We are all just data now. Or so it seems. Whether it’s school league tables, Sats tests, Ofsted inspections or a host of other data collection exercises guaranteed to instil fear and create angst in both pupils and teachers.
As I look out of my window and watch a pair of swallows, it reminds me that we are the only creature on Earth that tortures itself with perceptions of a future that may never exist rather than focusing on the one thing that actually does - the present, right here and now.
I know - try telling that to the harried primary school teacher trying to get his or her English class to understand what a split diagraph or modal verb is when even getting them all to sit down is a challenge. (If they fail the test she can always console them by telling them that the grown-ups haven’t a clue either).
There has never been more pressure on teachers to deliver learning objectives and our obsession with data has done much to fuel the teacher recruitment crisis as well as exacerbating soaring rates of mental illness among pupils across the land.
As teachers are exhorted to do more for less it is little wonder that many are voting with their feet. Yet nothing of substance was ever taught through fear. Great teaching only ever happens in the now and inspiring teachers know that it is all that exists.
As William Shakespeare wrote in Henry VI, Part II: “True nobility is exempt from fear.”
Which reminds me of an incident years ago when my late housemaster peered over his brass, half-moon shaped glasses, leaned over his desk and pointed the stem of his pipe at me after I had been caught having a cigarette. He uttered words that have stayed with me all my life: “Glassey, old man, don’t try and break the system because the system will break you.”
Actually, instead of the word ‘break’ he used a far more powerful verb which hugely impressed a gawky teenager like myself, especially coming from the lips of a much respected and loved senior master.
He was a kindly man who personified integrity and humility, and had shown exemplary courage in World War Two, fighting for his country against fascism and saving his own unit at huge risk to himself.
A brilliant educator and fiercely independent thinker, I often wonder what he would have said to me had he been able to see what teachers and their pupils face now. The question I would have liked to ask him is this: “What if the system itself is broken. What then?”
We live in interesting times and sometimes our leaders seem to believe that it’s somehow cool to be cruel and to ignore consensus as they consign our pupils to more unnecessary and counterproductive Gradgrindian misery.
Yet perhaps they would be wise to remember that they are not our leaders at all - rather our servants and that those they choose to ignore are the same voters on whom their jobs depend.
The great lie of all governments is that things will be better in the future and this is used to justify all manner of horrors infinitely worse than frontal adverbials.
We all expect high standards and everyone wants our children to be literate and numerate but we also want them to enjoy the journey. It may be possible to teach a seal to balance a ball upon its nose but that doesn’t mean that it is right or even desirable. The purpose of education is to set us free, not to enslave us.
James Glasse is a tutor and education consultant
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