The Forest

Michael Gove might be divisive but he has a presence and intellectual energy. He was also manifestly a dynamic force in government. A year ago he arrived mid-way through a conference I was attending and took the seat next to me (I was too scared to say anything). He scarcely had to clear his throat before everyone was paying attention. So when he appeared on the Leading podcast recently I was curious to hear what he had to say. 

Predictably, the two episodes made for infectious listening, but it was the (brief) discussion about his legacy as Secretary of State for Education that stayed with me. I am someone who survived a state education. I went to a comprehensive and then a sixth form college. The system worked for me where my incipient curiosity coincided with the eccentric enthusiasms and rigour of my teachers. This was almost entirely at the sixth form college, where the staff were mostly ex-grammar school teachers. 

So, if I rationalise from personal experience (which is almost certainly the wrong way to think about it), I have always had some sympathy with the reforms that Gove introduced, as controversial and adversarial as they were. By introducing more rigour into the curriculum and giving schools greater autonomy, he was trying to foster an environment closer to the kind of education that had brought me back from the dead-eyed, zombie-land of my secondary school.   

When Gove went head to head with Alastair Campbell I had expected political fireworks. Despite the bluster and some light huffing and puffing, the two appeared to share a very similar set of assumptions about the point or purpose of education. 

Both accepted that education should be about equalising opportunities so that everyone can enjoy the benefits. Their differences turned more on a question of method and its consequences: the autonomy of schools from local authorities and the risks to inclusion inherent in the ethos of academies. 

This is what stayed with me. When you hear discussions about education, you don’t often hear a debate about what it is for. Those sparring might reach for grandiloquent rhetoric (fairness, equality, productivity etc) or fall into generalities. Mostly the debate is technical: regulating the complexity created by the academy system, making sure schools are properly accountable, retaining teachers in a system that has been somewhat porous.  

Which always makes me feel that, among those who know, the point of an education was settled long ago and is no longer worthy of serious discussion. The real romance lies in the journey: how you make the glorious goal real. 

Maybe that’s right. Maybe the point of getting an education is in no real doubt; ultimately the aim is to acquire the skills that lead to preferment, a better paid job, or an elevated status and improving standards of living. Certainly the sense that is often implied is that it should help the student acquire the skills that are relevant in today’s economy, with a premium on the high-functioning academic abilities that are necessary for what would have once been called ‘the professions’ and are now so broad that they have the industrial title, ‘graduate-level jobs’.   

I would guess that some might still cry out that education has a broader purpose – the pursuit of knowledge for it’s own sake, for example – or that it cannot be narrowed down to one purpose but has a more complex and variegated role in advanced societies. Fragments of different ideas might scuffle about the edges of the debate, but it still seems rare to hear a clearly articulated position that begins from first principles – as the brief debate between Gove and Campbell showed. 

A first principle that is notable by its absence is a truth about human nature that, for me, is obvious and self-evident: human beings are different. They don’t just start from different places by the luck of the draw; they are fundamentally – or metaphysically – different. We are all one species but we exhibit a curious thing called character: each of us has a personality, different potential, different ways of looking at the world and thinking about it. The complex weave of human character also means that this contributes to idiosyncratic tropes or traditions in different parts of the world. Or, you might say, the flourishing of human character produces culture. Every one of us is born into a cultural hinterland of some sort, which then leaves its mark on the individual and shapes them, however much that might change over time.

But we are heir to a tradition of thought which claims that individuals can transcend their character. The exercise of reason, in particular, is a more stable lens through which to survey the world and a vantage point to which anyone with the right education can attain. A levelled, more equitable, ‘progressive’ world can be glimpsed and it is this ‘enlightened’ objective, powered by the technics and analytical know-how of an industrial economy, that could be said to animate the assumptions of our education policy. The implied purpose of an education, as the pithy discussion with Gove revealed, is to equalise an opportunity for self-betterment in all quarters.

If this story is correct, then it remakes the natural differences at work in human character in a single neat philosophy. Or, put differently, it flattens the natural diversity of human custom in pursuit of a univocal ideal. All of which could sound laudable or even worthwhile. Except the goal only stands if its starting premises hold good. Which begs the question: can human beings transcend or overcome the differences at work in their character? For every free thinker dousing the flames of illumination, there is usually a sceptic casting cynical glances at a bucket of cold water. 

Suppose, for a minute, two things: one, human beings, no matter how far they might develop or progress, cannot escape the circumstances of their character and two, the education system is predicated on the opposite view; that everyone, to some degree and with appropriate effort, is capable of higher-level attainment. What would be the effect? 

We might witness a scrappy competition for access to the coveted goal of greater socio-economic status in which only some parts of the population exhibit the potential to do well. You might see concerns about a two-tier system refashioned in different guises: an ‘aristocracy of merit’ in which privileged and self-serving groups preside over exclusive access to benefits, or a public education system over-engineered for academically gifted students (but no-one else). 

If the measure of success were so univocal and successive governments had pushed for greater access and opportunity, you might also see a broadening and flattening in the meaning of academic attainment and success, signalled by grade inflation and rising questions about the relative quality of teaching; a more mediocre form of attainment would shadow the growth among those pursuing it. You might also see a gradual preference for certain subjects because they enjoy greater esteem on the grounds of perceived utility.   

Thinking about those effects might also prompt the search for an explanation. If the country had introduced an education policy in, say, 1944, which institutionalised selection on a mostly academic basis and around 70 per cent of subsequent generations grew up with a spectral sense of failure, it might seem inevitable that education policies would show a collective neurosis about any form of selection. This would leave it stuck in a singular register of thought which vacillates between an attempt to treat all students in broadly equal terms and an attempt to provide opportunities for those with the wherewithal, character and aptitude to seize them. This push and pull could produce incoherence and endemic unresolved problems (principally inequality).

What if, instead, education embraced the principle that people are irreducibly different? What if, in fact, that difference were understood not as a problem to be overcome by futile attempts at social engineering, but as an intrinsic good – a beautiful garden with many different varieties of flower? 

A country interested in this way of thinking wouldn’t have to look all that far. Education in the Netherlands, for example, appears to recognise at least a degree of difference in human character and has no problem with selection. There, the system differentiates children early but not by one test with a focus on academic credentials. Schools work with parents and pupils to find one among several respectable routes that suit the potential of the student. And Dutch education does fairly well against international benchmarks. It, or so it would seem, can hold more than one thought in its head.

Such a system might also help to produce an economy which values engineering as much as the performing arts, or care workers as much as hedge fund managers and corporate lawyers. And it might soften the poisonous atmosphere of factory farmed graduates wilting in narcissistic competition over the only two values they are taught to know: lovely lucre and the illusion of status. 

Education, at one time, started by thinking carefully about what a human being is and what it means to flourish. It did not bypass the question through the assumptions of economic need and by subordinating knowledge to a fixed view of ‘necessary’ skills, (a mindset that seems more problematic given the speed at which the economy’s technical underpinnings outstrip the ability of education to keep up). Instead, it asked some questions: who are you and how can you develop for your own good and the good of the wider community? An open-minded and open-ended approach to these questions could not possibly predict where the answers might lead, but it could have a sense of what’s required to explore each question. It could also say that, if done well, its beneficiaries would flourish in myriad ways (some of which would even be economic). 

Oddly, the tendency to bypass the point of education or justify it in utilitarian terms, implies a culture drifting towards a closed frame of mind. It implies a question that has already been answered. In which case, aren’t we reducing everything to training, and why have any education at all?