What is the purpose of education?
Balancing learning with doing and what it takes to live a long, happy and healthy life. Thinking about artisanal teaching and learning to thrive in a rapidly transforming world for a better future for all.
Interview at the 11th International Conference for Education, Research & Innovation, Seville, November 2018
Scroll to the end for my ICERI keynote 👇🏼
Transcript
Some people would think that we send our kids to school to pass tests, to pass tests to go to university, to get a good job. Well, we know that getting a degree at a good university doesn’t guarantee a good job or a job for life anymore, so the system has changed. But also, we have to think about … Perhaps another way of looking at education and the purpose of education is to enable present and future generations to thrive in our society.
It’s a very different way of looking at things, and one might question is education’s role to produce human capital, if you like, for the work force? I’m not sure that that’s … I mean, partly. You want to be able to thrive, and to be able to thrive, you need to be able to invent your own job or to get some sort of gainful employment. But I think part of education’s role is, and thriving, is how we get along with each other.
Now, I’ll give you an example. If you look at the Harvard longitudinal study, which is the longest study of what it takes to live well in the world, to be healthy and happy, and so forth, live long. What they discovered, actually, and they studied many people, and these people are now in their late 80s, but actually, it wasn’t about their degree, their educational standing; it wasn’t about where they lived or their wealth. What it was was about good relationships. The key to a long life, a happy, healthy life, is a good relationships: relationships with your partner, relationships with your neighbours, and so forth. And yet, nothing in our education systems today work towards that.
So I think we have an education system today, which is probably perfectly adequate for the second Industrial Revolution; factories, offices, and that kind of thing. A good example would be London taxi drivers. You would spend four years learning something called “The Knowledge”; memorising, the roads of London, all the back streets, and all that kind of stuff. And then overnight, replaced by an app that you could download onto your phone. I think that’s a really good analogy for the education system. We have an education system which is designed around memorization and then vomiting out the answers on an arbitrary test, and then forgetting them. I think that we probably now are at a point where jobs that require memorization of information or doing things by rules or things by measurement, quite honestly can be done by machines. So we need an education system that perhaps nurtures human potential, rather than turns them into a robot. We should programme the machines, not be programmed by them, is what I would suggest.
So my point isn’t about memorization. It’s not about not having content knowledge or content mastery, but the ability to apply it. Because if you can apply it, we’re likely to memorise it better, and to be apt to know how to use it. So I don’t think it’s a sort of either/or, I think it’s like content is bad and skills are good. I think that they both feed each other, actually. And I think we have an imbalance in the present education systems because they are largely controlled by multi-billion dollar corporations that have a vested interest in the scarcity of content, and a measurement system that basically tests your memory recall. And that’s my key point.
So I’m not opposed to testing. I mean I think a certain amount of diagnostic testing is valuable, certainly for the learner, because the learner would like to know how am I doing with this particular thing. So I mean, learners do this outside of the school environment, in video games and so forth. They’re constantly being assessed, and so there’s nothing wrong with testing, as long it’s a diagnostic. I think that when testing becomes the driving force of how we teach and what we teach, then it becomes a problem.
So how do we get away from that, really? How do we move on? I think that it still has a place. I’m not suggesting that we remove the measurement industry entirely. What I’m thinking about is we need to have a public conversation about what are the things that we value. Now, when you come to education forums all over the world, people will talk about the things that we value for this century and the next century. We talk about creativity, we talk about collaboration, we talk about critical thinking, and so forth. But our measurement systems that we have today don’t really measure those. And they probably are unmeasurable because we actually measure what’s easy, but we don’t measure what we value. That’s why I think in the key notes that we heard this morning, a lot was talked about projects, about the way that we can demonstrate our ability to do things.
Now, to give you a commercial, a real world example. I hire software engineers in three continents at the moment: in China, in Europe, and in the United States. Now I don’t care where they went to university or what certificates that they have. I’m not just interested. What I do is I look at a thing called GitHub, which is very popular on software engineers. It’s where they share their code, where they demonstrate their voodoo, if you like, in creating code; where they collaborate, and everything else. I look at that. And that determines whether I’m interested in interviewing them, and even hiring them. Because that actually shows me what they can do. And that doesn’t mean that they haven’t got knowledge. It doesn’t mean that they didn’t sit tests or maths, for example, or an A-level or a degree, or whatever. But it tells me what they can do with that information.
As we know, there’s an awful lot of people that have lots of certificates and letters behind their name, but not that smart, or not that practical. And so I think that we need ways of looking at it. So I don’t think it’s necessarily replacing the measurement industry, but it’s at least having something that runs alongside it so that I can say, “Yes, you have this knowledge, but also, you have these skills.” And I think that’s what’s missing at the moment.
A good teacher uses a repertoire of skills. So project-based learning is just one of many. If you look at the Finnish education system they didn’t switch, as some of the media said, to project-based learning. They have subjects, they have subject knowledge throughout the year, but also within the new curriculum framework, they allow young people to use project-based learning to put those together. So in the framework direct instruction is still very important. It’s just the way that that direct instruction is then applied. Problem-based learning is another way of doing it, where you’ve set a specific problem. I think sometimes people confuse project and problem-based learning. Project is where it’s a project that means something to you, and is contextually relevant. Problem might be something entirely different, but you’re wanting to see how they work that out.
So there’s a variety of different techniques, and we’ve talked about things, for example, like design thinking. Again, useful, for certain types of things. Scientific method, scientific thinking is also valuable. And I think that young people or any people, actually, coming out of an education system need to be conversant with these variety of different ways of thinking. And teachers should be able to use their repertoire of techniques, not just one. I wouldn’t want my children, for that matter, to go to a school that was solely based around project-based learning. It doesn’t suit all children, for a start. It doesn’t suit all learners. What I want is artisan teachers. I don’t want to hand my child over to a technician. I want them to be an artisan. And that’s really what I am promoting.
I think in terms of global competencies that we need for certainly to thrive in this century and hopefully into the next, I’m not sure whether they can actually be taught. Can creativity be taught? Can critical thinking be taught? Can innovation be taught? I’m not entirely sure that they can be taught in the traditional direct instruction sense, but I think we can create environments where they can flourish, create environments where it’s permitted to think critically, it’s permitted to think outside the box and to be creative and to create environments where we collaborate.
So I think that being able to think critically, to be able to communicate, to be able to collaborate, to get on with each other, to think innovatively, to be innovative. I think these are all aspects of future competencies that will allow our present and future generations to be ready for the future, which is going to change quite rapidly. I think the key skill, the key thing that we need with, as I said, present and future generations, is that they know how to learn. Because actually any job that they get, they’re not going to know how to do.
I think we can teach how to learn because I think that that’s where we come down to projects, for example. I mean, so we’ve talked about project-based learning as one example of how you can learn how to learn. I think about what you do in your own life: you embark on a variety of projects, and you find things out along the way. You find things out because you start off … It’s called the creative learning spiral. You, first of all, you imagine a problem or a project, and so forth. And then you start working on that, learning about that. And then you iterate. You build something, for example, and it doesn’t work quite how you expect it, so you change things, and you try things again. And through that, you learn. And through that, you build a competency of learning how to learn. So I think it’s something that, yes, you can teach by providing the environment which allows you to learn. I think at the moment, we have an education system which is about consuming. I give you the information, you consume it. And then you repeat it on an exam.
If we create an example where we give you some information, and then give you the opportunity to have transference, you can transfer what I’ve just taught you to something else. To give you an example, and I’m running a workshop about this, actually, at this summit. I’ll teach young people, or in this case, people from the summit how to create an electrical circuit that turns a light on, and then how to write the code to turn the light on and off. But then I say to them, having taught them that, okay, what if you’re blind? Can you transfer what I taught you into turning a buzzer on and off? And you’d be surprised that they can. So they have learned something, and they’ve learned how to learn.
So I think the, in the context of education and my passion for this, and what brings me here, I think one of the things that affected me was spending time with a gentleman called Seymour Papert, who was an artificial intelligence pioneer and educator from MIT, and really regarded as the father of a learning theory called constructionism. Papert was a student of Piaget, and through that, he developed this way of believing that computers would profoundly change learning and teaching in a way that it would give young people, or any learner, better things to do. So rather than education as a transmission of knowledge, it was a reconstruction of knowledge. You’d learn by doing.
Now I had the opportunity to meet him when I was 17, as a result of having helped port the Logo computer language from a minicomputer at MIT to a microcomputer. And then the company I was working for at that time sponsored his speaking tour around a number of universities in England. So I had the opportunity of driving him around as a sort of taxi driver for just over a week. And at the time, I was like 17, I had blue hair, I was into punk music, and I was busy playing things like Sex Pistols and New York Dolls, all this punk music. But he was also fascinated in my background, in terms of self-directed learning, and he was telling me about his theories. So unbeknownst to me, really, because I was a 17-year old young man, I was sitting next to somebody who was a real thinker, and a real mover, in the terms of changing education. And his theories are why I’m here now. I mean, a lot of what I’m talking about in terms of constructionism, social constructionism, learning by making, and learning through experiential learning really comes from that man. He was the guy that, if you like, lit my fire, and passion for education.
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