Wading into The Pond

Splashing Around and the Good-Enough Life

Hello All,

Everyone has an opinion on education. On how teachers should teach, on how schools should function, on skills students should learn, on how students should be assessed, on the use of technology, on curriculum or on teacher salaries. While everyone has a right to express an opinion, the vigour and entitlement with which this is expressed is surprising.

I for one, would be hesitant in offering unsolicited advice on how physicians should treat patients, and on how lawyers should structure their practice. Neither do I walk up to investment bankers and offer my wisdom on how they should allocate their portfolios, or adjust their investment criteria. Yet we seem to live in a world where one’s economic and business acumen qualifies them to speak at length about issues in which they have no expertise.

I do not intend to sound bitter, nor do I mind that education is a ripe target for public interest. This is a testament to the importance of the educational enterprise to our individual, collective and social lives. The fact that everyone feels they can wade into and splash around in the educational pond is due to a number of factors.

1. First, education is viscerally personal. Everyone either in their own lives or through lives of their children, has an experience with education. Experience however should not be mistaken for expertise.

2. Second, education as a field is also notoriously susceptible to fads, and fad-based thinking. The persistence of learning styles, the trend of entrepreneurship education, and the relentless push to incorporate technology and devices in the classroom are all the result of fad-based thinking. We need only look at the proposed bans to cell-phones in schools as evidence of fad-based thinking gone awry.

3. The third is that public perception of education is highly susceptible to misperception, misrepresentation and in recent times ignorance. Public education has become a site of extraordinary political polarisation and a battlefield of contemporary culture wars. We see this result in a situation of absurd policies that have little to no basis in scientific evidence or even reality. Rampant misperceptions and ignorance about gender the role of teachers, the workings of a classroom, critical race theory, addressing inequity, social-emotional learning, colonialism and education, diversity, have resulted in a nightmarish and absurd scenarios - the push to force teaching of the Bible in Oklahoma, and the ban against critical race theory in Florida are just two examples.

What are some of the voices saying about how education must be shaped and reformed? The overwhelming focus of these voices is on the means of education rather than the question of why we need to educate. Until and unless we arrive at a consensus as to the ends of education, the question of how we educate is secondary.

The overwhelming focus of these voices have been focused on the means of education, rather than the question of why we need to educate. Until and unless we arrive at a consensus as to the ends of education, the question of how we educate is secondary.

Some have argued that schools in their current form are ill-suited to meet the demands of the workforce and the ever-evolving economy. The proponents of this line of thinking, argue that “evaluating our current education system against three criteria – job readiness, ability to compete against smart machines for jobs and creating long-term economic value” reveals that education needs to be reset to “meet 21st-century needs, shaping a path from education to employability and economic independence.” It is an argument evident in the remarks of Micheal Gove, the UK’s former education secretary, who in an address to the Royal Academy of Maths and Sciences in 2011 remarked:

If we are to keep pace with our competitors, we need fundamental, radical reform in the curriculum, in teaching, and in the way we use technology in the classroom. Unless we dramatically improve our performance, the grim arithmetic of globalisation will leave us all poorer.

Education in my opinion was never intended to fulfil the sole purpose of creating long term economic value, training students to compete against machines, or job readiness. This line of thinking paints the current educational system as woefully out of touch with current realities arguing that schools reinforce mindless conformity, do not nurture or value creativity and instead focus on outdated curriculum.

Others have turned to technology, arguing that AI will fundamentally re-shape the educational enterprise. An article in the Economist explains, “one theory holds that technology such as AI will make traditional learning less useful, so schools should nurture “problem-solvers”, “critical thinkers” and students who work well in teams. Inspired by such talk, countries have adopted curriculums that focus on vaguely defined “skills” and play down the learning of facts as fuddy-duddy.” In the extremes of this model, teachers are now “coaches” while students fuelled by their own interests explore “self-directed” learning and inquiry with the help of AI tutors and bots while teachers use AI tools to harness data, increase personalisation and engagement.

Yet another line of argument suggests that education should adopt lessons from entrepreneurship. According to this perspective, students should be trained to focus on global problems, focus on “moonshots,” increase their personal productivity, learn to create pitch-decks, network, hone the art of the LinkedIn connection, and raise funding. Advocates of these initiatives place an emphasis on the hard sciences, coding, and problem solving to train the next generation of Elon Musks, Jeff Bezoses, and Zuckerbergs. Why spend time learning about the Paris Peace conference, the consequences of battle of Panipat, or read Kipling, Shakespeare, or Vassanji, when children should be leaning about blockchain or investing in cryptocurrency.

To those of you who advocate an approach to education for economic readiness. My response is yes! We should prepare students for the workforce, they should be literate in math, sciences, and economics. Students should be equipped with the skills of teamwork, collaboration, perspective taking and develop soft skills that will allow them to survive and thrive in a world of economic fragility and uncertainty.

To those of you who advocate for the use of technology in the classroom. My response is of course! We should equip students with digital literacy, with the ability to use and employ technology for a noble end. Technology should be used to personalise education, and students should be aware of its potential, but also its limitations.

To those of you who advocate for an entrepreneurial approach. My response is absolutely! The entrepreneurial disposition of taking risks, of root cause analysis, of iteration and bias toward action, of fostering innovation and resilience is necessary. Students should learn to explore problems of their own interest, to develop solutions, and be given the confidence to marshall the resources and skills necessary to solve them.

My point, is that these are not aims of education, but rather the means. Here are a selection of others:

Martin Luther King has observed:

“The function of education, therefore, is to teach one to think intensively and to think critically. But education which stops with efficiency may prove the greatest menace to society. The most dangerous criminal may be the man gifted with reason, but with no morals… Intelligence plus character—that is the goal of true education. The complete education gives one not only power of concentration, but worthy objectives upon which to concentrate. The broad education will, therefore, transmit to one not only the accumulated knowledge of the race but also the accumulated experience of social living.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson has reflected:

We do not give them a training as if we believed in their noble nature. We scarce educate their bodies. We do not train the eye and the hand. We exercise their understandings to the apprehension and comparison of some facts, to a skill in numbers in words; we aim to make accountants, attorneys, engineers, but not to make able, earnest, great-hearted men.

In the same year as Gove’s address to the Royal Academy, Martha Nussbaum offered a starkly different purpose of education:

Eager for national profit, nations, and their systems of education, are heedlessly discarding skills that are needed to keep democracies alive. If this trend continues, nations all over the world will soon be producing generations of useful machines, rather than complete citizens who can think for themselves, criticize tradition, and understand the significance of another person’s sufferings and achievements.

So I invite you, wade into the educational pond, splash about, make your voice heard. But - before you do. Decide why you are wading in and to what end. If it is just to splash for the sake of splashing, then please, there are other ponds available.

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FK’s Reading List

In “The Good Enough Life” Avram Alpert responds to our collective but deeply destructive need to achieve “greatness” and instead through the worlds of politics, economics, philosophy, ecology, literature and technology paints a new paradigm for a “good-enough” world, and a “good-enough” relationship with ourselves, others and the environment

“My basic argument is that ‘greatness thinking’ in fact begins as a meaningful response to the fact that life is imperfect. Accidents, tragedies, and failures befall us all. Greatness responds by saying, “Don’t worry, we can overcome this; though the world as it is may be flawed, humans have the capacity to eventually remove the blemishes of our condition.” To do so we simply have to encourage the most talented among us - the great ones - to innovate and create and explore. They will push us past the limits of our ecosystem and create a flourishing world for the rest of us. To incentivise them to do so, they should be given tremendous wealth and power. And in order to find out who these great ones are we should have a tremendously competitive society where everyone is trying to prove why they are the greatest. To become great is to feel justified in being spared from suffering some real portion of life’s calamities: because you are improving life for everyone (whether by creating wealth, entertainment or inventions) all your rewards are justified. Seeking that sense of satisfaction and security beyond the flux of life is how I interpret the origins of my youthful desire for being great that I share with so many other people. Desiring greatness thus makes a lot of sense, but it also creates the anxieties and paradoxes of the world we live in.”

Thank you for reading,

best
FK