We’ve had the season of peace on Earth and goodwill to all. Yet if all you looked at was the world of education social media, you might be forgiven for not noticing it. Amid the encouraging tweets about Christmas plays and distressing posts about schools opening food banks for their families, teachers were still at war over how to do their jobs. As far as I’m aware, nobody suggested that traditionalists and progressives quit their sniping to play a football game in no-man’s land, but it wouldn’t have surprised me.

I look at it with a mixture of laughter at the squalid righteousness and despair at the squandered resources. Schools can’t fix all of society’s ills for sure, but it ought to be fixing those it can, and none more so than public education itself.

Instead, the market reforms, funding pressures and high-stakes accountability that threaten it go unchallenged as we fall deeper into internecine warfare over the purpose of education, the nature of learning, the best way to teach. Witness all the proxy battlegrounds: whether to show a film or not in the last week of term, whether you’ve only yourself to blame for giving up your PPA for a school play, whether behaviour is at crisis point…I could go on.

On the surface, the divide between traditionalism and progressivism seems to account convincingly for this state of affairs. It presents us with a simple dichotomy, a stark choice. If only we could all do it one way or the other, if only we could all pull in the same direction, then the system would work. We’d have peace, then. Thus spoke every autocrat in history.

Below the surface, a current silently moves the oceans of education policy. Trad/prog may make the winds that buffet our schools, but all sailors know the wind alone doesn’t determine where your ship ends up. The wind requires an urgent response. The currents require careful planning.

You might almost say the winds require the skills of sailors while the currents require the knowledge of a captain, but that would denigrate both the knowledge of sailors and the skills of the captain, and it’s the same whirlpool we keep getting sucked into. Cometh the storm, captain and sailors alike are doomed if their knowledge and skills aren’t pooled for the good of the ship.

Divided we fall

Here we are then, facing a perfect storm for the good ship Education, and all our captains are in denial of the currents. They would be, of course. They are the same currents that raised them to the crest of the wave.

For over a decade, we’ve celebrated the superhead, the lone executive, the Global Teacher Prize-winning teacher and the “outstanding” school, the solitary blogger, the dogged minister.

As the prayer goes: On Earth as it is in Heaven. Our mortal lives as teachers are shaped by individual targets, performance-related pay, observation results, half-termly progress reports, and non-negotiable policies.

Get all of these right and never go to sea, and you all may be rulers of the Queen’s navy.

The people who propagate the trad/prog division are those whose careers and/or voices have been promoted within this context of rampant individualism. The people who benefit from it on both sides are policymakers and influencers who are most threatened by a different paradigm - the General Melchetts of education and their deputies.

Your school may be navigating the winds of top-down accountability successfully - always tacking just so as the trad/prog winds change - but the warnings are clear to seasoned sailors. The current of far-right identitarianism risks smashing the whole public-school fleet on the rocks. You may even avoid the tidal wave. You may breeze into port on a sea of oil afterwards. But it won’t be a port you’ll want to see, nor a port that wants to see you.

As the new year approaches, and the storm gathers, perhaps it’s time to sail a different current, one of collectivism and solidarity. You may be a prog. You may be a trad. You may be either dependent on context. You probably can’t be neither, but you can choose to ignore the debate and still be a great teacher. But here’s what you can’t do:

• You can’t come into my classroom and judge me by your standards;

• You can’t force me to choose a label I don’t want;

• You can’t make good on your lack of agency by taking mine away from me;

• You can’t judge the quality of my teaching any better than I can judge yours;

• You can’t pretend you have all the solutions.

A new year’s revolution

The ideas of traditionalism and progressivism matter greatly. They have and will continue to shape schools and teachers in perpetuity. But debate between them will never find resolution anywhere else than in the choices and actions of teachers and school leaders in a specific context, a time and a place.

These choices should be taken collaboratively for the good of a whole community, not competitively for the good of a cohort, or worse still, of a superhead, an academy chain or a minister. We can’t change the current itself, and it’s certain that as state schools, we will never beat it to reach the distant shores of some nebulous promised land. But we can take a different course altogether to reach the new world. We can sail west and not fall off the edge of the world. Our policymakers will not lead us there, but if we go, they will follow. We can set sail straightaway by making a few changes:

• We can replace a culture of observation by a culture of team teaching;

• We can allow pedagogy to flow from curriculum and professional choice rather than diktat;

• We can increase each other’s agency while defending our own by acting through our unions;

• We can work openly with our communities to determine our own quality of teaching;

• We can meet any challenge with a focus on sustainability over reactionary politics.

As teachers and school leaders, we are not the grunt workers of a detached admiralty who last sailed, if ever they did at all, when the Cutty Sark ruled the waves. We are the system. We are complicit in its doings and undoing. As another saying goes: They that sow the wind reap the whirlwind.

I won’t sow it. In 2019, I ask you to join me in not doing so. Our identities as teachers must matter more to us than our identities as traditionalists or progressives. For the good of our communities, I ask you to join me in plotting a new course together: for better funding, better accountability, and better working conditions - for all of us, and all of our students.

JL Dutaut is a teacher of politics and citizenship and co-editor of Flip the System UK: A teachers’ manifesto, published by Routledge