114 days alone. Just one startling thing I want to change.
I’ve been asked: “If you were granted one wish by the Genie of the Learning Lamp, and you could change one thing about Education, what would it be?”
For me, the most challenging part of this question is that any one of us today would think of learning and ‘education’ as one and the same thing. I dare say that six months ago, it would have been considered haughty nitpicking to split the difference. But today, so many of us have worked alongside our own children as they learn at home, and the difference between that learning and whatever we call ‘education’ feels starker for it.
I might have found the wrong genie to make a change to education: I’d need the Genie of the Education Lamp for that.
For 114 days I have been sat at my desk, every day, unable to go further than one hour of time and the speed of my legs can take me. Favourite haunts have become the old port of Leith, and I’ve taken off every other day for an escape through the labyrinth of disused railway tracks, which compared to their 1950s heydays, now provide a different pulse through my city of Edinburgh.
For years the Edinburgh, Leith, Newhaven and Granton railway network connected the city centre with the industry of the harbours in the north of the city.
The tracks have gone, but life still pulses through them. In fact, what started as a bit of local knowledge for hardcore lycra-clad cyclists has become a public necessity, and even as our locks are released, the new habits formed over 114 days mean that life pulses through these veins of the city. Given the different ages of those walking and cycling here every day, all day, I think these green-furred arteries have been rejuvenated in a way that I feel will sustain for generations to come.
Tiny habits form, crystallise, become normal and then become loved. Try removing these cycleways now, and you’d have a riot on your cycle-greased hands.
When people pick up a new, joyful habit, they’ll fight to keep it.
It’s emotional. For all the right reasons.
My family have been learning and working in the rooms around me, and thriving. They’ve been digging into maths that they found hard before — the youngest one finds bits of it hard still, but she grapples with it in her own time, and nails it.
When she researched her personal project on Japan, wrote the script, pulled in photographs and created a presentation, when she worked out how to record the screen and her voice, and share it with her teacher, and when she got phenomenal feedback from her teachers and peers, she was proud.
Because it was all hers.
It’s emotional. For all the right reasons.
When the head of school creates a video for the end of the school year, perhaps struggling with ‘something in my eye’, it’s because he and his team have been pushed to learn about things they hadn’t had to before. They were pushed into being uncomfortably comfortable, and sometimes a bit beyond. They sought out help from mentors and peers, joined the dots, and created something on their own. And they’re rightly proud of what they pulled off. Because it was all theirs.
I’ve seen 114 days of proper learning, intensely, first hand. And not much in the way of education, the way we understood it four months ago.
There have been no exams or tests.
There’s been more feedback from friends on learning platform posts, and more meaningful written feedback from teachers, than ever before, and not one grade.
There’s been no pressure to perform in class in front of peers (and no need to hide your complete misunderstanding of the lesson from them).
There’s been no bell, timetable or teacher telling you that your learning is up because another group are waiting to come in.
There’s been no sitting through endless hours of peers’ ropey presentations on the same topic — just viewing the varied fare your mates have produced and really enjoying them.
But I know this isn’t the experience of every kid, particularly those from lower socio-economic groups where plenty of hurdles get in the way of finding flow. In some year groups, there are hundreds of kids who haven’t even registered a look at what their teachers have tried to create. But it’s not just ‘poor kids’. There are plenty of well-off or ‘getting by’ children, the ones ‘in the middle’ of the class, who have not had joy from learning in months, and may not have had it for half a year.
They’re running on intellectual fumes.
For them, there’s a lot of “have nots”.
There’s no private space to get peace and quiet.
There’s no peace and quiet in the rest of the house.
There are parents who don’t care, or parents who are so hard working that they can’t check in on their children during the day, or parents who are so stressed about their own prospects that they can’t cope.
There’s no laptop that they can use, that isn’t being used for mum and dad’s work, or big sister’s studies (“It’s such an important year… you’ll get your chance…”).
There’s no reliable, on demand internet at home, just pay-as-you-go mobile access that runs out or runs slow.
There’s no device with a screen bigger than six inches square to write, research and create.
There are no books on the shelves, real or virtual.
There’s no dinner table conversation, music sung or instruments played.
I’m not worried about their school results or relative progress to the ‘haves’. I’m worried about their happiness.
So if you want to have one wish for learning, rather than education, it might be this:
