Whether it’s teachers being replaced by robots or the curriculum is being damned for not being 21st-century enough, there’s a blinkered utilitarian demand that refuses to lie down, no matter how many blows it receives to the head. It’s the one that says schools must prepare children for a brave new world of employment that’s full of future jobs no one has ever heard of that require skills no one can identify.

I can only imagine the cartoons.

Well-known educational figures scrambling over the barricades, while fluttering behind them in tatters are huge bullet-ridden banners embroidered with words such as social mobility, gig economy and AI, and beneath their feet at the bottom of a precipitous cliff are piles of innocent teen corpses.

One of the reasons Scotland’s Curriculum for Excellence has been found wanting is because, at the time of its conception, this mythical, techno-utopia was a dominant theme in influential Scottish educational circles at the time. Combined with an ardent faith in the value of social mobility, it makes for a heady homebrew. I was there.

Questioning future jobs

As is so often the case, when you look below the surface you find some interesting things to reflect on.

Since when, for example, did a teacher’s job description require them to nurture and mould little employees for the state - outside of North Korea or the old Soviet Union?

Of course, careers advice and guidance forms part of any school’s role. In the real world of secondary school classrooms, individual teachers, acting as tutors and mentors, will quite rightly engage in discussions about future jobs or career paths.

I remember gently asking a myopic ex-tutee if he could read a few of the words from a poster on the wall of the classroom for me when, aged about 14, he announced he was determined to be a fighter pilot. He was bright enough and robust enough to appreciate the hint. All of this advice normally takes place with the individual child, their options, and choices at the centre: not the fantasy needs of business, manufacturing industry or geek world.

Which is more important: the right to an education or the freedom to choose?

Interestingly, the teachers I met in the old Soviet Union had no problem with that one. Choice every time.

Grander goals

It doesn’t need a report from a thinktank to tell you this urge to subjugate individual freedom to the needs of the economy has an unhealthy connection with the social mobility agenda. If your role in the educational food chain means all you hear when you see the phrase “social mobility” is schools leavers earning more money than their parents, then I can understand how easy it is to slip into this mindset. But secondary school teachers?

They lean towards grander goals. They introduce adolescent minds to Darwin, Shakespeare and the nation-state. They try to support hormone-woozy teenagers, many struggling to cope with the chaotic dynamics of their own family lives, while simultaneously alerting them to the equally disturbing cultural and international conflicts of the world they are about to inherit.

Which is why I’m so surprised the social mobility agenda has such a stranglehold on large sections of the profession. Teachers know individual lives are more complicated and unpredictable than points on a sociologist’s graph, however “cool” the software used to create it.

Social mobility truths

Fretting about this next generation’s future jobs because of economic or geo-political change is, ironically, entirely academic, when what you have to do in the next 40 minutes is to put some flesh around the word photosynthesis or walk through, for the fifth time, the difference between a metaphor and a simile, like a weary air steward commencing a flight.

So, I’d like to offer a thought experiment to all those weary stewards who fall for the lie that the social mobility of those they teach is their responsibility.

Think of almost any obscenely wealthy celebrity who came from humble beginnings and ask yourself how socially mobile they really are. 

In the next few months, I suspect we will be hearing a lot from teachers’ representatives about how much teachers “care”, how they will be keen to align the profession with the ranks of other public sector workers the public already value and respect.

Teachers who aren’t carrying banners for anything will know that they earned respect because one day. In any normal classroom free from fairy tales about social mobility or wealth, they taught students about photosynthesis and how to tell a metaphor from a simile successfully. And they knew it happily ever after.

They may even have taught them, via Jane Austen among others, that social mobility is always as much about marriage as it is money. It takes more than a tattoo to tango.

Which takes us back to those banners above the barricades: I can’t escape the feeling that the brave new world is one that abandons Jane Austen for Austin Powers.

Joe Nutt is an educational consultant and author.

To read more columns by Joe, view his back catalogue.

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