“Learner-centred education”. “Learners’ needs”. “Putting learners at the heart of education”. “Learner-directed learning”.
In 2024, and for some time now, education in Scotland - and it is far from unique in this - has tended to focus on a word that only came into common parlance relatively recently in the history of formal education: learners.
Both explicitly and implicitly, there are constant reminders - in CPD, policy documents, school communications - that learners are of paramount importance. Some people don’t even like using words like “pupil” and “student”, which they see as harking back to more rigid, hierarchical systems where not enough importance was attributed to the learner.
But what if this view of education risks going too far - if too heavy a focus on the learner may be to the detriment of the teacher and the overall quality of education?
That was the territory explored by Professor Gert Biesta in the General Teaching Council for Scotland (GTCS) annual lecture, held at GTCS headquarters in Edinburgh on Monday.
In “Taking the Angle of the Teacher”, Biesta unpicked the implications of a trend that, he said, has been prevalent in Scotland for the past 30 years: “The tendency to discuss everything educational in terms of learners and their learning.”
Or, as he put it in pithier terms, “the learnification of education”.
In official education publications, Biesta sees no shortage of examples of what he means. What is commonly described as the Muir report, for example, was actually titled Putting Learners at the Centre: Towards a Future Vision for Scottish Education; the report on the recent “national discussion” on Scottish education, meanwhile, went by the name All Learners in Scotland Matter.
Biesta, of course, is not saying that learners are unimportant - but he questions the determination to put them constantly at the “centre”, a focus that he fears could lead to a level of myopia.
“If anything is put at the centre of education, I would rather put the world there,” said Biesta, who is professor of public education at the Maynooth University Centre for Public Education and Pedagogy in Ireland, and professor of educational theory and pedagogy at the University of Edinburgh’s Moray House School of Education and Sport.
Learning is not inherently benign - mafiosi often showed themselves to be highly proficient learners, as did child miners in the early 19th century, Biesta pointed out.
Looking back at child labour in the mines, you could apply vocabulary that is routinely used in education circles in 2024: children found “powerful learning environments” and “gained useful knowledge and skills in real-life situations”, while a lack of teachers and teaching forced them to “adapt quickly”.
The point is that these qualities are not always desirable - you could even argue that they hark back to aspects of “a past we struggled to get rid of”, that was blighted by ills such as child labour.
Importance of relationships in learning
For Biesta, what must not be forgotten is the importance of relationships in learning - “which requires that you also consider education from the angle of the teacher”.
But are teachers being undermined by suggestions that their role is chiefly that of a “facilitator” - a “guide on the side”, a “learner among other learners” - surveying a host of personalised “learning journeys” through school?
“I don’t like this idea of the teacher as a facilitator,” said Biesta.
This, he fears, diminishes and disregards the influence a teacher can have.
He essentially posed this question: if we tell learners to prioritise what they want to learn and largely get on with it themselves, are we sidelining the teacher, whose skill and expertise can draw pupils’ attention to areas of learning they might never have considered otherwise?
‘A teacher adds something special’
Biesta - who has just started a four-year term on the Education Council of the Netherlands (Onderwijsraad), an advisory body to the Dutch government and Parliament - also drew a distinction between education and learning.
“Education, unlike learning, requires at least two parties: a student and a teacher,” he said, and “a teacher adds something special”.
Biesta’s critique is partly fuelled by concerns that the vogue for bespoke, student-led learning opens the door wide open for huge technology companies such as Google to sail in and talk up the “hyper-individualised” learning they can offer.
In practice, Biesta fears this could result in the widespread marginalisation of teachers, as pupils are increasingly encouraged to put on headphones, shut out the world and do their own thing.
He is also concerned that tech giants’ incursion into education would signal a more market-driven approach, intent more on short-term fixes and learners’ instant gratification than what is best for society - the type of arguments that he said were laid out in more detail in The Impulse Society, a book by journalist Paul Roberts.
Preparing pupils for the future
Biesta is also not convinced about rhetoric which suggests that, because the world is changing fast, the jobs of the future are largely unknowable, ergo formal education must have a looser, more open-ended, skills-based - and, yes, learner-centred - approach.
“The future is not just this unknowable black hole,” said Biesta during his GTCS lecture. His riposte is that the challenges of the future are more predictable than often portrayed: sustainability, peace and the protection of democracy will undoubtedly be priorities in the decades to come, for example.
And, says Biesta, this much we also know: learners - or whatever we choose to call them - will cope best with such challenges if we accept that teachers have a pivotal role to play.
Henry Hepburn is Scotland editor at Tes. He tweets @Henry_Hepburn
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