Learning, not education
This title may seem a bit bizarre. After all, most people in authority believe education is a good thing and there are organisations attempting to create compulsory education worldwide. The basis for this is the idea that there is an entitlement to education for young people. So I have to explain what I mean by ‘learning, not education’. My fundamental stance is that humans are crucially learning creatures. Human babies are born with the least range of inbuilt abilities of any creature. Babies have to learn hugely the first few years of their life and even then they are not able to survive on their own. So learning is central to being human and absolutely crucial for our survival.
Education, on the other hand, is now seen largely as an institutional process where teachers teach in classrooms against a curriculum with assessments of performance as a central part of the activity. Education and schooling are seen as one. It is this problem that I am addressing here.
Let’s take just one piece of evidence here, though more will follow. We have researched many thousands of managers and professional people across organisations around the world. We wanted to know what makes them effective at work. They all talk about things that they have learned but very little reference is made to education, training, colleges, universities, courses etc. Indeed, research conducted by a number of universities in the UK and USA has shown that the maximum contribution of education and training to the performance of a professional person is about 10 to 20%. (See Burgoyne and Reynolds, 1997; Cunningham et al., 2004; Eraut, 1998; Eraut et al., 1998; McCall et al, 1988; Wenger, 1998.)
This can come as a bit of a shock to people in the educational world. One reason for the shock is that, by and large, educational institutions do not follow up the people who have attended them to find out what impact that education has had on the lives of the people who attended. We started from the opposite end, which was to find out what made people effective and particularly what learning had helped them to become effective.
In our research we questioned people about what particular processes had helped them to become effective. The most often mentioned word was ‘experience’. When we pursued this in greater depth through extensive interviews, what people actually meant by ‘experience’ was quite varied. Reference was made to having had challenging projects, having had a good boss to work for, travelling to other countries, getting help from a coach, and so on. There was no obvious pattern to these answers – people vary enormously in terms of those experiences that had helped them to learn to be effective.
This research has been in the world of work. When I have done sessions with adults asking them about their wider life, including family and community, the value of education and training drops to an even lower figure. For instance parents often comment on all sorts of ways that they learn to be a parent. These include having role models, reading books, watching TV and films, talking to other parents, and so on. I ask these adults about their role in the wider life of the community, with friends or sports teams. Then things get mentioned such as their own friendships that have helped them to understand how to get on well with other people or how they have learned to take up leadership roles through being mentored by somebody.
A colleague of mine, David Gribble, often asks audiences to come up with one thing that they use on a daily basis that they learned after the age of 11 in education. People struggle to think of one thing. It’s another example of this syndrome whereby the claim that education is preparation for life in our society becomes problematic.
Another interesting example of learning not education came up when 13 of us who had had the greatest involvement in research and practice on learning in organisations came together to see if we could agree about learning. We drew up a Declaration on Learning which we all felt we could agree on, even though the 13 of us come from different backgrounds; for example some were very much university-based researchers, others worked in consultancy in organisations. What linked us all is that we had all written books and papers and done significant research and practice over a considerable amount of time. At one meeting of the group we were discussing an aspect of the Declaration. One person suggested that as we were thinking about learning then education and training should only be used as a last resort. We suddenly found that we could all agree to that statement. In organisations education and training activity tends to be very expensive and often ineffective because there is no attempt to measure what has come out of the education or training activity. The assumption that one size fits all and that everybody has the same learning need at the same time is completely erroneous.
There can, of course, be times when there are some common learning needs; but even then there is generally not a common starting point. One client of mine that I was consulting with was a well-known and very successful international investment banking company. Graduates who joined the organisation were immediately given a test on both the company’s policies and practices but also the general financial rules within which the company had to operate. Most of the participants could answer very few of the questions. That was not the issue. The new entrants were then told that they had two weeks in which to go and find the answers to these questions and that they would be given the same test at the end of that two weeks, in which they were expected to get 100 percent. The company found that not only did this save them a lot of wasted effort in running lectures and giving out boring reading matter but also that the participants had to spend time learning about the business by going out and talking to people. It’s a mark of the success of the business that they had such sensible practices.
A universal need is that of the driving test. In England anyone can take the test once they are an adult and they can find any mode that they wish to learn how to drive. The state is not interested in the learning mode used by the individual. The person could have spent 1000 hours on the road with a driving school or they could have had just a few hours driving around the block with mother and father. The mode of learning is irrelevant. What is required by the state is quite rightly that the individual has to demonstrate, on a real road in a real car, that they can actually drive safely. So outcome measures are important but measures of input may be irrelevant.
I can remember one conference on mentoring in the National Health Service that I was speaking at. I was observing doctors sitting on the back row reading the daily newspapers. They were attending the day conference in order to tick a box in their Continuing Professional Development scheme but they had clearly no interest in learning anything from the day’s events. Of course they were not being assessed as to whether they had learned anything. This is one of the worst examples of the irrelevance of training. A slightly amusing but also slightly worrying fact is that I know people who have been caught speeding, done a speeding awareness course in order to avoid getting points on their licence, and then three years later they have caught speeding again and done another speeding awareness course. The notion that people can every three years get caught for speeding and do a speeding awareness course and which some people may learn from but clearly others don’t seems to me somewhat unhelpful.
So the case I want to make is that we should pay a lot more attention to learning - and how people learn and what they need to learn, but pay a lot less attention to education and training in formal institutions. Indeed we have to wonder whether as a society we should be spending the billions of pounds that it costs to run educational institutions when they are clearly not at all cost-effective.
Ian Cunningham, ian@smlcollege.org.uk
Cunningham, Ian. "Why schooling is a major contributor to the crisis – and what can be done about it." Lorimer, D. and Robinson, O. (2010) The New Renaissance, Floris Books, Edinburgh. p.283
Self Managed Learning made difficult
I appreciate that the title may seem a little strange. So many self-help texts are about things “made easy”. What I want to cover here is the fact that it is quite difficult to get people to understand why we are doing Self Managed Learning. The prevailing paradigm is one where assumptions are that young people go to school to learn. The dominant model is one that I want to challenge here and I want to do that through presenting real evidence.
I’m a scientist by background and therefore I tend to be interested in evidence rather than prejudiced opinion. The way in which schools dismiss evidence and continue to practice in ways that are counter to the best available research is at the very least disappointing and at its worse potentially immoral.
So first I have to say a little bit about Self Managed Learning;( however for full information there are books and articles and videos available for people who are interested). After doing this I will give a few examples of evidence that seems to me to be incontrovertible and where if teachers and other adults working with children claim to be professionals they should act on the basis of this evidence.
An outline of Self Managed Learning
A simple distinction between what we are doing and what schools do could be captured in the following two sentences.
Schools teach children subjects in order for them to pass tests.
Whereas
In Self Managed Learning we assist young people to learn in order for them to lead a good life.
Whilst I am the chair of governors of Self Managed Learning College I also do work in the college with young people. My business card says “Ian Cunningham, learning assistant”. Our job as adults is to assist young people to learn in ways that are appropriate to them and meet their needs. We are also not interested in testing and assessment except where young people choose it.
My own view is that it’s wrong to assess another human being unless they have chosen it. So our students may take public exams if they choose and they do so in the context of their interests in pursuing a particular career they themselves have freely chosen, with our assistance as adults.
In assisting students with their learning we have no classrooms, no imposed curriculum, no imposed lessons, no imposed teaching. Students are able to learn in ways which suit them and which fit with the kind of direction they want to take in their lives.
We start off with a whole week where we find out about the person, their interests, what they like and don’t like and any directions they want to take in their life. After that we can start to work with them to help them to think through the kind of programme of learning that they want to undertake. So students do have timetables - but ones that they write themselves in relation to their overall needs.
In order to work through their plans for learning students are in what we call learning groups. These consist of six students and one adult to support the group. Students are free to raise whatever they like within the group in order to help them with their learning. The group is the basis on which students think through their weekly timetables.
In addition to belonging to a learning group each student is also part of a learning community. This is the whole group of students with adults who are there to assist them. At the moment in the college we have 24 students (aged from 9 to 16) and typically between three and five adults on each morning (we operate from 0900 to 1300 each weekday). We start the morning with a community meeting which is chaired in rotation; it could be a nine-year-old chairing the meeting or one of the adults.
The role of the community meeting is to work out collective needs such as agreeing rules for working through to organising trips or agreeing on bringing in visitors. Indeed anything can be raised by students that is relevant to the running of the whole community.
Some examples of evidence about learning
In creating the Self Managed Learning approach we have drawn on an array of well documented evidence about the nature of learning. Below are just a few examples taken from that evidence.
Teaching versus learning
There is a strange assumption that what is taught equals what is learned. If teaching worked perfectly then presumably every child would get A* in every exam that they took. Classroom teaching seems often to be aimed at a mythical average child. This average child doesn’t exist. Every child is different and there is no such thing as an average child.
We know for instance that there are huge differences in the way people prefer to learn. The classroom seems to be based on an assumption of a particular way of transmitting knowledge and skills through particular media that are again aimed at some mythical average child. Personally I never found the classroom an environment that I liked. I rather agreed with Oscar Wilde “I love to learn - I just can’t bear to be taught”.
In our research on learning with young people we found that there are at least 55 ways in which young people can learn of which the classroom is only one. In our college, given that students get free choice, no one has ever asked us to recreate a classroom. Some love to learn using a computer whereas others prefer to read books and others are like to get more help from adults. The question is why should we be concerned about the way in which a person wants to learn so long as they learn what they choose.
My favourite teacher at school was the geography teacher because he never taught as anything. He just gave us the material on a Monday and said I will test you on it on Friday. I loved this freedom as an independent learner. Others might choose a different approach.
The most important test that we have in our society is the driving test. Yet as a society we have no interest whatsoever in how a person learns to drive. Individuals could have had 1000 hours of lessons with a driving school or they might have merely spent a few hours driving with help from their parents in order to learn. As long as the person can actually go on a real road and show that they can drive safely they can pass the test. Why do schools assume that children must be locked into classrooms when it isn’t an appropriate way of learning for many children?
The subjective curriculum
The curriculum chosen by examining bodies and by the state is one that is a subjective choice. There is no objective basis to the choice of the curriculum. Indeed there have been many challenges to the current academically biased curriculum in England from a huge range of educationalists. And yet schools are now avidly buying into the English baccalaureate where there is a complete neglect of creative subjects in the arts and other areas outside a very narrow range of academic subjects.
Our approach to curriculum is to try to understand the kind of life that an individual wants to leave and what might be appropriate within that. Clearly if students are choosing, for instance, to go to university then they do have to deal with the fact that there may be an academic requirement that they might want to meet. However despite what schools and universities say you can go to university without any qualifications. The Open University is a good example but also universities have access courses for those without GCSEs and A-levels.
Summer born children.
The government’s own research a few years ago showed that at least 10,000 children every year get worse results at GCSE just because they’re born in the summer. These children are also less likely to go to university and what is particularly worrying is that both teachers and parents tend to underestimate the abilities of children born in the summer. This level of discrimination is quite appalling and yet nobody seems to want to do anything about it and schools continue to provide discriminatory environments making, for instance, children in year 11 all take their GCSEs in that year. We have found that our students might to take a GCSE a year or two earlier others might want to take another year beyond year 11 if they feel that that’s going to be advantageous to them. Why not?
Employers views.
Every credible survey of the views of employers over the last 10 years comes to similar conclusions. Generally employers say that schools are failing the world of work because they are neglecting important aspects of learning such as creativity, ability to get on with other people, ability to be self disciplined and self managing, etc. This evidence is generally ignored by schools despite the rhetoric of wanting, for instance, young people to learn to be able to be more employable. The continuing pressure to pass exams and assume that that’s going to get you into university and therefore have a good career is a monstrous lie. It is continuing to create misery for many young people.
An example of this was a meeting some months ago about education where a number of recent graduates complained that they could not get satisfying work. Some were unemployed; others were doing menial tasks for low pay. A week later I went to a meeting of companies in the digital and creative sectors in our city of Brighton. Most of the employers there were saying they couldn’t find people to fill the jobs that they had. They want people who are both creative and digitally aware and who can work in this fast-moving sector of the economy. It is also the major growth area of the economy in our city and in many parts of the UK. Schools and universities are failing young people when there peddling faulty information about the world of work.
The Government’s own figures show that the major expansion of jobs in the UK over the last 5 to 10 years has been in the creative sector or creative jobs within traditional organisations. The Government’s narrow emphasis on science, technology, engineering and maths is a delusion. Of course there is work in those sectors but the neglect of the creative sector is misguided.
Conclusion
The above are just a few examples of an evidence base that we see as supporting alternatives to the current schooling model. Another example is the weird requirement for people to be able to handwrite. This article was created without me writing a word on a piece of paper. I had a serious cycle accident recently and so I’m unable to handwrite or use a computer. This whole piece has been created on a voice to text piece of software. I accept that some enjoy handwriting, but I don’t ever feel the need to put pen to paper.
Ian Cunningham
Published in P.E.N Journal 24