Teaching for freedom

With liberal democracy under threat, schools need to take brave decisions about what they teach children

By Julian Astle @JulianAstle

The RSA believes we have now reached the point where the costs of the school accountability system outweigh the benefits — where the risks of inaction are greater than the risks of reform. In The Ideal School Exhibition, Julian Astle sets out a new vision for the future of schooling.

Download the full version of The Ideal School Exhibition

Watching the evening news, I find it hard to believe that less than 30 years have passed since history was supposed to have ended, or, to be more precise, since the Berlin Wall fell and American political scientist Francis Fukuyama wrote his famous essay The End of History? In it he announced that the 20th century’s ideological battles between East and West were over, that Western liberal democracy had won, and that a new era of progress and peace had begun. That was 1989, the year I left school.

This year’s school leavers will head out into a more turbulent and dangerous world. Economic security is threatened by the advent of the intelligent machine. And national security is once again a key public concern, with the terrorist threat level never falling below ‘severe’, rising tensions between Russia and the West risking a new cold war, and North Korea threatening nuclear war.

Even if our worst security fears prove overblown, the fact remains that we live on a dangerously overheating and densely populated planet where flooding and drought, conflict and persecution, and vast inequalities of opportunity and wealth have displaced 65 million people and created a migrant population greater than that of Brazil. Amid the backlash against this unprecedented movement of people from poorer to richer nations, liberalism is in full retreat, while nationalism, sectarianism and protectionism are on the rise. As a species, our ability to overcome our fear of the ‘other’ — to transcend our hardwired instinct to tribalism — is once again being severely tested.

Across the democratic West, those students who walk out of the school gates for the last time next summer will have to find their way in societies that are being transformed by the liberating but profoundly destabilising forces of globalisation. Societies that, in the wake of the deepest economic slump since the 1930s, are now turning in on themselves over issues of culture, identity, belonging and belief.

As citizens, they will have to weigh the costs of joining or turning away from an increasingly shrill and polarised public debate, dominated by the deliberately offensive and the easily offended. The former emboldened by the anonymity of the online echo chamber, the latter protected by ‘trigger warnings’ and ‘safe spaces’, with the struggle between them throwing up new challenges to the most precious but fragile democratic freedom of all: free speech.

In a post-truth age when ‘alternative facts’, ‘fake news’ and invented conspiracies are used to pollute the information space and undermine the very notion of knowable truth, those who enter that debate will need to stay a safe distance from both cynicism and credulity by learning to interrogate competing claims. They will need to make reasonable judgements not just about plausibility, but about motivation, correlation and causation, knowing what to attribute to malign intent and what to incompetence or chance.

At a time of angry populism, when the integrity of democratic institutions is questioned, they will need to know the difference between an ‘enemy of the people’ and a judge or legislator discharging their constitutional duty.

In an era of identity politics, when people are all too often judged not, as Martin Luther King once urged, by “the content of their character” but by the colour of their skin, their sex or by any number of other innate or inherited characteristics, the class of 2018 will need to decide for themselves what good, if any, is likely to come from placing the group, rather than the individual, at the centre of our public discourse.

At a time when elites and experts are widely derided, young people will need to identify their own thought leaders and their own champions of quality and truth to help sift the sublime from the ordinary, the profound from the trivial and the authentic from the derivative.

In our multicultural, multifaith societies, which are struggling to settle on the core, non-negotiable values that bind them, the class of 2018 needs to learn to live and let live without ever lapsing into moral relativism; to understand both the value, and the limits, of tolerance. They will need to weigh competing rights, balance mutually exclusive freedoms, and reconcile apparently incompatible world views and, when compromise cannot be reached, to settle their disputes peaceably within a framework of democratically determined, impartially applied laws.

When Islamists and far-right extremists are willing a violent clash of civilisations, young people will need to know how to resist their provocations without shrinking from the battle of ideas that will have to be fought between enlightenment and bigotry. And they will need to keep sight of the fact that the front lines of this unavoidable battle run through, not between, nations and religions.

Most importantly of all, they will need to learn that all of this will be more easily achieved if we can rediscover our civility, generosity, empathy and humour, the diminution of which has always accompanied the rise of man’s worst ideas and most dangerous ideologies.

Democratic institutions

This poses a challenge for all of society, but particularly for our schools, which are charged with passing on society’s norms, customs, culture and values, and where children are socialised. As the American psychologist and educational reformer John Dewey put it: “Democracy has to be born anew every generation, and education is its midwife.”

Anyone who doubts the connection between liberalism, democracy and education need look no further than contemporary Hungary, a country that has elected as its prime minister a man who promised to build an “illiberal democracy” knowing full well that, as The Times’ Philip Collins put it: “Liberal democracy comes as a pairing and anyone who disparages the first, threatens the second.”

But what Viktor Orbán also knows, and his actions over the seven years since his election reveal, is that an enlightened liberal democracy depends for its very survival on education. Which might be why, in contrast to the global trend, he has sought to restrict, rather than expand, the educational opportunities available to Hungary’s youth, cutting education budgets at every level, lowering the school leaving age from 18 to 16, reducing the number of young people going to university, appointing powerful chancellors to exert political control over the country’s higher education institutions, introducing a new, highly nationalist curriculum in schools and, earlier this year, introducing an apparently technical regulation, the effect of which is to close or move the Central European University, which since the collapse of communism has stood as a beacon of openness, independence and academic freedom.

The lesson could not be clearer. When authoritarianism is the goal, education is the problem. When freedom is the goal, education is the solution. But how do we educate for freedom? What sort of schooling will enable a young adult to fully grasp freedom’s value, understand its vulnerabilities, recognise its enemies and commit to its defence?

What kind of schooling will give our young people the wisdom and courage to make judgements, moral, intellectual and aesthetic, and the wherewithal to join what the English philosopher Michael Oakeshott referred to as “the great conversation of mankind”? In short, what kind of education will prepare them, not just to write a good exam, but to live a good life?

There are many plausible answers to this, but the status quo plus an hour of civics is surely not one of them. For this is a question that, once asked, leads inexorably to a fuller, richer, more expansive account of education’s purposes and character than that which underpins our current, technocratic, highly instrumentalist education debate.

That debate, of course, both reflects and drives what is happening in our schools, too many of which are narrowing their focus to exam results and hollowing out their teaching at the very moment when, as a society, we need them to do the opposite. To understand why this is, we need to understand the workings of the school accountability system: the primary cause of our current malaise.

Measures for success

Unlike Viktor Orbán, the architects of England’s accountability framework are driven by the best of intentions: to improve educational standards. And it is important to acknowledge that the accountability system has had a positive impact on standards. That was clearly shown by researchers at Bristol University, who compared the performance of English and Welsh schools after the Welsh Assembly’s decision to abolish performance tables and found the latter lagging behind.

But that does not tell even half the story. Yes, in high-stakes, low-trust systems where, if targets are not hit or thresholds cleared, trustees and governors can lose their schools and headteachers can lose their jobs, what gets measured tends to get done. But what of those things that do not get measured and therefore do not get done? And what about the way in which things get done; the tactics some schools feel compelled to employ, the games they are incentivised to play, to get their performance numbers in the right place?

In descending order of seriousness and ascending order of prevalence, these tactics and examples of gaming include: outright cheating in exams, or over-marking teacher-assessed modular exams; manipulating the admissions system to get more high-performing pupils on roll and excluding or, more often, ‘managing out’ other pupils to get low performers off roll; steering pupils towards easy-to-obtain qualifications of little interest or value; narrowing the Key Stage 2 curriculum and foreshortening Key Stage 3 to prepare pupils for high-stakes tests; focusing on subjects that count, or count double, in performance tables and on pupils who are close to the pass/fail borderline, to the detriment of statistically less ‘valuable’ subjects and students. Most pervasive of all is the practice of ‘teaching-to-the-test’ in which pupils are taught only what is likely to be tested and in ways that respond specifically to the demands of the test. Over the years, the government has sought to address each of these problems by tweaking the system. But this is the bureaucratic version of the ‘whack-a-mole’ fairground game. No sooner has an abuse been identified and closed down than a new one pops up somewhere else. The rules may change but the game goes on.

Apportioning blame for ‘gaming’ (or, as it could equally be described, for responding rationally to the system’s perverse incentives) is far from straightforward considering the intense pressure school leaders are under. But most people would, I think, agree that the greatest culpability rests with those who write the rules of the game, rather than those who are forced to play by them.

A league of their own

The good news is that there are some inspirational school leaders out there who refuse to play this bureaucratic education-by-numbers game; leaders whose decisions are shaped, not by the government’s agenda, but by their own sense of mission.

These educational missionaries are a different breed. They recognise the need for transparency and accountability to ensure money is well spent and children well taught. And they understand the importance of exam success for their pupils. But they also recognise there are lots of things a good exam grade does not tell us about the student who achieved it, such as whether the knowledge they have acquired is superficial or temporary, as is likely to be the case if they have been intensively ‘taught-to-the-test’.

What is more, the missionary knows that exam success tells us little about a pupil’s ability to put their education to use; to work with others, in real-life situations, under time pressures, while learning from, and not being disheartened by, mistakes, showing initiative, spark and leadership. They know a good grade does not tell us whether the pupil enjoyed learning the examined facts, or learning in general, or whether, having passed the exam, they are determined to keep on learning, fuelled by a sense of curiosity and wonder. And they know it does not tell us whether they are happy, kind, selfless or brave; whether they will go out into society determined to help others, to stand up to injustice and make a positive difference. All of these things matter more to the missionary than whether their pupils have been successfully coached in the techniques of answering an eight- or 16-mark question.

Over the past few months, I have visited a good number of these headteachers — these missionaries and visionaries — to find out how, in our tests-and-targets obsessed system, they manage to stay true to their promise to prepare pupils not just to write a good exam but to live a good life. That journey, which culminates in the publication this month of a new RSA essay, The Ideal School Exhibition, has taken me the length and breadth of the country and to the very heart of the debate about what schools should teach (curriculum), how they should teach it (pedagogy) and how they can find out if they are succeeding (assessment).

It is a debate that is increasingly influenced by science; by our rapidly growing understanding of how young people learn and of the implications for how adults should teach. But as the scientific community is at pains to remind us, in the end education is goal driven, and those goals are rooted in values.Which brings us back to the question posed at the outset: if you value freedom and want to live in a free society, what kind of schooling will best prepare our young people to flourish in that society?

For the leader of a mission-oriented school, the chance to provide your own answers to that question, and to run your school accordingly, is the reward that offsets the significant risks of opting out of the education-by-numbers game. And although all the heads I met offered different, sometimes radically different, answers, they all had an answer.

Mission goals

Peter Hyman, the founder of School 21 in east London, is clear: we need to move decisively beyond what he describes as a “small education”, narrowly focused on academic study, and replace it with a holistic education that attends to each child’s head, heart and hand, with teaching methods carefully selected to cultivate the skills, capabilities, attitudes and character strengths that Hyman sees as critical to success in the 21st century:

“We need an engaged education… an expansive education… an education that is layered, ethical and deals with complexity as an antidote to the shallow, overly simplistic debates our young people often have to listen to. The best defence against extremism and ‘illiberal’ democracy is an education that teaches reflection, critical thinking and questioning.”

Read Peter Hyman’s article in the RSA Journal

Other heads I met argue that this emphasis on skills is all well and good, but meaningless if you do not place sufficient emphasis on, and allocate sufficient time to, the explicit teaching of knowledge. It is a view neatly summed up by Richard Russell, a teacher who, in a recent article, argued that the privileging of skills over knowledge is a symptom of a wider trend towards postmodernism and relativism, the effect of which has been to blur the distinction between evidenced fact and baseless assertion, which is a gift to populists and other false prophets: “Without knowledge, critical thinking is redundant. Knowledge plays a key role in debating with — and hopefully changing the minds of — those who hold racist, bigoted and ultimately false beliefs. Without some knowledge, some acceptance of facts, we’re just people with different opinions shouting at each other. And it is knowledge of a subject that allows people to think critically about the divisive and cynical claims made by populists.”

This dispute over knowledge and skills is just one of many fascinating points of contention in the debate about how to prepare young people for adulthood. Even the nature of that debate — whether, considering the complex challenges of the 21st century, it is highly timely, or, considering the constancy of human nature, it is in fact timeless — is itself contested. And because so much of that debate is values based and goal driven, it is not there to be ‘won’. Rather, it is part of the wider conversation of mankind, the unending dialogue between the dead, the living and the yet-to-be-born, into which our children must be inducted.

That is the educational conversation the leaders of mission-oriented schools are engaged in. And that is the conversation the RSA intends to host and contribute to in the coming years. It is a conversation to which every teacher who despairs at having to talk about tests, targets and tactics should consider themselves warmly invited.

For this conversation to flourish on a large scale, there must be a loosening of the accountability system’s vice-like grip on our schools. We must arrive at the point where institutional failure can still be identified and tackled, but where the majority of schools have the space and the freedom to pursue their own mission.

Government will only step back if schools are ready to step up, however. Which is why any relaxation of external constraint must be accompanied by a step-change in the way schools drive their own standards, with practice increasingly informed by research and evidence. That is why the changes proposed in The Ideal School Exhibition — to assessment, to admissions and exclusions, to the use of performance data, to the role of Ofsted, and to the way in which we identify and support failing schools — are aimed at everyone at every level of the system, not just the politicians in Whitehall.

The aims of those changes are to free headteachers from having to choose between their school’s interests and those of their pupils by ensuring the two are aligned; to get classroom teachers focused on the curriculum, not the exam specification, so we test what has been taught instead of teaching what will be tested; to get examiners to make tests harder to teach to and to reward genuine quality rather than coached responses; to get Ofsted to balance the pressures of the accountability system by looking at how, as well as whether, a school has met its performance targets; to get government and the inspectorate out of the business of defining excellence and focused solely on identifying failure; and to ensure the actions of policymakers and regulators are more supportive and less punitive.

And behind all these aims is one overriding objective: to help those who lead and teach in our schools reclaim ownership of their institutions, their profession and their practice. Only then will we have a system that not only prepares our young people for exams, but prepares them for life.

Read The Ideal School Exhibition — a landmark new RSA essay by Julian Astle on the future of schooling

Download the full version of The Ideal School Exhibition