All knowledge is worth having

I wasn’t loving it - it was proving too forced, too mannered in parts; way too much like the deceiving idea - so I’d left it where it was and went through to the kitchen to prepare some lunch. When I returned to it I discovered that I’d (obviously) not saved the damn thing and everything except the core provocation was lost: “Now let’s just consider for a moment the notion that maybe not all knowledge is worth having”.

There is a name for this

Of course some knowledge is worth having, but who should decide what, when, when, how and why? At the moment it is us, but is this really sustainable or even desirable? And is this approach something that will bring us together or drive us further apart?

To start with, we already have loads of it, and when we want more we know where to find it and how to go about getting it. And if we want to master something we will because we are hard-wired to do so. We’re natural-born learners. In fact, you just try and stop someone intent on doing what they need to do to get better at something they really want to get better at. I mean, good luck with that. No, we are all perfectly capable of deciding the what, where, when, who and why of knowledge. It’s not a trust thing. It’s just a thing thing. In fact, it’s probably first and foremost a survival thing. Trouble is, that’s not our starting point in schools. For some reason we simply won’t allow ourselves to embrace the link between motivation and learning, and we certainly won’t countenance the notion that to do so will unlock a million extraordinary journeys that last a lifetime.

The other trouble is we’ve stripped our young people of any agency or autonomy, and certainly any responsibility for or jurisdiction over this strange commodity. We’ve tightly swaddled them with our insistence and our assumptions; our expectations, needs and demands. And we’ve denied them at all points the right to say no. Indeed, we have actually conflated this with poor behaviour! With our higher authority so self-bestowed, it is us who have surveyed the entire history of human endeavour and experience and curated our own selection of the knowledge we deem worth knowing. And all the while we’re ignoring the drivers of extraordinary achievement and deep, lifelong learning as we shun the very things that actually do fascinate the young people we work with. If you said all this out loud once, you certainly wouldn’t repeat it! You’d drop it instantly as utter nonsense. Yet here we are, twisting ourselves up through endless contortions as we seek to implement new and more efficient ways to deliver the same flawed methodology. All the time tilting a tin ear the very thing that will prove genuinely transformational; the thing that will truly emancipate learners and learning.

There is a name for this.

The whole lot must go

I’ve always been struck by the cowardice of storytellers who set up a scenario - usually apocalyptic - only to fail to push it through to its natural conclusion, presumably because they fear that the grim dénouement is too horrific for the audience to bear. Having brought people this far (usually on the promise of such an end of days), it’s as if they feel that what there really needs to be is redemption and reprieve; some glimmer of hope to enable us to absorb the full horror of the original proposition. Otherwise, we’ll all just abandon everything. Not all storytellers, of course. Neville Shute’s On the Beach fully embraces its destination and remains a landmark of utter desolation. But most don’t. Most wimp out and spare us our grisly destiny. I’m finding education is a bit like this at the moment. The prognosis is bad; the future bleak. The whole edifice is fissured, its halls empty and its dark aims illuminated, and all this with the impact on our young people as appalling as it is seemingly inevitable, but still no one seems able to really say what needs to be said; and worse still, that somehow and for some reason any new imaginaries must necessarily sit alongside the crumbling ruins of the existing paradigm as if there are those who may actually still benefit from such an arrangement. Nonsense. The whole lot must go.

And so it began

I had a visitor once from Tappahannock. I was exhilarated by a new and unexpected connection with someone from somewhere I’d never even heard about let alone knew anything about. It all sounded so exotic. I needed to know more and so it began.