Covid-19, bubbles and the future of learning

Strange things are afoot in the world of learning. Schools, colleges and universities are shut, national examinations have been cancelled and families are isolated in their homes. Common sense would suggest that learning will suffer as a result. However, a lot will depend on how learning is defined. For example, if learning is defined as memorising and understanding specific content related to passing an exam, then this type of learning is clearly going to suffer, not because schools have closed but because the exams have been cancelled.

For many students who were due to take GCSE’s or A levels this summer, the idea of continuing to learn the curriculum now makes little sense. ‘What’s the point?’ is a legitimate question for students to ask.  I’m sure many parents have also attempted to persuade their children that they still need to learn the curriculum despite the examinations being cancelled. However, it would appear that the curriculum by itself, without examinations, has very little value or purpose – in particular with reference to preparing children for life in the 21st century.

One of the unintended benefits of the current pandemic is that it has forced many parents, who live outside of the ‘education bubble’, to take an active role in their children’s education. By doing so they have had to peer inside the bubble and they are now starting to ask some very awkward questions. For example, why are children being forced to learn a curriculum which a) has very little value outside of school, and b) they forget soon after leaving school? Furthermore, is it not possible to design a curriculum which a) can still be assessed and b) enables children to develop a variety of 21st-century skills such as collaboration, communication, critical thinking, creativity and digital literacy? Finally, if the above is possible, why were these reforms not introduced decades ago and why are these reforms not being introduced today? Again these are all legitimate questions.

Parents living outside of the education bubble may also be surprised (and somewhat dismayed) to find out that this is not a new debate. In fact, these issues have been discussed and debated within the education bubble for well over 100 years! For example, in 1889, Auberon Herbert, a 19th century theorist and philosopher, edited a collection of letters from over 200 academics titled ‘The Sacrifice of Education to Examination‘. The purpose of the publication was to support the ongoing protect against ‘the centralising influence which great prizes had on education, leading all schools to adopt the same methods and thus cutting one deep rut in which all those engaged in education travelled’.

Some of the hurtful consequences were listed as follows:

• the temporary strengthening of the rote-faculties to the neglect of the rational faculties,
• the rapid forgetfulness of knowledge acquired,
• the cultivation of a quick superficiality and power of cleverly skimming a subject,
• the consequent incapacity for undertaking original work,
• the desire to appear to know rather than to know,
• the conventional treatment of a subject and loss of spontaneity,
• the dependence upon highly skilled guidance,
• the belief in artifices and formulated answers,
• the diffusion of energies over many subjects for the sake of marks,
• the mental disinclination that supervenes to undertake work, which is not of a directly remunerative character.

In his Preface, Herbert concludes with the following powerful statement:

It was sufficient to affirm that in its broad features the system was hopelessly evil and to be mercilessly condemned. It was a system from which the soul had been taken, leaving but an earthy remainder; it put lower motives in the place of higher motives, and denied and discouraged the generous interest that the young feel in the great subjects of knowledge.

One simple solution to this dilemma would be to demand that all students must now have complete access to the internet when taking any type of exam. This would make the majority of the existing exams (and therefore curriculum) redundant and so this would force the sector as a whole to revisit questions relating to the primary purpose of the school in the 21st century and what kind of curriculum would help to deliver that purpose. We would then expect something very different to emerge.