenge.  I once worked with a brilliant Scientist, the late Dr Duncan Bryant, an alumni of University challenge.  He had one hell of a mind on him.  He was a molecular spectroscopist, a lover of Sibelius, Augustus Pablo, The Jam, Queen and Alexei Sayle and the most knowledgeable pub quiz friend I’ve met.  He was a rarity, as is Daisy.

Most of us will NEVER connect all those discrete, abstract nuggets of knowledge into a single polymathic whole, unless we – teachers – help to make the connections for them.  If human minds are permanently learning in separate subjects from the age of 8 – 18, acquiring a mass of disconnected knowledge, this knowledge is not going to suddenly go ping at 18, or 21 and there you go wham bam you’ve got skills and creativity in spades now because there are three hundred gazillion bits of knowledge stored in your long term memory.  It really cannot be that simple.

This is why I am a fan of theming in primary school (and in Year 7&8) – not necessarily across the board but in related areas.  It makes sense to connect climate change (and its underlying scientific and geographical principles) with the industrial revolution in history, population growth the growth of towns and cities in geography, energy and electricity in science and the art of LS Lowry.  It makes sense to have some philosophical discussion about the structure of society and the mistakes humans have made, and keep making.  It makes sense to talk about economics and the environment, about materialism and greed and consumerism and what really makes us happy amongst all this. 

To make connections between disciplines and broaden the minds of the children we teach, we need to have a really broad subject inter-disciplinary knowledge.  Most of us don’t have this.  The good news is that we probably have it between us.  We need to make time to talk to each other beyond a five minute coffee, discussing last week’s football/strictly and the twenty hours discussing the nth revision of the school development plan.    

Finally number 5, subject cultural, philosophical and ethical knowledge.  What do I mean by this?  It means being really well read on the history of your subject, it means being a learner alongside the young learners in your care.  It means dedicating time to understanding the fringes of your subject in the adult world.  So instead of having Peter Atkins timeless (disciplinary) Physical Chemistry textbook in your head, you might want to have read his delightful little book, What is Chemistry? without an equation or formula in sight.   Instead of having read Darwin or even Dawkins, you might want to have read The Incredible Unlikeliness of Being by Alice Roberts or Andrea Wulf’s enchanting biography of Alexander von Humboldt.  In Physics, you could grapple with Stephen Hawking and Carlo Ravelli but you could also read Steven Weinberg’s delightful, “to explain the world.”  You could read a whole host popular science books or if a Geographer read Tim Marshall’s Prisoners of Geography.  You could read Genome by Matt Ridley and counter it with They F*** you up by Oliver James.  You could read some philosophy or some history of science.  I love the alternative perspectives writers like Michael Frayn, Siri Hustvedt, Alain de Botton, Kenan Malik, Waqas Ahmed, Daniel Levitin, Yuval Noah Hariri have infused with my mind…this helps me to place my subject in perspective, to teach it as a way of viewing the world rather than teach it as stuff you should know to pass an exam or a citizenship test.

I suspect the handful of you who’ve made it this far will say ‘but we do teach all this, in all these ways’.  And I know that some of us do, and some of our schools do encourage inter-departmental discussion and learning and extensive intra-departmental CPD focussed on subject knowledge, but I think that our education system has become so overly measured, compared, data fudged, squeezed and chronically under-funded that we have largely coalesced our resources into number 1 and 2.

If education and educators aren’t given time to learn deeply themselves; to experiment with what they teach, when they teach it and how they teach it then our system is no longer an education system.  It becomes even more of a factory model, a relentless treadmill, than some suggest it already is.

I suspect very few of us – I certainly don’t – excel in all five of these mooted areas of subject knowledge.  I think I’m strong in number 3 and number 5 with a soupcon of the other three to enable me to keep my head above water.  There will be others of you exceptionally strong in number 1 or exceptionally strong in number 2 or exceptionally strong in numbers 1 and 4.  If our colleagues are very strong in different areas to ourselves, the teaching profession has the tendency to smooth off the rough edges and tries to normalise  – or standardise – us all.  We seem to like jacks of all trades.  We seem to keep trying to remove the human element from our profession, trying to ensure that every pupil in every class has much the same experience and that we all teach the same stuff in a very similar way.

Our profession is resourced for this standardised, examinable model and people like me – who are clearly deeply passionate about teaching, about science, about philosophy, about discussion and about learning to think – can feel like an outsider in this conservative, overly regulated world.  I realise that the sort of change I would like to see in our education system are untenable in the current climate but to finish I’m going to give you a little taster of the abstract meanderings of my mind…

School – our 14 year long education system – is deeply inefficient for both teachers and learners.  A classroom with 30 (or 20, or 40, or 16) children and one all knowing, all teaching teacher at the front (or mingling amongst everyone) is quite a bonkers concept.  There are so many uncontrolled variables.  Of course the teaching profession does its best to optimise and improve this model but the efficiency of time, knowledge and skill use by both pupils and teacher remains suboptimal, unless that teacher is truly brilliant in all five areas.  They probably aren’t.  Even then an “outstanding” teacher, as they are human can only be outstanding for 80% of pupils, 80% of the time.  So that is 64%.  So here’s what I would do:

I’d make sure every school had at least one deeply knowledgeable subject specialist in every subject.  In the case of small primary schools this “subject expert [not just number 1 subject content expert, I emphasize]” could be shared between up to five schools.  Here, I am talking about primary school subjects excluding English and Maths where the school will always have several well trained and experienced subject experts.

This person’s role would be to design the curriculum in that subject and to ensure it was connected to other related subjects’ curricula via theming or cross curricula planning.  They would be responsible for subject specific knowledge (numbers 1, 3 and 5) CPD, training and discussion for all other teachers who teach those subjects in years (4?), 5 and 6 in primary (and 7 & 8 in secondary).   In primary schools they would teach all children in their subject at least once a fortnight (preferably once a week) for thirty minutes in small group tutorials of between 4 and 6.   They could still have a class for registration, PSHE and pastoral matters but the bulk of their timetable would be rotating around small groups of children doing some focussed “micro-teaching”, intervention, troubleshooting or addressing misconceptions.  Occasionally they could give whole year group, or combined year group mini-lectures (20 – 30 minutes) to introduce or close a topic.

Their expertise and subject knowledge would be in optimal supply all day, every day, without the need for differentiation (within a group of children), with very little need for behaviour management and very few external sources of distraction during those potent 30 minute tutorials.

Of course the children would need more than 30 minutes a fortnight (or week) studying that particular subject.  This is where the generalist class teacher and / or teaching assistants come in to play.  Practice questions (differentiated), workbooks, study guides, skills practice (in PE, music, drama etc) projects, essays, group tasks, science investigations and practical experiments, outdoor learning and exploration – all these could be “facilitated” by a generalist class teacher (possibly an expert in another subject themselves).  The subject expert teacher(s) would collaborate frequently with the class teachers to ensure they had the foundational knowledge and skills in that subject to troubleshoot and supervise independent, group or whole class study in that subject or activity.  The generalist class teacher would have to be skilled predominantly in number 2, (subject pedagogical knowledge) with some number 1 (subject content knowledge) and be fully equipped with great skills in behaviour for learning / behaviour management, facilitating group tasks and instructional teaching.

What of specialist subject teaching in year 4 or below?  Well that’s a whole other story.  I would ban lessons titled Science below year 4.  But some regular English lessons would be SciEnglish lessons – where there is some science comprehension, or some scientific writing (eg observation and description) and learning some simple scientific vocabulary.  I’d also have some MathSci lessons focussing on measuring, recording and the simple plotting and analysis of data.  Then I’d have a block of timetable called investigating and exploring which could involve some very simple science experiments, or surveys of the school grounds and local area, or museum trips – it would obviously include science (and geography and art and history) but it wouldn’t forcibly be a “science” lesson.

Here endeth the lesson on subject knowledge in primary schools.

Battle Lines (or the intentional, false polarity of teachers)

Today, on the day that some teachers and educationalists discussed #losethebooths while others spat counter-venom via the #edutwittersphere, I was really wound up by a tweet advertising ResearchEd Glasgow next weekend.  It was a tweet about a colour-coded triangle you’ve probably seen before (which most refer, inaccurately, to as a pyramid); about how the fight is back on!  Battle lines have been drawn.  These are – in my opinion – battle lines which most teachers, let alone most people, don’t really give a stuff about.  I can see the merit in the Research Ed movement.  I greatly admire many of the edutourbus residents who speak at these events, who have written some great books about teaching and curriculum and I can see myself become an #rEd eduligger in the not too distant future.

Yet, I can see that the #rEd brand has proliferated on the back of edumyths which have been falsely mythologised or falsely debunked.  I cannot claim innocence here.  If I could make money from selling books (about anything) and the after dinner speaking circuit, I would.  And to do that, I would have to nurture and manage my brand.  I have no beef with Research Ed.  But I do have beef with people belittling other’s views, experience or insight online, on the basis of one or two research papers or a eduzeitgeisty opinion. 

The problem of course, and the catalyst of Research Ed’s existence, is the blind acceptance and misrepresentation of edufads.  Learning styles have been debunked, so has growth mindset, too much teacher talk and many others.  Yet it is really the misrepresentation of some original educational research which needs debunking not so much the idea itself.  Most teachers love a quick fix and if your colleague has read something or heard something new, they might pass it on to you, you might try it out, it might work well, you might apply it more.  You might, in your stupidly busy doing rather than busy thinking world, print out that Twinkl worksheet and crack on. 

The concept of growth mindset is not flawed.  I take it to mean that the more open your mind is, the more willing you are to change your mind, and work hard to change it, the better learner you will be.

The concept that everyone has a different learning style and we should teach them in that learning style alone is flawed.  But the idea that some people learn more efficiently by looking, copying, watching while others can listen well and concentrate for longer than others and some can only really engage with or accept a concept once they’ve had hands on, 3D experience of it seems to make some sense, when I scan the cognitive, creative and character diversity in front of me.  I can see how such a nebulous theory can take hold.

The latest counter-trends (supported by many #rEd afficionados) to all this VAK, Growth mindset, mini-plenary stuff such as “retrieval practice”  (tests in old money) are equally open to misrepresentation.  So, like duh, if we teach something new and unfamiliar to someone (the 7x table, some abstract spelling rules, covalent bonding, the causes of the first world war, Macbeth) and give them a little test or quiz on it intermittently they are going to learn it (start to irreversibly cement it into their memories) it is going to be good for learning, whereas floating about wikipedia for abstract facts about an abstract topic they don’t much care for or know much about is obviously going to be less efficient (when it is hardcore memorisation of substantive, factual knowledge we value).  So yes, retrieval practice (pulling semi-glued facts from your mind to glue them stronger) makes perfect educational sense (and it is how I learned to spell, do maths and translate French) but if this becomes the ALL of teaching, the every lesson starter of every day for seven years we will allow retrieval practice to become the new VAK, GM, TMTT, ABI-EAT-SAID (another bloody irritating education acronym to stare at in disbelief).

So back to that triangle.  The very specific numbers on it (that we only remember 5% of what we hear, while remembering 70% of what we teach others etc) are red rag to a bull.  What evidence are there for these numbers?  Why are children sitting listening to wise, all knowing teachers such a bad thing?  Why is peer to peer discussion such a wonderful thing?  What if this triangle thing is really true, then our entire school system is fundamentally flawed, the one class teacher and 30 kids infrastructure outmoded, my job and my profession null and void?  I get it.  Teachers have been so hugely devalued by successive governments, not trusted by many parents and this triangle seems to suggest we don’t really matter very much in the learning process.  That kind of shakes some people’s worlds apart.  That puts people on the defensive.  That makes people suggest the triangle is untrue.  That it is not the truth and that the real truth exists in their mind because they are clever and they can see through all this floaty non-scientific snake oily bollocks.  I am totally cool with that.  They are – quite often – right about much of the misrepresented edumyths and fads which are perniciously bolted on to what should be the best  – and in many ways far simpler – job in the world.

Where the militant #rEdders start to alienate me is in their resolute stance that their evidence, their science, their cognitive load theory is 100% robust.  It is educational, psychological or neuroscientific research based upon the inner workings of the most complex organ in the known universe: the human brain.   None of this is pure, incontestable, empirical, $2billion of clinically tested to the nth degree science.  The #rEdders are not Bohr and Rutherford to the #VAKkers Democritus.  Nor are they Copernicus to Ptolemy, or Einstein to Copernicus.  There is art, intuition, perception and not just pure truthful, scientific reality to all this education malarkey.  

So, of course, if we want someone to cognitively develop, we need to teach some logic via the medium of maths (this isn’t all we teach for cognitive development).  We need an expert to impart those abstract concepts and that means children listening and not remembering much.  And listening again the next day, next week, next month, next term, next year, next teacher, next key stage, next school.  It is a grossly inefficient process but the teach themselves method, or chat to their friends over ice cream method is probably even less efficient for developing conceptual understanding of abstraction, thereby enhancing cognitive function.

But teaching children from 5 (should be 6) until 18 isn’t all about cognitive development.  It is about creative development, cultural development, character growth, community and much more.  Some of the stuff it is advantageous for us to learn as humans is not best taught using conventional classroom pedagogies. 

And that, I think, is all that misappropriated triangle is trying to say.  If I listen to one page of an audiobook once in the car and never listen to it again, I will remember very little of it.  I may remember a tincy bit more by reading it myself.  If I really want to remember it, to learn it (not just the essence of it) but learn it word for word and all its inference too, I am – undoubtedly – going to learn it even better by teaching someone else, by talking about it, by re-reading it, by thinking about it repeatedly.

I didn’t learn very much physical chemistry in my undergraduate physical chemistry lectures.  I didn’t listen well and most of my learned lecturers didn’t orate with much flourish or humour.  It was dry and frequently unfathomable.  Reading a chapter of Laidler & Meiser (Physical Chemistry textbook) didn’t help much either.  A small group tutorial discussion, or conversation with a friend may have helped to embed it a bit more.  Fourteen years later, while working for Pfizer and having transferred into the Materials Sciences group at Sandwich, working on solid state chemistry (lots of physical chemistry), suddenly all that semantic memory made sense.  I learnt quickly, I talked to experts and became an expert by talking to others about the amorphous state, about the glass transition, about crystallisation, about x-ray diffraction and gravimetric vapour sorption and differential scanning calorimetry; about polymorphism.  I learnt a bit by listening to lectures and seminars, more by reading journals, a lot more by discussing one to one over coffee and loads more by coaching, mentoring and training junior members of the team.  The essence of that triangle is true.  It just doesn’t suit our current exam orientated educational model.  That’s all.

All the evidence we have to support cognitive load theory, or retrieval practice, or any current, well justified teaching fad is based upon easily measured SATs data or GCSE results.  Optimising long-term understanding of complex scientific or mathematical concepts is not the current aim of education.  The current aim of education is to generate shedloads of comparative data allowing the government to claim they are raising educational standards. 

My scepticism over well reasoned and quite well evidenced on trend educational methodology is that the measure of its success is not the employability of the individual, nor the mental health of the individual, nor the collaborative, communicative or creative thinking skills of the individual; nor the emotional intelligence of the individual; nor the open-minded, flexibility of the individual; nor the happiness and fulfilment of the individual, nor the sense of purpose of the individual; nor the learning habits and generic skills of the individual, nor the trainability of the individual, nor the warm-hearted kindness of the individual; nor the selfless, community spirit of the individual; nor the ability of the individual to think and solve unfamiliar problems; nor the safety or liability of the individual, nor the deep cultural and technological understanding of the individual; nor the ability of the individual to apply and build upon on their existing knowledge…NO…they are measured purely on their scores in written tests and exams aged 7, 11, 16, 18 (and possibly 21 or 22). 

So our entire education system hangs on the scores in these assessments and exams.  And it is that narrow, falsely positive or falsely negative score which causes such futile, unnecessary battle lines to be drawn at educational conferences and on social media.

Of course humans will always draw battle lines.  It is what we do.  We rather like competition, we like them and us, we like sport, land grabbing, conflict and waging war.  These battle lines are thoughtlessly amplified by both sides.  The media and internet fuel the fire, people like Piers Morgan and Katie Hopkins build an affluent brand out of it.  Farage, Cummings, Gove and Johnson drew a battle line way back before the Leave campaign and they have played to it, built their careers on it.  Milked it.  Profited from it. 

Beyond the nanocosm of edutwitter within the microcosm of education perhaps the most prevalent and dangerous battle line is the one drawn by Greta and Extinction rebellion re:climate change.  Trump protects capitalism, economic growth and greed.  Thunberg protects the environment and is anti-capitalist.  I’m nearer to Thunberg but the argument is intensified and over simplified.  The battle line is drawn.  The message is robust.  We join the club.  We only look at things from one perspective.  We shout and scream and pat ourselves on the back.   If we all stop flying, if we all turn vegan, if we stop having kids.

But it’s not that simple.  Stop flying yes.  But what about the jobs, the investment, the human desire to roam and explore?  Veganism is, I think, a red herring.  Avocadoes from Mexico or local Welsh lamb?  Shopping locally, working locally, consuming less, having friends locally, completely re-evaluating the purpose of human society is more important that blindly turning vegan.  Battle lines are drawn.  If you’re not vegan you don’t care about the planet.  Er, I do actually.  Stop having kids?  We are past peak birth rate.  It is improvements in healthcare, sanitation and medicine and our rapidly increasing life expectancy that is the problem.  How do we fix that one?  Hard isn’t it.  Are we going to draw a battle line on that one? 

I’ll return to where I started with the #banthebooths debate.  I don’t know enough about this issue.  So I’m on the fence.  I don’t think anyone should be humiliated.  I don’t think anyone should spend a significant portion of their school week in isolation.  I don’t think cumulative “low level disruption” should lead to isolation.  I do think that if a pupil is out of control, seriously disruptive, seriously rude or violent, with a high risk of harm to themselves or others removal from the classroom is a necessary measure.  But, on Twitter, there is no debate.  Battle lines are drawn.  You are for or against.   IT IS NOT THAT SIMPLE, is it?

I love debate.  Heated discussion.  I also love hearing and then, hopefully, seeing others perspectives.  I am a shades of grey kinda guy, the world does not exist in black and white, right or wrong, left and right, trad and prog.  On that note, I found the results of @TeacherTapp survey on traditional and progressive teaching most enlightening this week.  I put myself slap bang in the middle, while I know the uber trads will label me as some progressive nutjob, while the Uberprogs (great band!) probably write me off as a trad sympathiser.   It is futile.  It isn’t real.  If teacher tapp is representative then only 2% of teachers see themselves as exclusively traditional and only 3% of teachers see themselves as exclusively progressive.  If you take those figures and a random sample of your twitter feed, then that is one heck of a VOCIFEROUS minority.  More trace than minority methinks!  Almost insignificant.  Let’s write the whole thing off.  Let’s remember that in our fiery online worlds someone draws a battle line.  I might get shot down in flames for this but I’m going to suggest that the battle lines I’ve written about above have as much to do with self-preservation, self-mythology, personal branding, provocation, votes and ticket sales as they do with heartfelt ideology…

An afterthought.  Some of my rants, theories and opinions could be construed as a battle line themselves.  I’m not interested in battles or wars.  But I do want a revolution.  A revolution where school education isn’t a standalone thing in itself, where what we study at school isn’t just a topdown academic treadmill that people fall off, as opposed to a bottom up fusion of cognition, creativity, character and cultural enlightenment with various junctions to hop onto a more conventional academic pathway along the way.  Random cliff-edge transitions, key stages, age related standardisation, SATs, 16+ exams would go.  Many of you may suggest that I’ve just drawn a massive battle line:  if we don’t have SATs then we’d have to have much more subjective teacher assessment, you cry.  Er, no.  That’s back to the black and white.  We’d just have freakin’ founts of pure, applied and general knowledge supporting freakin’ great teachers in freakin’ great schools, fully integrated with their local communities, tapping into local expertise, educating the future without arbitrary age related hurdles.  Empowering the mind.  Character. Cognition. Creativity. Culture.  And no battle lines.  Thank you.