I used to be a junkie. I keep it quiet these days. Not that any of my colleagues would judge me, because I fear some of them might be junkies, too. Even now.

Let me tell you what I used to do and let me also tell you that I blame a man called Fred. For it was he who kicked my addiction off.

It began when I was 17 years old. I realised - in my first real existential crisis - that I hadn’t read enough. Like a parent looking in on an indolent son during the school holidays, I looked back on my younger self and found him entrenched in front of a TV and playing Fifa Two Thousand and Something on the Xbox.

What does one do when an epiphanic flash discloses a misspent youth but become a junkie? The internet was only young then and I remember calling out to my mother to get off the phone line so I could begin the life of an addict.

I found what I needed in the form of a list. The list told me what to buy. So, the following day, moving surreptitiously through the byways and alleys of Soho, I bought everything on it. The next day and the next day and the next, I kicked back and imbibed relentlessly - it was a heady three days.

What I was beginning to become addicted to was something more enticing than the lotus leaf, more gripping than crack. What the internet had given me was a list of all the books I should have read, and I was reading them voraciously.

But this isn’t some literary article in which I say I came to value literature and logos and all that jazz. No, I was valuing some higher god - the list itself; efficiency, if you will.

Years enslaved to a computer console had left me hungry to be efficient in my remaining two-score and ten. From the moment I got the first of my listed books, I read in every moment - spare or not.

I quickly discovered that A levels were getting in the way of my reading: in politics classes, I impoliticly asked if I could read my book instead of listening to the teacher. The “no” bounced off me and I read my book anyway. Much the same in theology: damnation was bewitching, but more enchanting was my acceleration through the literary canon.

At university, I didn’t enjoy the fact that close analysis of literary texts was something akin to speed limits on a motorway, so I read through those classes, too, and no one pulled me over for it.

My life became all about removing what efficiency junkies might refer to as microfrictions. For me, efficiency equalled time, and this was time I would spend reading more and more books.

After university, teaching English seemed the best way to continue my efficient path through the canon. How wrong I was. After three years teaching in a state school in London, I aimed for the international circuit. The skewed logic of moving abroad went something like this: away from the pressures to socialise, date and see family, I would be able to absorb any spare drop of time into my efforts to read. I found in Cairo a place where I would be relatively unmolested by systems of social obligation. And my addiction spiralled even further.

So yes, I was a junkie - an efficiency junkie - Nile-bent on reading the Western Canon before the age of the 30.

The only problem was that, though I was efficient - though I sometimes read two or three novels a week in Egypt, with a full-time job - when I tried to think back to a book I had read just a few weeks before, I couldn’t really remember anything.

Plots became vague, characters nameless, even titles seemed hidden behind large indefinite articles. I was “reading” efficiently, yes - I was ticking text titles off my list continually - but my mind was like a waterlogged floodplain.

Not enough was being absorbed, or when content was absorbed, it was being misplaced: sometimes I would place characters from one text in the plot of another in a novel written by an entirely different author.

In a fairly inefficient way, I was slowly learning a productive lesson: efficiency is not productivity.

And it is a lesson that we now need in teaching more than ever: we can’t squash learning into small, remotely transferable hyper-efficient packages; and when our students finally return to school after this crisis, we can’t let them become efficiency junkies, too, forcing them to hoover up knowledge as quickly and efficiently as possible to catch up for lost time.

Let me explain further.

Now, I, of course, don’t blame myself for being a junkie. And neither should you, if the inclination takes you to become one. The man I blame is the man I mentioned before: Fred - or Frederick Winslow Taylor, to give him his full name for the charge sheet.

If we were to meet him, the best year in which to do so would be 1898, the year he was changing our world. Imagine Fred as a middle-aged man looking out at something with a gaze of fierce concentration. As he does so, note how his brow begins to furrow.

To be even more precise about my description of Fred, let’s place him somewhere: he is in Pennsylvania at this moment, at the Bethlehem Steel Works, standing on a raised platform, and looking out over several square miles of an industrial yard.

In this bleak Boschian landscape, Fred saw hundreds of men lifting 41kg pig irons on to rail cars. And as his brow furrowed, Fred was changing his world into our one.

You see, upon reflection, Fred realised why what he saw was wrong: it was not the inhumane, repetitive drudgery of the labour that was the problem, but rather an issue of mass inefficiency. He set about conducting “research” to fix it.

Selecting a sample of workers (the burliest and brawniest), Taylor asked them to increase their rate of work by incentivising them with cash rewards. The selected workers set to the task of lifting 41kg weights with great gusto and, inevitably, many suffered injuries. Those who injured themselves during the “research” were discounted from the study’s findings.

So, unsurprisingly, what Fred Winslow Taylor found at the end of his methodologically irreproachable research was that, if workers were incentivised with cash, Bethlehem Steel Works could improve each worker’s productivity by over 400 per cent.

Taylor promptly told the management of Bethlehem Steel Works that all workers could achieve the same level of productivity, and subsequently workers’ basic pay was slashed and performance-related pay offered.

But a little attention to Taylor’s project shows what often happens when efficiency becomes the goal: Taylor’s recommendation didn’t bear fruit. He was sacked from his role in driving efficiency at the plant in 1901 after the collateral costs of workers’ injuries kept hampering Bethlehem Steel’s productivity.

Now, levels of productivity did increase after Taylor’s cash-incentive scheme was implemented, but they fell back to below pre-incentive levels soon afterwards as workers failed to keep up with the incessant work rate.

Type Taylor’s name into Google and immediately his magnum opus, The Principles of Scientific Management (offered in efficient audio format), rises like Mephistopheles for you to invest/waste your time listening to. But you need to read beyond it to learn the lesson. That lesson seems to be: efficiency can be achieved but only for a time, before burnout occurs.

It’s a lesson that very few of us seem to have heeded. In education, in particular, it’s as though only Fred’s highlights reel has made it into the present day.

We were, of course, already on a trajectory to efficiency, even before Covid-19 closed schools and gave us more of an incentive to embrace the speedy and short approaches over the slow and long approaches. The argument that research can tell us the most efficient way to teach has been made continually for the past few years.

What is that super-efficient teaching method? According to many of our research leaders, it is direct instruction. Some disparagingly call this chalk-and talk teaching, but it is - in effect - a model of teaching in which teachers hand over information and it is repeated until learned, rather than pupils constructing it for themselves.

Now, the research oft-quoted advises a learn-and-retrieve approach to education - knowledge transfer and practice. Those elements can obviously be incorporated into almost all approaches to teaching, but the research chooses to tie its recommendations to speed. Group work, discovery learning, child-led approaches - it has all been cast as inefficient: yes, the pupils might get there eventually, but children - and disadvantaged children most of all - simply don’t have that time to waste to be put through that route.

Indeed, the evidence is awash with arguments about speed. For example, in Visible Learning (2009), a synthesis of over 800 meta-analyses relating to achievement, John Hattie argues that the “principles of direct instruction place it among the most successful outcomes” because, as he puts it, direct instruction’s principal objective is to “accelerate the performance of the students: that is, teach more in less clock time…and constantly monitor the performance of the students as they move to achieve their challenging goals”.

We should note here, though, that by “outcomes” and “performance”, Hattie means outcomes and performance in assessments, not life. We should also make it clear that Hattie’s work is not without criticism.

Another exponent of the direct instruction model was Barak Rosenshine. His “Principles of instruction” (2012) have been much celebrated and he argues that direct instruction “ensured that … students efficiently acquired, rehearsed and connected background knowledge by providing a good deal of instructional support”.

The overpowering premise of Rosenshine, like Hattie, is that efficient teaching, nearly always exclusively through methods of direct instruction, leads to examination success.

In fact, you can pick many examples from the current popular research canon and see this argument repeated. And you will hear it again and again in the coming months from teachers, school leaders and others. Too much time has been lost, the gap between disadvantaged pupils and their peers has grown too large, our only hope is efficiency.

Like most teachers, I can see the logic and appeal of the efficiency arguments, but efficiency is not ever identified for what it is - an ideology masquerading as statistics. Efficiency seems natural, almost non-ideological, because it seems to be tied up with nature itself, with Darwinian theories of survival of the fittest, the most efficient users of energy survive.

But even Darwin’s ideas of efficiency stem from 19th-century debates around production, usefulness and, ultimately, from Benthamite utilitarianism.

I worry about efficiency. I worry even more now that it will be thrust further to the front of the argument for a particular way of teaching. I worry because of Fred and his burned-out labourers and how that might translate to burned-out pupils and burned-out teachers. And I worry because I was a junkie and I know what efficiency did to me - socially, emotionally, but also cognitively: in an effort to know everything, I ended up knowing very little.

But perhaps I am biased? Perhaps it would not play out in a classroom as it did in my quest for literary omniscience? I decided to do a little test.

Imagine two Year 10 classes, both alike in dignity. In the period between January and February half term - just under six weeks - I decided to teach one of my Year 10 classes inefficiently and one efficiently.

Of course, when one is efficient, the decision then becomes about what one does with the extra time. I decided to use the extra time to cover a second text rather than revising the first, following the model that I had used in my youth. When schools return, it may well be that this sort of approach will be adopted by some in an effort to “squeeze it all in”.

So to the first “inefficient” class, I taught a single play, while teaching my second Year 10 class two plays efficiently. I gave free rein to discussion and debate in the first class, but in the second class, I suffocated anything that did not help us to progress through the texts. In order to collect data, I surveyed students from each of the classes and asked both classes to complete the same essay.

So how did it go?

I will begin with the surprising finding first, which seemed initially quite a rebuttal to my slightly beware-efficiency stance: the class that studied two plays really enjoyed covering so much ground in so little time because of a great sense of accomplishment it gave them. Rather than feeling at sea, a few students asked to study a third play by the same playwright.

When I asked individuals for their reasons for this, they claimed the sense of mastery, of being able to say they had read two plays by the same playwright at their age, gave them a thrill, something to be proud of, and meant they wanted to read more.

Inspiration or engagement is something Rosenshine does not speak of in his original article from 2012, and Tom Sherrington’s graphic-novelesque book version of Rosenshine’s principles, Rosenshine’s Principles in Action (2019), only mentions the word “engagement” once.

This was something the research on efficiency did not lead me to expect - working efficiently seemed to indicate that students were engaged and craved more.

But craving more is one thing; understanding what they crave is another. With the group who studied only one play, I was able to build up to, read, perform and debate the text. That first class seemed equally enthused about the playwright (if that can be a measure), but instead of wanting to accumulate more knowledge, more texts, the responses from the inefficiently taught class centred on thematic concerns of the play and their relevance to the current political zeitgeist. These were the general trends of student responses, but I needed to see what would be borne out in written responses.

The class that had studied one text inefficiently produced essays of a higher quality by GCSE standards than that of the second class that worked efficiently through two texts, mainly because the former were able to concentrate on language analysis, and had more time to digest what they were fed.

The second class that had studied two texts efficiently created essays of regurgitation rather than digested matter, essays that followed the small discussions we managed to fit between acts and the nuggets they had retrieved in recaps. The efficiently taught class’ essays were not tremendously precise in their approach to language, form and structure either - the things one can become adept at spotting only through slowness, not speed.

In short, the efficiency class had the same problem I had had with trying to cram it all in: a lot seemed to have been travelling so fast that it had missed the target in any meaningful way.

It’s a small test, yes. And I cannot say that efficiency does not have its place in the curriculum. One needs to respect the examination and acknowledge the doors it opens for students.

But I feel my hackles raised when efficiency is claimed as an indisputable good. I feel we need to discuss more widely the obvious downsides.

First, efficiency is not the same as productivity. While productivity is output per unit of input, efficiency involves times, because efficiency is measured in time. One can be perfectly productive but be inefficient. If one saves two hours by working efficiently and wastes three hours on YouTube with the saved time, one is only following a temporal version of Snackwell’s law.

Second is the issue of quality. I like to think of teachers not as Fred Taylors, but as tailors.

Tailored suits are inefficiently made, but the quality is generally indisputable. We shorten and lengthen, measure and taper, baste and balance, all to make the suits we create fit, to make them last and to make the wearers proud of the finest thing they will ever wear and will wear every day of their lives.

The education we furnish is a mark of our craftsmanship as teachers. In many respects, the drive for efficiency in education is perhaps a reflection that we are involved in an educational culture where quality, or more accurately depth, is not valued, where notes produced in revision-week sweatshop sessions in the Easter holidays are seen as good, enough at least to clothe paltry ideas that have had no time to grow.

Though we may be being chivvied with research and circumstance toward the factory to be retrained in efficient ways of teaching, and though it may become the aim of some when we return to schools, what we do with that extra time (which never seems to come) may be the area the hopeful among us can focus on.

David Gibbons is an English teacher at Eton College

This article originally appeared in the 17 April 2020 issue under the headline “Is efficiency a waste of time?