International issues and crises have generated a world where there are serious threats to how we live our lives. Whichever corner of the globe we live in, there are risks to us all of one kind or another, varying in severity and urgency.

These threats - in areas including food, water, energy, ecology, displacement of entire peoples and terrorism - destabilise the world that we know today, and new ways of thinking are required if we are to meet the challenges they present.

However, terrorism and the fear of radicalisation is the subject that I want to address in relation to our education system. While I do not underestimate the potential threat this poses, I do take issue with the way it is being addressed by government policy and the implications of this in education.

Most educators working in FE will have undergone Prevent training on radicalisation at some point in the past couple of years. This is important, but the way it is being approached fuels the fear rather than tackling the issue at hand: how to engage young people in dialogue about controversial and sensitive issues.

Narrowing minds

Immigration and the refugee crisis are two prime examples of topical issues that young people need to be able to discuss openly. The current approach to radicalisation shuts down opportunities for such discussion. Couple this with the limited and ethnocentric curriculum found across the primary, secondary and FE sectors, and I can only see a narrowing of young minds being the result.

The Brexit rhetoric, from both politicians and members of the public, demonstrates the dangers of decreasing opportunities for open discussion amid the powerful mass-media machinery of modern society.

Exposing young people to different points of view is an essential part of educating future generations. This seems to have been squeezed out of the educational experiences of most young people coming into FE.

Training on radicalisation fuels the fear rather than tackling the issue at hand

Time - the enemy of all educators within the current education system - is the biggest barrier to teachers being able to deviate from prescribed curriculum content, and open up discussions on issues that concern young people. If we are to truly educate future generations who are facing a very unstable global society, then we need to feel confident and have the right skills to facilitate debate about controversial issues.

Young people need to feel safe in order to contribute to conversations about challenging topics. The Prevent agenda closes down these opportunities and alienates young people who may have different thoughts, opinions and experiences from their peers. The training offered by most colleges does not equip educators with the skills need to be able to facilitate open discussions. It helps to make them fearful of what young people might say.

Learning is something that changes who you are as a person. It is often an uncomfortable process as it may challenge us to revise our understanding of things that we have taken for granted as being true. Learning is a transformational process that involves your whole being, not just your brain.

The fetish for the end product of education - exam results and qualifications - contributes to limiting opportunities for educators to create safe spaces to enable open and honest discussion.

Safe spaces for debate

My most recent experience of attending Prevent training included a hypothetical situation, which can be summarised as: “A student converts to Islam, his parents are not Muslims. What do you do?”

My initial reaction to being presented with this example was: what if we changed the word Islam to Christianity and the word Muslims to Christians? Would we even be having this discussion? I suspect not.

We need to have safe spaces within our learning environments to proactively explore exactly why this type of scenario is even up for discussion in the first place.

Exposing young people to different points of view is essential

This means opening up the debate on the curriculum, and daring to have a more learner-initiated system where talking about the issues that concern young people becomes a normal part of what it means to educate, rather than something extraordinary.

Training for educators must show them how to teach in a way that promotes this. Education, in terms of outcomes as we currently know and understand them, will then become uncertain. But it is exactly this degree of uncertainty that is needed to prepare future generations of young people for the uncertain world they will inherit.

Sasha Pleasance is an FE teacher educator, founding member of Tutor Voices and author of Wider Professional Practice in Education and Training, published by Sage @SashaPleasance