The Wrong End of the Telescope

Lawrence Cremin once observed that when a government wants a revolution, we get a new curriculum.

It is one of those deceptively simple statements that explains almost every major education debate of the past century.

Governments inherit problems they are expected to solve. Sometimes those problems are economic. Sometimes they are cultural. Sometimes they are social. Youth unemployment rises. Productivity falls. Social cohesion weakens. Civic participation declines. Mental health deteriorates. Employers cannot recruit. The economy changes.

Faced with these challenges, politicians naturally go looking for levers.

Some levers are difficult to pull. Reforming the labour market is slow. Housing policy takes years to bear fruit. Taxation, investment and economic growth are uncertain. Industrial strategy is complex. Changing the incentives facing employers may be politically costly. But one lever always appears immediately available.

Schools.

And so the curriculum becomes the instrument through which governments hope to reshape society in their image.

The Prime Minister’s proposals for new technical pathways at Key Stage 4 are simply the latest example of a pattern that repeats itself generation after generation. Before that it was curriculum reviews, the English Baccalaureate, 14 to 19 diplomas, Every Child Matters, vocational equivalences, creativity, enterprise, coding, citizenship and financial literacy. Every generation believes it has finally identified what schools have been missing.

The proposals themselves are almost beside the point. Some may make a genuine difference. Others will fade away before they ever reach classrooms. That has always been the way of education reform.

The more interesting question is why governments so consistently reach for curriculum reform in the first place.

The answer, I think, is a kind of political hubris.

Not malicious hubris. Just the understandable tendency for politicians to overestimate the influence they possess over what actually happens inside schools.

From Whitehall to the classroom is an extraordinarily long journey. Every initiative passes through civil servants, regulators, inspectors, academy trusts, local leaders, school leaders, department heads and finally classroom teachers before it reaches a child. At every stage, intentions are interpreted, reinterpreted, adapted and diluted.

I have often suggested it would make a fascinating doctoral thesis simply to trace what survives of a Secretary of State’s original ambitions by the time a Year 9 pupil experiences them on a wet Tuesday morning in February.

Ironically, politicians themselves are often far more influenced by society than society is by politicians.

The current enthusiasm for technical education illustrates the point perfectly.

It is striking that this is not a partisan issue. Labour champions it. Reform champions it. Many Conservatives champion it. Across the political spectrum there is now widespread agreement that England should place greater value on technical education.

That consensus has not emerged because politicians independently reached the same conclusion. Politicians are responding to something much larger than themselves. They are responding to employers, economic anxiety, concerns about artificial intelligence and reports highlighting the growing number of young people not in education, employment or training. And, most powerfully, they are responding to nostalgia.

Society changes first. Politics follows.

Schools are then ordered to deliver the revolution.

Older teachers know this cycle well. Every few years comes another announcement promising transformation. Another initiative that will finally solve society’s problems. Another proclamation of what pupils should learn. Another repudiation of what came before.

Most classroom teachers greet such announcements with weary resignation. Their daily reality remains largely unchanged. They still walk into classrooms each morning and teach the child sitting in front of them.

And it is there, in those classrooms, that I think we often begin our thinking in entirely the wrong place.

Whenever debates about technical education arise, we are invited to picture the disengaged sixteen-year-old. The pupil who has stopped believing school has anything to offer. The pupil who attends reluctantly, achieves little and leaves with few qualifications and fewer prospects. They certainly exist. Visit almost any secondary school and you will meet them. Their frustration is real. Their disengagement is real. It is impossible not to feel sympathy for them.

But there is something profoundly misleading about making them our starting point. We are looking at education through the wrong end of the telescope.

Imagine instead that we could rewind time. Imagine meeting that same child at the age of three or four.

Would we conclude that this child was naturally unsuited to mathematics? Incapable of appreciating literature? Unable to understand history or science? Destined always to require a fundamentally different education?

Of course we would not.

We would see what we see in every young child. Extraordinary cognitive potential.

The same physiological apparatus that made Isaac Newton, Marie Curie, Alan Turing, Gladys West and countless others is still present in children being born today. Human beings have not become less capable of learning.

If, after eleven or twelve years of schooling, large numbers of pupils have become convinced that education is not for them, that should surely prompt us to ask what happened during those eleven years rather than redesigning the final two.

We far too often fall into this trap of mistaking the consequences of unsuccessful education for evidence about human potential.

This is why I find myself uneasy whenever discussion of curriculum reform begins at Key Stage 4.

It feels like redesigning the finish line while leaving the race unchanged.

The children who arrive in Year 10 believing themselves to be failures rarely became disengaged at fourteen. Their story nearly always began much earlier. It began with knowledge gaps that accumulated year after year. It began with repeated experiences of failure where repeated experiences of success should have been. It began with an education system that too often resembles a conveyor belt, carrying every child forward at exactly the same pace regardless of whether they have mastered what came before.

By the time politicians notice the problem, they are reading the final chapter. But the child’s story has already been written.

It is entirely obvious to me that engineers, technicians, programmers, builders, designers and skilled craftspeople deserve every bit as much esteem as doctors, lawyers and academics.

But technical education is not distinct from education.

The highest forms of technical expertise rest upon remarkably broad foundations. Great engineers are mathematicians and physicists. Great surgeons combine biology with ethics, psychology, judgement and communication. Great software engineers rely upon abstraction, logic and language.

Which is to say, specialist competence grows out of broad competence. Powerful technical knowledge rests upon powerful general knowledge.

This is why schools exist first to educate, not to train.

Training prepares somebody for today’s job. Whereas education prepares somebody for tomorrow’s unknown world.

The current pace of technological change makes that distinction more important now than ever. Nobody knows which occupations will dominate thirty years from now. The greatest gift schools can therefore offer is not preparation for one particular labour market, but the intellectual flexibility to thrive across many different ones.

Even that, though, is not quite enough.

To justify broad education solely because it produces adaptable workers is still to accept the premise that the ultimate purpose of schooling is economic utility.

It is not.

Economic usefulness may be one consequence of education. It may even be an enormously valuable consequence. A well-educated population will usually be more productive, more innovative and more prosperous.

But consequences are not purposes.

If employability were the test by which curriculum content was selected, much of what is most beautiful, civilising and enduring in education would be difficult to defend. Poetry would have to justify itself to the labour market. Music would need to demonstrate its contribution to national productivity. History, philosophy, art and religion would survive only where someone could construct an economic case for them.

We know instinctively that this is absurd. Schools do not exist merely to supply labour to the economy. The economy is a beneficiary of education, but that tail should not wag the dog.

A meaningful education is entitled to be otherworldly.

Not everything learned at school must be justified by its immediate relevance to a local employer, a regional skills shortage or a political problem of the day. Pupils should encounter mathematics, literature, science, history, art, music and philosophy because these subjects form part of humanity’s accumulated intellectual and creative inheritance.

They matter because they help us to understand reality. They matter because they enlarge the imagination. They matter because they allow us to converse across centuries. They matter because they bring each new generation into what has sometimes been called the Great Conversation of humanity.

When a child reads Shakespeare, studies Euclid, encounters Darwin, listens to Bach or grapples with quantum mechanics, they are not merely acquiring information. They are joining a conversation that began long before they were born and will continue long after they are gone.

Every curriculum also communicates something to pupils about who they are and what education is for.

A curriculum centred upon broad human knowledge tells a child that the intellectual inheritance of humanity belongs to them. It says that they may enter the conversation, understand it and eventually contribute to it.

A curriculum designed chiefly around the jobs currently available nearby risks communicating something very different. It risks telling a child that their education is primarily preparation for the economic role others presently imagine for them.

And we know that this risk will not fall evenly.

Some children will continue to be introduced to abstract ideas, difficult texts, theoretical science, advanced mathematics and the accumulated culture of humanity. Others may be offered a curriculum justified principally by immediate relevance, local labour demand and anticipated employment.

The division would not simply be between academic and technical subjects. It would be between two different conceptions of the child. One child is treated as a future participant in the continuing intellectual life of humanity. The other is treated chiefly as a future unit of labour.

That is why I have argued for decades that schools need conviction.

They should, of course, be responsive to society. Public education belongs to the public, and democratic governments have every right to shape it. But responsiveness must not become subordination.

An education system without a clear sense of purpose will be conscripted into solving every social problem except the educational one.

Schools educate. Economies employ.

When governments confuse those two functions, they ask schools to solve problems that only employers, entrepreneurs and economic policy can solve.

Schools did not create the labour market. Schools do not determine fiscal policy. Schools do not create jobs. Schools cannot, on their own, solve youth unemployment.

Which brings me back to Cremin.

Curriculum reform is politically irresistible because it allows governments to demonstrate action. It creates headlines. It signals ambition. It reassures the electorate that something is being done.

But changing the curriculum is not the same thing as changing society.

When governments want a revolution, they reach for schools because schools are visible, trusted and universal. Yet the deepest causes of the problems they wish to solve often lie elsewhere. Some lie in families. Some lie in early childhood. Some lie in employment practices, taxation, housing, culture or the wider economy.

Education can transform individual lives. But it cannot, by itself, transform society.

The proper purpose of education is larger, more important and more enduring than the immediate priorities of any government. The proper purpose of an education is to enable every child to inherit the accumulated knowledge of humanity. It is to acquaint them with the ideas, discoveries, works and arguments through which human civilisation has developed. It is also to introduce them to the methods by which knowledge is created, tested, challenged and extended.

Children should not be merely passive recipients of an inherited culture. They should be prepared to become active participants in its continuing development. Every child deserves, and frankly has the right, to become knowledgeable, capable and intellectually free. Every child possesses far greater potential than we often imagine.

And because humanity will undoubtedly face extraordinary challenges in the decades ahead, we have a profound responsibility to cultivate that potential wherever it exists.

The purpose of education is not simply to prepare children for the world as it happens to be today. It is to give them the knowledge and intellectual power to understand that world, to move freely within it and, perhaps, to improve it.

A broadly educated person is freer: freer to change career; freer to participate in democratic life; freer to understand competing arguments; freer to resist manipulation; freer to appreciate beauty; freer to solve problems nobody has yet imagined.

If we genuinely want to transform outcomes, our attention should be drawn less towards redesigning the curriculum for fourteen-year-olds and much more towards ensuring that every three-year-old begins an educational journey built upon success, knowledge and intellectual confidence.

Governments will always want revolutions. That is their job.

Education has an older and more important purpose.

To cultivate free, knowledgeable and capable human beings. To induct them into the great conversation of humanity. And to prepare them not merely to inherit civilisation, but to extend it.