A Belief of Lack

Piel Castle, Piel Island, Cumbria  August 2024.  Piel Island has its own king apparently (not shown)

Nothing to see here

I like a list, and helpfully whatever it is that draws the relentless flow of information and news up on my laptop homepage continually generates them for me. This week, it was a list of famous musicians who were self-taught. This was like catnip to me so I clicked it open and scrolled through. There were 30 on the list and I set about transcribing it into my notebook. This morning, because of whatever it is that drives the remorseless flow of news and current affairs onto my laptop homepage, there was another list: the most influential guitarists of all time. Catnip. I turned to the list I’d made the other day and decided to cross reference the two to see how many of the greatest finger pickin’ chicken lickin’ maestros were, according to the first list, self-taught. It was six: George Harrison, Eric Clapton Joni Mitchell, BB King, Jack White and Jimi Hendrix. Now I totally appreciate that any extrapolations can only be partial and provocative, resulting as they do from a process that falls well short of the rigours demanded by science to afford credibility and legitimacy, and they naturally raise a million questions, but that doesn’t mean that there is nothing to see here.

A belief of lack

All this brought to mind Ken Robinson’s 2009 book The Element. In it, he draws on many other examples (including one of the other Beatles) who apparently showed none of the promise of their coming achievements while at school. In fact, SKR was able to serve up oodles of delicious irony marinated in rich, piquant hindsight, as he drew on comments from school reports where teaching staff lamented a very lack of the natural gifts that were going to unfurl and bless the world once these youngsters, often from unremarkable backgrounds, found, pursued and perfected their passions outside of formal education. So with an internet list of 30 famous musicians that were self-taught yielding six of the most influential guitarists of all time, where does this leave us all in terms of the purpose of formal schools and schooling as the vast majority of us understand and experience them? Sadly, it’s a belief of lack.

No holds barred

In A Product of History I wrote about some of the dark aims that informed early formal education. Though recontextualised and in some ways softened by time, many of these remain. Yesterday, I read a 2023 Ofsted report for a London school that is held in justifiably high regard by so many that understand the transformational impact of powerful lifelong learning; one that since it’s inception has been at the forefront of a movement towards genuinely purposeful education, drawing deeply on radical, child-centred pedagogy. last year’s inspection resulted in the school being downgraded from Outstanding to Requires Improvement. I was staggered by the pompous and patronising way that the school’s achievements were dismissed: “Leaders have put together a curriculum that they see as innovative.” The inspectors clearly did not recognise this for themselves, focussing instead on the need for the school to implement policy and practice that would ensure that their young charges would know more and remember more. How on Earth did that quantum become a useful yardstick for measuring lifelong educational impact? When I visit schools I find them stuffed with bored kids and cornered staff, delivering content that while clearly drawn from our shared commons, has had its true lifeblood sucked right out of it. Anaemic and drowsy and clinging on for dear life; middle-leaders pacing the corridors, book samples in hand and demanding fidelity to the scheme at all costs; headteachers stuck in their rooms, caught in meetings with colleagues from the central team. School improvement has gone from being a thankless task to being an impossible one: an unfair fight where holds are most certainly barred.

The dreamer and the madman left

I am currently reading Damien Lewis’s The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare. I came to the book via the 2024 spy action comedy film directed by Guy Richie. Although no less enjoyable for it, there’s no doubt it’s a downright ludicrous rendition of a true story carried out by a band of Churchill’s proto- special forces. If the film were to be believed, the mission to steal away three axis power boats crucial to the Nazi U-boat effort from a harbour in Fernando Po accounted for almost half the German causalities of the entire war, when in fact not a single person died on the actual mission. And I doubt whether there is any documented evidence that the swashbuckling Danish commando Anders Lassen actually said that he sought a ‘bucketful of Nazi hearts’, but most people can hold two histories simultaneously - one real and one fictionalised for the purposes of entertainment. The point here, however, is that there comes a moment of inflection when those with ultimate responsibility need to first acknowledge and then abandon a belief of lack and start conjuring up a new imaginary to tackle the realities on the ground. The current paradigm is a desiccated wasteland, where survival against the odds is the best that can be imagined, and where most have long since stopped imagining. But they must. Education urgently needs new stories; songs of hope and protest proffering fresh narratives that will drive a new belief in abundance. An ex-head of Ofsted said that the sector sought buccaneers to drive forward bold transformation. This would have been about 2014. He is long gone, along with his bold shout-out for the piratical and the swashbuckling. We need that shout-out to be shouted-out again; retweeted and restacked; a call out to the dreamers and the madmen left amongst us to do what the realities on the ground demand.

Thanks to Luke for the title. I hope you don’t mind!