An FT Journalist Turned Teacher Questions The Point Of Stuffing Random Facts Into Students. How Many Other Teachers Must Feel The Same Way Too?

The former FT journalist Lucy Kellaway left the pink paper in 2017 after 31 years to start an education charity at age 58. Now Teach brings retired bankers, accountants and judges into classrooms in the UK. As Ms Kellaway puts it,

“I can’t be the only 50 something person in the country to want a second career in this most noble of professions.”

Earlier this year, she wrote an article titled ‘What Is The Point Of Schools?’.

“As I looked at their faces I saw an impassive mask of the sheerest boredom. Vacant with a hint of despair. The thought presented itself to me: if this is education — stuffing random facts into students so that they can pass exams — then maybe it’s time to stop and do something different.”

I have spent the better part of the last ten years pushing back against the use of standardised tests as a measure of a young person’s worth. Not only is it degrading, but it also forces teachers to waste time in the classroom making their students learn useless facts. Time that can be better spent helping students learn useful skills and discover their passions and interests.

“When I started out as a teacher, I thought it was my job to inspire. I wanted to teach my students about the real economy and real businesses. I wanted to prepare them for the world by telling them about it and interesting them in it.”

Preparing young people for the world and interesting them in it. Isn’t that what education is about? Evidently not, as Ms Kellaway discovered.

“The penny dropped: my view of education was at odds with the prevailing one. The point of education as currently configured is as a signalling device to universities and employers — students with the right exam scores are allowed on to the next phase of life. The children need the qualifications not to understand the world, but to make their way in it.”

Education as a signalling device. The point of schools is to signal to employers that a young person is capable of following rules and sitting through thousands of hours of meaningless lessons in order to attain the necessary academic qualifications.

“It pains me to have to teach such bilge. I despise the limited way of thinking that says you need two advantages and two disadvantages to everything and you must structure every six-mark answer in the same way. It is boring, stupid and bears no relation to the economy.”

‘Bilge’ and ‘despise’ are strong words, but that is precisely how Ms Kellaway feels about the curriculum she is forced to teach. She cannot be the only teacher in the world who feels this way. Teachers join the profession to inspire, but the system is set up so that teaching becomes 99% perspiration and 1% inspiration. If that at all.

“I will do this because it is my job. But it seems to me that it doesn’t have to be like this. It is perfectly possible that education could serve both functions — to learn useful and interesting things about the world and to get some qualifications that perform the same signalling function.”

The system must change. We have a moral imperative to inspire young people through education, to help them prepare for jobs of the future and to become innovators, entrepreneurs and changemakers.

The time to act is now.