Educating Ruby (9 page)

It turns out that Eric is all too real. A significant number of apparently bright, self-confident, articulate, high-achieving students will seek counselling during their undergraduate years at Oxford and Cambridge: that’s several thousand young people.
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There will be a variety of causes, obviously, but one of the major ones is this feeling that Eric is suffering from of having been found out, unmasked as an imposter – someone who, the evidence seems to suggest, is unworthy of being where they are. And that evidence is that they are now struggling with the weight and the difficulty of the work they are being set, yet they are supposed to be ‘bright’, and bright students are not supposed to struggle. Therefore, so the thought pattern goes, I must be more stupid than I and others believed, and so I am a fraud. This is a shattering realisation, so it is no surprise that anxiety and/or depression ensue.

So-called ‘imposter syndrome’ is on the rise, according to the directors of both the Oxford and Cambridge counselling services, and one of the reasons is that schools are getting better at force-feeding and shoehorning their students through the syllabus, so they get the grades they need, but do so in a way that fails to prepare them for the demands of life after school. More modularising, more coaching, more detailed feedback from caring teachers about what exactly you need to improve if you are going to get the coveted A* in your A levels. All of this helps to get the grades, but systematically deprives students of opportunities – as
one tutor put it to us – to learn how to ‘flounder intelligently’. As we saw earlier, this is vital not only to cope when you are at university, but also to field that curve-ball question which you are sure to be tossed at interview. (We’ve used Cambridge as our example here, but we know that there are Erics in many universities and colleges.)

The same applies, by the way, in today’s job market. Working for Google is a plum job, and they get thousands of applications. But, again, watch out for the questions they will ask your daughter at interview. If she is asked whether she has an IQ of over 130, warn her that there are right and wrong answers. Yes is the wrong answer. At Google, they think if you have bothered to take an IQ test, and have bothered to remember the result, you may well be the kind of nerd who treasures badges of past accomplishments, rather than the kind of ‘intelligent flounderer’ they are looking for. At Google, intelligence does not mean being able to solve abstract logical puzzles under pressure. It means being able to think and question and learn in the face of unprecedented problems for which there are as yet no right answers. Likewise, if they ask your daughter whether she has a track record of success, it is much better for her to say it is patchy than to edit her CV and pretend she is Little Ms Perfect. Crowing about the past doesn’t cut it at Google; grappling with the future does. And some schools teach that, and many don’t.

To help get a handle on your worries about school, it might be useful to remember the difference between education and schooling. Education is a vision of what it is that our children will need if they are going to flourish in the world as we predict it will be: that is to say, in their world, not ours. What knowledge and skills, what attitudes and values will stand them in good stead as they embark on life in a globalised and digitised future? To decide on the core aims of education, therefore, we need imagination and philosophy. We need to imagine, as well as we can, what their world will be like – at a fairly broad level of generality. Education has to be meaningful and relevant to the software designers, hairdressers, financial advisers, plumbers, nurses, neurosurgeons and farmers of the future. So we have to think: what will be the demands, risks and opportunities of the world that we foresee? And what are the personal resources that will enable young people to cope with those demands, capitalise on those opportunities and live good lives as a result?

If the world they will experience is likely to make complex demands on their ability to be an honest and trustworthy friend, for example, what attitudes towards online relationships do we need to help them develop? If their world is likely to be full of options and uncertainties, how do we help them get ready to deal well with uncertainty and make careful and wholesome choices? If their world is going to contain a rapidly increasing number of old people (that’s us), should education be aimed at producing young people who will naturally feel kind, caring, patient and responsible towards the elderly? That’s the conversation of education. It is to do with what’s left at the end of their formal educational
experiences, the residues of that experience which will enable them to engage intelligently with the ups and downs that come their way. This is a moral conversation, and it is necessary and unavoidable. If people disagree about the aims of education, this has to be within a conversation about differing values and differing images of the future.

School, on the other hand, is a particular system that societies have invented for ‘doing education’. Education is the ends; school is the means. The only way of deciding if a school is ‘outstanding’ or not is to refer back to our list of those desirable residues (the seven Cs), and judge it by its success at producing young people who fit the bill. Are we turning out a lot of Rubies and not many Erics? Are they helpful to old ladies in the supermarket who can’t find the right money? Are they flourishing at university when the workload is a lot higher and the social safety net much weaker than they experienced at school? Are they able to have fun without becoming obnoxious or damaging their health (whether that be the arrogant posh boys of the Bullingdon Club trashing a country restaurant or local kids throwing up in a city centre on a Saturday night)?

Exams are a proxy for those desired residues, and we should be asking whether they are capturing, as well as they can, the qualities of character and mind we think our children will need. Is a medical student’s performance in their examinations a good predictor of their clinical judgement or their bedside manner? (It isn’t.) Does a theology student’s level of moral reasoning, as measured on a test, correlate well with their actual honesty or kindness? (It doesn’t.) A motor mechanic may have passed her apprenticeship exams, but if her welds break up when your car goes over a pothole then we need to find a new test. The test of schooling is not whether you can do well
at school
– or even whether you
enjoyed your schooldays – but whether what you have done has prepared you effectively for something else: college, a job or life at large. Exams ought to do a reasonable job of predicting how someone actually functions in some context in the future. If they don’t, they just become self-referring and self-serving. If people disagree about schooling, rather than about education, then this is a technical matter. Empirically, are schools delivering the benefits they claim to? And are the instruments they use to assess how well they are working appropriate?

The really important point to stress is that schools must always be trying to enhance young people’s capabilities in some way. Which particular capabilities they are aiming at is a question of values; but at root, schools must be aiming to help people
do
something better out of school or after schooling has finished. Knowledge that gives you no practical purchase on the physical and social worlds beyond school is pointless. For example, if university entrance depended on your ability to recite screeds of nonsensical poetry – stuff that you mugged up just for a three-hour memory test, and then was generally agreed to have no further use or interest at all – there would surely be an outcry about wasting children’s time and insulting their intelligence, and rightly so.

What Ruby and Eric teach us is that there is always a deeper agenda going on at school, which is about the cultivation of competence and character. It is what we called earlier the ‘other game’. On the surface, school may seem to be all about the content –
learning about
things like the chemical
elements or the Tudors – and the grades. But, implicitly or explicitly, you are also
learning to
do things: to respond in certain ways when particular things show up. At primary school you learned to hang up your coat, wait your turn, clear up after yourself and ‘play nicely’. Gradually, as you move up, you learn to create a PowerPoint presentation, structure an essay, solve disputes and read your teacher’s mind. Ruby has learned to hold her head up, to value her own curiosity, to get on well with people of all kinds, to pay careful attention to what she is doing, to manage her time and think for herself. Nadezna and Eric have learned different habits. Nadezna has learned to be slapdash; she doesn’t know how to take pains over something or why she should. Eric has learned to respond to pressure by waiting to be rescued and reassured – and when he finds himself in a situation where that is not happening, he goes to pieces.

At least as important as the accumulation of knowledge and understanding is the development of a range of useful real-world competences. A good part of education ought to be, we think, focused on making sure that young people can do a whole lot of things that they will very likely find useful. But what are the core competences for living safely, sociably and satisfyingly? Obviously, it will depend on the culture and circumstances into which you were born. But, broadly, can we pick out some general ‘competences for living’? Here are some candidates. They were generated in the context of a very exciting ‘global summit on education’ held at the Perimeter Institute, an elite physics lab in Waterloo, Canada,
in October 2013.
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For five days, a group of around 30 young people from all around the world explored, with the help of some ‘experts’ (of which Guy was one) what the school of 2030 ought to look like. Here is one of the lists they came up with on 21st century competences: