Try this little thought experiment. Next time you find yourself magnetically drawn against your will to endure a TV discussion or debate, ask yourself how often the speaker demonstrates by their own words that they have listened to the person who has just spoken? We have become extraordinarily poor listeners.
Recently I listened carefully to a group of delightfully mentally healthy, articulate A-level students, and what they had to say was both sad and profoundly important. More teachers need to hear it.
I’d been invited to contribute to a day of debate and discussion organised by the Academy of Ideas on free speech and social media, so it was inevitable that some of the students found themselves thinking about how their freedom to express themselves manifests itself in school. One in particular voiced an unusually sophisticated concern. She explained that she was aware, in a number of her subjects, of an unpleasant tension between her desire to express herself and a pragmatic need to provide ‘the right answer.’ She appreciated that the purpose of lessons was primarily to pass exams by answering questions in distinctly prescribed ways, yet many of those lessons, because of the nature of the subjects she studied, also demanded debate and discussion. In fact much of the pleasure and delight she got from those subjects was because the objects of study encouraged her to think for herself.
She was, in her late teens, visibly struggling to find a way to voice her own feelings, her own thoughts and her own ideas because both she and her teachers were equally pragmatic about the exam game they were playing. The path to university wasn’t just signposted with letter grades written in glaring neon lights, it was walled in on either side by concrete and barbed wire.
Now at this point it would be so easy to fall for the 21st century learning, oh so soft skills, “AI is the glistening future” siren calls but I’ve been roped to the mast far too many times, so they can whistle. I’ve also heard enough from university colleagues about safe spaces, trigger warnings and no-platforming to appreciate where those neon signposts have led recent crops of sixth formers.
When you need a room full of fluffy puppies to cuddle just to get you through the “stress” of taking your finals, any knowledge you manage to reproduce on paper is probably just as fluffy.
As I continued to listen to these students’ concerns, I found myself rethinking the entire idea of how to teach teenagers to express themselves. The bookshelves at the moment are weighed down with advice from experts about reading and writing, the twin pillars of student expression in most A-level subjects. It tends to be laudably pragmatic, a catalogue of plans to follow, strategies to try out and methods to use. But it’s noticeably devoid of anything that would help my student manage her paradoxical existence as a freethinking individual, interned by our education system.
Like every English teacher I had my own favourite ideas and techniques to move children steadily forward in terms of both their vocabulary and eloquence, spoken and written. “Creative writing”, whatever that was, featured occasionally but I was acutely aware that all too often it relied on modelling and resulted in mere mimicry. I had no time at all for the expression “scaffolding” because it was too often shorthand for cheating, but listening to these students, I now think it’s symptomatic of a deeper pedagogical problem. You don’t teach a girl to think for herself when you build her a scaffold - you cut her thinking head off.
What’s gone awol from the pedagogical lexicon is not just provocative, stimulating discussion and debate, but a deep-rooted, classroom-based habit of actually teaching teenagers how to think for themselves, and express themselves without fear or favour.
But before you object and cite in your own defence all those classroom discussions and creative writing exercises, ask yourself how often any of that kind of work really starts with the individual child’s personal motivation? Writing their own haiku about a butterfly, a newspaper article about the Manchester bombing, or a speech about climate change, have as much to do with the average child’s real life as an essay on identity politics in the works of Aristophanes.
I think the closest I ever got to shoving a finger in this pedagogical dyke was a rare lesson I used teach in which I would tell the class they would spend the entire time writing about anything at all they wished to, on two conditions. That they wrote as much as they could and that with 10 minutes of the lesson to go, I would stop them and insist they read over, correct and edit all they had written. I would not see the work nor collect it in. I wouldn’t “mark” it or assess it in anyway and no one else would ever see it. They’d be free to take it out of the classroom and bin it if they wished.
You could guarantee that classroom would be filled with silent faces alternately staring into space and bending intently over a sheet of A4 and if I walked in between the desks (as I sometimes did just for fun), a good few arms and shoulders would instantly hunch up over their paper to hide it from my adult eyes.
Far more significantly for serious teachers, it was not unusual that one or two children would loiter behind at the end, or take longer than usual packing their things away before quietly and unobtrusively placing a sheet of paper on my desk. On at least one occasion what was written there led to a far safer home life for the courageous child who seized that rare opportunity she’d been given, to genuinely express herself - freely.
Joe Nutt is an educational consultant and author. To read more of his columns, view his back catalogue
