Stop the world, has been the age-long plea, I want to get off.

Sometimes amid all the confusion what seems to be very little thing suddenly stands out.  Such things, or ideas, chase around our minds, looking for a suitable link to make with other thoughts.  There is no time to deal with them now, but you feel they are too important to be ignored, they excite you, and they could be the missing link in your own thinking.

Two evenings back, reading through one of my favourite quarterly journals – Human Givens – I came across a quote from Plato made some two and a half thousand years ago.  I give it to you to ponder over the course of the holidays:

“Those who think they are too smart to engage in politics are punished by being governed by those who are dumber.”

The second was a cutting I had taken from an article in the BA High Flyer magazine ten years ago, entitled The Mystery of Creative Families.     I don’t know who wrote it.  Something in that article, however, stands out very powerfully now, a decade later.  It reads:

“A stream seems to run through creative families.  Such children are not necessarily smothered with love by their parents.  They feel loved and wanted, and are secure in their home, but are often more surrounded by an atmosphere of work and where following a calling appears to be important.”

Think on that one as well for, as the Initiative has said so many times, “however good schools may become they can’t do it all on their own” and “a balanced education involves home, community and school as equal partners.”

* Desiderata, taken from mid 17^th century Latin as meaning something desired, something worth working to achieve.

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It is nearly forty years ago that, as a newly appointed Head, an older colleague gave me a piece of priceless advice.  “Divide the morning’s mail into two piles, the urgent and the important.  Immediately deal with the important and leave the urgent until later in the day when you will probably find that somebody else has sorted it out.”

That advice has guided me ever since.  It has never been easy.  Too often people in authority, including Prime Ministers and Headteachers, crave the publicity of the gallant trouble-shooter rescuing a venture at the last moment, while most often the problem would not have arisen if he or she had earlier concentrated on rectifying the root causes of the difficulty.

At first the telephone, then the fax, and now emails give us a continuous flood of messages and it is hard to put them in some kind of order.  The ability to decide what is important and what is merely urgent becomes an ever more pressing problem.  Not just for teachers, of course, but even more so for politicians as we get closer to the Election.

In August of last year the Initiative published a Briefing Paper for Parliamentarians on the design faults at the heart of English education, as a means of testing politicians’ policies in advance.  The Paper concluded with Ten Actions that would need to be taken.  They were:

One Parliament must take the lead in showing the country that the task of education involves far more than producing pupils able to pass exams.

Two Under too much pressure to improve examination results schools tend to develop superficial “quick wits” rather than the more robust, long-term “hard wits” which breed flexibility and adaptability.

Three How we are treated as babies and toddlers determines the way in which what we were born with can turn us into men and women capable of doing new things well, not simply repeating what earlier generations have already done.

Four Legislators must appreciate the evolutionary significance of adolescence, and provide opportunities for young people to extend their learning in a hands-on manner.

Five A far less content-prescriptive curriculum emphasising such skills as the ability to think, communicate, collaborate and make decisions is required.

Six Quality education is everything to do with teachers, not much to do with structures, and very little to do with buildings.

Seven While Britain prides itself on being a democracy it frequently forgets that such a fragile concept cannot flourish unless each new generation is well-nurtured in the affairs of the mind, and appropriately inducted into the responsibilities of adulthood, and the maintenance of the common good.

Eight It is not more money that is needed to transform English education, rather it is to reallocate those funds that are being spent now in ways that should go with the grain of the brain so as to radically enhance the quality of education, the life of children, and national well-being.

Nine All-through schools from 5-16 should be based on an extension of present primary school practice so as to restore the balance between school, home and community.

Ten For a democracy to be fully functional, the state cannot simply be defined in terms of a government that makes and administers laws in which individuals are then free to do their own thing.  Just to live within the law means very little; but to live within the law and have a sense of civil society, is to create a great place in which to live.

Do the candidates in your constituency recognise that these are the important issues, on which future policies have to be based?

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How this should be done in the 21^st century engages the thoughtful attention of David Conway in the context of today’s national curriculum.  Conway makes a robust case for why “a free society cannot operate without a body of well-educated citizens who have the ability and confidence to hold government and public services to account”  Like Thomas Jefferson before him, Conway argues that if the people are not enlightened enough to participate within political affairs the remedy is not to take that responsibility from them, but to educate them well enough to participate with full comprehension.

To create such an educated citizen, Conway argues, it is necessary to draw upon the wisdom of the ages classified into separate disciplines each with its own particular methodology.  Conway deplores the attempts by modern educationalists (he specifically sites Richard Pring of Oxford) to simplify such studies to fit the limited attention span of what they see as an ever less thoughtful and careless society.  This is not just a problem of our own time for Aristotle understood that what might make sense to a mature mind could mean little to youngsters who had no experience of life and could only repeat high-flown phrases ‘without conviction of their truth.’ Without experience of the rough and tumble of life questions raised by a liberal education mean little to the young.

A functional democracy, such as England, requires men and women of affairs who can think like philosophers and philosophers who can think and act as craftsmen.  John Milton understood this when he said that “although a man should pride himself to have all the tongues that Babel cleft the world into, yet if he had not studied solid things as well as words he would nothing so much be esteemed a learned man as any yeoman or tradesman.”  The English have subsequently done themselves great damage by either not recognising this or falling into the trap of so watering down intellectual study that it becomes almost worthless.

The solution does not lie in the promotion of somewhat nebulous topics that start with an issue of immediate interest, but have no methodology which can ultimately provide a lifelong framework for thinking straight.  Rather the answer lies in having teachers of such a wealth and depth of academic and human understanding that they can infuse the teaching of an intellectually rigorous discipline with the multiple connections to other bodies of knowledge that keeps a child alert and involved.  Without this, in Livingstone’s words, a curriculum becomes “a bursting portmanteau (overnight cases) which ought to be confined to the necessary clothes for a journey through life, but becomes instead a wardrobe of bits of costume for any emergency.”  Milton magnificently bridged the perceptual gap between the affairs of the hand and the heart, between the private and the public, when he defined “a complete and generous education [as one which] fits a man to perform justly, skilfully and magnanimously, all the offices, public and private, of peace and war.”

It is the very lack of a unified understanding of what English schooling should be about that the Bristol Report on Transition so shockingly demonstrates.  Bristol is a patchwork of different kinds of schools – state and independent, ancient foundations, secondary modern schools redesigned as comprehensives, Academies and Foundation Schools, each with their separate ethos and character, receiving children at the inappropriate age of eleven from more cohesively planned primary schools.  And it is here that English schooling falls apart for the differences between the primary and secondary schools are fundamental and include the assumptions, the prejudices, “the language, the approach, for the very nature of the phases are as different as any two cousins can be.”  Bridging that gap consumes all the time and energy which teachers should be putting into developing “a complete and generous education.”  The system, the Report concludes, reinforces the culture of “two tribes, the tribe of secondary teachers and the tribe of primary teachers” which squeezes out any genuine attempt to ensure that liberal education for which Conway and Milton (and probably Pring) plead so convincingly becomes the bedrock of democracy.

See Civitas for “Liberal Education of the National Curriculum; The University of Bristol’s Transition from Primary to Secondary School; Action One, Six and Seven of the Briefing Paper and Chapter Eight of Overschooled but Undereducated

Related posts:

1. Who will take Education where?
2. Occasional Pieces: Education: A Question of Democracy
3. It’s Really Very Simple … The Solution to England’s Education Problem

Today, the 7^th December 2009, the leaders of 192 countries converge on Copenhagen in an attempt to prevent climate change from ravaging the planet.  These people come to Copenhagen amidst claims, and counter-claims, that this is a man-made problem, as opposed to a natural phenomena.  Public opinion in most countries, though decreasingly so in the world’s two greatest polluters (American and China) is largely in favour of policies that would constrain economic practices that increase global emissions.

I am a geographer by training, and spent years helping youngsters make sense of the world around them.  Long ago I read Rachael Carson’s Silent Spring in which she stated the obvious; “the thin layer of soil that forms a patchy covering over the continents controls our existence, and that of every other animal of the land.”  By the time of James Lovelock’s publication of The Gaia Hypothesis in 1979 very many of us had in our minds that in this fragile skin of no more than ten miles down into the earth and ten miles into the sky, was all the space that humanity had “to live and die and have our being.”  Millions of years of life forms have created an environment conducive to human life, and have bequeathed to us vast deposits of carbon that could be released to give enormous short-term benefits, but probably long-term disaster.  Having visited the Athabasca Tar Sands earlier this year I now have a frightening picture of the devastation that results from the exploitation in a few short years, of reserves that had been built up over the millennia.

In that thin ‘skin’ which surrounds the earth – equivalent to the thinnest layer of varnish you could ever put on a baseball – humanity has to live, work, breath and somehow throw away its rubbish.  But the ‘rubbish’ is only part of the problem.  If civilisation is to survive it must live on the interest, not the capital of nature.  “Ecological markers suggest”, wrote the Canadian Ronald Wright, “that in the early 1960s humans were using about 70% of natures yearly output.  By the early 1980s we had reached 100%.  In 1999 we were at 125%,” and now it is thought to be approaching 150%.  The numbers may lack precision but their trend is clear – they point to planetary bankruptcy because one-third of what we are consuming comes from non-renewable resources.  And still the world population grows remorselessly.

So last Saturday, for the second time in my life, I joined a demonstration marching through London in support of the Copenhagen Conference.  On the trip up to London I re-read the conclusion of the biologist Fritjof Capra’s book Hidden Connections.  “As this new century unfolds, there are two developments that will have major impacts on the well-being and ways of life of humanity.  Both have to do with networks, and both involve radical new technologies.  One is the rise of global capitalism; the other is the creation of sustainable communities based on ecological literacy and the practice of eco-design.  Whereas global capitalism is concerned with electronic networks of financial and information flows, eco-design is concerned with ecological networks of energy and material flows.  The goal of the global economy is to maximise the wealth and power of its elite; the goal of eco-design is to maximise the sustainability of the web of life.”

In ancient Jewish tradition it is said that God told Adam and Eve “Take care that you do not destroy the world, for if you do, there will be no one left to repair what you have destroyed.”  A century or more ago Chief Seattle reminded the European settlers moving into his part of the Pacific Northwest of the fundamental belief of the Native Americans: “We have not inherited this world from our parents, we have been loaned it by our children.”

If there is the vaguest chance that global warming has been caused or exaggerated by the way in which we are living our lives then we have absolutely no alternative but to take the Copenhagen Conference incredibly seriously – for the sake of our children’s children’s children.

See Chapter Two of Overschooled but Undereducated

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The wedding of a son or daughter stirs parental memories as nothing else can.  As guests congregate you come face-to-face with different chapters of your child’s life, and you are reminded of your own early life together.  Being a story-telling species our minds struggle to draw all these pieces together into a meaningful narrative.

Two of our three sons have married in the past couple of months.  David married Frea on one of the wettest days of July in a wonderful ceremony in Somerset; his best man was an American whom David had known at school and university when we lived in Virginia, and a number of the guests had crossed the Atlantic for the wedding.  It was a wonderfully happy time.  Then last Saturday Peter married Lindsey in Washington D.C. where Peter, within eleven years of graduating from his Virginian high school, had already climbed the ranks of the Foreign Office to become Chief of Staff at the British Embassy.  Both weddings were enormously happy and lively events, and it was not until afterwards that Anne and I had any opportunity to draw all the bits together in our minds.

It was twenty-one years ago, when Peter was ten, David seven and Tom five that we first swapped our house in England for the summer holidays with friends in Virginia.  The highlight of that trip was a three-day visit to the old colonial capital of Williamsburg, possibly the first genuine historical recreation of a bygone era.  Stretching for a mile from the reconstructed House of Burgesses (where representative government had first started in America) down the Duke of Gloucester Street to the College of William and Mary with Bruton Parish Church and the Governor’s Palace to one side, and the Powder Magazine on the other, it has almost ninety original buildings.  Williamsburg has been meticulously restored and we were enchanted by the numerous character actors talking with visitors in the streets, the houses, gardens and in their workshops.

Especially we delighted in the various debates between serious actors taking the parts of such historic figures as Jefferson, Washington, Patrick Henry, George Wythe and Peyton Randolph.  The debates in the Raleigh Tavern, the House of Burgesses and in the Courthouse, required much concentration from the visitors who were then invited not simply to ask abstract questions of the actors from a late 20^th century perspective, but themselves to think and question as if they, too, lived in 1774.  It wasn’t easy, and required considerable feats of imagination to appreciate how finely-balanced were the views of the emerging patriots who first coined the name “Americans” and the residual loyalists who argued with intense emotions “we are, after all, Englishmen.”  There was nothing triumphal about these arguments and the actors were most careful to remind their audiences that there was nothing inevitable about the transformation of the fiercely individualistic thirteen colonies into the land which later 20^th century Americans had come to see as the undoubted leader of the free world.

Our young sons learnt so much about the origins of democracy from 15 or so visits we have made to Williamsburg in the past 21 years.  For the first seven of those years the boys returned to their English comprehensive school, and then for four years to the high school in Fairfax County outside Washington where we then lived.  Peter then went to Cambridge where the young orator who had first debated the case for severing all ties with King George’s England, became President of the University Debating Society, spent time as intern both on Capitol Hill and in Washington, and then joined the Foreign Office. During the wedding reception one member of the Embassy staff took us to one side to say how invaluable was Peter’s daily advice to the Ambassador “as Peter understands the Americans better than any of us.”

Before flying back to England Anne and I took a couple of days for R&R and went back to Williamsburg.  The fall colours were spectacular, and the town looked its best.  But, as we had been noticing for the past seven or eight years, the essential human spirit that made Williamsburg such a pivotal experience for our sons, was rapidly disappearing.  The buildings are still there and well cared for, but there are now far fewer character actors.  Several years ago this had been explained away as a result of the recession and a falloff in the number of visitors.  But it’s much more than that, and the explanation needs to be noted as much by my English as American readers.  In 2005 I was told by a disenchanted character actor that there were so few youngsters who, having been disciplined in school to memorise the correct answers, had the personal confidence to join in the debates.  They were largely disinterested in talks with ‘old-fashioned’ craftsmen – be they silversmiths, milliners or shoemakers.  Last week the opportunity to talk personally to actors had all but disappeared and had been replaced by set-piece ‘incidents’ where all the visitors had to do was to stand around and watch.  “It’s all become Mickey Mouse now”, said one of the character actors who, 20 years before, had regularly filled Bruton Parish Church for half an hour to hear a recitation of a 1774 sermon.  “What we do now does not require any imagination on the part of the visitor,” he explained.

As evening drew on I feared for the dumbing down of young people for, as Einstein once remarked, “imagination is more important than knowledge.”  Leaving the bookstore I saw a new edition of David McCullough’s excellent biography of John Adams, second President of the United States.  The publisher had seen fit to replace a copy of a contemporary oil painting of the real John Adams on the book’s cover with a photograph of the actor Paul Giamatti who had played the part of Adams in a recent television reconstruction of his life.  Stare into the eyes of Giamatti, most accomplished actor as he is, and you see a 21^st century mind; what the next generation needs is the imagination to stare into a portrait drawn from real life, and then realise that the future is theirs to make.

See Actions 1 and 10 of the Briefing Paper

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My friend is a remarkably fit and shrewd 85-year-old still able to make most valuable comments at the governing body of a secondary school.  A General Practitioner for more than 40 years he has ‘seen it all’ but is never judgemental yet always full of sound advice, particularly on general health issues such as obesity and mental health.

Making his point about the devastating impact of obesity caused by a too easy access to fat and over-sweet foods, he recalled how, in the summer of 1938 when he was 14, he had wanted to visit his grandparents in Huddersfield.  At the time he was living with his parents in southeast London.  Early one morning his mother packed up two-days’ worth of sandwiches and the young, one-day-to-be-a-doctor set off on his bike to cycle across London and started to make his way north.  He slept the night in a hayrick and later the following day reached Huddersfield.  After several days with his relatives his grandmother packed him up some more sandwiches and he set off south, slept in another hayrick and reached southeast London later the following day.  His slight figure and merry twinkle reflect a life in which he has always been attuned to his environment, and where most problems have a solution… if you look around enough.

I’m not such a cyclist, but at 16 I remember setting out with a friend to spend a week hitchhiking around Scotland.  It was slow going to start with, so we decided to separate and try our luck separately.  We hoped to meet at a certain farm just over the border at Carter Bar on the A68, but if we missed each other we would rendezvous the next day at the post office in the town of Callendar some 30 miles from Edinburgh, on the hour, until the other turned up.  Cliff never made it to the small wood by the farm, and for the first time in my life I camped alone.  Setting off the next morning I again started to ‘thumb’.  Reaching Callendar I was delighted to find Cliff already there – in fact, so successful had he been that he had actually got there the night before while I was camping 150 miles to the south.  Returning from Edinburgh the following week I reached Portsmouth, where I then lived, in 14 hours and coincidentally, in 14 lifts – one of which bought me a very good lunch in Grantham.

On that trip alone I must have trusted myself to the responsible behaviour of some 40 drivers, totally unknown to me (or to my parents) before that.  We are told that it is different now.  “You are a pervert and a danger to children,” wrote A N Wilson in The Daily Mail, “unless you can prove otherwise,” which totally contradicts the basic principle of English law that one is innocent until proven guilty.  To hold to that principle means running all kinds of risks, but to accept the alternative – as proposed in the Vetting and Barring Scheme – is to replace a respect for freedom with the fear of penalty.  To assume that children are surrounded by perverts is to deny them the priceless opportunity to grow up by discovering the diversity of the world around them.  The horror of so much child molestation is not that the police have failed, it is that neighbours have not noticed what is going on around them.

To provide a cycle track to Huddersfield would make it safer for a child today to cycle to see his grandparents, but to threaten an adult with a £5,000 fine for stopping to give a young person a lift without having first been vetted at a cost of £64 would have denied me the opportunity of learning how to deal with all kinds of people.  Hitchhiking was a most important part of my growing up, for however else could I have learnt how to hold conversations with a lorry driver, a priest, a housewife, an architect, and a Rear Admiral all in one day – and on a one-to-one basis.  I wish today’s youngsters had that opportunity, for it was what made me a person strong enough to deal with so many of life’s problems.

See Actions 1, 3 4 and 10 of the Briefing Paper

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It was in 1987, as we set up Education 2000 (the precursor to the 21^st Century Learning Initiative) that I was facing a tough time in trying to get people to think outside the box.  One day a friend sent me this comment from Edmund Burke (1729-1797):

“Those who carry great public schemes must be proof against the most fatiguing delays, the most mortifying disappoints, the most shocking insults, and the most presumptuous insults of the ignorant upon their designs.”

I found that most reassuring!  More recently I have found myself going back even further to the most unlikely of writings, namely that of Machiavelli and what he wrote in The Prince (1513).

“And it ought to be remembered that there is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in its success, than to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things. Because the innovator has for enemies all those who have done well under the old conditions, and lukewarm defenders in those who have the laws on their side, and partly from the incredulity of men, who do not readily believe in new things until they have had a long experience of them. Thus it happens that whenever those who are hostile have the opportunity to attack they do it like partisans, whilst the others defend lukewarmly, in such wise that the prince is endangered along with them.”

Much more recently Rudyard Kipling, not as popular now as he was in the days of the British Empire, also understood perfectly the lonely road of the innovator when he wrote one of his most famous poems, If.  This is a long poem, so I will be selective.

“If you can keep your head when all about you
are losing theirs and blaming it on you…
If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
And stoop and build ‘em up with worn-out tools…
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the will which says to them: “hold on!”

Wonderful as these sentiments are, that is impossibly strong stuff!  Kipling has frequently been parodied.  The one I like best starts

If you can keep your girl, when all about
Are losing theirs, and blaming it on you!

Think on this when you are on the lonely road!

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1. Review: The Road to Whatever: Middle class culture & the crisis of adolescence by Elliott Currie

Turbulent times call for strong nerves. Walking along the canal to my office early last week I was admiring the heron standing on the opposite bank, its beak poised to thrust into any fish swimming its way. Overhead several seagulls, encouraged inland by the lack of fish in the Bristol Channel and the profusion of fast food left on the streets of Bath, hovered looking for tasty morsels. One gull, possibly more hungry than the rest, did something I’ve never seen before – flying first to a great height it then dive-bombed the heron, as if to displace it from its perch.

Gulls are large and strong birds, whereas herons are slight, being a perfect adaptation to a particular form of fishing. The heron remained stock still until, at the very last second when the force of the impact would surely have killed the heron, it simply opened its enormous beak and snapped at the gull. Suddenly realising the danger it was in, the gull, with the skill of a Harrier jet pilot threw itself into a barely controlled role; emitting a most furious cry, the gull headed downstream. Infuriated at its failure, but not one to give up, it tried again at least a dozen times. Every time it changed its line of attack, from the left, from the right, from behind, and from up and under. The heron, quite remarkably, never flinched and was still standing its ground as the gull eventually flew away, probably swearing!

An hour or so later I, too, needed such strong nerves. Months before, knowing that one of England’s largest grant-making charities was encouraging applications from organisations such as ourselves, we had submitted a detailed proposal for funds to extend the argument beyond the politicians to the general public. We had written many papers, and had several lengthy discussions about the need to radically transform the nature of social and political dialogue in England to deal with an issue of this magnitude.

With the memory of the heron still fresh in my mind I nervously opened an envelope that had just arrived from the Foundation. “You make a powerful case for what is wrong… and what ought to underline policy in this complex and inter-related area… but the breadth of your remit – necessarily so I accept – (means) the impossibility of identifying outcomes in the medium term…” Which meant that they would not support us. The letter concluded “My best wishes… as you begin to generate the national and political debates that are so vital.”

I cringed and trembled as I thought of other times in the past which seemed so similar. Grant-making bodies, entrusted by their founders to back innovation, seem staffed by officers who just do not have the controlled nerve of the heron, and don’t seem able to understand those who do.

At that moment I longed to have the steadfast nerve of that heron. Then I remembered the quotation sent to me more than 20 years ago from a well-wisher who quoted Edmond Burke: “Those who carry on great public schemes must be proof against the most fatiguing delays, the most mortifying disappointments, the most shocking insults, and the most presumptuous insults of the ignorant upon their designs.”

See Blog 35, and Action Ten of the Briefing Paper

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I am having to take a short break from the tedium of “topping and tailing” letters to be sent out to every MP with the Briefing Paper in three days time.  After writing Dear so-and-so, and signing “yours sincerely” six hundred and sixty times, my writing is almost indecipherable.  Having to concentrate on spelling three of the Clarke’s with an e, and three without; on four Davies’ with an e, and one without, and sorting out which of those two dozen Scots start their surnames with Mc as apposed with Mac, ought to be enough to keep me awake!  But it is not, for the human brain likes novelty, not repetition.  I am no exception.

I make myself concentrate not only on the Member’s name but try to envisage for five seconds or so the nature of their constituency – how will these ideas play out in Manchester Central or Winchester; in Tooting or Basingstoke, or in Totness, and the Forest of Dean?  I stumble over some of those surnames as I try to write in flowing longhand names like KAWCZYNSKI or LAZARAWICZ and double-barrel surnames that too easily spread across the page.  I wonder about the anthropological and social reasons for why there are so many Smiths and Taylors in the House of Commons but no longer any Butchers, Bakers, Thatchers or Farmers, several Browns (with or without e’s) but no Whites or Blacks?

Will they take notice?  Will there be something that encourages Members to spend just enough time reading this letter (one amongst hundreds they each receive every week), that they turn to the Briefing Paper and allow the ideas to stimulate their minds.  That is what is needed.  “You employ very powerful and cogent arguments, and I think the Paper will make many candidates think who have not previously spent much time reflecting on the validity (or otherwise) of their pre-conceived ideas about educational policy,” wrote one Parliamentary candidate earlier today.

Good policy cannot be created by politicians, young or old, unless they have a proper understanding of where the nation has come from, and where it needs to go both in the short, and long, term.  In the inimitable words of Josh Billings, a 19th century American colonist, “it is not people’s ignorance you need to fear, it’s what they know which just ain’t true any longer, that does all the damage”.

See Action One of Briefing Paper and the whole of Overschooled but Undereducated

No related posts.

For all those reading the Briefing Paper for Parliamentarians, or the Book Overschooled but Undereducated, it may be helpful to explain The Initiative’s understanding of what it takes to bring about change. These ideas will become ever more relevant as the country gets closer to the General Election.

As far as I, now the Director of The Initiative, was concerned it started long ago with the belief that was shared by so many of us in the 1960s that it was the teachers’ task to equip youngsters to think for themselves, and balance their personal aspirations with general societal well-being. We were taught by people well-enough versed in the classics to help us understand the truth of Aristotle’s critique of popular education – “they repeat, but without conviction.” Like Plowden we saw a glorious opportunity, through a revitalisation of education, to strengthen the country’s ability to make democracy work. Initially as a teacher, then Vice Chairman of the Royal Geographical Society’s Expedition Advisory Committee, and subsequently headteacher, my theory of change was of the standard textbook kind… start small, define carefully your objectives, define the time scale, assess progress as objectively as possible, and then if appropriate prepare to scale up.

As the youngest head of a secondary school in the country I was much impressed with Lord Bullock’s “Language for Life” (1975), that, if young people were to communicate well, it was essential that every teacher, regardless of discipline, be also a teacher of communication skills. (“Why should I, a teacher of chemistry, do the job of the English teacher?” complained my then senior chemistry teacher.) Bullock, who now seems extraordinarily prescient, was ignored.

Seeing in the power of the word processor in the mid 1970s, a technology that could make easier the task of drafting and re-drafting, I scrimped, cajoled and borrowed enough money to create what became Britain’s first ever fully-computerised classroom in 1979 with a terminal for everyone. That was the easy part… what was much more difficult to achieve was the staff training as to how to integrate this into the pedagogy of the various disciplines in the classroom.

We were soon overtaken by politicians. Keith Joseph (a good man but nearing the end of his career, and death) was much impressed but, not having funds within the DES itself in those days for curriculum innovation asked David Young at the Manpower Services Commission to put this on a national basis by announcing the £700 million Technological and Vocational Educational Initiative (TVEI). This, as far as my thinking was concerned, almost totally missed the point by excessively linking the technology, not with pedagogy, but with specific vocational skills. Continue reading here.

See “No Smoke Without Fire”, Action 10 in Briefing Paper and the Introduction to Overschooled but Undereducated.

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