Our guest today is Alex Beard. Alex is a former English teacher at a London comprehensive and is now a senior director at Teach For All, a growing network of independent organizations working to ensure that all children fulfil their potential. He is fortunate to spend his time travelling the world in search of the practices that will shape the future of learning and has written about his experiences for the Independent, Guardian, Financial Times and Wired. His book Natural Born Learners is a user’s guide to transforming learning in the twenty-first century and this will be the topic of our discussion today.
Excellent! An inspiring approach, which you would have thought was obvious in some ways, but is clearly not nearly obvious enough to make any difference to most of the world of education. He didn’t mention all the things that prevent education being so far from this vision (in many places, except perhaps Finland): political pressures, funding limitations, parental expectations, and the sheer crushing weight of educational tradition. Perhaps it is as well that he didn’t, or it might have turned an inspiring talk into a depressing one. Nevertheless, my feeling whenever I contemplate the educational system, both in the UK and in many other places, is largely one of despair. In the sector I have had most to do with, sixth form education, things are going markedly backwards. The computer (or container) metaphor still rules totally. A whole set of utterly mad A Level syllabuses have just been introduced, groaning with content that students have to regurgitate in exams, with about 50% more in them even than the content-heavy syllabuses they replaced. This is even more of a disincentive to any teachers who might dream of helping students to develop the skills they need than the previous syllabuses were, since any time they might spend on that feels like it’s stolen from all the ‘stuff’ the student-containers should be taking in. Then A Level Critical Thinking, the only A Level that was actually based on a general set of skills rather than loads of content (apart from Maths and English, to some extent), has now been abolished, almost without even a squeak of protest from the people who ought to care about it politically. We can fantasise about how to improve the education system (and I have lots of ideas too in that field), but what can we do when it is controlled by people who are apparently totally possessed by maladaptive, anti-educational, fixed ideologies?