Educating Ruby

by Guy Claxton

  ● Are the seven Cs the kinds of attitudes you would like your children (or students) to have?

  ● Are the seven Cs ones that you think will help them to thrive in the 21st century?

  ● If you had to rank order the seven Cs, which would be at the top of your list? Which at the bottom? How would you adjust them?

  ● Do you think it is realistic to think about cultivating them explicitly (or is that pie in the sky)?

  ● If a school did pay more attention to this ‘other game’, do you think its results would go up or down?

  ● Are the seven Cs just for the ‘low achievers’ like Ruby, or are they appropriate – vital even – for the high fliers as well?

  Talk amongst yourselves!

  Now here’s the second part of our thought experiment. It involves you being the head teacher again, but this time you are wandering down the High Street in Cambridge. As you are passing the offices of the University Counselling Service, the door opens and out in front of you steps Eric – who was one of your brightest students in the same year as Ruby, and left to read natural sciences at Trinity Hall. You are both a little embarrassed, but after a few stilted attempts at conversation you say you can’t help but notice that he has been in the counselling offices, and you hope everything is all right. It patently isn’t: Eric, who was a confident young man at your school, is now pale, withdrawn and having great difficulty making eye contact. You are finding it hard to hear what he is saying, but he mumbles something that sounds like “Feeling like a fraud”. Overcome with concern for the dramatic change in Eric, you suggest a cup of tea which he warily accepts. What do you think is the story that he gradually reveals over tea? Do you find Eric plausible?

  It turns out that Eric is all too real. A significant number of apparently bright, self-confident, articulate, high-achieving students will seek counselling during their undergraduate years at Oxford and Cambridge: that’s several thousand young people.2 There will be a variety of causes, obviously, but one of the major ones is this feeling that Eric is suffering from of having been found out, unmasked as an imposter – someone who, the evidence seems to suggest, is unworthy of being where they are. And that evidence is that they are now struggling with the weight and the difficulty of the work they are being set, yet they are supposed to be ‘bright’, and bright students are not supposed to struggle. Therefore, so the thought pattern goes, I must be more stupid than I and others believed, and so I am a fraud. This is a shattering realisation, so it is no surprise that anxiety and/or depression ensue.

  So-called ‘imposter syndrome’ is on the rise, according to the directors of both the Oxford and Cambridge counselling services, and one of the reasons is that schools are getting better at force-feeding and shoehorning their students through the syllabus, so they get the grades they need, but do so in a way that fails to prepare them for the demands of life after school. More modularising, more coaching, more detailed feedback from caring teachers about what exactly you need to improve if you are going to get the coveted A* in your A levels. All of this helps to get the grades, but systematically deprives students of opportunities – as one tutor put it to us – to learn how to ‘flounder intelligently’. As we saw earlier, this is vital not only to cope when you are at university, but also to field that curve-ball question which you are sure to be tossed at interview. (We’ve used Cambridge as our example here, but we know that there are Erics in many universities and colleges.)

  The same applies, by the way, in today’s job market. Working for Google is a plum job, and they get thousands of applications. But, again, watch out for the questions they will ask your daughter at interview. If she is asked whether she has an IQ of over 130, warn her that there are right and wrong answers. Yes is the wrong answer. At Google, they think if you have bothered to take an IQ test, and have bothered to remember the result, you may well be the kind of nerd who treasures badges of past accomplishments, rather than the kind of ‘intelligent flounderer’ they are looking for. At Google, intelligence does not mean being able to solve abstract logical puzzles under pressure. It means being able to think and question and learn in the face of unprecedented problems for which there are as yet no right answers. Likewise, if they ask your daughter whether she has a track record of success, it is much better for her to say it is patchy than to edit her CV and pretend she is Little Ms Perfect. Crowing about the past doesn’t cut it at Google; grappling with the future does. And some schools teach that, and many don’t.

  Education is not the same as school

  To help get a handle on your worries about school, it might be useful to remember the difference between education and schooling. Education is a vision of what it is that our children will need if they are going to flourish in the world as we predict it will be: that is to say, in their world, not ours. What knowledge and skills, what attitudes and values will stand them in good stead as they embark on life in a globalised and digitised future? To decide on the core aims of education, therefore, we need imagination and philosophy. We need to imagine, as well as we can, what their world will be like – at a fairly broad level of generality. Education has to be meaningful and relevant to the software designers, hairdressers, financial advisers, plumbers, nurses, neurosurgeons and farmers of the future. So we have to think: what will be the demands, risks and opportunities of the world that we foresee? And what are the personal resources that will enable young people to cope with those demands, capitalise on those opportunities and live good lives as a result?

  If the world they will experience is likely to make complex demands on their ability to be an honest and trustworthy friend, for example, what attitudes towards online relationships do we need to help them develop? If their world is likely to be full of options and uncertainties, how do we help them get ready to deal well with uncertainty and make careful and wholesome choices? If their world is going to contain a rapidly increasing number of old people (that’s us), should education be aimed at producing young people who will naturally feel kind, caring, patient and responsible towards the elderly? That’s the conversation of education. It is to do with what’s left at the end of their formal educational experiences, the residues of that experience which will enable them to engage intelligently with the ups and downs that come their way. This is a moral conversation, and it is necessary and unavoidable. If people disagree about the aims of education, this has to be within a conversation about differing values and differing images of the future.

  School, on the other hand, is a particular system that societies have invented for ‘doing education’. Education is the ends; school is the means. The only way of deciding if a school is ‘outstanding’ or not is to refer back to our list of those desirable residues (the seven Cs), and judge it by its success at producing young people who fit the bill. Are we turning out a lot of Rubies and not many Erics? Are they helpful to old ladies in the supermarket who can’t find the right money? Are they flourishing at university when the workload is a lot higher and the social safety net much weaker than they experienced at school? Are they able to have fun without becoming obnoxious or damaging their health (whether that be the arrogant posh boys of the Bullingdon Club trashing a country restaurant or local kids throwing up in a city centre on a Saturday night)?

  Exams are a proxy for those desired residues, and we should be asking whether they are capturing, as well as they can, the qualities of character and mind we think our children will need. Is a medical student’s performance in their examinations a good predictor of their clinical judgement or their bedside manner? (It isn’t.) Does a theology student’s level of moral reasoning, as measured on a test, correlate well with their actual honesty or kindness? (It doesn’t.) A motor mechanic may have passed her apprenticeship exams, but if her welds break up when your car goes over a pothole then we need to find a new test. The test of schooling is not whether you can do well at school – or even whether you enjoyed your schooldays – but whether what you have done has prepared you effectively for
something else: college, a job or life at large. Exams ought to do a reasonable job of predicting how someone actually functions in some context in the future. If they don’t, they just become self-referring and self-serving. If people disagree about schooling, rather than about education, then this is a technical matter. Empirically, are schools delivering the benefits they claim to? And are the instruments they use to assess how well they are working appropriate?

  The really important point to stress is that schools must always be trying to enhance young people’s capabilities in some way. Which particular capabilities they are aiming at is a question of values; but at root, schools must be aiming to help people do something better out of school or after schooling has finished. Knowledge that gives you no practical purchase on the physical and social worlds beyond school is pointless. For example, if university entrance depended on your ability to recite screeds of nonsensical poetry – stuff that you mugged up just for a three-hour memory test, and then was generally agreed to have no further use or interest at all – there would surely be an outcry about wasting children’s time and insulting their intelligence, and rightly so.

  What do children really need to learn?

  What Ruby and Eric teach us is that there is always a deeper agenda going on at school, which is about the cultivation of competence and character. It is what we called earlier the ‘other game’. On the surface, school may seem to be all about the content – learning about things like the chemical elements or the Tudors – and the grades. But, implicitly or explicitly, you are also learning to do things: to respond in certain ways when particular things show up. At primary school you learned to hang up your coat, wait your turn, clear up after yourself and ‘play nicely’. Gradually, as you move up, you learn to create a PowerPoint presentation, structure an essay, solve disputes and read your teacher’s mind. Ruby has learned to hold her head up, to value her own curiosity, to get on well with people of all kinds, to pay careful attention to what she is doing, to manage her time and think for herself. Nadezna and Eric have learned different habits. Nadezna has learned to be slapdash; she doesn’t know how to take pains over something or why she should. Eric has learned to respond to pressure by waiting to be rescued and reassured – and when he finds himself in a situation where that is not happening, he goes to pieces.

  School should provide children with knowledge about the major problems that the world is facing. But we never really got proper education about climate change and biodiversity loss and the energy crisis and the financial crisis, and all of these things that are affecting children as they become modern citizens and workers in the world. How can we possibly be the generation who tries to solve these problems if we’re not taught about them from an early age? I think that’s a really big problem that school should address … Instead, the school assumed that we all wanted to go to university, and that Oxbridge was right for everyone. They aren’t thinking about your true desires and embracing the uncertainty of life. They didn’t cater for us as individuals.

  What school didn’t equip me with was diversity – diversity of outlook, lifestyles, career choices. You need to be open-minded and flexible; you need to be willing to make yourself vulnerable, to really be able to connect with people, to really love them. For me school was: “You will do A levels, you will go to university, you will become a good citizen, you will have babies. The end.” School is such a closed little environment. I didn’t mentally mature until I left school. Even though I only left school last year, I feel I’ve learned so much about myself and my place in society. I’ve become a much more open-minded person in general. But I’m still worried that I won’t take enough risks, that I won’t go for things if the outcome is uncertain, that I won’t travel places. It’s easier to just slip into a comfortable job and group of friends. I don’t want to do that.

  Elsa, recently left an independent girls’ school

  At least as important as the accumulation of knowledge and understanding is the development of a range of useful real-world competences. A good part of education ought to be, we think, focused on making sure that young people can do a whole lot of things that they will very likely find useful. But what are the core competences for living safely, sociably and satisfyingly? Obviously, it will depend on the culture and circumstances into which you were born. But, broadly, can we pick out some general ‘competences for living’? Here are some candidates. They were generated in the context of a very exciting ‘global summit on education’ held at the Perimeter Institute, an elite physics lab in Waterloo, Canada, in October 2013.3 For five days, a group of around 30 young people from all around the world explored, with the help of some ‘experts’ (of which Guy was one) what the school of 2030 ought to look like. Here is one of the lists they came up with on 21st century competences:

  ● Self-protection – how to look after yourself, e.g. in strange or threatening situations.

  ● Inter-cultural – how to get along with folks different from yourself, e.g. empathy, tolerance.

  ● Finance – e.g. how to manage money, budgeting, protesting effectively about financial scandals.

  ● Sex – e.g. how to communicate verbally and non-verbally about needs, preferences and uncertainties, and about contraception; how to be sensual and sexual and sometimes wild.

  ● Manual/practical – e.g. how to use basic hand and power tools safely and appropriately.

  ● Science – how to engage with scientific discoveries, controversies and abuses, e.g. fracking, stem cell research; how to tell valid from bogus scientific claims – assessing evidence.

  ● Statistics – how to weigh up probabilities and operate intelligently in probabilistic situations, e.g. the risks of different medical treatments.

  ● Scepticism – how to spot sophistry and sloppy thinking in all areas of life.

  ● Talking – e.g. how to explain yourself clearly and confidently in all kinds of situations.

  ● Writing – how to write effectively in a variety of different ‘voices’, e.g. a business-like email, a love letter, a request for permission, a good story, a reflective journal.

  ● Reading – how to read in different ways and at different rates for different practical purposes and (very importantly) for pleasure.

  ● Navigation – how to orient yourself in space by using wind, compass, maps, geo-positioning gizmos, etc.

  ● Cookery – how to plan and make a nice meal from scratch.

  ● Horticulture – how to grow plants and plan a garden.

  ● Care – how to take care of creatures of all kinds and sizes, especially animals, babies and the elderly.

  ● Religion – how to find a non-exploitative setting for exploring deep questions and expressing honest experience.

  ● Relationships – how to behave graciously in company; how to help make collective decisions.

  ● Morality – how to behave well with other people, e.g. showing honesty, trustworthiness, integrity, moral courage, appreciation, generosity, forgiveness.

  ● Self-presentation – how to dress and groom yourself to achieve different purposes (e.g. an interview, a date) and for satisfying self-expression; clothes, hairstyle, jewellery, piercings, tattoos, etc.

  ● Driving – how to drive and look after a bicycle, a car, a motorbike, etc.

  ● Leisure – how to amuse yourself and find humour in situations without upsetting others.

  ● Fitness – how to choose and pursue forms of exercise that are fun and keep you fit.

  ● Relaxation – how to unwind after stress and release tension; positive kinds of ‘self-soothing’ and ‘self-talk’.

  ● Attention – how to stay focused and concentrated when needs be, and how to detect useful, often subtle, cues in your world such as other people’s non-verbal signals.

  ● Craftsmanship – how to be careful and accurate when needs be; how to produce your ‘best work’.

  As you read it, you might like to be mulling over these questions:

  ● W
hich of these do you think all youngsters ought to develop?

  ● Which do you think would happen without any special training or attention?

  ● Which are appropriate at what ages?

  ● Which do you think are appropriate/inappropriate matters for school?

  ● Which others would you want to add? Delete?

  You’ll immediately see there is a lot of ground for disagreement. But do you agree that this kind of competence has to be the starting point for thinking about what our children really need to be taught in the future? The group of young adults who thought up this list certainly thought so.

  Habits of mind

  This list of competences is a bit of a rag-bag. We could tidy it up somewhat by dividing it into two groups: what we might call skills – which are techniques that can be learned or trained quite explicitly – and what we will call habits of mind – which are more general tendencies to respond to events in a particular way. Solving simultaneous equations or making meringue is a skill. Handing in lost property or owning up when you have broken something are examples of a more general habit of mind called ‘honesty’. Many people are drawing attention to the importance of these more general habits of mind these days. If children are to grow up with the ability to thrive in a challenging and fast-changing world, they say, it is things like Ruby’s seven Cs that they are going to need. Two recent books provide comprehensive reviews of the research that shows how important these habits of mind are for success in life. They are How Children Succeed: Grit, Curiosity and the Hidden Power of Character by Paul Tough, and Ungifted: Intelligence Redefined by Scott Barry Kaufman.4 Ruby, with her resources of commitment and confidence – a feeling of being able to direct her own life, and to put in the disciplined effort to achieve her goals – will do better in life, in every way you can think of, than Nadezna.