Teaching teenagers, or how I finally started to understand education

Today’s blog is about education and a philosophy of education and how you develop one and maintain one and lead a school with one and implement one within the context of your school. This month I went to the annual IB World Heads Conference (i.e. schools that run any of the International Baccalaureate curricula) and spent four days listening to keynote speeches and having conversations with other school heads, and networking and drinking coffee and eating cheese (the conference was in Holland). I went to workshops with themes like ‘Educating our Children for a Changing Global World’ and ‘Learning That Matters’ and ‘A Global Renaissance in Education’ and – my personal favourite – ‘Strong leadership that cares’. Plus I’m applying for positions at new schools (last year in Israel, bah) so have to write myriad application letters in which I expound my own ‘personal philosophy of education’. It’s on my mind. So if this sort of thing is not your bag, turn away now and go back to that Buzzfeed article on cats that forgot how to cat, or whatever else tickles your fancy. Otherwise, if you feel like joining me on my own little intellectual journey, here’s my tuppeny’s worth on educational philosophy in general and the ongoing formation of my own in particular.

It’s a challenging time to be in education. The globalisation and technological advances of the past twenty, thirty years have changed the workplace to such a degree that the education that is delivered in some parts of the world is considered by many experts to be obsolete. The exams systems and structures, the practices for getting into tertiary education, the curricula outlined and delivered in many countries are all geared to workplaces and career paths and societies that don’t really exist anymore. It used to be that schools prepared students – the majority of them at least – for life in economies that were primarily in the industrial sector. But the digital age has totally changed the way we go to work. Start-ups and e-industries are one of the fastest-growing sectors of the economy, certainly the economy in the West where I live and work, and the use of computers has dramatically impacted almost every other economic sector, both in how we work and where/when we work. It is now very rare for a person to stay in one career sector, let alone one job, for their whole life like they used to. One of our family friends, known to me as Uncle Adrian, worked for the Inland Revenue his entire life. Many of my friends have switched careers already; if they haven't done that they certainly haven't stayed in the same job for longer than five years, unless they’re vicars or teachers – and it’s actually considered bad form for teachers to stay in one school for a long time, short of internal promotion, as it implies stagnation.

It also used to be that going to school and university gave you an advantage because knowledge was the primary currency. Today, anyone can get any information they want online – assuming of course that they have access to a computer and life’s most basic need, wifi (so much for Maslow’s hierarchy of needs and the assumption that physiological stuff come first). Have you ever stopped to ponder the fact that “Let’s Google that shit” is a common response to any question these days? What happened to the days when you went to the library to look stuff up? It drives my friend Matt completely crazy and like a grumpy old man he laments the loss of basic knowledge and skills that mobile technology and the internet have rendered obsolete. He’d roll his eyes and tut whenever a mobile phone came out. When the apocalypse comes and no one can get online, Matt will be the one leading the survivors and laughing at those people who have forgotten basic skills like reading maps and working analogue radios and ferreting around libraries for information. Read Station Eleven. It may well happen. But to return to my train of thought: the challenge facing education is, therefore, to prepare children for workplaces where skills have more value than knowledge, where flexibility is crucial and problem-solving essential.

When I became a teacher, it was mostly because I really like history and I figured that being a history teacher would be a good way to stay in that field, plus it was a great transferable skill that would come in handy when I started my grown-up expat life jollying my way around the world. Plus I did (and do) actually believe strongly in the importance of the study of history for teenagers and for people in general and for society at the broadest level. During my teacher training I sat through endless lectures on education methodology and had endless discussions on what it meant to deliver history as a discipline. But I didn’t really spend much time thinking about what it meant to be an educator, about developing my own personal philosophy of education. This was possibly because at the time I saw teaching as merely a gateway to something else. I certainly didn’t expect to love it so much that now I see it as my vocation and can’t imagine ever doing anything else with my life (though never say never). I have a bad tendency to act without first thinking, so it’s not really a surprise that I blundered through my first years as a teacher without actually contemplating what it meant. But somehow, over the fourteen years that I have now been involved in education my own somewhat scattered thoughts have coalesced into what I suppose I would consider my own personal philosophy of education.

On reflection, I’m a little concerned that it’s only really in the last year or so that I realised I had a personal philosophy of education. It’s rather worrying for someone whose job has for a long time been to educate to realise that they hadn’t really defined why they educate or what the purpose of education is. I’m not very observant, it has to be said (and is said regularly by my mother) and in retrospect it appears that over the years I have managed to pull something together and am managing to articulate it in what is, I hope, a meaningful manner. It does helps that this philosophy is not static but is massively dynamic. It’s forever being influenced and challenged and shaped by my interactions with my colleagues, with other educators, with parents, with students, with friends, with people I meet who are interested in what it means to be a teacher. This includes an Israeli guy I met this summer who expounded, at length, his thoughts on how schools should be run and Maths should be taught (he was adamant that students didn’t really need mental maths anymore because computers can do all of that stuff now) and my parents, whose perspective on basically everything is useful (they’ll read this so I have to say that…) but whose thoughts on education in particular have led to lengthy dinner conversations that I’m sure bore the living daylights out of anyone else round the table, but that fascinate us.

On a side note, it’s interesting how teaching is one of the professions where people who aren’t remotely qualified think that they’re experts. Everyone went to school, therefore everyone knows how to teach a class, right? This is a syndrome one particularly finds with the parents of one’s students: they have their own children, therefore they must be experts in educating them. It’s like me walking into a restaurant and telling the chef that because I like food, I should cook the evening menu. It’s also a bit like that Michael Macintyre skit about having children which starts with “The people who don’t have children, they think they know, don’t they? They think they know what it means to have children… [they] think they know what they’re talking about. YOU HAVE NO IDEA.”

I just put that video link in because it makes me laugh like a drain, so back to the point: a philosophy of education. In its purest form, here’s what I think secondary school education should do:

·       Equip students with the skills they need to function effectively as adults – emotional and psychological as well as academic and practical.
·      Encourage students to aim high and fail big. I had this conversation with a student on a long car journey back from our school scuba trip in Eilat last week, who told me that he preferred low expectations, because you were then never disappointed; I told him he was a chicken who needed to push himself more. (Not quite like that obviously; my Dean of Students has been telling me lately that I ‘lack compassion’ so I’m trying to work on my tone…) 
·      Help students to enjoy learning for learning’s sake and realise that it doesn’t stop when you walk out of the school gates at 18.
 ·     At the same time, give them the skills they need to survive in a world that is changing rapidly and dramatically – communication, critical thinking, team-work, problem-solving, just for starters. 
·     Develop the whole person. One of my favourite things as a teacher is to be given the chance to watch students grow over time, wrestle with relationships (parent, teacher, friends), work out how to manage workloads and social time and deadlines, start to define themselves as people and reflect on where they’ve been and where they’re going.
·      Challenge students intellectually, regardless of their ability level. One of my greatest success stories was a student who sat at D grade in GCSE History for 18 months, then fought his way up to a C. I wanted to give him an OBE. One of my favourite things is to watch a group of students debate historical events, challenge each other’s narratives, work together to synthesise what they’ve been studying. It’s amazing. Things like this keep me going.

This list is by no means exhaustive and is a work in progress (much like myself). Of course, we also have to help our students acquire the right knowledge and skills to pass exams and get into university. But that perspective on teaching about which you read so much in the papers, the single-minded pursuit of results, is really just scratching the surface of what education is and should be and means to teachers. I’m not reinventing the wheel here and you may not be reading anything new, but I think I need to spend time every now and again reflecting on why the job I chose as a gateway to a life jollying around the world turned into the vocation that challenges me every day. I love being in education. It’s the best. It’s not for everyone, but it’s definitely for me. I leave you with Taylor Mali’s (now-famous) performance poem on ‘What Teachers Make’. Sums it all up, really.