The Characters of Christmas and the Classroom.

While we put on quite a show at Christmas, full of cheer, jollity and far too much food there is, in virtually all families, an underlying tension rooted in the rituals of our own childhood Christmases.  Christmas has become like Disney.  It is all about the kids.  So parents and grandparents, Auntie Hilda and Great Uncle Sid, put on this performance every year.  Even when the kids grow up, it is still all about the kids.  All about the differences between your nostalgic, romantic Christmas as a kid and your wife’s Christmas as a kid.  Or all about the Christmas you’d like to have had as a kid, but never did.

Media, advertising and commerce bombard us with images of the perfect Christmas; these images combine with our episodic memories of the past and we try – frantically and obsessively at times – to recreate the perfect feeling of the idea of Christmas for our families.  Behind the scenes there are spinning plates, arguments, unspoken tension; perhaps a snatched snog in the corner of the kitchen if you’re lucky.

This is all rather similar in the modern school classroom.  The teacher tries to conjure up an atmosphere of collective learning, while in reality there are lots of different people, all with very different prior attainment, interests, capabilities, family cultures and expectations; and perceptions of what the hell they are doing in that room at that time with that teacher.

What Christmas and the Classroom have most in common is performance.  Both are a show; a mirage; a mask on the surface of the hidden, existential darkness. 

To demonstrate this tension I’m going to create some paired Christmas Characters and their Year 6 classroom counterparts:

Dad (47) / Teacher

Dad likes to prepare the Turkey and all the trimmings.  This is a big project which requires a lot of planning, organisation and prior knowledge.  He believes in cultural inheritance and doing things properly.  Once he has prepared and cooked everything from scratch, sourced several bottles of Claret, port and twenty tonnes of Stilton he wants to sit down at the table.  There he wants to eat a lot, drink even more; he doesn’t want to listen to any ill thought out bigoted bollocks extracted straight from yesterday’s Daily Mail.  He doesn’t want to take any responsibility for the carnage he has created in the kitchen, he just wants to sit, drink and enjoy a fun filled family Christmas without any washing up, tidying or further nagging.  Oh, and he wants to be listened to.  A lot.

The teacher wants to be appreciated for all his planning, organisation, experience and prior knowledge.  He wishes to share his insight and wisdom in the classroom.  He sources the best resources to enable this.  Once he has unveiled his wisdom, orated, performed, provoked and stimulated he wants everyone to work independently, calmly and happily and to – occasionally – revel in the humour and spontaneity of the classroom. He refuses to accept any responsibility for the negative behaviour of his class – or their failure to learn anything from him – because he has read lots of books and spends too much time reading blogs on Edutwitter!  He strongly believes that anything he does cannot override the complex and varied histories of the myriad characters in his class; that his job is to spark interest, impart knowledge and develop skills.   If he wanted to be a social worker or psychologist he’d have trained to be one.

Mum (48) / Headteacher

Mum is quite happy to delegate some sub-responsibility for Christmas to Dad but she knows that she is in charge.  Behind the scenes she plans, shops, cleans, cooks and does loads of other shit no one thanks her for or recognises that she does.  She does, however, have a strange penchant for window dressing and makes a real fuss over how everything looks and could be perceived by others.  She resents the fact that Dad gets all the glory for being a much better cook than she is, while he appears to have a complete disregard for all other (far more time consuming) household chores which always go completely unappreciated.

The Headteacher happily delegates some sub-responsibilities to others, particularly things she isn’t very good at!  She does work very hard behind the scenes, though she frequently seems to be busy at being busy without much to show for it (other than a well run and happy school, which is of course way more important than anyone ever realises at the time).  She is a little bit obsessed about how the books and displays look and bangs on about them all the time, because these things are easy to spot, measure and control.  She quietly resents the fact that her teachers are much more popular than she is.

Maternal Granny M (76) / Ofsted Inspector

Granny M is frankly fairly terrifying.  If her (several) glass(es) of fizz is/are not supplied at 12 noon prompt, her face looks like an emaciated old bulldog being stung by a hornet.  Her five hour hairdo is perfectly coiffured into a structure more complex than the London Underground system.  She is very quick to judge.  She reluctantly compliments Dad on his excellent Turkey feast but then ruins it by commenting on all the other things he’s fucked up that year.  Her lipstick appears to be everywhere it shouldn’t.  She talks for hours but says nothing and spends a lot of time tutting about the extent of the materialism showered upon the children.

The Ofsted inspector is an incredibly well presented lady: all style and no substance.  If her demands are not met instantly she has the most terrifying facial expression imaginable.  She is quick to judge.  She offers feint praise, but then twists the knife.  Her influence is pervasive and rather debilitating.  She is full of good intent but her implementation seems so laboured.  Her impact leaves a slight bad taste in your mouth!

Paternal Granny P (78) / Teaching assistant

Granny P loves the kids.  Unconditionally.  And a bit too much.  She only sees the good in them and never the lurking, subliminal bastard.  She showers them with praise and shitloads of chocolate.  When not over-indulging the kids she quotes propaganda from the Daily Mail.   She is full of praise for her son’s culinary efforts and becomes very competitive and territorial with anyone who seeks to control or undermine him better than she does.

The teaching assistant loves the kids.  She is properly down wiv ver kids.  She loves the opportunity to stick star stickers in their books and use loads of multi-coloured pens.  Sometimes, when supporting a task in Science or History, she can be prone to sharing her own bigoted and deluded misconceptions with the kids, just to ensure the Conservative party remains in existence long past its sell by date.  If anyone challenges her, her class or her teacher she becomes very territorial and defensive. 

Maternal Grandpa (76) / Chair of Governors

Grandpa used to be an accountant.  He religiously reads the financial times and misses it on Christmas day.  He shuffles awkwardly about the house not quite understanding the modern Christmas.  He is a stickler for detail and tradition and ensures everyone (over 12) goes to midnight mass.  

The chair of governors can’t really keep up with the ever changing school initiatives and shifts of emphasis.  He hates the jargon and has no idea whether his deep dive learning style character education was ever fully impactful before growth mindset was uninvented.   Runs a tight ship financially, while otherwise, he spends a lot of time looking rather confused.

Grumpy Aunt Mildred (68) / Mary

Aunt Mildred has never married and doesn’t really like people, so Christmas family gatherings are a bit of a challenge for her.  She loves horses, dogs and the countryside. 

Mary is a very quiet girl in class.  She struggles academically and doesn’t fit in to any of the friendship groups at school.  She has a habit of making rather forthright statements, awash with a healthy dose of social ineptitude.  The highlight of her week is when she gets to clean out the school Guinea pig cage every Friday afternoon.

Mad Cousin Mark (43) / Mark

Mark is an artist; a drinker and very anti-establishment.  His mother died when he was six years old and he is the youngest of five children.  After a long period of rebellion, drifting, travelling and shed loads of drugs he finally settled into a ramshackle, isolated cottage on the Hartland peninsula in North Devon.  He loves winding up the wider family at Christmas whilst glugging away at the Claret.  He is a bad influence on Dad at the dinner table and both hilarious and terrifying in equal measure during the annual charade of charades.

In class, aged 11, Mark was late, untidy and showed very little interest in conforming to school expectations.  Detentions, missed breaks and a chair outside the headteacher’s office were water off a duck’s back to him.  He was always engaged in (rare) art lessons and was a star turn as Scrooge in the Christmas play.

Cool cousin Madison (27) / Madison

Maddie works in London.  No one really knows what she does.  But her job fuels her extensive fashion and cocktail budget.  She always looks amazing.  On Christmas day she looks divine and soaks up bucketfuls of attention from the men.  The younger girls want to be her.

In Year 6, Madison had her ears pierced and experimented with subtle amounts of make up.  The other girls were wary of her but she was very popular with the boys.  In class she was quietly compliant and achieved well. 

Neice Harriet (32) / Hattie

Harriet has two young children Emily (3) and Bertie (1).  She is exhausted and dotes on them.  Christmas is a lovely time for her as her wider family entertain and help out with the kids.  She has a glass of wine at lunch and falls asleep on the sofa in the afternoon.  Her life consists of coffee mornings, toddler groups and horses.  Endless freaking horses.

Hattie is a helper in class.  Always smiling, always busy, always popular.  Busy doing. But is she learning anything? 

Dave (her husband, 34) / Dave

Dave is a computer programmer with a degree and PhD in Maths.  He has a pretty whizzkid job with one of the big city banks.  Harriet and the kids have humanised him a little, so he can quietly enjoy a big family Christmas.  However, his patience is tested by Granny M asking endless questions about his job and never actually listening to his careful, explanatory answers. 

In Year 6, Dave is bored.  The bought in maths mastery scheme goes way too slowly for him.  His teachers keep harping on about his arrogance and lack of collaborative skills.  He justs wants to do maths.  Proper maths.  Not box tick national comparison SATs maths.  Apparently he has no imagination in English.  He resents school and his teachers and can’t wait to escape the stultifying primary classroom.

Nephew Ed (30) / Edward

Ed is a rugby player.  A big strapping, strong hulk of a man.  He eats twice the amount of anyone else around the table.  And drinks twice the amount too, without any tangible effect.  He is a lovely guy; affable, attentive, polite. 

Ed is a key leader in Lions class (Year 6).  Popular with the boys, girls and teachers, he is highly dependable.  He wishes there was more PE at school but after school running club and weekend rugby at his local club just about channel his physical energy.

Susma (28) – Ed’s wife / Susma

Susma is Nepalese and a qualified pharmacist.  She is a Hindu but loves to be part of a big family Christmas.  She radiates warmth and kindness and is charm, attentiveness and politeness personified.

Susma moved to England aged 8 when her father – a Gurkha – was posted over here.  In Nepal, she was used to classes of 80 children in very simple buildings with no technology.  By Year 6 she was fluent in English and worked diligently, patiently and independently at all times.  She achieved well and went on to study all three sciences at A level with Maths before embarking upon her Pharmacy degree and PhD in Biopharmaceutics.

Tom (21) / Tom

Tom is carrying out his undergraduate placement year in the chemical industry.  He spent Christmas Eve in the pub, getting in at 4am, and has the mother of all hangovers today.  His younger cousins and siblings are doing their best to ruin his peace.  When Granny M tires of quizzing Dave about computer programming she moves on to Tom’s fresh insight into structure elucidation using mass spectrometry and nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy.  He is loving “doing” real science with “real” scientists in industry and is not missing men in beige suits drone on about deriving physical chemistry equations from first principles in soulless lecture theatres.

Tom is one of the more able boys in Year 6.  Considering his future pathway, it is interesting that he enjoyed history, geography, art and maths much more than the formulaic and predictable science lessons in school.

Becky (19) / Becky

Becky has just completed her first term reading Philosophy in Edinburgh.  Despite her drunken night out with Tom in the pub, she can talk.  For hours and hours.  About all sorts of heavy shit.  Her intellectual curiosity is exhausting.  And the anti-monarchy rant she has just before the Queen at 3pm unleashes Fire and Brimstone from Grandpa and both Grannies – triggering a rare moment of harmony between the elder in laws and out laws.

At school Becky was a voracious reader.  She read books all day, every day.  In maths lessons, science lessons, PE lessons, lunchtime.  She read books.  All day long.

Luke (17) / Luke

Luke has discovered white wine.  He tries to out drink Ed the Rugby player.  This doesn’t end well.   At school, Luke is doing a random selection A levels and BTECs.  It is starting to dawn on him that his grade 9 in Fortnite at GCSE wasn’t much use.

In Year 6, Luke was what some might describe as “a typical boy.”  Focussed and capable in maths lessons; sporty and active; never read a book.  Ever.  English and “academics” not really his thing.

Katie (15) / Katie

Katie has discovered opinions.  No one has ever had them before.  Alarmingly, for one so young and so bright her opinions are not of the usual socialist, eco-warrior type but of the vile, Faragist, racist polemic type.  She is absolutely insufferable all Christmas day long.  Granny P loves her.  No one else does.

In Year 6 Katie was chair of the pupil council.  Not because she was the kindest and most organised pupil in the school, but because she rigged the voting system and manipulated all the teachers.  And everyone, even the headteacher, was terrified of her.  Ridiculously high IQ.

Connor (13) / Connor

Connor doesn’t speak all day.  Despite it being Christmas Day, he still manages to cram in his usual 10 hours of Fortnite.

At school Connor has Late night Fortnite eyes.  He doesn’t do any work and is tired all the time.  When he grows up he wants to be a You Tuber. 

Chardonnay (11) / Chardonnay

Chardonnay spends all day extracting make up and fashion tips from Madison.

Chardonnay spends all day at school thinking about fashion, make up and when she is next going to see her super cool grown up cousin Madison. 

Maisie (9) / Maisie

Maisie is loving Christmas day.  She enjoys helping Dad with the cooking, Mum with laying the table, Harriet with her young cousins.  She is a sweet, lovely, innocent, pre-adolescent girl who still loves Christmas despite cousin Chardonnay telling her Santa doesn’t exist.

Maisie is classroom compliance personified.  She would walk the plank if her teacher told her to.

Ben (7) / Ben

Ben makes a lot of noise.  He has broken three radio controlled helicopters.  It is only 9am.

Ben makes a lot of noise at school.  Especially when he is moved down to blue on the behaviour chart.  Again.

Oscar (5) / Oscar

Oscar is building Star wars Lego with admirable patience for a boy of his age.

Oscar has told Miss Bolland, his reception teacher, that he is going to live on Mars when he grows up.

Emily (3) / Emily

Emily is subliminally storing the elaborate, disneyfied, commercial hellfest of Christmas into her episodic memory for the first time.

Emily is ridiculously happy.  And a little bit emotional too.

Bertie (1) / Bertie

Bertie doesn’t have a fucking clue what is going on.  So Dad is somewhat bewildered as to why Mum and Granny P have spent over £400 (combined) on his first Christmas.

Bertie isn’t at school yet.  But if the neotrads at the DfE have their way he’ll be doing his preschool phonics check in the new year.

So Christmas, like the classroom, can be a bit of a performance – with all of us players.  Of course it can be joyful, of course it can be full of love, of course it can be the heart warming best of humanity.  Yet, scratch the surface of the celebrations family pack; of the Waitrose mini mince pie multi-pack; of the misery of the Eastenders Christmas special; of Angela Rippon tap dancing; of George Bailey and Clarence; of Oh come let us adore him; of shaking the vicar’s hand; of smiling politely while Granny M or Granny P spouts some alien thoughts; of the piles of plastic throwaway presents; of smartphones assembled in sweat shops and there is tension, the tension of the modern world; the tension of how the hell did we make the simple joy of community, of family, of friendship get so corrupted by money, by materialism, by individualism, by selfishness.

Christmas and the classroom are united by ritual.  Ritual is important.  Ritual is continuity, ritual is security, ritual is unspoken love, ritual is harmony, ritual is implicit – not the modern, tedious, explicit version – mindfulness.

Ritual is peace and harmony.  Peace and goodwill to all mankind.  Ritual makes the world go around.  Ritual creates security; creates belonging.  Belonging matters.  We are nothing alone.  We are everything together.

Ritual underpins the best of humanity, the best of community.  Community matters.  Community looks out for us.  Community gives us purpose.  Community gives us meaning.  Christmas, like the classroom, is community, ritual and performance. 

It is what you want it to be.  It is what you make it.

Happy Christmas everyone.  xxx

An honest and incoherent series of reflections and observations on the outcome of the UK general election by Toby Payne-Cook

So, a very decisive UK general election result has kicked things off a bit in my Twitter and infrequent Guardian reading echo chambers.  This has compelled me to write this thought piece on British politics, its people and my perspectives of the last few decades.

First a bit about my political background.  My politics are confused.  I was born into social privilege (both parents were at least third generation private school educated; my Mum always goes on about her aristocratic paternal great great grandparents; the Middleton-Butler’s of my Dad’s maternal line made a lot of money in the 19^th century British Steel industry; my Dad was a Cambridge educated “gentleman” farmer in North Devon and my Uncle [Mum’s brother] is Sir John Nott, former member of Thatcher’s cabinet 1979-1983 and minister of defence in the Falklands war).  For my Dad I was number 6 of 7, the first product of his third marriage and for Mum, number 1 of 2.  My parents sacrificed everything they didn’t have, to scrimp, save and borrow; to qualify for bursaries and send me to socially privileged boarding schools for “posh thickoes” so that I could get a scholarship award without being uber-academic.  Aged 15 I was an outrageous snob, an ignorant racist, and a bigot – partly due to views imparted upon me and partly due to my sleepy, isolated, mono-cultural, upbringing in the bucolic, farming hinterland of North Devon.  Beneath that entrenched veneer I was a confused, socially conditioned, adolescent just like everyone else is aged 15.  Then Dad died when I was 16.  I – gradually – became a liberal, non-conformist, anti-authoritarian head of house at Milton Abbey school in Dorset.  Didn’t make it to medical school so went through clearing to Kingston Poly in 1991 to study chemistry.  Then industry for 17 years, then PGCE and now teaching (for 7 years).

I was born into Conservative politics.  My elder half-siblings were in their twenties in the 1980s and were all quite academic and intellectual and very left-wing in comparison to our father, their mother/step-mother and my mother.  I remember big arguments when they visited.  They didn’t enjoy their privileged, traditional boarding school educations from the late 1950s through to the early 1970s as much as I did in the 1980s.  I was apolitical at school and university.  I remember winding up my Maggie worshipping English GCSE teacher with the infamous 1987 Sun headline about Neil Kinnock.  “Who put a picture of that man above my board?” he screamed in the midst of a full on board duster pelting rage.

After school, in long university summers, I worked on Devon farms with local farm labourers at the tail end of any prosperity in the agricultural dairy farming sector.  We laughed a lot and swore like troopers.  Much later, in the late nineties, as a formulation scientist with Zeneca Agrochemicals I enjoyed manufacturing banter during plant commissioning trials in Yalding, Kent and Grangemouth, Scotland.  I remember Julie Burchill, the journalist, once writing that the working classes and upper classes have much more in common than either do with the middle classes in between.

At Kingston Poly, then University, I drifted away from my public school roots: too many of my school friends pre-occupied with being Chelsea and Fulham socialites and an occasional arrogant, unpleasant sense of entitlement.  Once I moved into the pharmaceutical industry: mingling with intellectual scientists, academics and industry leaders; travelling around Europe with work and being influenced by the residual counter-culture of the mid nineties Glastonbury festival (the joyous church of humanity at which I worshipped) I became far more socially conscious, more liberal; and – I hope – a lot less racist, xenophobic, bigoted and entrenched in the politics of my ancestry and socially-privileged schooling.

In recent years I have become a deeper thinker (reading books by Yuval Noah Hariri, Michael Frayn, Anthony Warner [the Angry Chef], Siri Hustvedt, Michael Foley, Malcolm Gladwell, Alain de Botton, AC Grayling, Ben Goldacre, Francis Wheen, David Mitchell [comedian], Ruby Wax, Caitlin Moran, Dan Levitin & Cordelia Fine – to name just a few – which have influenced and skewed [or should that be reflected?] my worldview); a multinational scientist; a progressive teacher rooted in traditionalism; a vociferous remainer; a libertarian leftist in principle; a floating centrist in practice.

My voting history is:

1992 – Conservative with a small c – I liked John Major and was still a little entrenched; 1997 – Yogic Flyers, forgotten their proper party name (the Tories needed to go, my roots couldn’t quite vote Labour [but I would have voted for John Smith RIP, not the kings of insincerity and champagne socialism Blair & Mandelson], I was still fairly apolitical); 2001 – Liberal Democrat; 2005 – Liberal Democrat; 2010 – Liberal Democrat; 2015 – Green party; 2016 – Remain; 2017 – Green party; 2019 – Liberal Democrat.

So, like many other liberal, utopian, semi-green, globalised idealogues out there, Thursday night and Friday morning didn’t fill me with joy.  But, as I’m not a purebred leftie or a Corbynite I am coming to terms with the result.  The post-election mudslinging is ugly.  But the result and statistical analyses have made me think a bit.

First of all, the difference between power and principle.  The Tories under Thatcher and Johnson are all about power.  Some of them may be about principle and it will be interesting to see how much social and economic change the Johnson era thrusts upon us, but mostly their strategy has been about gaining power.  Blair and the New Labour project was the same.  All about gaining power.  Labour shifted a long way to the right economically to steal power from a tired Conservative power base.  Cameron shifted along to the left to regain the centre ground.  New Labour could have done so much to affect social change but they blew it, with Blair’s attempt to have a Falklands moment in Iraq backfiring and squandering the most massive mandate for change of our recent time.

The two most interesting sets of statistics I’ve seen post this election are two scatter graphs.  The first plots % vote leave in a constituency on the x-axis against % swing to Conservative on the y-axis.  There is a very strong correlation with those who voted leave in 2016 to those who voted Conservative in this election.  Johnson, Cummings, Gove et al have played a very cunning and very long game since 2015.  Their immaculately stage managed and propaganda rich Leave campaign, the Brexit idea, driving not so much the increase in their vote, but their clarity of purpose in this election.  Very clear and simple branding.  Not a whole load of principle but a highly effective gamble that has paid off in earning them a lot of power for the next 5, maybe 10 years.

More interesting to me was the second graph, plotting the same y-axis (% swing to conservatives) against % of university graduates in that constituency.  Here there is a strong correlation between the more educated you are (on paper) and the more likely you are to vote labour.  It is no coincidence that Tony Blair sought to send 50% of the population to university.  He knew that if people left their working class roots behind, their subservient conservative propensities, and left home to gain an education they would drift towards the intellectual cognoscenti and vote labour.  But then, as I’ve said, he messed it all up with a massive big lie.  Something about 45 minutes and weapons of mass destruction.  Note to Labour supporters: it isn’t just Tory politicians that tell lies. 

All this analysis, all this comment, all these statistics which tickle the senses and so anger us broadsheet reading political animals are mostly irrelevant to most of the electorate.  The electorate, of all parts of the intellectual spectrum, are mostly voting with their hearts and NOT their beard stroking and carefully considered minds.  Emotion, feeling and cultural inheritance are stronger than reasoning.  The Labour party’s or the Green party’s utopian idealism are too overwhelming, too idealistic, too complex for a lot of people.

We have to remember that we are the country of Downton Abbey.  We still have a monarchy.  We haven’t had a revolution.  For reasons not entirely clear to me we quite like deference.  We are suspicious of liberté, egalité, fraternité.  We like to wallow in our past; in our empire; in our historic, pioneering, industrial leadership; in being the inventors of the modern world. We still have a complex class structure which cuts deeper than socioeconomic groups. 

Not long before the referendum in 2016, I had read Yuval Noah Hariri’s ‘Sapiens’ which slightly shifted my view of humanity.  In it he describes religion, nations and money as imagined realities.  This coupled to the Marxist lyrics of John Lennon’s Imagine really resonate with me.  The idea of a country, a border, a currency, a belief system just something we have culturally imposed on ourselves to enable the advance of civilisation and try to make sense of the existential crisis induced by human consciousness.  Before voting remain on the basis that we live in a highly complex, interdependent, globalised world I flirted with the notion that human civilisation was at its best when we lived in tribal communities of no more than 150 people, that the concept of leaving, of going it alone in our insignificant little tribe was truer to ourselves.  According to Hariri, we can only really communicate and collaborate effectively in groups of this sort of size.  The idea of keeping things small, of keeping things close, of not trusting that nearby tribe who are 99% the same as us began to appeal, until I realised that we couldn’t really go back to a simpler, bygone era.

Like Corbyn, the idea of pride in an imagined nation, pride in a national anthem, pride in being English, or British, or European; pride in being human – these things are all a bit alien to me; but they are what our politics, what our nation; our communities are built upon.  So, while this is a good conversion to have with the leftist intellectual cognoscenti in Islington, the great British public isn’t quite ready for it, yet.  And when you get all pious, earnest and high-minded that no one else seems to understand your well-reasoned worldview one starts to look a bit ugly. 

Unfortunately for us liberal leftists, the idea that “I’m alright, it’s all the others” prevails in our society.  We have an inherent distrust of strangers.  We are rooted in the alleged glory of our past rather than the insecurity of our future.  I hate this.  When I travel to other countries for work or pleasure, I am always intrigued and curious about their politics, their education systems, their workplace cultures.  I can see what they do well and what we do badly.  I can see what we do well and they do badly.  Many of us never get to see ourselves from the perspective of others, we just get slogans and hyperbole pumped into us by some very clever journalists at the Sun, the Daily Mail, the Express or the Daily Mirror.  The Telegraph, the Times and the Guardian mere bit parts in our national psyche.

For me our politics and economics went wrong with Maggie Thatcher.  She declared there to be no such thing as society.  She presided over the gross rise in materialism and individualism, both curses of the modern age.  She championed greed and a form of self-serving ambition.  To hell with everyone else.  Many suggest she destroyed our manufacturing industries and the communities which supported them, but I can see that the Unions perhaps had too much of a stranglehold over some industries in the seventies.  There is a fine line between a productive, motivated workplace and an oppressed workforce.

The seventies hang heavily over people’s memories of labour in their unionised prime.  I remember the Friday morning after the 1997 election.  While I hadn’t voted in New Labour, I was fairly excited about the new era that dawned that morning.  At lunchtime, at Zeneca Agrochemicals in Yalding, Kent I remember this particular, nascent, ex public school boy, graduate scientist, 25 year old being quite shocked by the lovely ladies working behind the bar in the canteen who were less than enamoured by labour returning to power after 18 years.  They quickly silenced my celebratory, liberal, intellectual, leftist verbiage.  I then realised that the Conservative party wasn’t just the party of the uber-rich; the privileged, bigoted tosspots I shared my school days with but also the party of the hard working, working class.

Despite my very different experience of life, I can empathise with those communities in the fallen red wall up North, and in the midlands.  Debra Kidd’s long, passionate Twitter thread today about post mining communities being ravaged by years of Tory cuts to public services; being ravaged by years of underinvestment resonated.  I could feel the pain.  But counter to the destruction of these urban, working class communities was a BBC radio 4 programme recently.  In that programme the new labour induced drive for social mobility, the 50% to university, was argued to ravage those communities further.  The argument that a community can cope with 15% of its children leaving to gain a university education, but that a departure of 50% tears them irreversibly apart.

We live in a complex world.  Looking back, we can see that the un-invention of certain technologies and cultural developments could help to improve modern society. Look at the furore over single use plastic packaging for example.  The impassioned monologue by Anne Reid in ‘Years and Years’ is so true.  We all play our part in creating a world we never wanted.  Our evolutionary instincts are overridden by rapid cultural advances; and those advances in culture cannot adapt fast enough to the exponential advance of technology.  We moan about the robots taking over.  We moan about bureaucracy.  Yet we let it happen.  We all play our part. 

And yet we rigorously defend the past.  Think of education. In our current, conservative, Nick Gibbesque world we constantly doff our caps to a traditional, academic education.  This isn’t a mistake.  If we teach children all about history, geography, chemistry, literature and maths we have very little time to teach them about prejudice, about emotional intelligence, about parenting (both under- and over-parenting) about politics, about entrenchment, about materialism, about environmentalism, about the selfish, self-serving, secular, risk-averse, compliant, conformist, bureaucratic world we have created.  When they find out about it, they rant about it for a while and then sign on the dotted line.  As Philip Larkin once wrote, man hands on misery to man – it deepens like a coastal shelf!

The big conversation our most progressive politicians want us to have in our schools has been largely silenced.  There is too much at stake for those running our country, our economy, our schools.  We’ll see what happens to the Greta Thurnberg generation.  Will they grow up to be less selfish than us?  Will they be more liberal, more open-minded, make more personal sacrifices, be less fucking money orientated?

I am no big fan of centralised bureaucracies but I am still of the belief that Brexit is the greatest act of economic, social and cultural harm any modern country has inflicted upon itself.  I hope for a more tolerant, peaceful and wiser world.  I would like there to be less of a gap between rich and poor.   I  would like education to be more about empowerment, enlightenment and community; less about exams, compliance and comparison.  I would like people to be more community minded; to lead simpler, energy-sparing lives.  I would like to live in a world where people realised that we are not born German, or English, or Indian; that we all have far more in common than we care to acknowledge.   I would love to live in a world where we share our riches and our working hours out more evenly.  I would love to live in a world where status and wealth were not the only measures of success.  I would love our politicians to be more honest, to work more openly for the long-term happiness, sustainability and prosperity of our nation(s), in synchronisation with our European and International neighbours.

Yet, I am realistic.  We live in a hierarchical society.  Humans are tribal creatures.  We like to belong to a tribe; a belief system; a politics; a football team.  Utopia does not and will never exist for everyone.  Our team is not necessarily better than their team. 

I believe that life, education, politics; pretty much everything, is far simpler than we make it.  For now, the Conservatives have the simpler message and the stronger leader.  Love them or loathe them, we are stuck with them because their message – wrongly or rightly, truth or lies – appealed more to people’s hearts; whereas Labour, the Liberal Democrats and I am always trying to win people’s minds. 

A feeling – for most people – will always conquer a thought.

Fifty Decisions (which have shaped my life).

by Toby Payne-Cook

Preface

“Aristocratic genealogy may seem a quaint preoccupation, but the idea behind it rests upon a universally relevant concern: irrespective of the status details of our families, each of us is the recipient of a large and complex emotional inheritance that is decisive in who we are and how we will behave.  Furthermore, and at huge cost, we mostly lack any real sense of what this powerful inheritance might be doing to our judgement.”

Alain de Botton – The School of Life, 2019

 “Your life has been shaped by decisions – by all the dozens of conscious major decisions you have made yourself, by all the millions of minor ones, and by all the billions and billions of entirely unconsidered ones.  It has also been shaped by the decisions of others, as you may be gratefully or only too painfully aware.”

Michael Frayn – The Human Touch, 2006

            I like lists.  Favourite albums.  Places.  Books.  Gigs.  Influential people.   But this is no ordinary list.  This is a summation of the fifty decisions that have shaped my life, written to celebrate and reflect on my first fifty years on the planet.  I often ponder how similar I would be if an identical genetic template grew up in a very different climate, with considerably less affluence and social privilege, with different schooling, qualifications and life experience.  How different would I be?

One of my favourite films is the wonderful, ‘It’s a wonderful life,’ starring James Stewart as George Bailey.  The premise of that infamous tear-jerker is that our lives and our decisions not only affect our immediate life but also have a reciprocal effect on the lives of many others – hopefully in a predominantly positive way.  We, typically, spend between 70 or 80 years living a conscious life that touches and leaves it mark on many other lives; with little pause for thought or contemplation.  We are trapped inside this thing called the self, our (probably false) perception of ourselves.  Our view of the self shifts throughout our lives: our 5, 15, 25, 45 and 75, almost completely different both inside and out.  Would our 15 relate to our 45, our 25 to our 75?  Our future is uncertain while our past travels with us, playing a huge part in the trajectory of our lives.  How much would a different childhood home, different school, different A level choices, different friends, different hobbies and different work environments have on our experience and perspective of life?

             Choosing my list has been cathartic and insightful; each decision making possible many more decisions – some big and many small – and, looking back, making me ponder what could have been if a different decision had been made at the time. 

It is my hope that the indulgent reflections herein trigger your own self-analysis and help you to explain to yourself the roots of your love life, politics, religion, interests, character, profession(s), values, musical taste and sense of purpose.

I am cognisant of the bias within my reflections.  That all these decisions have some nostalgic value to me, that my memory does not tell the complete truth, that my mind cunningly reprocesses information to fit my version of my life story.  The perspectives of nearly fifty me are skewed and corrupted by my episodic recollections of the past; my current family relationships embellishing, over-analysing or leading me to misinterpret events and their consequences from not only my past but the past of my nearest and dearest.

While Michael Frayn’s and Alain de Botton’s words may have spurred me to write this book about the decisions that have sculpted my life; the book is also a vehicle to explore the human condition. 

As a second career teacher of now nearly seven years I am exposed to parents, children and teachers who – I believe – have self-preservationist and socially conditioned views about the importance of teachers, schools and education to young peoples’ lives.  When I am confronted with a class full of children, only really a handful seem to fully subscribe to what it is teachers and schools are trying to do.  Most are treading water, ticking a box, passing the time, doing it because society says they have to.  We somehow manage to make most of the most mentioned in the previous sentence conform to our school structures, the subjects we deem it important to teach them, the exams they sit, the national testing, the league tables, the data is king, the over-scientism and under-artism of everything.  It all ends up being normal, because being normal and belonging to the normalcy of everything has become important in the modern world.  You can deviate privately but our public, professional personas have become so normalised we have all become rather similar, rather dull, rather caught in a trap, there’s no turning back. 

Man is born free, yet everywhere he is in chains – Jean Jacques Rousseau.

Parenting young children and teaching pre-adolescent children is terrifying when you think about it.  Everything adults do, say and teach has the potential to be imprinted on their minds.  And an awful lot of what most adults (including me some of the time, I’m sure) say, do, think and teach is wrong.  Pre-adolescent children accept and rarely question anything.  They totally accept the status quo and are unbelievably compliant: delightful, delicate and highly dependent sponges.  They are impressionable.  Their lives are blissfully innocent.  They live in ignorant bliss of the harsh realities of modern global capitalism, or extreme poverty, or of anything going on beyond their own, tiny, over-protected, frequently mollycoddled existence.  We control them.  We entrench them.  Sometimes we indulge them.  Occasionally we spoil them.  They rarely transcend that entrenchment.

Recently (November 2019), I have been teaching a little bit about variation, inheritance, genes and DNA to an immature yet bright Year 7 cohort (aged 11 – 12).  I was surprised to find that a few children have difficulty in separating their inherited features and traits from their childhood experience with their parents.  Some genuinely thought (and I’m not entirely sure I convinced them otherwise) that their parents’ wealth, politics, interests and religion were part of their inheritance rather than their environment.

The premise of this book suggests that our experiences, specifically the decisions which lead to – or prevented – certain experiences, shape our lives more than the features and traits encoded within our DNA.  As our understanding of genetics, biotechnology, epigenetics, cognitive psychology and neuroscience increase exponentially, it seems that the interplay between nature (our genes) and nurture (our environment) is key.  I will never know whether my traits of extraversion, openness and partial agreeableness were sitting there in my genes waiting to be expressed when the right conditions came, or whether endless time spent with my parents, mostly my Mum, enabled, implanted and developed those traits.  It is fairly hard to separate the two, if we grew up in a happy and stable home with our biological parents.

Undoubtedly, more than any other species, our upbringing makes us who we are and plays a huge part in what we become.  Calves, lambs and foals can walk within minutes of birth.  All we can do is suck, scream and shit for our first few weeks and months!  We are so heavily dependent upon our parents for so long, it is impossible to conclude anything else other than our first few years of development are absolutely crucial to the story of ourselves.

I will veer into both amateur genetics and amateur psychology throughout the book but I hope that my pseudo-intellectual deviations don’t detract too much from the significance of the decisions discussed within.  I may have had no choice about many of the early decisions in this book, and those early decisions may have had a deeper, subliminal effect on subsequent, more independent, decisions but I am about to make a very important decision.  I have decided that it is now time to stop writing this introduction.     

1. The 6^th Tee

            She was 29, down from London; staying with her parents over the Easter weekend in 1971.  Richard and Phyllis had recently retired from suburban Kent to her maternal grandparents’ former home in Devon.  She was six years into a long affair with her boss: a married man, married – back then – to his 2^nd wife; nine years into an exclusive Chelsea gift shop girl’s life.  Devon was, perhaps, a temporary escape from this stale situation.  A week in the fresh, soporific air; infused with the therapeutic sound of crashing Atlantic waves.  A week of reminiscing about childhood holidays; about her early childhood, evacuated down here in the war.  A week of being fussed over by Mummy.   She was the youngest of three children; almost an only child.  Her sister was seven years older and married at twenty-three.  Big brother was thirty-nine, married with three children and busy as a Conservative politician, the member of parliament for St Ives and the Isles of Scilly in Cornwall.  Fond of her six nephews and nieces, we can assume that her biological clock was ticking. But today she was playing golf; mixed foursomes at the Royal North Devon, the oldest links course in England, with a man, a lifelong bachelor; a man who would become a brilliant Godfather to me.

            He was 53, a former Cambridge blue and scratch golfer.  He was secretary of the golf club and head green keeper too.  He was working that day.  In the evenings, he was shacked up in a flat in Westward Ho! with his lover of several years, having separated from his second wife, seven years earlier in 1964.  He was born in 1917, the son of a Devon vicar, two elder sisters and one younger.  He went to Lancing College then on to Cambridge University to read history.  Played a lot of sport.  Messed around.  Kicked out.  Went to Wye Agricultural College.  Then the war, Lt Col in the Royal Artillery aged only 24.  Italy and North Africa.  Grim.  He never really spoke about it after that.  You don’t glorify war.  I learnt that from him.  He married an actress during the war.  Had two boys.  In 1946 he was looking for farms; his first wife and the boys’ mother killed herself.  Sisters helped out.  A nanny.  They moved to Devon.  Married.  Bought a farm in 1949.  A pioneering and much respected farmer still remembered by the village elders today.  Three more children.  Bought a manor house in 1961.  Experimented with progressive farming methods, took his finger off the pulse.  Drank and smoked a lot.   Played a lot of golf.  A bit of a player, we think.  Stopped farming in 1964, and left his wife too.  In 1969 he became secretary and head green keeper of the Royal North Devon Golf Club.

            The golfers, including her, had just left the 5^th green and were heading towards the 6^th tee, looking North.  The best vista on the course, two miles of golden sand bombarded by 3000 miles of unforgiving Atlantic surfer dude waves to the west; the gently undulating Northam burrows to the east; the windswept and rapidly eroding sixth, seventh, and eighth fairways clinging to sand dunes in front of them; the imposing church tower of Northam, two miles away and up a hill, looking over the bay from behind.

She was playing well.  The golf was of a good quality.  My future Godfather, a very competitive golfer, was happy with his partner’s performance.

He appeared as she approached the 6^th tee.  He’d seen that she was playing that day.  He handed her an envelope.  There was a brief exchange and he returned back towards the golf club, over a mile away.  She opened the envelope and read the note.

Her golf spiralled downhill.  Her mind spiralled.  Her heart raced.  She was giddy with love.

His decision to write the note and then to pass it to her catalysed a spontaneous, life-changing, and ultimately life-creating decision.  She didn’t want an affair.  Nor did he.

Shortly after that fateful day, she returned to London and terminated her affair, her job and her London life.  He, too, terminated his affair. 

They vowed to marry.  And to have children.  A month later, they were looking for a place to live in rural North Devon, a place to raise a family, a place to make love, a place to make me.

*   *   *

            With hindsight, my parents’ spontaneous decision to begin a romantic liaison until death parted them is almost completely unfathomable.  My father had five children aged 27 to 15, he was twenty-four years older than my Mum and most of his personal farming and family riches had been blown on manor houses, ambitious agricultural projects, inventions, school fees, cars, cigarettes and whisky.  My gregarious mother – in her own words – moved straight out of the King’s Road in Chelsea, London and into some isolated farming hinterland in the middle of nowhere.  It was unconventional, to say the least.

            The decision to hand over the note on the 6^th tee triggered their loving relationship.  Just over six months later, at some point in November 1971, as a consequence of their love, my father ejaculated approximately 300 million sperm into my mother.  One of them, on one particular day, somewhere in the middle of my mother’s erratic and unpredictable menstrual cycle, made it to her egg cell. 

            Twenty-three chromosomes made of DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid) from the Toby sperm fused with twenty-three inside the Toby egg, to create my unique Toby genetic code.  As I am human, like you reading this, the vast majority of that code is identical to yours.  This is one of the great misconceptions about genetics and DNA – in reality our human DNA is what makes us all so similar; the differences we attribute to our genes, a mere blip hidden in the mire of this magnificent, massive and multifarious molecule of life.

            My DNA – just like yours – codes for the proteins which enable the structure and function of my body; my two arms, my legs, my reproductive organs, my heart, my spinal cord, my brain, my skin adorned with its several million hair follicles, the ossicles in my middle ear, the amylase enzyme in my saliva; the insulin synthesized in my pancreatic cells; the endless proteins involved in my complex metabolic pathways; the production of myoglobin in muscle cells; the antibodies in my immune system.

            Of course it also codes for the proteins that determine my eye colour, my blood group, my ear lobes, my height, my bulbous nose, my pre-senile baldness, my inability to roll my tongue.  More complicatedly, and still relatively mysteriously, combinations of genes or the expression (or inexpression) thereof may code for my intellectual propensity, my extraversion, my sense of humour, my suboptimal co-ordination, my creative thinking, my numeracy, my love of food, my relative lack of inclination towards exercise and the insufferable amplitude of my overactive vocal cords at full power.

            My father’s decision (before he became my biological father) to hand that love letter to my mother (before she became my biological mother) ultimately led to the creation of me.  It was, undoubtedly, the most critical of the fifty decisions discussed in this book, for without it there would have been no me for the other forty-nine decisions to shape, sculpt and skew my partially constant, yet shape-shifting character.

            That really is the point of this book.  Decision number one led to my biological synthesis.  It catalysed the multiple possibilities of me.  But it didn’t make me me.  The making of me, whatever and whoever me is, came much later.

            But what is me?  Is my me the same as your you when that you refers to me?  Is your you version of me different for lots of different you?  When did my me become me?  When we stop to think about this there really is no me; not a constant – and certainly not a consistent – one anyway.  The question which fascinates me increasingly, is how much of me is pre-determined in those genes?  In that random sperm meeting that specific egg of those two parents?  If I was raised by adopted parents, in a different country with a very different climate, amongst a different sequence of siblings and a very different education system how different would or could 50 year old me be?

            While it has been tempting to think of nature (our inherited genes) and our nurture (how we are raised as a child) as separate influences on our adult beings, we are beginning to understand the complex interplay between our genetics and our environments.  For example did my mother’s incessant conversation with me throughout my childhood trigger my extraversion, or did the expression of an “extravert gene” in early childhood trigger my mother’s conversational manner with me, thus exacerbating my innate extraversion further?

            As a teacher, I am aware of the subliminal belief amongst many of my peers that what we do in the classroom makes a huge difference to peoples’ lives.  It is without doubt a potentially important part of children’s developing emotional and intellectual architecture, but is it only ever working with a genetically pre-determined set of cognitive propensities?  I suspect so.  I suspect we have varying amounts of intellectual propensity and cognitive potential coded in our genes.  But I also suspect that that propensity can be triggered, enhanced and optimised throughout our lives just as it could – alternatively – be hindered, stifled or suppressed.

            So, really, that monumental yet seemingly insignificant decision near the 6^th tee at the Royal North Devon golf club led to two life changing moments:

1) The biosynthesis of my genetic code stored in that original, solitary zygote.

2) The parents who raised and nurtured me.

Now might be a good time to quote Phillip Larkin.

This be the verse by Philip Larkin

They fuck you up, your mum and dad.

They may not mean to, but they do.

They fill you with the faults they had

And add some extra just for you.

But they were fucked up in their turn

By fools in old-style hats and coats,

Who half the time were soppy-stern

And half at one another’s throats.

Man hands on misery to man.

It deepens like a coastal shelf.

Get out as early a you can,

And don’t have any kids yourself.

            So not only was my character layered upon my genetic template by the way my parents behaved around me, the way they spoke to me, guided me, supported me, disciplined me, ignored me, loved me and nourished me but I was inculcated in all their beliefs, their interests, their work habits; their rituals and idiosyncrasies, their anxieties, their passions, their strengths and their flaws, their prejudices, their friends, the leftovers from their rare yet elaborate dinner parties, their arguments; their depression; their politics, their religion – or dormancy thereof, their family histories, their family tensions and politics; their death. 

This was – or is – our normal.  Many people think of their upbringing as normal, as stable, as the only way it can be.  Many never question their own family weirdness, never consider the fact that there is no normal.  Until of course you meet your in laws and realise either quite how normal – or weird – your own childhood was!

            It is only through starting to write this book that I have fully considered the impact other’s choices, especially those of our parents, have upon us.  It was not until decision number 15 of 50, when I was 16 years old, that I made an independent decision that would have some bearing upon the trajectory of my life.

*    *    *

            In each chapter, one for each of the fifty key decisions which shaped my life, there are three sections.  The first describes, or recounts, the original context and moment of the decision.  The second, and generally longest, section analyses the implications of that decision and any other important decisions it enabled.  In the third and final section of each chapter – this one – I will consider potential alternative scenarios if the original decision had not been made.

In this case, the final section will be rather brief – for I would not exist.  But what of my parents had they not become my parents, had he not handed her that note?   

My father, I suspect, would have continued to drink too much, smoke too much and would have not experienced the joy and contentment that his third family brought him.  Equally, he may not have experienced the financial stress of raising two more children and running a small family business.  His alternative trajectory may have triggered an earlier, or later, death.

My mother may have never had children.  She was a brilliant mother to young, adolescent and grieving children, a loving wife and nurse to a dying husband, a brilliant daughter to elderly parents.  She may not have been so close to hand to care for her paralysed mother or dying father; the purpose and focus that being a wife and mother brought her may have never enriched her life.  She would not have been widowed aged 46.  The most gregarious, extravert and outrageous person I know may not have spent so long living alone in a ramshackle farmhouse in an isolated and isolating rural enclave in North Devon, with all its unintended consequences… 

Hi Toby! How are you?

I’m good, thanks.

Er, no you’re not. You are fine.

Oh, yeah – that’s what I meant (without revealing the honest truth about not being fine at all, of course).

I don’t know about you, but my use of the word good in place of fine in the above context irritates me. Yet this mild irritation pales into insignificance when the word good is used to describe someone’s professional competence.

Yesterday’s tip on TeacherTapp about the difference (or lack of difference) between teachers in “Outstanding” schools and those rated “Requires Improvement” or lower got me thinking about this.

Is it accurate to describe someone as a good teacher? Are all teachers good? If not, are some bad?

I fully understand that some teachers have a lot more experience than others (experience can be measured in time or variety). I also understand that some teachers have deeper and/or broader subject knowledge than others. I also understand that some teachers may tick box the teaching standards better than others. Some might really love the performance of the text book good lesson. Some might be really good at marking. Or good at explanatory analogies. Or good at putting children at ease. Or good at doing a retrieval quiz at the start of every lesson. Or good at consistently following the behaviour policy. Or good at designing well sequenced curricula. Some might read more edubooks than others. Some might go to more BrewEds than others. Some might tour the world listening to the latest hip educelebrity on their never ending book tour. Some might be better teachers of children than others. Some might be better teachers of Maths than others; English; Science; Drama or Golf course management.

You get the gist. Being a good teacher is context dependent. It is cohort dependent. It is probably pupil dependent. Mood dependent. Weather dependent. Stage of the term dependent. What shit is going on in your life beyond the classroom dependent. What shit squared is going on in each child’s life beyond the classroom, and what exponential shit went down in their parents shit before them.

So, from my seven years of experience in the classroom I have circumstantial evidence (in the form of wine, books, mugs, chocolates and really lovely messages from children and parents in cards) that I am sometimes a really brilliantly terrifically wonderful and very verY veRY vERY VERY GOOD teacher.

I also have some counter-evidence from different children and their parents that I’m really not a very good teacher at all. Maybe sometimes quite a BAD one. Good is so completely and utterly subjective.

This is a problem almost unique to teachers.

When I was a scientist in industry (and the same applied to my friends and collaborators in academia) no one described each other as good scientists, or bad scientists. Again, some were obviously more experienced than others (again time and variety are very different notions here). But we were all good. Good in a great many different ways. We worked together, or apart, and – generally – played to each others’ strengths (in terms of technical skills, level of expertise or more generic skills). I’m not sure there are refuse collectors rated good out there either. Or good post persons. Or good nurses. Good just isn’t used in any other professional contexts to anywhere near the same extent as it is in teaching.

Good permeates our educational language like a lazy writer. Good schools (on whose narrow, box ticking, easily measured terms)? Good lessons. When it comes down to it, defining what good actually is, is rather difficult. But then defining a lesson or a school is rather hard too. For me a lesson is simply a unit of time in a school timetable but many teachers over many years have made a lesson into a thing in itself.

Of course there are some better ways of teaching than others. But we would do well to remember that better for some is not necessarily better for all. It is surely impossible to be good all the time for everyone in all settings at all ages.

The misnomer of good has become a problem.

You got it?

Good.

The acquisition of knowledge is the foundational basis for all future learning, skills and application.  Knowledge creates culture, companies and venerable institutions.  Without it, our minds are insipid vacuums, incapable of anything worthwhile: we are void.  Conversely, skills enable us to prosper amongst the uncertainties of 21^st century life; allow us to outsmart the machines; employers want skills.  Without skills, we are just memories lost in a technologised world; subliminally controlled by machines with far greater memories than ourselves.

I find these polarised positions quite exhausting; neither of them particularly conducive to improving education for all.  The new wave of knowledge-rich warriors pour scorn over the creativity and skills evangelists, and vice versa.  Views have, seemingly, coalesced into two rival tribes with wise voices on both sides of the debate.  In this article, I examine the strengths and flaws of each extremity before seeking resolution, and sharing some ideas of how knowledge can be deepened, and skills developed, within the KS3 Science curriculum.

Developing a knowledge rich curriculum is a noble cause, rooted in social justice, increasing cultural capital and providing opportunity for all.  David Didau is a deep thinker in this area and he presents some compelling arguments in his latest book, Making Kids Cleverer.  Didau speaks for a vociferous band of traditionalists who believe that knowledge is the great leveller; that if only we could make more knowledge stick in schools, then we could close the attainment gap and finally end the dominance of the independent or grammar schooled elite running (or ruining?) the country.

Another knowledge champion who has read, observed and thought a lot about the process of learning in schools is Daisy Christodoulou.  Her comprehensive dressing down of myths such as “the internet changes everything”, “project based learning is the answer to education’s failings” and “how endlessly practicing the end product makes perfect” are well reasoned and hard to disagree with once you dig deeper into your own educational preconceptions and misconceptions.  She is right that you don’t – necessarily – become a more skilled footballer just by playing loads of matches; she is right that children can drown in cognitive overload and confusion if left to their own, unguided, enquiry based learning and she is right that the internet gives us unprecedented access to information, not to be confused with knowledge.  She argues eloquently that knowledge underpins the acquisition and application of skills later in life. 

Yet, if we extrapolate the idea that teaching knowledge is all that matters in schools, don’t we end up rewarding those blessed with great memories; rewarding those who can both quickly process information and retrieve it readily from long-term memory?  If your processing or retrieval is suboptimal, then won’t the daily treadmill of knowledge – however brilliantly it is pumped into your brain – become a source of indifference rather than inspiration; won’t you become alienated from the content that your teachers believe will make you cleverer, get you to university and overthrow Boris, Jacob et al for the keys to the kingdom?  It is interesting to observe how academic most of those campaigning for an exclusively knowledge rich curriculum are.  It is a worthy mission, but can knowledge really be power to all; is it realistic for everyone to be on an academic, linear treadmill towards an Oxbridge Professorship with various exit points along the way?  Is that really giving everyone what they need?

The Creativity and Skills evangelists arguments are more progressive, but equally compelling. Before teaching, I spent 17 years in science based industry; so their views resonate but when they start to deny the foundational basis of knowledge, they have a habit of raising the hackles of teachers grafting away in the classroom.  No one advocating a greater emphasis on skills would suggest not learning times tables, some spelling rules or the names of everyday objects and phenomena.  While we can agree that searching information on the internet is not the same as acquiring knowledge, we really cannot put our heads in the sand and pretend that childhood today is essentially the same as it was 50 years ago.  Children, like adults, are now exposed to huge amounts of information; and get to explore the world in their laps, at the touch of a screen or swipe of a finger.  This is both empowering and debilitating.  Schools ignore this transcendent force at their peril.

Daniel Levitin explores how schooling needs to change, to adapt to the demands of the age, towards the end of his book, “The Organised Mind – thinking straight in the age of information overload”.   At no point does he propose children sitting and learning knowledge and skills straight from Google; but he does suggest they need to be taught how to discern the key facts or knowledge from the information available on the internet.  Eagleman and Brandt in “The Runaway Species” go a little further in suggesting approaches to encourage – or develop – creativity, in parallel with the acquisition of knowledge.   From an educational perspective, two books by Bill Lucas:  “Educating Ruby” (with Guy Claxton) and “Teaching Creative Thinking” (with Ellen Spencer) are key reference points for those of us with a desire to develop thinkers, communicators and collaborators rather than churning out memorisers and walking encyclopaedias.  In Educating Ruby he argues that what we really need to learn are confidence, curiosity, collaboration, communication, creativity, commitment and craftsmanship.  For these are the skills valued by employers; and skills which enable future learning and personal fulfilment.  Professor Lucas doesn’t argue against knowledge, he just makes the point that children need to leave school with a toolbox full of capability, rather than a briefcase full of grades.

The two extremes are rooted in differing philosophies about the purpose of education.  Knowledge-rich equates to the classical definition of an education: transmitting culture and passing on the best that has been thought and said.  Education becomes a thing, a stand-alone platform in itself.   Whereas a greater focus on skills is more about knowing ourselves than knowing stuff; a more seamless – and admittedly intangible – transition from dependent, self-obsessed child to independent, self-aware and purposeful adult.

When thinking about the relative merits of both philosophies, I take myself back to my time as a development scientist with Pfizer, the multi-national pharmaceutical company, when I regularly interviewed undergraduates and graduates.  On paper, the calibre of interviewees was astonishing but at interview, many could barely think for themselves.  There was an army of conscientious memorisers out there, but very few flexible thinkers.  While Pfizer is built upon knowledge, my time in industry taught me the following: why be a walking encyclopaedia when knowing who to ask, where to look, or how to interpret complex information is what really matters?

 So how to resolve this burgeoning fracas between knowledge and skills?  We need balance.  Interestingly the majority of Edubooks explore the two extremes with only Tom Sherrington’s “The Learning Rainforest” and Martin Robinson’s “Trivium 21c” exploring the dichotomy, and considering a fusion of traditionalist and progressive ideals.  Education is primarily about knowledge; but we mustn’t supress or ignore the development of skills.  Knowledge multiplied by knowledge does not miraculously equal creativity.  Yes, creativity is underpinned by deep knowledge but it is not crafted from it.  Children’s innate and nurtured skills cannot be ignored until the end of formal schooling. 

The most ardent educationalists quickly become cynical when another pseudoscientific initiative is bolted on to their already frantic roles.  A list of words read out at assembly, or plastered on a classroom wall do not do the skills agenda any favours.   Time needs to be set aside to discuss, and teach what collaboration, communication skills and creative thinking really are, and why they matter (in the long-term).  Small tutor groups (not to be confused with registration groups) could be constructed to regularly discuss how pupils have been developing generic skills, and enacting habits of mind (Discipline, Perseverance, Collaboration, Inquisitiveness and Imagination)¹ across the curriculum.

Science is – arguably – the subject most challenged by this dichotomy.  I have witnessed too many children floundering with cognitive overload when carrying out a practical task to embed a scientific principle while working collaboratively.  It is a grossly inefficient learning process.  Professor Lucas suggests “split screen learning” with separate knowledge and skills objectives but I’d go one stage further (in the non-examined key stages):  separate subject knowledge (60%), subject skills (20%) and generic skills (20%) lessons as applied to a termly (subject or faculty specific) theme. 

We need to be more honest with ourselves, and our students, with what it is we want them to learn, or practise.  If we dilute the teaching of knowledge by contamination with skills, learning will be suboptimal.  Conversely if we keep harping on about theory while teaching the knowledge which underpins a skill – or while practising an existing skill – the skill will never be mastered.  Knowledge will always underpin skills, but skills need honing, practising, applying – and highlighting – too.  A modern education requires the explicit teaching and practising of both stuff AND fluff.

Further Reading:

Didau, D. (2019) Making Kids Cleverer Crown House Publishing Ltd

Christodoulou, D. (2013) Seven Myths About Education   The Curriculum Centre

Levitin, D. (2014) The Organised Mind  Pengiun

Brandt, A. & Eagleman, D. (2017) The Runaway Species  Canongate books Ltd

Claxton, G. & Lucas B. (2015) Educating Ruby  Crown House Publishing Ltd

¹Lucas, B & Spencer, E. (2017) Teaching Creative Thinking  Crown House Publishing Ltd

Sherrington, T. (2017) The Learning Rainforest  John Catt Educational Ltd

Robinson, M. (2013) Trivium 21c   Independent Thinking Press

by Toby Payne-Cook

Two days ago, I randomly placed a survey on Twitter.  162 people responded.  These people were presumably part of my echo chamber or part of my echo chamber’s consequent echo chambers, so I am under no illusion that the totally unrepresentative data from the survey actually means anything but let’s agree that 162 people can infer a pattern, a feeling; that we can take something from this survey, even if it is only the rambling assertions and questions within another of my meandering blog posts!  The results were as follows (in response to the question, ‘What’s more important to you?’):  27% of those 162 people selected BEAT CANCER (extend life);  51% selected REVERSE GLOBAL WARMING;  12% selected RE-PURPOSE HUMANITY and 10% selected STOP BREXIT.  Back to some analysis in a few paragraphs time.

Yesterday I enjoyed some light-hearted discussion on Twitter about the plastic packaging of shower gels and shampoo; about Imperial leather soap in cardboard packaging.

On Saturday, I was a minor part of a minor Twitter spat about extinction rebellion protestors being part of the problem as they all own iPhones, that ultimate symbol of modern materialist wealth.

A week ago there was some debate about the phrase Rousseauian nonsense corrupting education policy within EYFS (the early years foundation stage [aged 2 – 5 in the UK]) and into KS1 (key stage 1 or years 1 and 2 at school in England and Wales, aged 5 – 7) which led to me to discussing Rousseau’s assertion that “Man is born free, yet everywhere he is in chains” and one tweacher friend asserting this statement to be incorrect on the basis that human civilisation is so much more advanced now than it was, now that we have modern medicine, and we live forever (metaphorically) in comparison to our ancient forebears.  This led to me siding with the nihilistic arguments of Malcolm Gladwell and Alain de Botton in the 2015 Munk debate, “Do humanity’s best days lie ahead?”  

This weekend and today there is much chatter about Labour’s suggestion they would abolish Ofsted, not open any more free schools, abolish private schools and re-power local authorities.  I have described this as tiresome two party flip flop politics, as surface edutinkery, as the never-ending politicisation of education and of demonstrating the dearth of big ideas in education policy over the last few decades, or forever…

Several months ago, when extinction rebellion was starting to bubble up several teachers were incensed when accused of not teaching climate change, or not properly teaching about (human induced) climate change in schools.  It is definitely discussed (and taught in subject silos and exam specifications) but how many schools debate it, discuss it and make connections in children’s minds (or their own) between the science, the geography, the ethics, the economics and the politics it is hard to know.

And several years ago I read a wonderful biography of Alexander von Humbolt called ‘The Invention of Nature’ by Andrea Wulf.  Von Humbolt was arguably one of the greatest polymaths to walk the Earth (and he walked an awful lot of it in the early 19^th century).  He was a hero of Darwin’s, he coined the concept of nature, the importance of interdependence and when standing on a summit or high ridge in the Andes mountains he frequently felt so moved by the scenery that his imagination carried him even higher.  This imagination, he said, soothed the ‘deep wounds’ pure ‘reason’ sometimes created.  Alexander von Humbolt was the antithesis of Carl Linnaeus who classified and grouped living organisms based upon their differences.  Von Humbolt sought and identified their connections.  Their interdependence.  Interdependence may just be the most important topic we teach at school in biology.  Just as Energy maybe the most important we teach everyone in physics and sustainable development may be the most important we teach in geography.

At first glance all these disparate introductory paragraphs may seem unrelated.  My four survey options may even seem discrete.  But they are not.  Everything is connected.  If I was allowed to vote in my own survey, I’d have voted to re-purpose humanity.  Nebulous, I know.  One person’s purpose for humanity may be another person’s hell.  But I don’t believe we can fix or reverse human induced climate without some collective, global re-purposing.  While many would argue that the forces of Trump and Johnson are trying to re-purpose humanity and that Brexit will give us more freedom to change more things for the better (will it bollocks), the kind of re-purposing I imagine, and the kind of collective global co-operation and consensus required to reverse climate change would surely be easier to come about as part of a large, admittedly clunky and bureaucratic, organisation such as the EU with largely egalitarian aims for the good of humanity.

So a brief Brexit aside.  The Lib dems have gone a bit bonkers over this (but I’m with them).  They are looking at the complexity of human civilisation from very high, of course they are electioneering and trying to differentiate themselves from the Tories and Labour but I believe they come from a position of principle, rather than one to secure or maintain power.  Only 10% of people in my pointless, statistically insignificant survey want to stop Brexit (more than the other three options).  Yet those who have the most power to fundamentally reshape the way we govern and lead the world economically, politically and environmentally seriously want Brexit.   Why?  Because they want to take back control.  Or, in the case of Trump, have more control over us.  Why do they want to take back control?  Not to make us richer or more famous as a country.  It is to prevent the EU from meddling with our tax system.  To prevent EU tax policies seeking to redistribute wealth.  To prevent EU tax policies meddling with the toxic money laundering culture connected with the City of London that preserves tax havens and preserves most of the global gravy train within the pockets and investments of the richest 1% of the richest countries in the world.  It is to preserve the profits and power of the multinational corporations running Trump’s America behind the scenes.  So Brexit maintains the extremes of global capitalism on a massive scale.  Anything which preserves the ugly, rich extremes of capitalism, of profit at all costs, of cost rather than value, is good for materialism.  And materialism is not good for reversing climate change.

We all buy and own too much shit.  I’m as guilty as most.  We all are.  The amount of food, and the amount of fridge space (and therefore supermarket fridge space, and therefore all sorts of unnecessary plastic packaging) available per capita for my three children is far in excess that was available to me in my affluent middle class childhood in the 1970s and early 1980s.  The perceived human right to an annual holiday in the sun; the labour saving and leisure time sapping technology in our homes; a perfectly ripe Waitrose avocado; a brand new car(s) complete with service plan; a replace rather than repair culture.  This is normal for many of us.  I’m a big fan of the cleverly branded shower gel Mint Source.  But I don’t need it.  No one needs it.  We don’t need shower gel; and we really don’t need that natty, single use, gizmo plastic toothpaste pump either. A little bit of soap can go a long way as Jimmy Cliff once sang.

But what to do?  We live in world full of advertising, full of product placement, full of the mass marketing of beauty products and cosmetics.  These products are made by big profitable companies, driven by the bottom line; shareholder value, driven by economic growth.  We vote in governments because of their perceived care of the economy, of jobs and of low taxes.  So long as we are all complicit in this; so long as we buy stuff that we think makes our lives better or happier, so long as we think we deserve a holiday in the sun, then climate change will continue to run amok.  It is a painful message.  As Blur sang on their Magic Whip album in 2015, there are too many of us.  And too many of us are consuming too much. 

Wind farms and wave power will certainly help (we could be energy self-sufficient on our near climatically perfectly located little islands) but the only sure fire way to drastically reduce emissions globally is to drastically re-evaluate our materialism, to massively reduce our consumerism.  And that is going to be seriously unpopular with those of us who’ve grown up in the age of plenty (Western teenagers from 1955 – 2015, shall we say). 

Only yesterday evening my sister-in-law and I engaged in lively debate on this topic.  We agreed that we should turn the heating down and wear jumpers more in the winter but when I suggested that I’d ban international leisure air travel (and quite possibly business travel too) stopping her from her annual fix of Spanish sun, she wasn’t happy.   I said you could slip down to Broadstairs on the train and put on a wetsuit if the sea was a bit cold instead (until we stop making largely unnecessary leisure wear like wetsuits)! 

It is seriously tricky.  It is hard.  It will be really hard.  To go from this to a much simpler, less luxurious existence.  Originally my Twitter survey was triggered by an advert during one of many Rugby fixes on TV this weekend, by Cancer Research saying we can beat cancer.  We will beat cancer.  Now, this is a sensitive area.  But if I caveat it with the following:  I lost my Dad to cancer when I was 16; he was 70.  I lost a good friend aged 42 to pancreatic cancer two years ago.  My favourite godparent (my Mum’s best friend) was taken aged 53.  Amanda’s Mum made it to 78 but her last three weeks were brutal.  There are countless others for us all. Some way too young.  Some way too wonderful.  Life is not fair.  Yet mortality and preserving life isn’t good for global warming either.  There are too many of us.  We have too many domesticated animals.  And, on average, too many of us live too long.

So to fix or reverse global warming we need to fundamentally re-purpose humanity.  And to re-purpose humanity we probably need to start with re-purposing education.  Instead of education being the beacon of our advanced civilisation (and therefore our relentless consumerism), it should become – in the words of Nelson Mandela – the only weapon we have to change the world.  Education in schools is not about educating for a fundamental societal change, it is about education to preserve the existing status quo, to preserve jobs and employment and therefore to preserve wealth creation and preserve materialism.  School education is interwoven with the strong forces of global capitalism.  If governments really want to “save the world” (they mostly don’t) then fundamental re-evaluation of the purpose and structure of education is required. 

Yes, some of the structures and systems which have evolved in our current high stakes accountability and exam-orientated system are clunky and sub-optimal but tinkering with Ofsted or abolishing private schools is not nearly a big enough change to dramatically shift the priorities of the western world.  Humanity is unequal.  Always has been.  That isn’t right.  But shafting the rich won’t make it more equal.  We need to work together to drag the poor out of poverty.  Sending the dashing and perfectly coiffured young Lord and Lady Finknorton-Ferreting-St John-Farquar-Smythe to school alongside ver kids from darhhn ver local estate won’t fix the entrenched divisions in society, not without a near infinite bolus of taxpayer investment.

So, I acknowledge in my naïve quest to find Utobia (thanks @sputniksteve for coining this dream of a term!), that re-purposing humanity will be hard – quite possibly, if I let the complacency of modern humanity rinse over me (as it has for the last 47 years) – in vain and far too much effort.  But it is the only way to reverse global warming.  We can tax private cars off the road.  We can heavily tax air travel.  We can tax the shit out of second homes.  We can invest in state of the art low energy infrastructure.  We could all go vegan (not a perfect solution).  Or we could all breed locusts (an energy efficient source of protein).  We could invest in genetically modified improvements to metabolic pathways in photosynthesis and other cutting edge technologies, we could put wind turbines up all around our coast and harness the power of the waves but until we are prepared to sacrifice the majority of our riches and our materialism (not just a few private schools) we stand no chance in reversing global warming.  Beating cancer for all its individual and personal benefit won’t help either.  People like me having three kids.  No to that too.  And curse those damn antibiotics and sanitation as well.  Curse the absence of war, pestilence and famine.  Curse the infernal freedom of the car.  Curse electricity.  Curse individualism.  Curse Maggie Thatcher for not believing in society.  Curse us all for buying into everything we’ve been subliminally influenced to buy into.  Curse advertising.  Curse TV.  Curse fucking humans.

Which brings me back to Brexit.  Individualism and isolationism aren’t a sign that we want to work together to try to fix the biggest challenge of our time.  The only way we’re going to reverse global warming is to work together globally.  To work together with hugely diverse thinkers and cultures, to be open-minded, to be egalitarian, to be a little more socialist and a lot less economically right-wing.  To be more consensual and less protectionist. 

I often wonder if we knew in 1800 – before the onset of the industrial revolution, with a global population of just under 1 billion – what we know now, what we’d do differently.  For while the hard Brexiters want nothing more than to take us back to glory days of the British Empire in the late 1800s, I’m fairly sure it isn’t because they want to undo the harm caused by global industrialisation and its consequent population explosion.   

I want to finish with Rousseau, the Munk debates and a little bit of Yuval Noah Hariri and Michael Frayn.  Rousseau was absolutely spot on with us all being in chains.  We are blessed with the wonder of life, with this beautiful planet yet our advanced civilisation based as it is upon the imagined realities of money, religion, nations and corporations (concepts which don’t tangibly exist) is ridden with guilt and governed by societal structures we have no choice over.  When I extract myself from the modern world, perhaps on the coast at Hartland in Devon like von Humbolt on a high ridge in the Andes, I feel part of nature, I feel totally free, completely alive.  But then I’m quickly back in conventional society where I’m subliminally controlled by the media, by politics, by economics, by expectations, by my own sense of entitlement, by social conditioning, by entrenched views, by my own decisions and the decisions of my colleagues, my family and my forebears.

Human life was definitely not better (anywhere) 200 years ago.  But with all our consequent advances comes responsibility.  And that is daunting.  Our ingenuity is inspiring but our disconnect from the interdependence of nature is a big problem.  We are in chains and we don’t know what the hell to do to escape them.

Influenced by:

162 responses in a little Twitter survey on Saturday 21^st September 2019

The Invention of Nature, the Adventures of Alexander von Humbolt – the lost hero of Science by Andrea Wulf, 2015, John Murray publishers

The Human Touch by Michael Frayn, 2006, Faber & Faber

Sapiens by Yuval Noah Hariri, 2011, Vintage books.

Alain de Botton and Malcolm Gladwell at the Munk debate, “Do humans best days lie ahead?” in 2015

Jean Jacques Rousseau, 1762, quoted in The Philosophy Book, DK London, 2011

Following a bizarre sequence of events on Twitter today culminating in a discussion about Rousseau and the Munk debate from 2015 featuring Steven Pinker, Malcolm Gladwell, Matt Ridley and Alain de Botton asking “Do humans best days lie ahead?” I thought I’d share my Year 7 topic starter on Humans with you. So there may be a little bit of scientific, anthropological and historical inaccuracy but the gist, I hope, is fairly accurate. I personally prefer the more philosophical answers towards the end, so bear with the scientific terminology at the start. Children first had to come up with their own definition of What is a human? before discussing this in rotation as a class and following the instructions below. What is a human?      18 possible answers (in 50 words or fewer) below…..   Which are your favourite 3 definitions and why? Try to come up with your own, improved definition…in fewer than 50 words

1) A human is a made of mostly oxygen, carbon, nitrogen and hydrogen atoms.  Atoms join into simple molecules like water, glucose or amino acids.  They form larger molecules like proteins, which can assemble into living cells.  Cells form tissues that form organs, then organ systems that form the living human. (50)

2) A human is a type of living organism.  All living organisms carry out seven life processes:  Movement, Respiration (the process of releasing energy from sugars), Sensitivity (responses to stimuli in the environment), Growth, Reproduction (making new life), Excretion (getting rid of waste) and Nutrition (food or photosynthesis).  (47)

3) A human is a complex living organism which takes in food and oxygen; gives out waste products such as carbon dioxide and urine.  It is classified as a hominid, within the order of primates, class of mammals, the phylum chordata (vertebrates, or animals with a backbone) and the animal kingdom. (50)

4) A human is a mammal; an advanced class of animals that evolved from birds and reptiles about 100 million years ago.  Humans are descended from apes, their last common ape ancestor lived about 6 million years ago.  Humans (homo sapiens) like you and me first appeared about 300,000 years ago. (50)

5) Humans walk on two legs and have two arms (four limbs combined).  They have an internal skeleton (endoskeleton) for support, protect internal organs and aid movement.  Humans have body hair, two eyes, two ears, one mouth and some other bits depending on whether you are a boy or a girl! (50)

6) Humans can be old, middle-aged or young.  Young humans are called children.  Young children are sometimes called toddlers; before becoming toddlers humans are called babies.  Unborn babies are called a foetus.  Before the foetus develops a human shape is it an embryo.  The embryo develops from a fertilised egg cell.  (50)

7)  Humans change a lot throughout their lives.  David Brooks in a book called “The Road to Character” classifies modern humans into 6 stages:  Childhood; Adolescence; Odyssey (finding yourself and working out who you are!); Adulthood (financial independence or having children); Active retirement and Old age. (46)

8) Humans are highly intelligent beings.  While cephalopods (e.g. octopus) pigs, dogs, dolphins, monkeys and apes can be described as intelligent beings, so far as we know, humans are the only species who realise they are alive; who can – as Descartes said – “I think, therefore I am.”  They can think. (49)

9) Humans are conscious beings.  Since discovering the use of fire (and cooking) and the making of simple tools, their brains have expanded massively in comparison with other mammals.  They have developed language, maths and invented music, art, stories, religions, nations, money and science to try and make sense of everything. (50)

10)  Humans have developed culture.  Culture is history, art, literature, science, religion, customs and traditions.  Culture is the foundation and continuation of civilisation.  Culture gives humans a sense of belonging; shapes human interests, politics and economics.  Cultures are rich and wonderful yet “everywhere man is in chains.” – Jean Jacques Rousseau 1762.  (50)

11)  Humans are ingenious inventors.  They have discovered fire, language, medicines and distant planets.  They have created writing, art and music.  They have invented tools, maths, wheels, farming, the printing press, steam engines, electricity, the chemical industry, motorised vehicles, computers, space travel and the internet.  (44)

12) A human is a learner.  Babies can only scream, sleep, drink and poo!  It takes a year to learn to walk; two years to talk; after that their brains are like sponges sucking up knowledge.  There is no limit to how much a human can learn.  If they want to. (50)

13) I am human.  I am virtually identical to you.  I have some DNA in the nucleus of every one of my 300,000,000,000,000 cells.  It stores my genetic code.  98% is the same as a chimpanzee.  99% of my genome is the same as yours.  Just 1% makes us different. (50)

14) You are a human.  You are a product of your environment:  of where you grow up, how rich you are, where you go to school, how you are spoken to, of your childhood experiences.  Decisions you make, and others make for you, make you who you are.  (47)

15) A human is a machine, containing thousands of miles of pipes filled with liquid.  They contain a pump.  Each cell is a perfectly tuned microscopic chemical factory.  Their muscles and bones work together as a biomechanic robot.  Their brains contain neural networks more complex than a computer circuit board.  (49)

16) Humans are social animals with a natural instinct to connect with others: to develop friendships, fall in love; to form tribes.  As civilisation developed their social instinct has driven them forward while overcoming it in armies, churches, classrooms, meeting rooms and sports fields has been key to their success. (50)

17)  A human is an animal wearing clothes, pretending not to be an animal.  Through all the culture and technology humans have developed, many of them have forgotten they are part of nature, part of the rich tapestry of all life on this beautiful planet.  (44)

18)  A human is a selfish, destructive creature that has fallen out of love with nature and fallen in love with its own self importance.  A human wants more and more.  It takes but rarely gives.  It shows little gratitude, kindness or appreciation.  It destroys the environment and ultimately, itself.  (49)

4.  Unleashing knowledge from the shackles of formal assessment.

In which I “riff” on knowledge and attempt to disentangle it from those pesky exams we call GCSEs.  This post is another meandering purge of some nascent thoughts and anti-thoughts about knowledge.  Within it, I attempt to assimilate some of the ideas and wisdom I encountered from Clare Sealy, Martin Robinson and Christine Counsell at CurriculumEd on 1^st June and from Craig Barton, Robert Plomin, Anthony Seldon and others at Bryanston Education summit on 5^th June.  I’m very conscious that my verbose musings are addled with my personal conflict (and some contentious, nascent ideas) between a more modern, skills orientated education and the more traditional foundations of knowledge our education system was designed to impart.  Following this “braindump” of conflicting and sketchy thoughts, my next blog will describe a fanciful utopia of bottom up, rather than top down. Then I might actually get around to sharing something useful about what I (and the school I work in) am doing to develop curriculum, character and learning habits.

In my last blog I explored my experiences and insight into Collaboration and Creativity:  two words guaranteed to get the juices of the 21^st century skills evangelists flowing, while simultaneously causing the very serious campaigners from the university of knowledge rich to come out in an irritating rash; sometimes a full on delirious sweat.  In this piece, I’m going to doff my cap to the traditionalists, to those who believe knowledge is all, knowledge is King, Queen, Jack and Ace.  Without knowledge we are fledgling beings floating in a fluffy sea of chaos and uncertainty.  

I understand the assertion that education is about the passing on of knowledge, about embedding cultural context and understanding within our young charges and that it should NOT be synonymous with a future multinational management training course.  The assertion that – in those precious 6 hours a day, 5 days a week, 38 weeks a year for 14 long, confusing years before most of us have the faintest idea who or what we are, let alone what we’re really interested in or competent at – there is not time to waste on soft skills, or the utilitarian demands of industry or business, makes a lot of sense. 

I have already written about my personal, privileged, private boarding school education where 5 hours a day (and 3 hours on Saturdays) were always academically focussed; always about knowledge.  But, big back alley full of butt ends BUT, there was SO much time outside those intense, frequently dull and uninspiring hours to indulge our senses and varied characters with sport (never-ending bloody hours of it), art, drama, music, debating (loved this), long conversations with teachers who had time for us, combined cadet force army war games (avoided these and went farming instead), ferretting (a decoy for all sorts of nefarious deeds) and endless hours of wandering, walking, talking, thinking and dreaming before the internet and social media came along and ruined everything.  So, my creative mind and collaborative spirit were nurtured beyond the treadmill of the school k-k-k-k-k-K-K-Knowledge pump.  As, indeed, were they for anyone born before 1980 (too old for social media, internet, iPads, smartphones, digital TV channels, Netflix and all other childhood boredom distractors / creativity sappers, while growing up).  Leonardo da Vinci, William Shakespeare, Galilei Galileo, Blaise Pascal, Isaac Newton, Charles Dickens, Isambard Kingdom Brunel, Albert Einstein, Niels Bohr, Karl Marx,  Simone de Beauvior,  Winston Churchill,  Clement Atlee,  Rosalind Franklin, Alan Turing,  Margaret Thatcher, Stephen Hawking,  Richard Dawkins, Tony Blair, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Siri Hustvedt, Marcus du Sautoy, Alice Roberts, Heidi Allen and countless other less famous scientists, engineers, mathematicians, inventors, writers, artists, thinkers, entrepreneurs, journalists, politicians and business leaders never had specific skills lessons in collaboration, creativity (or communication) at school.

And all those campaigning for a shift towards the teaching of 21^st century skills, and away from what is sometimes called the factory model of education had school educations rooted in knowledge too.  It is easy for me, or Sir Ken Robinson, or Sir Anthony Seldon to denigrate our current educational obsession with knowledge when the schools we have attended and the schools we have taught in or led are esteemed, elitist, semi-selective establishments where knowledge comes first, and all the character and creativity fuelling stuff is bolted on beyond those core hours of academic study.  Most schools don’t have the time or freedom to bolt this stuff on, so – on a results in exams orientated academic treadmill – when facing the choice between teaching knowledge or “21^st century skills” (which are uncannily similar to 20^th century skills) in the five hours of timetabled lessons per day, knowledge is almost always the correct answer.

So – very shortly – I am going to make the case for knowledge to take centre stage in our schools, but there are my contentious views on GCSEs and our obsession with assessment to address first.

I have always thought that what we teach should determine how we teach rather than the other way around and that endless nuance of the how can only go so far in transforming education; so changing the what – and focussing on the what (curriculum) – is undoubtedly the most important aspect of education to influence; to change; to focus on.  Curriculum underpins everything else and – arguably – knowledge underpins curriculum.  So the focus on knowledge is a good thing.  It is just a shame that the renewed focus on curriculum has come AFTER the extremely content heavy overhaul of GCSE specifications.  We are – as education policy always seems to do – making great changes to address our immediate challenges while ignoring the root (and deeper purpose) of the challenges of education.  We are – as some might say – treating the symptoms of the disease rather than the cause(s) of the disease.

In our high stakes accountability system of SATs in primary school and GCSEs in secondary schools the ideas, books, tweets, blogs and conference talks from such luminaries as Tom Sherrington (@teacherhead), Christine Counsell (@Counsell_C) and Clare Sealy (@ClareSealy) are especially worthy of note in this area.  In primary the ideas and blog posts of Neil Almond (@Mr_AlmondED), Christopher Such (@Suchmo83), Solomon Kingsnorth (@solomon_teach), Tim Roach, (@MrTRoach) Cassie Young (@ModernCassie) offer some great insight into what a knowledge rich primary curriculum could look like.  In secondary Mark Enser (@EnserMark), Rebecca Foster (@TLPMsF), Sarah Barker (@mssfax) and Stephen Lane (@sputniksteve) write with insight and authority on curriculum and in secondary science the #cogscisci crew of Ruth Walker (@Rosalindphys), Adam Boxer (@adamboxer1), Bill Wilkinson (@DrWilkinsonSci), Niki Kaiser (@chemDrK), Miss Charlie (@mxcharlier) and Ian Taylor (@MrTSci409) write eloquently, enthusiastically and authoritatively on the subject of scientific knowledge.

But – and this is no criticism of them – they are all writing within the system; within our narrow, exam focussed education system.  This is understandable because it is the system we work in.  And the system we all know and either love, or love to hate. 

In practice I don’t have any great beef with the exam system.  It sort of worked for me.  I have a good long-term memory, and a fairly proficient working memory too, so I was fine.  Also, the onerous GCSE treadmill is probably quite a good way of sucking up the worst of our self-obsessed, self-conscious, peer approval seeking, insecure, confused, risk-taking, inward-looking adolescent years and I realise that it has become people’s job, perhaps even their raison d’etre to optimise children’s GCSE results in their subject.

In principle, I think our fixation with 16+ public exams as a gateway into our lives, or a gateway into further study, or as a mechanism to compare the capability and potential of human beings, or as a measure of the effectiveness of our education system, or as a mandatory and standardised platform for future multifarious endeavours is UTTERLY flawed, outmoded and distracting.  I would say the same about SATs at the end of KS2 (primary school), and for many I think I may even include A levels within this rant.

I very much see education as the beginning, and definitely not as an end in itself.  The knowledge we impart, we pump into children’s minds at school serves a far greater purpose than the obtaining of a certificate with some random letters or numbers on it.  The knowledge we acquire at school should be foundational; essential to the development of our minds so that we have the best possible platform with which to enter the adult world.  It should enhance the opportunities available to us in life.  The act of becoming educated should develop our self-awareness, our independence, our collaboration, our characters and our skills but most importantly it should provide us with foundational knowledge which allows us to become a stable, useful and functioning member of adult society.  It probably ought to help us to become more savvy too, to be more aware of those who may seek to rip us off, manipulate or influence us for their own ends.   

I rather like being part of a diverse society (diverse inside our heads, inside how we think and learn and feel [not to be confused with the complete red herring and hot potato of surface diversity of gender, age, ethnic origin, nationality, affluence etc]) where different people bring something different intellectually and creatively.  We cannot all know everything individually, but we can know everything collectively.  While there probably are some basic, foundational nuggets of knowledge we all benefit from which we all need to be able to think and decide and learn more effectively, this individualistic idea that we cannot share – or pool – our collective knowledge when solving problems, or designing products, researching or running businesses seems fairly archaic.  So I would argue that teaching everyone the same information (knowledge if it is learnt) until they are 16 is pretty crazy.  I would argue that 13 or 14 would be a better baseline cut off, after which we progress down different (flexible NOT fixed) pathways depending upon our interests, capabilities and motivations.  As Leonardo da Vinci once said, “Study without desire spoils the memory and it retains nothing it takes in.”  There is so much inefficiency and resentment in trying to get everyone to the same place aged 16.

This is not an argument against the teaching of knowledge.  But it is an argument against teaching the same, fixed, prescriptive knowledge to everyone geared towards some highly specific exam specifications, in multiple subjects, aged 16.

If we go back to my original list of famous and successful people at the start of this blog, they were all born before 1980.  As well as receiving no explicit teaching of “21^st century skills” or even any mention of this nebulous concept (that doesn’t mean that communication, creativity, collaboration etc weren’t taught implicitly…) they grew up in the much maligned secret garden of education.  In the secret garden, teachers were trusted more, and had more autonomy and – exam specifications aside – there was no national curriculum to teach prior to 1988.  Equally, schools were not compared in counter-productive league tables and Tony Blair had not yet invented the misplaced concept (and unemployment figure fudging) of 50% of the population entering higher education.  So, while their education was knowledge based and didn’t feature any soft skills training sessions, there was more creative curriculum freedom for teachers, less emphasis on comparing schools (using exam data) and generally less pressure on the system in terms of funding and outcomes.  Education was about doing education rather than the incessant showing that we’re doing education, which really is quite different.  There was arguably a lot more education going on because a lot less time was spent measuring the nebulous, unwieldy beast!

We need to bear this in mind.  That it is trendy to pour scorn on the secret garden.  That many leading educationalists and policy makers now started school post 1980 and only know the carefully controlled, bland, one size fits all, excessively exam focussed education system within a prescriptive and jam packed national curriculum.  This is why the progressives (typically a little longer in the tooth) rage against knowledge, not because they are anti knowledge, but because they are anti the misrepresentation of knowledge via the medium of a relentless, one dimensional, substantive subject knowledge, exam orientated treadmill.  This treadmill doesn’t make us “better.”  It just shows us that (in one dimension) we’re better.

So, if we can unshackle knowledge from the narrow, shallow, short-termist knowledge required to tick an exam grade box; and reclaim knowledge as the basis of human thought, ingenuity, curiosity, creativity, collaboration and effectiveness then knowledge should indeed be re-crowned King.

Knowledge should be about opportunity.  About options.  About interests.  About purpose.  About foundations.  About broadening horizons.  About guiding sensible life decisions.  About raising awareness.  About knowing where to find it.  About knowing who to ask.  About knowing how to share it.  About sorting wisdom from bullshit; real news from fake news.  About wanting to know more.  There is no endpoint to it.  Education should fill us with knowledge, yes, but more importantly it should turn us on to knowledge.  Education should make us realise how little we know, and how much we should keep striving to know.  Education should not make us certain; it should make us doubt and question and want to know more.  We need to steal back education from those who believe there is a fixed endpoint to knowledge, from which everything miraculously spirals after that, for that must surely kill the acquisition of knowledge for so many far far far too early in their lives.

I realise that I am now writing from a utopian perspective, from a privileged and fairly academic perspective, from an insatiable thirst for knowledge perspective.  People like me, and people like you reading this must remember that we cannot all be on a deep quest for understanding and knowledge; that many people in this world just want to do, want to belong and want to deploy their skills and talents in a purposeful way.  We have to acknowledge that knowledge isn’t important to many people, nor will it ever be.  And we have to figure out what everyone needs to know, before we diversify on to our own skills based pathways through life.

So, I am pro-knowledge.  It would be weird to be anti-knowledge.  But as you can tell, I am not particularly enamoured with the (obsessive) assessment of knowledge.  I see knowledge as a basic human right, a need, something which is foundational to a fulfilling, meaningful and – hopefully – purposeful existence.  I don’t see it as a mechanism for comparing people, for ranking people, for selecting people:  “Oh you know that and he doesn’t, so you can enter my club.”  Of course, I don’t want people on the roads without having passed a driving test, or surgeons operating on me without having passed their medical exams, or hotel kitchens serving me without having been tested on the appropriate hygiene standards.  Of course there needs to be some assessment of knowledge for entering university and some basic national qualification(s) which make sense to employers but as I have articulated above, what could the teaching of knowledge look like if we weren’t so driven by its assessment?  For too long, we have allowed the assessment tail to wag the curriculum dog.

Another clarification.  Just because I’m slightly against the frequent assessment of children, doesn’t mean I’m against teaching knowledge, or encouraging pupils to “progress” (I prefer “develop”).  And it doesn’t mean I’m anti-testing.  A test, or low stakes quiz as people seem to call them these days, is a very important tool for embedding knowledge.  Craig Barton (@mrbartonmaths) spoke wisely about this at the Bryanston education summit, criticising the way he was told to teach maths in his early years of teaching, where he was frequently assessing where his pupils were at – causing much stress, and little progress.  He described his epiphany when he realised that frequent low stakes testing (not to be confused with formal assessment), and therefore retrieval of knowledge, actually helped the children learn.  So the teaching and learning of knowledge is clearly a good thing, the very purpose of teaching; of a school education but our recent obsession with weighing and comparing the pig, rather than the far more important activity of feeding the pig has – arguably – slowed the pace of learning, of knowledge acquisition.  We could infer from this that the more we measure and compare schools and pupils, the less they learn.  The endless, stressful, preparation for assessments or exams and the frequent “gaming of the system” can lead to crammed, short term knowledge (or teaching to the test) which can show that education is improving all the while reducing the lasting knowledge (and understanding) foundations in school children.

I fully appreciate that someone gaining a spread of 7s, 8s and 9s at GCSE is likely to be more knowledgeable than someone gaining a handful of 4s, 5s and one 6.  I also appreciate that their grades could suggest a greater work ethic and more determination to succeed.  But all this is aged 16.   Fast forward 10 years and it is of course possible that the 7,8,9er has blossomed into an intellectual force, maybe a “teach firster” spreading the all important word of knowledge.  But it is equally possible they haven’t quite found their niche, unshackled from the comforting, controlling rituals and regime of school.  While the 4, 5 and 6er has found out what they’re really interested in, started reading, discussing, podcasting and researching and has acquired a much deeper and longer lasting knowledge base than the 7,8,9er has on that over-valued, misrepresentative piece of paper.  

I realise that I’ve very much veered out of my jurisdiction, raising the hackles of many seasoned GCSE teaching professionals with my naïve, ill-formed ideas and questioning, but these beastly exams really do skew our whole educational system just so we can compare people, teachers and schools. 

16+ public exams or a Toby utopia of no 16+ public exams, we are still left with the rather important question of what we should teach at school; what does everyone need to know?

I loved listening to Martin Robinson (@Trivium21c) grapple with this question at CurriculumEd at Lichfield Cathedral School on 1^st June.  What knowledge?  Whose knowledge is more important?  Do we need a little knowledge about a lot or is a lot of knowledge about a little more beneficial.  And is the knowledge decreed by exam or SATs specifications really the best that has been thought and said?  And who decides on the best that has been thought and said?  These are important, unanswered questions.

When I left my role as a pharmaceutical materials scientist (a niche subset of a product development chemist, or formulation chemist) at Pfizer and decided to embark upon a second career in teaching I suggested that anyone with sufficient curiosity, open-mindedness, motivation to learn and above average intelligence (how to measure this?) could have done what I did.  I suggested that an adult in their 20s or 30s with basic command of maths (a 6/B or more at GCSE), a reasonable command of two or more of the sciences (2 x 6/B or more at GCSE) and Arts / humanities A levels could become an effective and capable development scientist if they wanted to.  I broadly stand by this.  A mind that has been educated, has been usefully wired in some way and wants to learn can learn anything if it wants to.  I think that science A levels and degrees are the conventional entry points into my exclusive club, but as someone who barely learnt any physics at school (I scraped a C at GCSE); learnt and then forgot lots of my Biology A level and attained a B in Chemistry A level based upon some weird natural affinity for the glorious subject and very little effort; later scraped through my second year at University and then – to my surprise – found out that I was really quite a competent, curious and conscientious analytical chemist following my Eureka moment during an undergraduate year in industry, I still question how important all those years of spiralling, semantic scientific memories at school and university really were. 

I felt like I was learning best by actually doing, learning by actually having to produce some work, some results (otherwise I’d have let others down, rather than just myself) and I felt like science suddenly came alive for me and that all the knowledge which rinsed over me at school and university wasn’t very important.  This train of thought takes us back to my mention of good old Sir Ken at the beginning.

I now think that I’m probably wrong.  That learning a bit about scientific culture, the history of science and most importantly, the language of science was probably very important.  This is the problem with semantic memory: we have absolutely no sense of how important those layers of knowledge were in enabling my scientific capability.

This fascinates me.  We know that the most brilliant minds know quite a lot about quite a lot.  This means they are rather good at holding conversations with people and learning even more.  We know that the best scientists, artists and journalists weren’t the best straight away; that they have tried and failed innumerate times, but have learnt something at each step along the way.  But we really don’t know how much stuff we need in our heads to begin with – within and across “domains” – to be able to leap curiously into the unknown.  

I think that the freedom to become a chemist was granted to me via disciplinary knowledge rather than substantive knowledge.  If I’ve interpreted her writing correctly, Christine Counsell argues that disciplinary knowledge is much more important than substantive knowledge.  Really understanding the discipline of chemistry, or the discipline of history rather than a long list of chemistry facts or historical facts.  This makes sense.  I’m really not sure how the specific dates of the key battles of the Hundred Years war (actually 115 years, I remember that too) between England and France make me a better historian, but I understand that reading a lot, particularly conflicting sources and perspectives helps to build a deeper understanding of different periods of history in my mind.  Memorising and learning the name and symbol of every chemical element does not make me a brilliant chemist but understanding the patterns and structure and development of the periodic table probably enhances my scientific capability and understanding.

Identifying the key “threshold concepts” in our subjects and teaching them repeatedly and with gradual greater depth is far more useful than the constant bombardment of the brain with shallow, substantive, pub quiz facts.

But then we have to ask, does the mind have to be trained with the recall of substantive facts before it can embark on learning more complex, deeper, disciplinary “threshold concepts” which form the gateway to further knowledge acquisition and application?  Does anyone know the answer to this question?  All we know is that people who know more, can learn faster and can learn more effectively.

And then we throw in some of the emerging genetics research into memory and learning.  The work of Robert Plomin, which suggests that some minds have greater genetic propensities for the acquisition of knowledge.  Some minds can lap up and assimilate knowledge, and then much more knowledge; while other minds really battle with the processing and conversion of information into knowledge.

Also interesting in current discourse is the ‘distraction thing’ or more jargonistically speaking, cognitive overload.  Our senses are bombarded with sensory overload all the time and our brains play all sorts of tricks on us as a result of this.  Reducing the amount of conflicting information being bombarded with our brains should theoretically improve our attention, or at least give us greater opportunity to learn.  But then our minds can freely distract themselves.  A window, a view, a moment of repetitive tedium, a monotonous teacher or even the view behind your eyelids (in your “mind’s eye”) can be enough to drag you away from the myriad information your teachers are obliged to share with you.

More than ever before we live amidst a world of information, a world of opinion and spin.  Making sense of it all can take a lifetime of open-minded listening, discussion and debate and even then the pure knowledge – the definitive truth – can remain elusive.

So it is really hard to know what to teach everyone.  And once we decide, deciding for how long each day, or each week or each term we should spend on that subject or topic is far from intuitive.  And deciding how many subjects or topics to teach (to timetable) simultaneously per day, or per week is probably suboptimal too.  And then there is the sequencing, the repetition, the spiral layering, the little and often or lots and less frequent of each sub-topic, topic and subject which requires a lot of thought too. 

This is why the focus on curriculum is so important.  And why the work and ideas of Clare Sealy, Christine Counsell, Martin Robinson, Tom Sherrington et al are so important; but also why it is all so frustrating for it seems that we – us humble, inert teachers – are to accept the National Curriculum of 1988 and all its subsequent tweaks in 2014 and devise a curriculum around those ideas, without deeply considering whether the knowledge we pass on in the classroom is the most meaningful, purposeful, enriching, enlightening, powerful, enabling or foundational that we can pass on.  It is almost as if we don’t really want people to think, we just want them to know.  Surely if knowing has any purpose at all, it is to help us think.  And the more I think about this stuff, the more confused I become.

Ultimately, when our knowledge foundations are secure, when our brain is fully primed, conditioned and attuned to the environment in which we live, grow and work we decide what knowledge we want (or need) to know.  We are then motivated (or incentivised through employment) to learn it.  A 23 year old who realises that their maths is suboptimal can turn their hand to GCSE maths much more readily and efficiently than a nonchalant, confused, adolescent 14 year old who knows very little about the politics, economics and psychology of our modern, complex, human society. 

Finally, I want to leave you with something I heard Christine Counsell say about a year 7 history class she encountered.  They spent 6 weeks studying King John in great depth.  And then whizzed through all the other medieval Kings in one or two lessons.  Christine applauded this approach.  In those long six weeks those children learnt all about King John, about the context of medieval times, about what life was like back then for both the rich and the poor, about the Magna Carta and its lasting significance.  Those children developed a deep relationship with King John and his reign, deepening their substantive knowledge but also their disciplinary knowledge.  This deep knowledge then allowed the rapid acquisition of related content.

This strikes me as good teaching.  King John could be replaced with the periodic table, or the principles of algebra, or pretty much anything within a discipline.  Do lots of it.  Get deeper and deeper.  Then use this bolus of knowledge as a platform for making links and connections to related content within the subject or domain, and indeed beyond it too.  The challenge we have in the Sciences is that children are examined in too much breadth, there is simply too much substantive knowledge to learn for the GCSE curricula so teachers – however brilliant – are forced to skip through it to try and cover it all.  For many children nothing gets learnt.  And it all ends up being a pretty good waste of everyone’s time.  So let’s narrow the curriculum within the Sciences, let’s ensure connections to other subjects are made when the opportunity arises (and ensure the whole curriculum is sequenced optimally) and most importantly let’s teach the key concepts and ideas in Science (if we can agree what they are) deeply, repeatedly and enthusiastically. 

Finally, let’s pass on this enlightening knowledge because we know it will help children expand their minds, broaden their horizons, deepen their thinking and help them to become a fulfilled, purposeful and – hopefully – gracious adult human one day.  Let’s not pump it in soullessly at 300 million miles an hour so they can optimise your school’s progress 8 score.  Because when we do that, most of it spills out straight away and provides little platform for future growth. 

Knowledge empowers.

Slow, deep learning helps the knowledge stick.

Let’s claim back knowledge, from the short-termist and high stakes tyranny of GCSE and SATs data, as the basis of a foundational, empowering long lasting education.

In my next blog we’re going to encounter that wonderful Maverick Mr Yamazaki courtesy of Solomon Kingsnorth (@solomon_teach) and consider a bottom up rather than a top down approach to Science education.  After that, we’ll finally get into some specific ideas and suggestions about the science curriculum in KS3 and how we can explicitly integrate skills and character virtues into a knowledge rich curriculum.