Nothing to Lose

I feel like a broken record at times, never more so than when discussing the cycle of trends in which education, and culture more broadly, seems perpetually trapped. I have written and spoken about this ad nauseam for decades. Yet the cycle keeps turning, and its absurdity demands that we continue to draw attention to it...

There is a ritual in English education. Every few decades, the prevailing intellectual fashion changes, and a remarkable number of people discover, almost simultaneously, that they have been mistaken about everything they previously believed. Positions once defended with evangelical certainty are unsubtly abandoned, old convictions acquire new qualifications, and ideas that were recently considered indispensable are suddenly found to be obstacles to progress. The transformation is often so swift that one might reasonably wonder whether the intellectual revolution occurred overnight, or whether the convictions were never quite as firmly held as their owners had led us to believe.

We are, once again, living through one of these moments. The political weather has changed, and with it the language of educational ambition. Those who once spoke passionately about the emancipatory power of knowledge are discovering the attractions of a broader, more fashionable vocabulary. Academic rigour, cultural inheritance and the obligation of schools to introduce children to the accumulated achievements of civilisation are being repositioned as concerns of a previous era. In their place come familiar promises of relevance, engagement, personal development and preparation for a world that is always described as changing at an unprecedented rate. None of these aspirations is inherently objectionable, of course. The trouble begins when they are presented as alternatives to intellectual seriousness rather than consequences of it.

It would be foolish to assume that every change of position is an act of opportunism. There is considerable virtue in changing one's mind, provided that the change is occasioned by something more substantial than a change of minister. Intellectual honesty requires us to expose our beliefs to evidence, argument and the possibility of correction. I have changed my mind about important matters throughout my life, and hope to continue doing so. A conviction that cannot survive scrutiny deserves to be abandoned. But there is an important difference between a belief that has been defeated by evidence and one that has simply fallen out of favour. The former represents intellectual progress. The latter may represent little more than an unusually sophisticated form of social anxiety.

What interests me is not the spectacle of people changing their minds, but the extraordinary power that the prospect of disapproval seems to exercise over otherwise accomplished individuals. People who have spent decades acquiring expertise, responsibility and professional standing can find themselves curiously unable to express an unfashionable opinion. Their private conversations may be full of reservations about the direction of travel, yet their public pronouncements remain carefully aligned with whatever appears to be the emerging consensus. They are not necessarily dishonest people. Many will have persuaded themselves that discretion is wisdom, that compromise is maturity, and that preserving one's influence is a necessary condition of exercising it. These explanations are attractive because each contains a fragment of truth. They become dangerous when they provide a permanent excuse for never saying what one actually believes.

I have been thinking recently about the peculiar relationship between influence and freedom. We tend to imagine that the acquisition of power liberates people from the constraints that govern ordinary professional life. A senior leader, surely, enjoys greater independence than a junior colleague. A chief executive has more room to manoeuvre than a middle manager. Someone who has accumulated a reputation, a network of influential acquaintances and a record of achievement ought to be less vulnerable to the anxieties of professional approval. Yet experience suggests that the relationship is often reversed. The more people acquire, the more frightened they become of losing it.

There is a tragedy in this. A person spends years climbing towards a position from which they might finally do something consequential, only to discover that the preservation of the position has become more important than the purpose for which it was sought. The institution that was supposed to provide a platform for action becomes an elaborate mechanism for ensuring inaction. Influence ceases to be a means of achieving something worthwhile and becomes a possession to be guarded. One begins by seeking authority in order to change the world and ends by allowing the world to determine what one is permitted to think.

This is not a peculiarity of education. It is visible wherever status and ambition collide, in politics, business, universities and public institutions. The people most assiduous in courting power are frequently those least willing to challenge it. They learn to recognise the subtle signals by which approval is distributed, to anticipate the preferences of those who control appointments and opportunities, and to distinguish between opinions that will enhance their standing and those that might diminish it. Over time, the process becomes almost unconscious. They no longer need to calculate what they ought to say because they have become exceptionally good at believing whatever it is advantageous to believe.

I suspect this is one reason that genuine independence of thought is rarer among powerful people than we might expect. The qualities that help someone ascend an institutional hierarchy are not necessarily those that enable them to challenge its assumptions. Indeed, they may be quite different qualities. An ability to accommodate, to reassure, to avoid unnecessary controversy and to make influential people comfortable can be enormously useful in securing advancement. There is nothing intrinsically wrong with diplomacy, and an inability to work constructively with others is hardly evidence of intellectual integrity. But when the capacity to accommodate becomes the governing principle of a professional life, something essential has been surrendered.

The question, then, is how one might escape this arrangement. How does a person acquire influence without becoming dependent upon its preservation? How can one participate fully in institutional life without allowing the institution to take possession of one's judgement?

I think the answer lies in a particular kind of freedom, one that is available to more of us than we generally suppose. It belongs to those who have decided that there are things they are prepared to lose.

We commonly associate having nothing to lose with desperation. The phrase conjures an image of someone who has been deprived of security, status or opportunity, and who is therefore willing to take risks that more fortunate people would avoid. But there is another meaning, almost the opposite of the first. It describes the person who possesses things worth keeping but has ceased to be governed by the fear of losing them. Such a person may have a demanding career, a comfortable home, a reputation built over many years and ambitions that remain unfulfilled. They may value all these things enormously. What distinguishes them is that they have decided none is worth the price of surrendering their integrity.

This is not indifference to consequences. It is a different ordering of their importance. The person who has nothing to lose in this sense is perfectly capable of recognising that an unpopular position may cost them an opportunity, a friendship or even a career. They simply refuse to allow that possibility to determine the position they take. Their convictions remain open to persuasion, but not to purchase. They may be shown to be mistaken, but they cannot be frightened into pretending to believe something else.

There is an extraordinary liberation in reaching this point. Much of the anxiety that accompanies professional life arises not from the work itself but from the endless calculation of how one is perceived. We worry about whether we have said too much, offended the wrong person, missed an opportunity to cultivate a useful acquaintance or failed to demonstrate sufficient enthusiasm for the latest initiative. We rehearse conversations that have already happened and anticipate judgements that may never be made. An astonishing amount of intellectual energy is consumed by the management of other people's opinions of us.

To relinquish this preoccupation is not to become careless about relationships or contemptuous of reputation. A good reputation, honestly earned, is valuable precisely because it allows others to trust us. But reputation is a consequence of conduct, not a proper substitute for its direction. Once we begin making decisions primarily to preserve the impression others have formed of us, we have placed our freedom in their hands. We become dependent upon an audience whose preferences we cannot control and whose approval may be withdrawn without explanation. The person who is prepared to lose that approval discovers that it no longer has the same power over them.

There is, of course, a distinction between courage and recklessness. It is easy for someone insulated from financial difficulty to romanticise the willingness to lose one's livelihood. A young teacher with children to support and a mortgage to pay may reasonably exercise greater caution than an established chief executive. Moral courage cannot be measured simply by the volume of one's public dissent, and acts of integrity may demand sacrifices invisible to the wider world. Nor does conviction confer infallibility. The world has suffered quite enough at the hands of people who mistook the intensity of their beliefs for evidence of their truth. A genuinely principled person must remain capable of doubt, humility and reconsideration.

But these qualifications make the responsibility of those in positions of security and influence more pressing, not less. If a chief executive, a senior civil servant or a prominent educational leader cannot afford to defend an unfashionable idea, one wonders who possibly can. The greater the protection afforded by one's position, the weaker the excuse for allowing professional anxiety to determine one's public convictions. It is difficult to think of a more dispiriting use of authority than to employ it principally in the service of remaining acceptable to those who possess still greater authority.

The educational consequences of this failure are particularly serious because the costs are so unevenly distributed. When a senior leader abandons a principle, the consequences are seldom borne primarily by the leader. Their professional life may continue with little interruption. Indeed, the change may bring fresh invitations, useful introductions and the satisfaction of being recognised as someone in tune with the times. The consequences for children, however, may endure long after the fashionable consensus has dissolved.

I have spent much of my professional life arguing that education should provide every child with access to the extraordinary intellectual inheritance of humanity. The accumulated knowledge of mathematics, literature, science, history, music and the arts does not belong to a particular social class, nor should it be reserved for those fortunate enough to encounter it at home. It is a common inheritance, and the school is among the most important institutions through which that inheritance can be shared. This conviction has survived changes of government, changes in educational fashion and changes in my own professional circumstances, not because I regard it as immune to criticism, but because I have yet to encounter an argument that persuades me to abandon it.

I have heard, over the years, countless versions of the claim that traditional academic knowledge is insufficiently relevant to the lives of disadvantaged children. Sometimes the argument is expressed through the language of engagement, sometimes through employability, personal development, wellbeing or the needs of the twenty-first century. Each formulation has its own attractions, and each contains legitimate concerns that deserve attention. But beneath them I frequently detect an assumption that ought to trouble us: that the intellectual world beyond a child's immediate experience is somehow less appropriate for that child than for someone born into more favourable circumstances.

I cannot accept this. The child growing up in poverty has no less claim upon Shakespeare, algebra, ancient history or the scientific understanding of the natural world than the child whose parents have the resources to provide these encounters independently. Indeed, the argument for a rich academic education becomes more compelling as the advantages of home diminish. A child from a prosperous family may acquire cultural knowledge through travel, conversation, books, museums and the casual accumulation of experiences that accompany privilege. For a child whose circumstances offer fewer such opportunities, school may be the only institution capable of opening these doors.

To deny that child access to the full intellectual inheritance of humanity in the name of relevance is not an act of liberation. It is a form of confinement, however benevolent its intentions. It risks making the accident of birth a permanent boundary around the possibilities of a life. Education ought to enlarge the world a child can inhabit, not merely make them more comfortable within the world they already know.

None of this requires schools to neglect the emotional, social or practical dimensions of growing up. Children are not disembodied intellects, and a good education must attend to the whole person. But the suggestion that intellectual ambition must be moderated in order to make room for these other concerns rests upon a false opposition. Knowledge does not compete with human flourishing. Properly understood, it is one of the principal means by which flourishing becomes possible. The confidence that comes from understanding something difficult, the pleasure of recognising a connection previously unseen, the capacity to participate in conversations that would otherwise remain inaccessible: these are not incidental benefits of education. They are among its deepest purposes.

The danger of the present moment is not that people are discussing a broader conception of education. Such discussions are necessary and often fruitful. The danger is that an entirely legitimate concern for children's wider development becomes an excuse for retreating from the demanding intellectual ambitions that schools ought to hold for every pupil. It is especially troubling when those who previously defended these ambitions appear willing to dilute them without explaining what new evidence has caused their change of heart.

English education has an extraordinary capacity for forgetting its own arguments. Ideas are periodically rediscovered, presented as innovations, adopted with enthusiasm and eventually displaced by their apparent opposites. Each generation seems convinced that its particular moment represents a decisive break with the past, although anyone who has remained in the profession long enough can recognise the familiar outlines of debates that were supposedly settled decades earlier. The language changes more readily than the underlying disagreements.

I have sometimes wondered whether the cycle persists partly because institutions reward novelty more reliably than they reward continuity. A leader who announces a transformation is more likely to attract attention than one who patiently maintains a successful practice. A new framework offers opportunities for consultancy, professional development, publication and institutional distinction that the patient refinement of existing work rarely provides. There is an entire economy of educational change, and its participants have little incentive to declare that some questions have been answered satisfactorily and might best be left alone.

Political change accelerates the process. A new administration brings new priorities, new language and new opportunities for those sufficiently alert to recognise them. Organisations adjust their strategies, conferences suddenly take on different themes, and familiar figures begin to speak with surprising enthusiasm about ideas they once regarded with suspicion. The spectacle can be entertaining, particularly for those of us who have lived through several iterations. But the entertainment is tempered by the knowledge that schools are not abstractions upon which adults can rehearse their intellectual fashions without consequence. A generation of children passes through them while the argument continues.

What is striking about the present moment is how unnecessary much of the anxiety appears to be. We know that governments change. We know that ministers come and go, often with remarkable speed. We know that today's fashionable orthodoxy will eventually become tomorrow's object of ridicule. The people whose approval seems indispensable today may be entirely forgotten by the time the next educational settlement begins to take shape. Yet intelligent adults continue to organise their professional convictions around the anticipated preferences of individuals whose influence is, by its nature, temporary.

Perhaps the explanation is that institutional life encourages a peculiarly narrow conception of time. The next appointment, the next policy announcement, the next inspection framework and the next opportunity for recognition loom much larger than the distant consequences of present decisions. The immediate rewards of accommodation are visible and personal, while the costs of abandoning a principle are diffuse and often delayed. A child who receives a diminished education today may not discover the full extent of that loss for twenty years. By then, those responsible will have moved on, and the language used to justify their decisions will have fallen out of fashion.

There is something profoundly unsettling about this asymmetry. Those with the greatest capacity to shape children's futures can be rewarded for decisions whose consequences they will never personally experience. It creates a particular obligation to resist the temptations of short-term approval, to judge educational decisions against a horizon longer than the political cycle, and to remember that the purpose of leadership is not to remain in leadership.

I do not mean to suggest that those who hold public office or lead educational institutions should set themselves against government as a matter of principle. Democratic government has a legitimate role in determining the direction of public education, and those entrusted with public institutions have corresponding obligations to work constructively within that settlement. Nor is every disagreement a matter of conscience. Much of leadership consists of negotiating imperfect circumstances, accommodating competing interests and finding workable arrangements with people whose views differ from our own.

But constructive engagement does not require intellectual submission. One can implement a policy responsibly while remaining free to question its wisdom. One can work respectfully with ministers and officials without seeking their personal approval. One can recognise the authority of democratic institutions without treating the opinions of those temporarily occupying them as the final measure of truth. Indeed, the quality of public decision-making depends upon the existence of people willing to offer independent judgement, particularly when that judgement is inconvenient.

The distinction matters because the alternative is a public conversation populated increasingly by people who have become expert at anticipating what others wish to hear. Such a conversation may be polite, orderly and superficially consensual, but it will be intellectually impoverished. The most important questions will remain unasked, the most uncomfortable evidence unexamined, and the most consequential assumptions unchallenged. Everyone will appear to agree, not because agreement has been reached through serious inquiry, but because disagreement has become professionally inconvenient.

There is a temptation, when confronted with this prospect, to retreat into cynicism. One can become preoccupied with identifying the opportunists, cataloguing their inconsistencies and exposing the distance between their former declarations and present enthusiasms. Occasionally such scrutiny is necessary, particularly when those involved exercise considerable public influence. But it is not a satisfying way to live, and it risks allowing the behaviour of others to determine the character of one's own intellectual life. Resentment is another form of dependence. The person consumed by the failings of their contemporaries is scarcely freer than the person consumed by their approval.

A better response is simply to refuse to participate in the performance.

There is no obligation to revise a conviction merely because its public defenders have become less fashionable. There is no requirement to adopt a new vocabulary whenever political leadership changes, or to demonstrate one's sophistication by distancing oneself from ideas that remain well supported by evidence. It is entirely possible to listen carefully to new arguments, acknowledge legitimate criticisms and adapt one's practice without surrendering the principles that give that practice coherence. Indeed, the ability to distinguish between what is fundamental and what is contingent may be among the most important attributes of mature leadership.

I find myself increasingly attracted to the idea of a professional life organised around a small number of durable commitments, held with sufficient seriousness to guide action and sufficient humility to remain open to correction. Such commitments need not produce certainty about every policy question. On the contrary, they provide the stability from which uncertainty can be explored honestly. When one is no longer preoccupied with discovering which opinion will be rewarded, it becomes easier to consider what the evidence actually suggests. When one's standing does not depend upon appearing infallible, it becomes easier to acknowledge mistakes. When approval is no longer the principal currency of professional life, disagreement becomes less threatening and intellectual friendship more possible.

This is the freedom I have in mind when I speak of having nothing to lose. It is not the freedom of someone who has ceased to care about the world, but of someone who cares about something more important than their own position within it. It does not demand withdrawal from institutions or indifference to their success. Quite the reverse. It allows a person to serve an institution without becoming its servant, to exercise authority without being possessed by it, and to pursue worthwhile ambitions without allowing ambition to corrupt the purpose of the pursuit.

There is another, rather wonderful consequence of this freedom, and one that I think we too easily overlook. Life becomes an adventure. When we cease to organise our decisions around the preservation of what we already possess, the future opens up in ways we could never have anticipated. The loss of a job, the closing of a professional door, even exclusion from a circle whose approval once seemed important, may feel at first like a calamity. Yet each can become the beginning of an entirely unexpected chapter, leading us towards people we would never otherwise have met, places we would never have visited and work we could never have imagined doing. We are remarkably poor at predicting the possibilities that lie beyond the boundaries of our present circumstances, and the life we so anxiously protect may be considerably smaller than the one waiting beyond it. Of course, there are no guarantees that the next chapter will be easier or more comfortable, but that is rather the point. An adventure whose outcome is assured is scarcely an adventure at all. There is something deeply impoverishing about spending our brief time on earth attempting to eliminate every uncertainty, protecting ourselves so carefully against the possibility of loss that we inadvertently protect ourselves against the possibility of discovery. I would rather live a life punctuated by unexpected turns, occasional disappointments and the exhilaration of new beginnings than one in which every decision was calculated to preserve the familiar. After all, the adventure is not something that interrupts life. It is much of what makes life worth living.

I have no wish to pretend that I have always lived up to this ideal. Like anyone who has spent a working life in organisations, I have made compromises, misjudged situations and occasionally placed too much weight upon the opinions of others. Nor do I imagine that my present convictions are necessarily my final ones. I hope to continue learning, to encounter arguments that unsettle my assumptions and to discover that some things I currently believe are mistaken. But I have become increasingly certain that the freedom to do these things depends upon being willing to disappoint people whose approval might otherwise seem valuable.

There is an important difference between wanting one's work to matter and wanting oneself to matter. The first directs attention towards the world and the contribution one might make to it. The second directs attention towards status, recognition and the maintenance of a favourable impression. Both impulses probably exist in most of us, and neither can be eliminated entirely. But the balance between them determines a great deal about the character of our professional lives. When the desire to matter becomes stronger than the desire to do something that matters, we become vulnerable to every passing fashion and every promise of advancement.

I suspect that the people who achieve the most enduring good are often those who have managed, in one way or another, to escape this confusion. They are not necessarily the most celebrated figures of their generation. Some will never occupy particularly senior positions, and others will exercise their influence in ways that attract little public attention. What they share is an independence of judgement that allows them to persist when persistence is unfashionable, to dissent when dissent is uncomfortable, and to remain faithful to a worthwhile purpose when the rewards of abandoning it are considerable.

They are not immune to fear. Courage would have little meaning if they were. They have simply decided that fear will not be allowed to govern the most important decisions of their lives.

I sometimes think that the greatest gift of growing older is the gradual discovery of how little many of the things we once worried about actually matter. The invitations that never arrived, the opportunities that passed us by, the people whose approval we failed to secure: most disappear into the general accumulation of forgotten concerns. What remains is a more searching question about whether we used the time and influence available to us in the service of something worthwhile. A career can be enormously successful by the conventional measures and still represent a profound failure of purpose.

For those of us entrusted with the education of children, that question has urgency. We are but the temporary custodians of institutions whose consequences extend far beyond our own careers. The pupils in our schools will live with the effects of our decisions long after the ministers, policies and professional fashions that shaped those decisions have passed into obscurity. We owe them a seriousness of purpose that is not contingent upon political approval, and an intellectual honesty that cannot be traded for professional advantage.

The current fashion will pass, as fashions always do. Some of those now enthusiastically embracing it will eventually rediscover the merits of positions they have recently abandoned. New language will emerge, new orthodoxies will establish themselves, and another generation of ambitious professionals will learn to anticipate the direction of the wind. The cycle will continue for as long as educational leadership remains more concerned with belonging to the prevailing consensus than with examining whether that consensus deserves our allegiance.

But participation in that cycle is not compulsory. We can choose to stand somewhere more permanent, not by refusing to change our minds, but by refusing to allow fashion to do our thinking for us. We can hold our convictions firmly enough to act upon them and lightly enough to reconsider them. We can value our reputations without becoming their prisoners, and pursue influence without allowing its preservation to become our purpose. We can accept that the price of intellectual independence may sometimes be exclusion from rooms in which we once hoped to sit, and discover that the loss is rather less consequential than we imagined.

There is a profound peace in this, and perhaps even a kind of joy. To be relieved of the obligation to please, to be free to follow an argument wherever it leads, to be able to say what one believes without first calculating its effect upon one's prospects, is to recover something essential about the dignity of intellectual life. It makes possible a form of leadership that is less anxious, less performative and, I suspect, considerably more useful to the people it is intended to serve.

The world does not need more people who have mastered the art of remaining influential. It needs people who remember why influence was worth acquiring in the first place.

And the remarkable thing is that this freedom is available to us whenever we are prepared to claim it. We need not wait until we have accumulated sufficient wealth, achieved sufficient seniority or secured sufficient recognition. We need only decide that there are some things we will not exchange for the approval of others, and accept the consequences of that decision. In doing so, we may discover that what we feared losing was never quite as valuable as we imagined, and that the possibilities awaiting us were infinitely greater than those we had so carefully arranged for ourselves. The future becomes uncertain, certainly, but wonderfully so. There is a whole world out there, and a life spent protecting our place in one small corner of it seems a terrible waste.

It is then that we discover what it really means to have nothing to lose.