The Trad vs Prog Education Debate - A Bad Case of Attention Blindness - David Price

“Everybody is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid.”
Albert Einstein
(Edit: Twitter tells me he didn't say this after. Or maybe he did. Nobody really knows...)

A few weeks ago I was presenting at an inspirational event in Brussels. The ‘Learning By Design’ conference was hosted by the International School of Brussels, a brilliant school preparing kids for a global, entrepreneurial future. Actually, I should say conference(s), because alongside the event for adults, their students took part in a ‘social innovation hackathon’, and I was privileged to be able to work with some of them. Collectively, they researched social challenges facing us in the future, and then had two days to design and prototype potential solutions.

Among the many inspiring ideas to emerge, two students impressed me enormously. I’ll not name them, but their big idea was to create and supply prosthetics for dogs that had lost a limb. Over the course of a week-end, they had investigated the challenges around prosthetics, carried out market research by speaking to around 30 veterinarians in Brussels (thus securing a few of them as future clients), set up a social media strategy & website and presented a proof of concept, 3-D printed, prosthetic. If all that weren’t enough, they then did a brilliant ‘pitch’ to the adults on the final day of the conference.

They did all this in just under three days.

However, the truly remarkable aspect to this story is that I discovered later that these two were some of the schools more challenging students. Given their hard work and levels of engagement, I frankly found this hard to believe but a quick conversation with the mother of one of the boys confirmed it. Rebellious disengagement might be the kindest way to describe their history. Even in great schools like ISB, there are some kids that just aren't ‘school shaped’ - and yet here they were, passionate, entrepreneurial, highly communicative, and hugely productive in their learning.

People like Richard Branson, Bill Gates and many other entrepreneur/school drop-outs would identify with these kids. So, what’s the problem here that we’re dealing with?

Well, let’s hear from Lazlo Bock, until recently, the head of people operations at Google:
“Your degree is not a proxy for your ability to do any job. The world only cares about - and pays off on - what you can do with what you know (and it doesn’t care how you learned it).”
Google have stopped hiring on standardised qualifications like GPA or degrees - as have Ernst & Young and an increasing number of global brands. Why?

Perhaps a clue can be found in the emergence of the so-called ‘knowledge economy’. In a recent survey of Fortune 500 companies (dominated by knowledge businesses) the top five most valued skills were:

1. Teamwork;
2. Problem Solving;
3. Interpersonal Skills;
4. Oral Communications;
5. Listening Skills.

So, we currently have a system for judging individual abilities - and school performance - almost entirely based upon the things students know, and can recall in a written test, when the world we’re supposed to be preparing them for, views that as judging fish by their ability to climb trees. How many written papers will we sit in in our working lives? How many standardised tests measure our ability to work with others, articulate our ideas and listen well - even at graduate level?

(Via @Keith_Turvey)
Having found myself deeply moved by my interactions with the two young entrepreneurs in Belgium, I came back to the UK to find the same old tired, polarised, arguments on social media taking place over whether traditional or progressive teaching methods ‘work’. I even found myself stupidly getting drawn into some of them. Such discussions, it seems to me, are pointless for a number of reasons:
a)The social media ‘echo chamber’ is real, and Trads and Progs will never change their entrenched positions, even in the face of compelling evidence - their minor social celebrity depends upon their intransigence - so it’s futile to get drawn in;
b) Almost all of the good teachers I know don't see the world in black-and-white - they adopt teaching strategies that could be deemed traditional one minute, progressive, the next - for them it’s a false dichotomy;
c) The yardsticks by which we judge ‘what works’ are redundant. In fact they’ve been redundant for several decades, but our policy makers lack the courage to admit it.

In short, as long as we judge the effectiveness of any given strategy by the performance of students in written-recall standardised examinations (from Masters to PISAs to primary SATs) we are allowing ourselves to be catastrophically distracted. After having lived with Google’s domestic artificial intelligence system ‘Home’ for a month now, it’s easy to see that in a few years, the need to learn spelling and grammar rules, as well as calculating numbers, will be as redundant as taking the current driving test when we’re all in autonomous vehicles. Technology continues to radically alter the skills that are important in society - so why do we still assess students as we did in the 19th century?

And here’s the tragedy: so long as schools and students are being judged on the wrong high-stakes measures, we will continue to teach to whatever the predominant test is seen to be, with a disastrous legacy. Great principals will lose their job because they believe in the best long-term interests of their students, not the 110m Hurdle Sprint of test scores. The exodus of teachers, demoralised by a system that corrupts their very vocation in becoming an educator, will accelerate. Millions of young people will consider themselves failures.

The needs of assessment have driven education policies in most Western countries for decades. And there are huge vested interests in sticking with the industrialised model that has shaped everything that trickles down from standardised testing. But it tells us nothing about the kind of intelligences and competencies that our workplaces, society and communities need in a future-focussed, compassionate education system. For the moment, of course, literacy and numeracy matter, and we need to ensure that all our children have reached a level of proficiency in them. But how are children going to find their unique strengths, hone their entrepreneurial skills, and develop the oracy and presentational skills needed to thrive in a predominantly freelance/SME environment, when - as is the case in my local high school - they are all compelled to study triple-science in their exam years, and are allowed to study just one subject of their own choice?

So, the real discussion to be had is not whether one teaching approach is better than others in raising test scores, but in determining what better yardsticks can we imagine to help our kids be future-ready?

This is too important to be left to politicians: we need an alliance of parents, business leaders and educators to shape a new narrative for education, and find new ways of measuring what really matters. If we don't, we will consign generations of kids to a future they find themselves ill-equipped for - fishes continually being made to climb trees.

"The more any quantitative social indicator is used for social decision-making, the more subject it will be to corruption pressures and the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social processes it is intended to monitor."
Donald T. Campbell, 1976