Proxies for learning

We can be so horrible to our teachers.

I have sat around large office tables with senior school leaders challenging staff with their pompous, rhetorical questions, gimcrack notions and cheap rented statements, all ripped in short form from others, and often poorly understood if understood at all.

A fear gun

It used to be, ‘It’s not what they are doing, it is what they are learning, that really matters’. A nonsense phrase, if ever there was one, and one that stands up to no scrutiny what so ever. Now, everything is a ‘poor proxy for learning’. This is a vile and condescending phrase designed entirely to make the messenger appear, in the hearts and minds of the listener, as if they can draw at will on powerful knowledge, profound insights and uncontestable truths about the nature of learning - what it is and what it most definitely isn’t. Following the statement with a list of examples does nothing to validate the detestable phrase. It’s little more than a ray gun set to shrink, shot from the hip and intended to convert ripples of worry into waves of inadequacy.

But don’t worry - the truth is out there

At the conferences we can fill our free eco-jutebags with top tips, top tens and slick infographics; motivational lanyards and thought-provoking highlighter pens; chiches, platitudes and blatant non sequiturs, and, if we get their early enough, the keys to our redemption.

A Carolean education imaginary

Trouble is, the contents of a thousand such bags won’t really help us. They will never mitigate for the harm caused by expecting our powerful young people to ‘perform’ in clearly sub-optimal conditions that are in no way conducive to purposeful, personally meaningful learning. Trinkets and tinkering can never compensate for the structural weaknesses in the imaginary, so we must create a new one; an imaginary for a new era: a Carolean education imaginary. One which guarantees the primacy of the young person rather than the system.

The time has come to acknowledge the possibility that it is the imaginary itself that is the poor proxy for learning.