When I was a young teacher, an elderly gentleman lived on his own at the other end of my street. He had taught languages at a large boarding school for many years. We had moved into our house after our wedding and he brought us a present: a second-hand cast-iron pot (none too clean) and a cookery book by Constance Spry.

Through a series of irregular chats on the street and the occasional visit to his gorgeous but spectacularly decrepit 17th-century house, we got to know each other. He had many stories about his career. Some were hair-raising, some implausible, but all were funny and told with an ironic twinkle - often over a “libation” or a “cold collation”.

One day I must have mentioned that I was helping on a school trip to Germany. “Not Nuremberg?” he asked. We weren’t going to Nuremberg.

“Pity,” he said. “The first time I took a trip to Nuremberg was before the War. I decided the boys needed to see one of the ghastly rallies. So, at the end of one term, I said, ‘Who wants to come and see Hitler?’ And three boys did, so we got in my car and drove for half a week and arrived just in time to see Hitler in his pomp. And, as he was leaving the stadium, we pushed to the front - three boys in British school blazers and me - past the SS and the Brownshirts. And Hitler went down the line and shook everyone’s hands. Then we went back to the car. ‘Remember this, boys,’ I said, as if they could ever forget it. ‘Remember, today you have shaken hands with evil.’ ”

Of course, there is no way of substantiating the story, although some years later I saw a film of former prime minister Ted Heath giving a similar account of a visit to a Nuremberg rally in his university vacation. There’s also a rather disconcerting account in my school’s archive of a visit to Germany by a party of girls in the 1930s, who reported being charmed by the courteous attentions of the storm troopers they met. So, it might be true. Or based on a true story, at least.

In one of the poet and playwright Louis MacNeice’s most evocative lines, in the poem Snow, he observes: “World is crazier and more of it than we think”. One of the pressing purposes of school education is to ensure that, as they grow up, children and young people begin to understand that the world is, in another wonderful phrase from the same poem, “incorrigibly plural”. In other words, most of the world is not like them, does not speak how they speak, think how they think, eat what they eat or care much about the things they obsess over.

You would think that the internet might have made this easy, but it is an echo chamber with an Anglospheric bias. Ask the internet about education in Georgia and you will be overwhelmed with the minutiae of educational policy in Atlanta, but you’ll struggle to find much about schools in Tbilisi.

And an undertow of conformism that affects too many schools can easily lead to a kind of educational solipsism. When I was interviewing candidates for a head of art job some years ago, one was unimpressed by the theme set for a recent exam. “They make the topic too big,” she opined. I asked her what the topic was. “My World,” she replied. “But I get them to focus on what they know, so they usually do something about their bedroom.” She didn’t get the job.

Walk in the footsteps

As a headteacher, I would have some concerns today about a spontaneous car trip halfway across a continent to attend a fascist rally. But I believe strongly that we sell children and young people short unless they have the opportunity to travel and to walk, for at least a few days, in the footsteps of their peers in another country and culture.

They need to experience some of that craziness and incorrigible plurality. Even if it’s only in the little things. Did you know that, in Belgium, Burger King sells beer alongside its Whoppers? Neither did I until a group of 13-year old pupils told me - along with loud assurances that they had only had Dr Pepper. They could talk of little else all the way back home.

Sometimes, what they learn is a bit more insightful. Pupils realising that, in Scandinavia, English didn’t even count as a foreign language made me lament the increasing monoglottism of our education system all the more. The contrast between the pragmatic efficiency of English language learning abroad and the sense of defeatism that surrounds our attempts to promote any modern foreign language other than our own was stark.

And the rigour of non-native speakers’ English language learning can be intimidating. One of the more embarrassing experiences I had as an English teacher was to be asked by a visiting Italian pupil how many tenses there were in English. She had been told that there were 14; I struggled to identify half that number to her satisfaction.

Of course, merely visiting a place doesn’t necessarily mean you understand it, let alone that it speaks to you. The first time I went to Auschwitz with a school group was before the end of Communism, and there were relatively few visitors. At the end of the tour, our guide showed us her tattoo - she was a camp survivor.

Walking us down a corridor, which was lined with photographs of early camp inmates, she stopped and said that “there are people in your country who say that this never happened, that this is all a lie, that I and these people did not exist. Go home and tell them what you have seen. Their pictures do not lie. What you have seen does not lie.”

There was no banter on the bus back to the youth hostel. But on another visit some years later, a group of pupils dutifully filled in a worksheet without any obvious emotional contact with what they were seeing.

A colleague talks about the “breaking point” in a school trip abroad - the point where the cultural or emotional experience breaks through the group dynamic and enables the pupils to see that there is indeed more of the world than we think. It might be a collective experience (narrowly avoiding being caught up in a riot in Budapest was one such) or a culmination of individual epiphanies. A lone boy quietly weeping by a memorial wall in a First World War cemetery in Belgium springs poignantly to mind: he had finally found the name of his great uncle who had been killed in 1918. But the name was also his own name. Suddenly, the connection between himself, the great uncle he could never have known and the vast global events of history snapped together with devastating force.

Immersive experience

Exchange visits have declined in frequency as concerns about safeguarding and health and safety have grown. This has, I am sure, contributed to the sense that, if “abroad” is in any way relevant, it is probably a dangerous place full of people who are somehow out to get us.

Having strong longstanding links with partner schools abroad where the leadership takes safeguarding seriously themselves means that pupils need not be deprived of the embarrassing, scary but hugely rewarding experience of staying as a guest in someone else’s house in a foreign country.

Learning by immersion is certainly powerful. At one extreme are schemes that enable children of primary school age to spend six months in France or Germany speaking no English. On their return, the children find it temporarily difficult to once again speak English, but their brains are programmed to have instant access to fluency in another language for the rest of their lives. A much shorter and less intense experience can still have profound educational benefits, both linguistic and cultural. And even when the purpose of an exchange is not linguistic at all, exchange groups tend to quickly get beyond the breaking point and start to benefit profoundly from the incorrigibly plural.

So, in the very unlikely event that I became education secretary in this new government, I would ensure that every pupil had spent at least two weeks away on an overseas visit before the age of 16, paid for if necessary from public funds. Every primary or secondary school would be expected to have at least one partner school in Europe and one elsewhere in the world, with funding for regular visits backwards and forwards by both pupils and staff - as well as e-learning. And I would make sure that all schools were resourced to make the most of the links and not be swamped by the routine chaos of school life.

I would also be doing something really radical to ensure children and young people have an education that genuinely enabled them to experience the incorrigible plurality of the modern world. The programmes provided by the International Baccalaureate (IB) organisation cover the full range of school education and are the benchmark for global education. Based in Geneva, the organisation has been quietly getting on with creating an education for global citizens for the past 50 years. Indifferent to the political shenanigans that have blighted most national education systems over the decades, it has grown in strength, purpose and popularity.

The IB Diploma is often praised for its breadth of subject choice in the sixth form and while that is an important feature, such praise is in itself a very anglocentric way of looking at things. The real strength of the IB is in its learner profile, a concept that is genuinely embedded into the pedagogy and, crucially, the assessment of the IB from its youngest to its the oldest learners and from the start to the finish of their studies.

All our UK-based curriculums tend to reward conformism and the educational solipsism of that head of art candidate. They have all colluded in the dismantling of modern foreign language learning UK schools. But to succeed in the IB, you have to see the world as others see it. You have to look outward as well as inward. You have to walk in someone else’s footsteps and learn to speak using someone else’s words. You simply cannot study an IB course at any level without seeing the world as “Crazier and more of it than we think”.

Looking back at my old photo albums, I am uncomfortably aware that too many of the school trips I have led or taken part in over the years have been to places that bear the scars of education’s failure to promote a deep understanding of our incorrigibly plural world. Auschwitz, Eastern Europe under Communism, Budapest at the start of the Orbán years, the battlefields of the Western Front, to list a few.

I wish I were certain we were doing everything possible to make sure we didn’t make the same mistakes again. It’s time to stop talking and instead do something decisive and startlingly different - a bit like driving to see a Nuremberg Rally on a whim.

Melvyn Roffe is principal of George Watson’s College in Edinburgh

This article originally appeared in the 26 July 2019 issue under the headline “Put the whole world in pupils’ hands”