Will Education ever reach its Tipping point? – EDUWELLS

For more than 500 years, western culture has fallen into many major problems due to its sense of exceptionalism and thus routine lack of reflection. Western human habits continue to prove contradictory and paradoxical. A lack of reflective habits makes changes to any human system routinely difficult. The environmentalist, George Monbiot talks of tipping points in cultures between just two states: impossible and then inevitable. We often refuse and argue against changes that, once made, we deny ever having had a problem with. Consider conservative arguments against votes for women, banning smoking in restaurants, gay marriage, and even the climate crisis. Many of those conservative voices can now be found trying to rewrite history and claim they always supported the ideas.

Royal Blood

One sticky idea we are yet to resign to history is the overall idea that some humans are simply of more value than others and thus naturally deserve privileges and opportunities. From Egyptian Pharaohs to God-appointed British Monarchs, from Darwin to Donald Trump, people, especially those with power, have found stories and excuses to explain their apparent superiority and thus remove any moral issue from the matter of their privileges. Education became part of this system.

God becomes Science

The 19th century’s significant developments in scientific thought may have encouraged a scepticism towards the idea that Queen Victoria’s appointment as ruler was God ordained but it didn’t stop the men in charge finding a pseudo-scientific alternative in eugenics. Eugenics(1883) being the belief that genetics (1866) had proven the idea of superior bloodlines and thus inferior bloodlines that could be ‘cleaned’ from society through breeding controls. Charles Darwin and his cousin Francis Galton travelled together in Africa trying to confirm the superiority of the white European races. Amazing to think how the siloed nature of school disciplines has many science teachers pin up a poster of Darwin that a Social Science teacher might not pin up due to him being one of the most influential white supremacists in history.

Eugenics as core to society and schools

Hitler’s 1930’s response to eugenics may have highlighted its truest nature but throughout the 20th century this was treated as just a ‘bad apple’. It’s a lesser know fact that the core belief of the Nazis was actually a global belief at the heart of American, European, and Australasian political and industrial leadership from 1900 to 1974 (the last official U.S. eugenic sterilisation of an ‘inferior’ woman). Twenty years before Hitler’s rise, it was Winston Churchill, as Vice Honorary Chairman of the British Eugenic Society who helped organise the London Eugenic convention in 1912, to argue for, amongst many things, the sterilisation of inferior women. All the American presidents between 1900 and Hitler (1933) were members of eugenic societies. Eugenics fans were to be found everywhere from industry (Henry Ford) to literature (Virginia Wolfe) but the longest lasting impact of eugenics, still visible today was in schools (Edward Thorndike et al).

Today’s school day defined by eugenics

During World War One, a debate took place across the western world between the pedagogical progressives (Dewey et al) and the administrative progressives (Thorndike et al) regarding the shape, nature, and purpose of a school day in the 20th century. The idea of educating the general public was developing, mostly driven by a diminishing need for child labour more than any real moral cause. Dewey et al argued that people could continue to develop due to experiences. Thorndike et al (the eugenicists) argued that learning happened in a linear fashion restricted to the limits of one’s inherent / genetic capability. It now seems inevitable from the list of powerful political names above that the end decisions about the nature of the school day, its priorities and routines would be designed to meet the desires and beliefs of eugenicists. Rather than be concerned with learning and development, school became a societal tool to confirm one’s existing and fixed capability / societal ranking.

Eugenic legacies in today’s schools

After more than a century of normalising eugenic (ranking) routines in schools that focus on completing work to be graded rather than learned from, it is understandable that again we are still waiting for a tipping point that shifts us from our eugenic norms to a non-judgemental culture of actual learning. I thought I would cover just five of the existing norms that once seen through the lens of our eugenic history might be easier to argue against.

Legacy 1: Timetables

Only while schools are mainly concerned with ranking students as good, average, and bad, is the ridiculous random nature of a school timetable of lessons enacted as a perfectly normal idea. Nowhere outside schools would recommend that the best immediate preparation for an hour’s study of Romeo & Juliet was an hour’s deep dive into Photosynthesis. In the same way, no theatre company recommends the best way to reflect, consider, and learn from the experience of Shakespeare, is to stare hard at quadratic equations. The timetabling of six lessons everyday is not just detrimental to learning but evidence that the school day was never devised by people concerned with learning.

The randomness of the school day and the fact that schools never feel a need to coordinate the order of topics or scheduling of assessments during the day shows how we are still issuing school work to confirm a student’s ‘inherent’ limitations rather than assist them to learn and develop.

Legacy 2: Exams are Eugenic events

To schedule and start a standardised exam, education has to proclaim a considerable sense that students all have a fair and equal shot at proving their ability (value). At the same time, education always knows this is not the case. Student A has had 5 years of after-school private tuition, their own bedroom to study in, and their own laptop with internet connection, Student B has none of this. To even start an exam as a worthwhile ability test, education has to turn a blind eye or believe that the circumstances of Students A & B make little or no difference to their performance. If they felt otherwise, they simply wouldn’t start the exam.

By starting an exam, we are publicly stating that circumstance has no impact on the fairness of the exam. We are also stating by ignoring circumstance, that exams are a serious and worthwhile measure of inherent / genetic ability. The quality of your performance is a measure of the quality of your bloodline. I honestly think that this is why we have normalised the obvious unfairness of standardised testing. Education behaves as if to say that if your family is privileged and can offer additional supports, it is most likely because you have higher quality genes and thus the eugenic school system supports this by running assessments that will conclude that you are ‘superior stock’.

The most paradoxical schools exams are those in the subjects of History and Science. In History, students often touch on eugenics (often as ‘just a Nazi thing’) before then being asked to sit an examination of their assumed “inherent ability”. In Science, students all learn that fair testing involves the standardisation of all variables or results become meaningless. We then conclude “inherent ability” regardless of the wide variance between students’ conditions for exam preparation. Despite science never accepting the results of any school exam as a measure of ability, our eugenic norm continues to dominate our habits.

We have spent 100 years using standardised testing as tool to fulfil the original 19th century eugenic need: to confirm the already privileged as deserving their privilege. As Alfie Kohn has said about standardised testing: “They only act as a measurement of the average local house size.” To prove this, while not being able to run national exams during Covid19, the UK allocated qualifications during 2020 by “what the school normally gets.” This is covered in Sammy Wright’s acclaimed book Exam Nation.

Legacy 3: Teachers not talking about Teaching

Thorndike loved his standardisation so much he proposed that teachers were not needed as intuitive skilful operators. He took a systematic method focused on testing and feedback, proposing a ‘science of learning’. The overall eugenic thinking in education is that teachers deliver information and nature takes its course regarding how a student will be capable or not of dealing with it. Genetically higher value beings will receive better grades than lower value beings and the confirmation of deserved status and success will be complete. One legacy of this is that almost no country continues to run an on-going teacher training programme beyond a teacher’s first year or so. Most teachers in the world receive or sign up for ad hoc random PLD, all at different times, with differing levels of quality, and wide-ranging priorities and philosophies.

I often tell colleagues that there is no such thing as the teaching profession as most teachers are not held to account for their development and most are not even part of the professional dialogue. The majority of teachers can get through the year tucked away in the classroom doing “their thing”. Knowing that other teachers are also effectively self-taught, teachers are left not wanting to tread on each other’s toes, which leads to silence in strategic discussion about teaching. The various sciences of learning have struggled to get anywhere in proper implementation because they impede too much on individual teachers’ “way of teaching” (or ‘surviving’ as some say).

When teachers are honest, most haven’t thought about how learning best happens because they have only been employed and instructed to hand out activity, measure responses, and rank the students accordingly.

My goto example of this is a common story about the implementation of an online teaching platform in a school. The school paid handsomely for the system but the range of use was widely dependent on the teacher. Some used it everyday, some didn’t use it at all, the middle leaders didn’t track its use, and the platform company itself had never seen a need to confirm a positive impact on learning from using the system. The platform was sold almost entirely on the benefits to teachers in reducing their workload and ease of handing out (busy) activity. In a global education culture not accustomed to considering the impact of different practices, no student, teacher, leader or education business felt a need to confirm the platform was worth using and paying for. At no point had the business or the high school department thought to carry out a control test for benefits. This is true of most educational tools.

Help Teachers talk about teaching: As I will discuss below, actual learning is autonomy, mastery, and purpose. These three conditions have to be present if you want teachers to learn more about their teaching, and be trusting enough to share the learning with colleagues. Starting a self-review culture is key with two easy and safe steps. 1. It has been shown that teachers recording and reviewing their teaching practice is the most effective PLD. Teachers are often scared to video their teaching so start with audio. Have them use their phone (face down) to record the audio of the 1st 15 mins or a section of a lesson. They can start to reflect on their own and then eventually with a buddy colleague (critical friend). Another effective collection of feedback is to survey classes with a Keep, Stop, Start survey. “For your learning, what should Mr Wells: A) Keep doing B) Stop doing C) Start doing. Again teachers can reflect alone on the feedback and eventually start to share with colleagues.

Legacy 4: Marking

One idea that would sound popular to teachers but they might also think is impossible within the (eugenic) school system is the removal of all teacher marking of work. The guaranteed delay between work completion and the teacher returning the marking is detrimental to learning. Feedback and correction (actual learning) needs to be rapid, be it from the teacher, peers, or from resources and activities offered to the student.

The reality of school life around the world is that in a busy day of 6 lessons, most students do not activity respond to delayed marking feedback. It is likely that they will already be onto some next task by the time they are looking at any marking and often respond with a surface-level “oh I see” before then continuing on with their new task rather than being able to put the feedback/correction into immediate practice. Most marking is still backward looking on what was missed in the last task that won’t be repeated and so students don’t normally read it or respond. Feedback needs to be forward-looking focused on what this means for the next task. Conclusion: For most students, marking does not impact them due to the feedback delay and nature of the school day moving on to unrelated tasks.

Marking Solution: Classroom routines and activity structures that ensure feedback and reflection is on-going and constant. Stepped worked examples, peer-marking, answer sheets, and reflection / comparison routines means that nobody can cheat because there’s no point and the understanding is that we are only here to learn. All feedback is forward-looking based on what this means for the next page or task. The teacher knows that to take work home to mark is detrimental to progress and mostly a waste of time, especially where comments are not future focused.

Legacy 5: Carrots & Sticks

Over the last 20 years, Daniel Pink became a frequent best seller for his books on motivation. He highlights a key shift between what was understood as incentives in the 20th century and what motivates people in the 21st century. In simple terms, the 20th century believed and enacted extrinsic motivators of rewards and punishments. He explains that as we have moved more and more from daily simple mechanical tasks, intrinsic motivators are now proving much more powerful. The fact that even rudimentary cognitive tasks (like 90% of school) are proven to be better motivated by the 3 intrinsic conditions of autonomy, mastery, and purpose, correlates directly with the original educational argument about true learning held by John Dewey 100 years ago.

Motivation solution: The 20th century eugenicists were happy enough to hand out undesired classroom tasks in the name of ranking society’s citizens, and so automatically adopted the extrinsic carrots and sticks as motivators. Dewey argued that autonomy, mastery, and purpose were the true conditions of learning and now we are discovering that they are also the natural motivators that would have learners coming to school out of choice and not legal obligation.

So what?

I feel it’s only fair to offer some solutions rather than simply complain about never reaching our tipping point. It does seem that typically slowly, humans are shifting their understanding and education to a culture of learning. The UN, OECD, and some governments are waking up to the misalignment of a narrow set of 20th century education priorities shaped by eugenic-style thinking and the rapidly increasing complexity of 21st century daily life and its world’s economies.

It still seems “impossible” to many that we might not have school timetables, exams, and programmes for teachers to deliver, but the misalignment mentioned above is becoming more prominent each year and trends are starting to suggest it is inevitable that the world will eventually demand we rethink “school” to actually develop young people for complexity and inquiry and not make students comfortable within institutions that encourage conformity and only present ideas that have ‘known answers’.

My next post will cover my implementation of an intrinsically motivating alternative to our Eugenic habits and structures. The alternative has visibly resulted in more learning without needing grades (carrots) to engage students.

Here is a good 4 part lecture on Eugenics in Education by Ansgar Allen. Each part is only 10 mins.