The Education Game

Reevaluating success

Today it would be difficult to find many parents who think that Rote Learning and a standardized national curriculum are the most effective tools to encourage their children to achieve their unique potential. With these kinds of reservations in mind, many parents are reevaluating the traditional notions of success embodied in the current education system and are pushing for a redesigning of the concept of education to meet their changing expectations.

It is within this context, that Graham Brown-Martin acknowledges that a successful education has to be guided by what it believes its purpose is. He argues that one of the issues around the idea that schools are failing, is the standardized way, through grades and examinations, students are being measured.

“We’re not really understanding where the education system is taking them and missing out on the potential of the child,” says Brown-Martin.

One of Andrew Brewerton’s concerns with the education system relates to the issue of collusion between pupil and teacher. The professor contends that both enter into a kind of power play relationship in which the pupil tries to double guess what the teacher wants them to say. Within this kind of learning environment, pupils tailor their responses to what they think the teacher wants to hear because that’s what they’ve been told to do.

Brewerton quotes the dance choreographer, Pina Bausch, to illustrate the point. “Very late in her career”, says Brewerton, “Bausch said, I’m not really interested in how my dancers move, what interests me is what moves them.”

Singapore

Apparently, one of the leading education systems in the world that is now talking about this obsession with grades, quantifying and measurement, is Singapore. In January 2017, the government of that country decided to partly remove the grade system. They did so on the basis of the argument that learning itself should be an end in and of itself as opposed to a persistent tick box exercise.

The step taken by the Singapore government is not a surprise to Brown-Martin who acknowledges that the existing educational environment is failing to satisfy the creative aspirations and well-being of humans and instead is overly focused on meeting the demands of an economy that’s increasingly dominated by machines and AI.

The growing realization is that the quality of education that the country has been so famous for in terms of ratings, is no longer fit for purpose. It was in the context of recognizing that there was a creative niche to be filled within education that Andrew Brewerton created the Plymouth College of Art. The academics intention is to nurture a transformational and trans-generational environment.

The feedback Brewerton received from students has been positive and he has witnessed an extraordinary development in learners. The Plymouth School of Art model, as Brown-Martin suggests, could be the prototype to challenge the prevailing orthodoxy where diktats from above and the measurement culture continue to leave many teachers beleaguered.

Brown-Martin argues that what we’re seeing is a deskilling of the existing profession as opposed to an upskilling. Teachers are finding that the theories they have learnt do not necessarily correspond to the actual craft of teaching on a personalized and practical level. These are the kinds of skills that computers are unable to replicate.

Measured to death

The result is that teachers are being measured to death, spending more time evidencing their practice than actually practicing. So the teachers, in effect, become production-line workers as part of a supersized society which seems to be waging an undeclared war on childhood. The pace of life is accelerating. With too much stuff and too many choices, children are feeling the pressure.

In his book, Simplicity Parenting, Kim John Payne reminds us about the extraordinary power of less. His idea is simple. It doesn’t take much to bring out the innate capacity for innovation in our kids. Of course, everybody knows that getting good grades isn’t the most important thing about education because if it was we wouldn’t need to go to job interviews. In the real world, it’s the things that grades don’t measure that often determine our success.

This raises an interesting question: Are schools that produce pupils with good exam results necessarily giving them the best education?

Academic qualifications are a one dimensional way of looking at human beings. Andrew Brewerton argues that the education system should be for everybody but acknowledges that this narrowly defined notion of success is nevertheless a legitimate part of our culture, even though it doesn’t work for everybody.

Brewerton says that the business of learning is inseparable from life and that their mutual purpose is nothing less than individual, social and professional transformation. Whenever that kind of learning journey has been introduced, it has opened up a very different set of conversations with a much larger number of people.

Why, then, is the UK government failing in its duty to encourage and nurture this inclusive learning journey?

Brewerton has the answer:

“The English have a kind of genius for taking diversity and turning it into hierarchy. If you think carefully about the nature of need or what innovation might be in education, you end up asking a different set of questions. They’re not all about the classical model of academic achievement.”

Negated

Brown-Martin argues that the opportunity for the education sector to embrace an abundance of information society is currently being negated by a 20th century business model that is intent on maintaining scarcity.

Brown-Martin says:

“We’re not providing people with a way of leveraging the abundance of the 21st century away from this model. And so we end up in this hierarchy. Can you teach entrepreneurship? I’m not sure you can.”

In the view of Brewerton, an environment of innovation is one in which entrepreneurship or enterprise is created as opposed to being taught. In this understanding, the entrepreneur is the self-motivated person that follows their own path, inseparable from the business of life, as opposed to a path that has been prepared for them.

In that sense, the job of a teacher is not to get in the way of learning but to open up fields of research inquiry that are personal to each individual. But, as Brown-Martin says, the general education system, from primary through secondary, does very little to nurture that ethos.

“What we tend to do is restrict curiosity. We positively move against individuality, creativity and innovation. If we think about great innovators when they first appear, they were often criminalized or considered mad. I always think of innovation as being able to identify the dots that other people can’t see and then joining them up quickly”, says Brown-Martin.

How do we get away from the exam factory to nurturing more rounded individuals who are able to thrive?

Brewerton highlights some interesting research which says that young people who engage in arts and cultural learning are 20 percent more likely to vote and 100 percent more likely to volunteer.

He also raises some important questions:

”I think it really comes back to the question what is it that the education system is for? What is it that should be driving the education system? Is it about creating a human capacity or is it about compliance? What is it that we expect of learners? Do we assess them, or are we just content to audit them at various points in their development?”

Brown-Martin says that the prevailing establishment orthodoxy encourages children to be trained as stormtroopers as opposed to Jedis.

”Is that going to be useful in terms of purpose for the well-being of the planet let alone individual countries? Of course it’s not. We won’t find our innovators, our Jedis if you like, that way,” says Brown-Martin.