Climbing the wrong mountain

I was talking with a parent last week, who told me that her middle-school child had asked her to help with his homework - which of course, she did, really focusing on the issue he presented, and, she thought, really helping very effectively. Brilliant! she thought, feeling rather pleased to be so useful.... until he sloped off, clearly upset. Only when she stopped and said ‘let’s talk...’, she told me, did it emerge that the problem was not really the maths problem, but other things going on in her son’s life - specifically some social issues. And it was not that he did not quite know how to raise these issues - he was not even fully aware that there was more than the maths until he was asked.

This is such a familiar issue to teachers and parents who know to listen, acknowledge and just quietly ask open, inviting questions like ...and what else? Because the most difficult time for a child is not when no-one understands them - it’s when they do not understand themselves; and so the issue is often not quite what it seems to be.

The same is true for adults, and organisations, where it’s also critical to have a good understanding of exactly what an issue really is, at root, before addressing it. If we do not, then we may put all our energy into addressing what we think are problems, but in fact are not. We may be climbing the wrong mountain.

The huge promise of technology is a great case in point. We know it can do incredible things - and it served us superbly when we went into lockdown last year. When a technology is new, we see all the great things it can do and the additional functionality we have.

But, generally, when we adopt technology we need to be sure that we really, really understand the situation where we intend to deploy it. Take the electronic book, for example. When Kindles first came out, some predicted the end of the paper book (and to be fair, a few stores did close) - but then on closer inspection it emerged that 50% of books are bought as gifts - and that’s just not attractive on a kindle, for the same reason we don’t generally send wedding invitations by email. And it seems that with Kindles allowing people to read more, they more readily think of books as good presents to give and receive - so people actually go and buy more paper books, and so the number of books printed is now actually higher than ever before! It turns out that we did not really understand book-buying like we thought we did; we had (implicitly) defined the purpose of a book as being to provide information, and we optimised things for that. But the situation was not as we thought; in fact books have a social as well as an informational role. And this is, I suggest, also why educational technology has often not lived up to it’s early promise - because it has not yet allowed for the social nature of what schools do.

So when we look at using technology in schools, this means that we shouldn’t adopt it unless we are very clear on precisely what we want it to do, and why. The history of Ed Tech shows that often the impact of technologies is not as people expect it will be, so we need to look carefully to see that the technologies aligns with our purpose, or they will simply be passing fads.

These things have changed education, but not everything about education. 

An interesting example here is the software that claims to do marking for teachers.  Now, with a pile of essays sitting beside my desk on a Saturday evening, that may sound like a wonderful thing - but what is the real point of marking an essay for a student?  One purpose, for sure, is to give the student some feedback and maybe a grade (ahem, see here!).  But rather like the kindle example, if that's all we see then we are missing at least three other critical things:

• Students need to feel they are working for people, not for machines.  
• Teachers need to understand what the students are thinking if they are to have proper relationships with them.  Software that does marking may damage that, and that damage is likely to outweigh any other gains (this is just the other side of the previous point).
• We may well end up setting tasks which can be marked by computer, rather than the tasks we should be setting.  There's evidence that exactly that is happening already in  some national systems.

The last of these is the most pernicious because it would mean that we have forgotten our purpose. So what is the purpose of education? What is it that we need to understand to ensure we do not scale the heights of excellence only to find we have climbed the wrong mountain? 

Well, that’s a great question that has appeared again and again over the ages, of course (see here for an historical perspective). There is no single answer, and there are many legitimate perspectives, but there is a world of difference between Missions and Guiding Statements of different schools. It’s not a competition, but I am inspired and hopeful that we have Peace and a Sustainable Future as our Mission, our north star. If we get this right for individuals, it will support lives of meaning and success; but more broadly it speaks to the need to create meaningful change; to leave the world better than we find it, to the extent we can.

It’s a long climb, and we will likely not reach the summit anytime soon, but this is the right mountain.