Gove Epistles

Dear Mr/Mrs Education Minister,

(apologies for the somewhat impersonal address, but you seem to change on a whim or whenever a new government comes to town)

I am writing to you to express my thoughts on the UK’s education, having reflected for many years on the current state of our systems and policies. I do apologise that my letter is somewhat lengthy; however I have much to say.

What is the value of education?  I assume this has to be the most fundamental question that is considered when crafting a model for a nation’s children. When schools first entered the British psyche in the middle ages, they were for the merit of passing on wisdom and specific skills to a particular community of scholars (but the system had evolved from the Spartan army training – allowing a group of slaves to be trained for battle through a robotic system of education). When Education for All provided compulsory schooling in the 1880s, it was to allow every child in our country access to learning (although this soon gave rise to a hierarchical policy of educating). When the National Curriculum came into practice in the late eighties, it was to standardise these learning models in a seemingly homogenous way (training us all think-as-one).

I have to ask the question, what is this learning for within our schools now, in our current climate? In its simplicity, I would assume schooling exists to provide learning for life; education’s role being to give our children the groundings of specific knowledge and wisdom needed to make their own way into the wider world when they reach adulthood. Because we extrapolate our children from the home environment at an early age, we no longer simply leave parents to deliver this knowledge and wisdom; I assume this is to allow children fast and easy access to a broader range of learning.

Having taught in the UK as an English teacher for over eleven years, and worked in schools in several countries around the world, I feel that I can no longer placidly participate in delivering our current educational models. I am urged to comment on what I have experienced, as I am aware first hand just how countries look to the UK for positive educational models, and also how many countries are modelling some of our systems as part of the UN’s Millennium Development Goal number two: Achieve Universal Primary Education (by 2015).  What I have seen, both through implementation of this development goal in countries such as Nepal, India and Tanzania, and within our own educational development, is the move further and further away from wisdom to knowledge, then from knowledge to mere information. Erosion of skill, culture, community and identity come hand in hand nowadays with education, and I find that deeply troubling.

Within every country’s unique educational models lies the question: what is the value of education? What do we want our children to use this time for? What do we want them to gain? What do we hope for from our citizens of the future? School in the UK has changed dramatically since its conception, and certainly since the introduction of the National Curriculum. Over time, skill-based subjects (cookery, textiles, woodwork etc.) have been given less and less importance in order to pave the way for what are classified now as more “intellectual” subjects. Thus, more and more we have been educating the brain and ignoring the body; pushing our youth more and more towards a future of university and away from skilled trades and employment. In 1980, roughly only around 12% of our youth went to university. Nowadays, nearly 50% of our demographic are starting a degree course. Some may say this is a remarkable achievement of progress, but what is the need for so many more graduates in our country when we simply do not have the relevant jobs for them to fill?

Graduate unemployment levels remain staggeringly high; mainly due to a lack of jobs relevant to their qualifications. Yet the number of skilled jobs remains as high as ever; jobs that our youth do not want because they think (mainly because the education system tells them) that these jobs are beneath their potential with their educational levels. Our specialised industry as a growing nation has slowed as time has progressed, factories have shut down, family businesses no longer passed down and wealth has become fundamentally significant to the nation’s psyche. We import more and more produce as we shut down more and more of our country’s own self-sufficiency, and yet now, ironically, we have to import the skill to continue the industry we have retained.

Career guidance and aptitude direction such as Morrisby Tests during secondary schools rarely tell children that they should aim to become a farmer, a builder, a tradesman, a plumber, an electrician, a baker, a shop keeper. Why not? These jobs are the foundation of our country:  without these fundamental skills, we will not function as a nation. The country is not built upon bankers, lawyers, psychologists, anthropologists, economists and historians; it will simply crumble without our vocational stability. A huge inequality is slowly building within our students’ expectations and understanding of employment; an inequality leading to rising levels of graduate unemployment and a growing lack of qualified, skilled youth able (or willing) to take our jobs; jobs that many skilled workers from overseas are now snapping up as we import the skill we need.

What is the value of education? To give our children guidance and a head start in the world? If so, then tragically our current models of education do not prepare them for the world in which they enter. There is a real lack of application of knowledge in our educational model; with children being asked to learn for examination success rather than understanding how to apply key skills to the wider world. The relevance of so much of the curriculum to the “real world” remains uncertain to so many and thus creates apathy in learning and irrelevance in application.

When children become adults, they require certain skills, knowledge and wisdom in order to function within the environment of our country (and the wider world). They need to understand how to cook for themselves, care for themselves, their family, their home; how to manage their finances;  they need to understand how be part of a community; how to be productive; they need to understand the political running of our government in order to deliver a meaningful vote; need to understand how to care for their environment; understand how to be an ethical citizen in the global economy and a positive citizen of our richly multi-cultural world,  as our world gets smaller and more accessible through our progress within technological developments. Each and every one of these elements is a given part of our every day existence as adults in a modern Britain. And yet, how much of this is taught in school? Little, possibly none.Why is Geography not a compulsory subject for children until they leave school? Why are they not being taught about Global Awareness when consequences of international development and relations are plastered daily over the newspapers? Why are they not being taught how to be a moral global citizen; to understand how the people and the planet are so closely unified; to understand how to deal justly and fairly with our fellow nationals before they enter a world of international trade, travel and global engagement? These skills will be necessary every day for the rest of their lives.

Why is Philosophy not a compulsory subject for children? Why are they not being taught about the very fundamentals of whom and what mankind is and how to think, critically, externally and internally? These skills will be necessary every day for the rest of their lives.Why is Environmental Awareness not a compulsory subject for children? Why are they not being taught about how to sustain the environment in which they exist; to care for the wildlife, the landscape and the planet around them? In this changing climate, awareness of global sustainability and environmental protection is vital for our future generations and these skills will be necessary every day for the rest of their lives.

Why is Ethics not a compulsory subject for children? Why are they not being taught about how to be a good citizen; to have a positive impact on their communities; to care about the society of the earth and have respect and tolerance for cultures around them? These skills will be necessary every day for the rest of their lives.

Why is Cookery, or Home Economics, not a compulsory subject for children? Why are they not being taught about the food they eat each day; learning about nutrition, culinary skills, cooking on a budget, growing food, understanding the impact of what they eat on themselves and the environment around them? They will have to think about food every day for the rest of their lives.Why is Business Studies not a compulsory subject for children? Why are they not being taught about how businesses function and how the world is built upon varied models of enterprise? These skills will be relevant and necessary every day for the rest of their lives.

Why is Engineering not a compulsory subject for children? Why are children not being taught how to care for their home and transportation; how to build a house, put up shelves, wire a plug, change a light-bulb, change a fuse, wallpaper a room, fix a leak, mend a broken tap, fix a puncture, change a tire, and learn simple mechanics? These skills will be necessary every day for the rest of their lives.

Why is Politics not a compulsory subject for children? Why are they not being taught about government policies; understanding the running of our country, the role of our government and how politics impacts every element of our democracy? This wisdom will be necessary every day for the rest of their lives.

Why is Economics not a compulsory subject for children? Why are they not being taught about money, about savings, investments, mortgages, ISAs, shares, currency, and fiscal exchange? Everyone in our modern world needs to understand how finances work, as we’ve created a world built upon money. These skills will be necessary every day for the rest of their lives.Finally, and probably most significantly, why are our own unique cultures and traditions not ingrained within our education? As a developed nation, we have eradicated the cultural identity of the UK through our developing educational models over the past one hundred and thirty years. Children no longer learn the customs and traditions that have filtered through our rich history; they learn little about the identity of the UK as a cultural nation, never mind its place in the wider world.  More and more we are losing sense of where we’ve come from and our place in the world, in order to develop an education that means nothing in any world; at home or abroad.

I myself am a product of the National Curriculum, being immersed into it at the tender age of nine. As a result, I retain very little wisdom and even less knowledge or information from my school days; I simply learned how to pass examinations. I have little cultural heritage and identity; everything I have being absorbed from my family and home environment, not from schooling. Yet I was lucky enough to gain one piece of useful wisdom from my eighteen years of education, given by a teacher who taught me the most valuable lesson of all: they taught me how to think. This fundamental life skill is barely blinked at within our current educational model.We cannot bemoan the apathy our children demonstrate towards education and the ignorance they show when faced with these challenges mentioned earlier, when we do not provide for anything otherwise. Every day, children are being let down by our education as it is giving them nothing tangible for their future. Their learning holds no relevance to the world outside of the text book, whilst the judgement of our examination system only praises those able to achieve success in subjects that our own system has deemed hierarchically more potent than others. Our daily press delights in criticising the failures of our youth; failure to achieve the same GCSE success as predecessors, failure to get jobs, failure to gain literacy levels on a par with their grandparents, failure to tick the boxes we’ve drawn.  Our children play along diligently for eleven, thirteen, sixteen years in our Education System Puppet Show, only to be criticised for bad acting in the final performance.

As a form of education, the press is powerful; it is omnipresent and we cannot pretend that it does not have a tremendous power to influence (after all, for most, critical thinking is not a skill learned at school). Our glorified models of success shown in the media celebrate celebrity and wealth as signs of importance and success in life; neither of which are championed at school because we (the teachers who have learned how to think critically) know that they are meaningless models of personal enrichment and achievement. Yet, in the face of our country’s media education, is it surprising that we are educating a generation who are being told to value material success over skill, society, ethics, global awareness and self-belief? It seems that a harmful mixed message is once again being delivered to the most impressionable minds.

What is the value of education? As it stands, it seems to be to fail generation after generation to be adequately equipped to survive in a nation that every day loses more of its identity and heritage and closes its doors upon itself. We are, once again, educating our children today to fail in the world we are building them tomorrow; they are, once again, being Born to Fail.  However, here’s the point I come back to every single day: what could be the value of education? Fundamentally, to pass on the wisdom of how to think, how to live and how to survive in the world around us. If we are to eradicate apathy, dissent and criticism from our country’s education, we must make it relevant to our community, to our country, to our future and (most importantly) to our children.

Yours faithfully,

Rachel Musson

(Writing on behalf of tomorrow’s children.)