I think that is one of the most amazing and exciting stories I have ever heard.

So let me extract just two final thoughts from a summer rich in fascinating memories but one which—so far—has not lessened my fears that England has still not woken up to the reality that however good are the very best schools, they alone will never be good enough to adequately equip youngsters for a changeable, problematic future.

Professor John West-Burnham, who I meet from time to time at various conferences, gave a fascinating presentation to this year’s conference of the Secondary Heads’ Association. “It could be argued”, he said, “that the school system is approaching an optimum state. It is difficult to envisage what else might be done to improve its efficiency and effectiveness … Performance is plateauing.” We need, he said, “to question the fundamental premise of the nature of the school … In many ways schooling is a living fossil.” This had undermined the concept of education, he concluded: “Education has come to be seen as the outcome of schooling rather than a key process of which schooling is a manifestation.”

“Schools”, he went on to say, “reduce key areas of the human experience into time-constrained and disjointed activities. Education by contrast is integrative … it enables unified understanding, and realises that life is not compartmentalised; citizenship is not a subject, a moral and spiritual understanding cannot be taught for they have to be learnt.”

That was a splendid statement. If enough people take notice of that and understand its seriousness then the tide could be beginning to turn. Really good teachers don’t need elaborate buildings to ensure their pupils’ attention. What is for sure is that a merely moderately competent teacher won’t succeed with his pupils in either a palace or a crumbling Victorian edifice. All this begs the biggest question: are English adults up to being quizzed by young people? A dozen years ago I was part of a small project that asked 15 and 16 year-olds what they really needed to improve their learning. Their answer was curious. “What we need most”, they said, “is contact with adults other than parents and teachers. We know what our parents think because they tell us all the time; we are slightly suspicious of teachers as they tell us what it has been decided they think we should be told. We want to know what real people think … because we don’t hear very much from them.”

There is the crunch. If ordinary citizens are not in themselves interesting people then just who is left for the pupils to model themselves on? So I close by taking this paper back to where it started. Schooling is not the problem in itself; it is simply a manifestation of a much deeper problem of malfunctioning communities and collapsed families. In a curious sense this is reassuring. Malfunctioning communities and collapsed families are both things which, in our own small ways, we can each do something about. Indeed if community after community, a thousand people after a thousand people started to do this, no government could stand in their way. In fact, even with a government incentive as big as £15 billion, little will change unless we each, as individual members of families, neighbourhoods, interest groups and faith communities, do our own bit.

Bibliography

Allman, William F., “The Stone Age Present: How Evolution Has Shaped Modern Life–From Sex, Violence, And Language To Emotions, Morals, And Communities”, (New York: Touchstone, 1995).

MacMurray, J. M., “The Personal World”, (published by Floris Books Edinburgh 1996)

Ridley, Matthew, “Nature via Nurture”, (Harper Collins, 2003).

Abbot A.J., “Lieutenant Peter Puget, The Grain of the Brain”, and Modern Society’s Failure to Understand Adolescence”

Time Magazine, May 10, 2004, “What Makes Teens Tick”

Carr-Gregg, Michael, “The Age”, (Melbourne, 20 April 2004).

Abbott, A.J., ” Master and Apprentice; Reuniting Thinking with Doing “, (due to be published in Spring 2005)

Lutwake, Edward, “Turbo Capitalism”, (2001)

Livingstone, Sir Richard, “The Future In Education”, (The Clarendon Press, Cambridge, 1941)

Abbott, A.J., “To Be Intelligent”, (ASCD, March 1997)

West-Burnham, John, “Leading to the Future – Making Sense of the Past”,
(SHA Headlines, July 2004)

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