Bullshit Jobs - Futurist, Thought Leader, Leader... if you call yourself this, you're most probably not

If you call yourself a 'Futurist', 'Thought Leader' even 'Leader', you're most probably not one. I keep coming across people at conferences and on social media that have these titles, yet have shallow theoretical and practical competences.
Futurists
I've lost count of the presentations I've seen that are merely anecdotes and examples culled from the internet with some general nonsense about how 65% of all primary school kids are being taught for jobs that don't yet exist, or some other quite from Einstein that, on inspection, he never said.
Let me give you some real examples. Two years ago, I went to speak at DevLearn in Las Vegas. Now one wants a keynote speaker to provide new, insightful thinking, but a guy called David Pogue did a second-rate Jim Carey act. His ‘look at these wacky things on the internet’ shtick was a predictable routine. Kids can play the recorder on their iPhone! No they don’t. Only a 50 year old who bills himself as a ‘futurist’ thinks that kids take this stuff seriously. 

At Devlearn, we also got a guy called Adam Savage. I had never heard of him, but he’s a famous TV presenter in the US who hosts a show called Mythbusters. He spent an hour trying to claim that art and science were really the same thing, as both were really (and here comes his big insight) – storytelling. The problem is that the hapless Adam knew nothing about science or art. It was trite, reductionist and banal. Then there was the speaker on workplace learning, at OEB last year, who used the totally made up “65% of kids… jobs that don’t exist” line.
My own view is that these conferences do need outsiders who can talk knowledgeably about learning and not just about observing their kids or delivering a thinly disguised autobiography. I want some real relevance. I’ve begun to tire of ‘futurists’ – they all seem to be relics from the past. 

Bullshit Jobs - the book

This is where David Graeber comes in. He’s written a rather fine book, called Bullshit Jobs, which identifies five types of jobs that he regards as bullshit. Graeber’s right, many people do jobs, that if they disappeared tomorrow, would make no difference to the world and may even make things simpler, more efficient and better. As a follow up to the Graeber book, YouGov did a poll and found 37% thought that their jobs did not contribute meaningfully to the world. I find that both astonishing and all too real. In my experience, worryingly true. So what are those bullshit jobs?

Box tickers

Some of Graeber's jobs largely orbit around the concept of self-worth. Graeber identifies box tickers as one huge growth area in Bullshit Jobs. Now we know what this is in most organisations, those that deliver over-engineered and almost immediately forgotten compliance training, that is mostly about protecting the organisation from their own employees or satisfying some mythical insurance risk. It keeps them busy but also prevents others from getting on with their jobs. They forget almost all of it anyway.

It also includes all of those jobs created around abstract concepts such as diversity, equality or some other abstract threat. The job titles are a dead giveaway Chief Imagination Officer, Life Coach… any title with future, life, innovation, leadership, creative, liaison, strategist, ideation, facilitator, diversity, equality and so on. All of this pimping of job titles, along with fancy new business cards, is a futile exercise in self and organisational deception. It keeps non-productive people in non-productive jobs. Who hasn’t come across the pointless bureaucracy of organisations. From the process of signing in at reception, to getting wifi and all sorts of other administrative baloney. But that is nothing compared to the mindless touting of mindfulness, NLP courses and other fanciful and faddish nonsense that HR peddles in organisations. Then there’s a layer of pretend measurement with useless Ponzi scheme tools such as Myers Briggs, unconscious bias courses, emotional intelligence, 21^stC skills and Kirkpatrick.

A second Graeber category is taskmasters, and he specifically targets middle management jobs and leadership professionals. Who doesn’t find themselves, at some point in the week doing something they know is pointless, instructed by someone whose job suggests pointless activity. The bullshit job boom has exploded in this area, with endless folk wanting to tell you that you’re a 'Leader’. You all need ‘Leadership training’ apparently, as everyone’s a Leader these days, rendering the meaning of the word completely useless. Stanford's Pfeffer nails this in his book Leadership is BS.
All of this comes at a cost. We have systematically downgraded jobs where people do real things, like plumbers, carpenters, carers, teachers, nurses and every other vocational occupation, paying them peanuts, while the rise of the robots, and I don’t mean technology, I mean purveyors of bullshit, all of those worthy middle-class jobs that pay people over the odds for being outraged on behalf of others. Leadership training has replaced good old-fashioned management training, abstractions replacing competences. Going to ‘Uni’ has become the only option for youngsters, often creating the expectation that they will go straight into bullshit jobs, managing others who do all most of the useful work.

I disagree with Graeber’s hypothesis that capitalism, and its engine the Protestant work ethic, leads to keeping people busy, just for the sake of being busy – business as busyness. I well remember the team leader in a summer job I had saying to me ‘listen just look busy… just pretend to be busy’. I felt like saying ‘You’re the boss, you pretend I’m busy’. Most of these bullshit jobs arise out of fear, the fear of being seen not to be progressive, the fear of regulation and litigation, the fear of not doing what everyone else is doing with a heavy does of groupthink.

We keep churning out these hopeless jobs in the hope that they will make the workplace more human, but all they do is dehumanise the workplace. They turn it into a place of quiet resentment and ridicule.

Geary - Evolution and education…

David Geary brings an obvious but often ignored theoretical influence to learning theory – evolution and evolutionary psychology. He claims in The origin of mind: Evolution of brain, cognition, and general intelligence that it is difficult to see learning theory without understanding that how we learn has been largely shaped by millions of years of evolution. This is why some things are easy to learn, others hard. 

Motivation and control

With the focus on primary and secondary learning, Geary’s beliefs on motivation and control are often overlooked. He believes that our motivations, intrinsic and sometimes extrinsic are also subject to evolutionary influence. Our natural tendency to be distracted and not focus for long periods on abstract knowledge makes teaching and learning difficult. Understanding motivation, control and attention is therefore important when understanding both teaching and study skills.

Folk psychology

Geary refers to folk psychology as your natural cognitive state, where you speak, listen, recognise faces, assume others have intentional minds, see some as kin, others as outside of your group. In a sense we do not ‘learn’ these abilities, they are universal and come naturally to all humans. The problem in learning, is that these intuitions often have to be replaced by counterintuitive knowledge, especially in science.

Folk biology

We also have a folk biology, natural knowledge about flora and fauna, what is good for us, possibly dangerous. He speculates that this formed the foundations for our scientific classifications until corrected by later evolutionary and genetic science. We make natural assumptions about other species and their natural environments. Sometimes this folk biology works against the teaching and learning of biology, especially evolution. Our natural focus is on the similarities across a species, yet it is variation and reproduction that drives evolution. Evolutionary theory runs counter to our natural intuitions.

Folk physics

Folk physics includes false notions of motion and other physical phenomena. The classic example is the common belief that, when thrown, objects such as balls or arrows have an internal ’impetus’ that drives them forward. Newtonian physics showed this to be false. This belief in ‘impetus’ inhibits the teaching and learning of forces and natural laws that show ‘impetus’ to be a fiction. It quite simply does not exist. This folk physics can persist to prevent understanding of centrifugal forces and other beliefs such as flight using aircraft wings.

Primary and secondary learning

Geary’s theories have consequences for practice. Primary learning constantly interferes or inhibits secondary learning. Take discovery learning. Left to their own devices children are likely to stay within their primary learning mode when problem solving so be unable t0 deal with new situations. One has to guide or change those primary motivations and beliefs to learn new skills.

Most education and training involves secondary learning. It means making the effort to overcome our natural primary motivations and beliefs. This is also true in learning theory, where we have a tendency to default to primary motivations and theories, rather than look to sometimes counterintuitive theories, such as spaced practice, interleaving and retrieval practice, to effect efficient secondary learning.

Influence

In the rush to see all learning as social and environmental and to deny pre-existing genetic (read evolutionary) influences, biology is often ignored. Geary brings evolution and biology back into play as not only an explanation for why we learn some thins with ease but have difficulty with others. His primary-secondary distinction is a useful underlying theory as it is both explanatory and guides us identifying false assumptions in learners as well as a framework for instruction.

Bibliography

Geary, D. C. (1995). Reflections of evolution and culture in children’s cognition: Implications for mathematical development and instruction. American Psycholo- gist, 50, 24-37. 

Geary, D. C. (1998). Male, female: The evolution of human sex differences. Washing- ton, DC: American Psychological Association. 

Geary, D. C. (2001). A Darwinian perspective on mathematics and instruction. In T. Loveless (Ed.), The great curriculum debate: How should we teach reading and math? (pp. 85-107). Washington, DC: Brookings Institute. 

Geary, D. C. (2002a). Principles of evolutionary educational psychology. Learning and Individual Differences, 12, 317-345. 

Geary, D. C. (2002b). Sexual selection and human life history. In R. Kail (Ed.), Advances in child development and behavior (Vol. 30, pp. 41-101). San Diego: Academic press. 

Geary, D. C. (2005). The origin of mind: Evolution of brain, cognition, and general intelligence. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association. 

Geary, D. C., & Bjorklund, D. F. (2000). Evolutionary developmental psychology. Child Development, 71, 57-65. 

Geary, D. C., Byrd-Craven, J., Hoard, M. K., Vigil, J., & Numtee, C. (2003). Evolution and development of boys’ social behavior. Developmental Review, 23, 444 -470. 

Geary, D. C., & Flinn, M. V. (2001). Evolution of human parental behavior and the human family. Parenting: Science and Practice, 1, 5-61. 

Geary, D. C., & Huffman, K. J. (2002). Brain and cognitive evolution: Forms of modularity and functions of mind. Psychological Bulletin, 128, 667-698. 

Year of learning dangerously – my 15 highs and lows of 2018

So 2018 is behind us. I look back and think… what really happened, what changed? I did a ton of talks over the year in many countries to different types of audiences, teachers, trainers, academics, investors and CEOs. I wrote 65 blogs and a huge number of Tweets and Facebook posts. Also ran an AI business, WildFire, delivering online learning content and we ended the year nicely by winning a major Award. 

So this is not a year end summary nor a forecast for 2019. It’s just a recap on some of the weirder things that happened to me in the world of ‘learning’…

1. Agile, AI-driven, free text learning

As good a term as I can come up with for what I spent most of my year doing and writing about, mostly on the back of AI, and real projects delivered to real clients of AI-generated award winning content, superfast production times and a new tool in WildFire that gets learners to use free-text, where we use AI (semantic analysis) as part of the learning experience. Our initial work shows that this gives huge increases in retention. That is the thing I’m most proud of this year.

2. Video is not enough

Another breakthrough was a WildFire tool that takes any learning video and turns it into a deeper learning experience by taking the transcript and applying AI, not only to create strong online learning but also use the techniques developed above to massively increase retention. Video is rarely enough on its own. It's great at attitudinal learning, processes, procedures and for things that require context and movement. But is it poor at detail and semantic knowledge and has relatively poor retention. This led to working with a video learning company to do just that, as 2+2 = 5.

3. Research matters

I have never been more aware of the lack of awareness on research on learning and online learning than I was this year. At several conferences across the year I saw keynote speakers literally show and state falsehoods that a moments searching on Google would have corrected. These were a mixture of futurists, purveyors of ‘c’ words like creativity and critical thinking and the usual snakeoil merchants. What I did enjoy was giving a talk at the E-learning network on this very topic, where I put forward the idea that interactive design skills will have to change in the face of new AI tech. Until we realise that a body of solid research around effortful learning, illusory learning (learners don’t actually know how they learn or how they should learn), interleaving, desirable difficulties, spaced practice, chunking and so on… we’ll be forever stuck in click-through online learning, where we simply skate across the surface. It led me to realise that almost everything we've done in online learning may now be dated and wrong.

4. Hyperbolic discounting and nudge learning

Learning is hard and suffers from its consequences lying to far in the future for learners to care. Hyperbolic discounting explains why learning is so inefficient but also kicks us into realising that we need to counter it with some neat techniques, such as nudge learning. I saw a great presentation on this in Scotland, where I spoke at the excellent Talent Gathering.

5. Blocked by Tom Peters

The year started all so innocently. I tweeted a link to an article I wrote many moons ago about Leadership and got the usual blowback from those making money from, you guessed it, Leadership workshops.. one of whom praised In Search of Excellence. So I wrote another piece showing that this and another book Good to great, turned out to be false prophets, as much of what they said turned out to be wrong and the many of the companies they heralded as exemplars went bust. More than this I thought that the whole ‘Leadership’ industry in HR had le, eventually to the madness of Our Great Leader, and my namesake, Donald Trump. In any case Tom Peters of all people came back at me and after a little rational tussle – he blocked me. This was one of my favourite achievements of the year.

6. Chatting about chatbots

Did a lot of talks on chatbots this year, after being involved with Otto at Learning Pool (great to see them winning Company of the Year at the Learning technologies Awards), building one of my own in WildFire and playing around with many others, like Woebot. They’re coming of age and have many uses in learning. And bots like Google’s Duplex, are glimpses into an interesting future based on more dialogue than didactic learning. My tack was that they are a natural and frictionless form of learning. We’re still coming to terms with their possibilities.

7. Why I fell out of love with Blockchain

I wrote about blockchain, I got re-married on Blockchain, I gave talks on Blockchain, I read a lot about Blockchain… then I spoke at an event of business CEOs where I saw a whole series of presentations by Blockchain companies and realised that it was largely vapourware, especially in education. Basically, I fell out of love with Blockchain. What no one was explaining were the downsides, that Blockchain had become a bit of a ball and chain.

8. And badges…

It’s OK to change your mind on things and in its wake I also had second thoughts on the whole ‘badges’ thing. This was a good idea that failed to stick, and the movement had run its course. I outlined the reasons for its failure here.

9. Unconscious bias my ass

The most disappointing episode of the year was the faddish rush towards this nonsense. What on earth gave HR the right to think that they could probe my unconscious with courses on ‘unconscious bias’. Of course, they can’t and the tools they’re using are a disgrace. This is all part of the rush towards HR defending organisations AGAINST their own employees. Oh, and by the way, those ‘wellness’ programmes at work – they also turned out to be waste of time and money.

10. Automated my home

It all started with Alexa. Over the months I’ve used it as a hub for timers (meals in oven, Skype calls, deadline), then for music (Amazon music), then the lights, and finally the TV. In the kitchen we have a neat little robot that emerges on a regular basis to clean the ground floor of our house. It does its thing and goes back to plug itself in and have a good sleep. We also have a 3D printer which we’re using to make a 3D drone… that brings me to another techy topic – drones.

11. Drones

I love a bit of niche tech and got really interested in this topic (big thanks to Rebecca, Rosa and Veronique) who allowed me to attend the brilliant E-learning Africa and see Zipline and another drone company in Rwanda (where I was bitch-slapped by a Gorilla but that, as they say, is another story). On my return I spoke about Drones for Good at the wonderful Battle of Ideas in London (listen here). My argument, outlined here, was that drones are not really about delivering pizzas and flying taxis, as that will be regulated out in the developed world. However, they will fly in the developing world. Then along came the Gatwick incident….

12. Graduation

So I donned the Professorial Gown, soft Luther-like hat and was delighted to attend the graduation of hundreds of online students at the University of Derby, with my friends Julie Stone and Paul Bacsich. At the same time I helped get Bryan Caplan across from the US to speak at Online Educa, where he explained why HE is in some trouble (mostly signalling and credential inflation) and that online was part of the answer. 

13. Learning is not a circus and teachers are not clowns

The year ended with a rather odd debate at Online Educa in Berlin, around the motion that “All learning should be fun”. Now I’m as up for a laugh as the next person. And to be fair, Elliot Masie’s defence of the proposition was laughable. Learning can be fun but that’s not really the point. Learning needs effort. Just making things ‘fun’ has led to the sad sight of clickthrough online learning. It was the prefect example of experts who knew the research, versus, deluded sellers of mirth.

14. AI

I spent a lot of time on this in 2018 and plan to spend even more time in 2019. Why? Beneath all the superficial talk about Learning Experiences and whatever fads come through… beneath it allies technology that is smart and has already changed the world forever. AI has and will change the very nature of work. It will, therefore change why we learn, what we learn and how we learn. I ended my year by winning a Learning technologies award with TUI (thanks Henri and Nic) and and WildFire. We did something ground breaking – produced useful learning experiences, in record time, using AI, for a company that showed real impact.

15. Book deal

Oh and got a nice book deal on AI – so head down in 2019.

Could this be the worst piece of online learning ever? Let me explain why it may well be…

PewDiePie is a legend among his 65 million YouTube followers. He lives in my home town, Brighton, and has built his reputation on videos that praise, review and sometimes eviscerate games. Unusually, this piece of US gamified, elearning was his target and he nails it.

I’ve written a lot about how online learning has gone down a rabbit hole, with its overworked media, all presentation and no learning, reliance on recognition not retrieval (MCQs), and sometimes (not always) ridiculous use of games and gamification. This is a hilarious example of condescending scenarios, awful multiple-choice questions, interspersed with screens full of text, even a game within a game. It’s so bad it’s good – as comedy.

Seriously though, it has all the hallmarks of where the online content market has gone wrong. I can only guess what this cost the client – but it was most likely a high five or even six figure sum.

Look and feel

Let’s be honest, hard to pull off, but it both looks and feels awful. Not sure where the art direction came from but it’s all over the place. I’ve come to loathe this cartoon style learning. I find it condescending and patronising in equal measure but this is what happens when you slam together disparate media, from 3D animation to clip art to screens crammed with text. It’s a mess.

Media rich is not mind rich

It tries SO hard to be engaging with 3D animated characters but they are straight out of the clip-art, cliché playbook. Then the animated effects that slide, whoosh and pop up like a disjointed, surreal dream. We need to sit our teams of content designers down, and scream out the simple principle – LESS IS MORE. We have decades of research showing that all of this ‘noise’ inhibits, not enhances, learning.

Multiple-choice

The questions are, at times, mind-blowingly bad. Multiple-choice questions are difficult to write but they could have made the effort. You end up just clicking through or laughing at some of the ridiculous options. 

Gamification

This is where it really goes up its own asshole. So determined are they to gamify everything, they completely destroy the learning. It’s clearly a game designed by someone who has no knowledge of actual computer games. You get a lot of this in online learning companies. So bad is the media mix and rewards, that it is truly hilarious. But nothing prepares you for the ‘millionaire’ game within a game, doubling down on the use of trite gamification. It’s not that all gamification is bad but so much is this badly executed, Pavlovian nonsense.

Conclusion

How can I sum this up. It should be compulsory to show this, in ALL instructional design courses, as an example of how NOT to design learning. If you get to the very end look out for the hilarious point where he downloads his PDF pass certificate and PewDiePie says, it’s a ‘virus’. It is so surreal that it could pass for a deliberate piss take. When online learning has come to this, you know it’s time for a rethink. Enough already with the graphics and grotesque gamification. It’s embarrassing. Stop. Slow down. Keep it simple. This is what used to be called edutainment but it is neither edunor tainment, it is the ugly cul-de-sac of an industry that has abandoned learning for crap media production.

6 reasons why we don't need ‘mentors’

I’ve never had a mentor. I don’t want a mentor. I don’t like mentoring. I know this is swimming against the tide of liberal orthodoxy but I value liberal values more than I value fads, groupthink or orthodoxy. But there’s many reasons why I’m both suspicious of and reject mentoring.

1. Fictional constructs

Mentor was a character in Homer’s The Odyssey and it is often assumed that his role was one of a guiding, experienced hand for his son and family. This is false. Mentor was simply an old acquaintance, ill-qualified play a protective role to his family, and worse, turned out to be a patsy for a hidden force, the God Athena. A similar tale has unfolded in recent times, with mentoring being revived on the back of late 19^th century psychoanalytic theory, where the original theory has been abandoned but the practice upon which it is based survives.

There is another later work of fiction that resurrected the classical model as a source for the word ‘mentor’ in education, Fenelon’s Les Adventures de Telemaque (1699). This is a tale about limiting the excesses of a king but it did reinforce the presence of the word ‘mentor’ in both French, then English. Yet Mentor in this ponderous novel is prone to didactic speeches about how a king should rule (aided by the aristocracy), hardly the egalitarian text one would expect to spark a revolution in education. Interestingly, it pops up again as one of two books given to Emile in the novel of the same name, by Rousseau.

2. Psychoanalytic veneer

Mentoring came out of the psychanalytic movement in education with Freud and Rogers. Nothing survives of Freud’s theories on the mind, education, dreams, humour or anything else for that matter. But Rogers is different. His legacy is more pernicious, like pollution seeping into the water table. His work has resulted in institutional practice that has hung around many decades after the core theories have been abandoned. We need to learn how to abandon practice when the theories are defunct.

3. Mentoring is a trap

As Homer actually showed, one person is not enough. To limit your path, in work or life, to one person is to be feeble when it comes to probability. Why choose one person (often that person is chosen for you) when there are lots of good people out there. It stands to reason that a range of advice on a range of diverse topics (surely work and life are diverse) needs a range of expertise. Spread your network, speak to a range and variety of people. Don’t get caught in one person’s spider’s web. Mentoring is a trap.

4.  People, social media, books etc. are better

You don’t need a single person, you need advice and expertise. That is to be found in a range of resources. Sure, a range of people can do the job and hey - the best write books. Books are cheap, so buy some of the best and get reading. You can do it where and when you want and they’re written by the world’s best, not just the person who has been chosen in your organisation or a local life coach. And if you yearn for that human face, try video – TED and YouTube – they’re free! I’d take a portion of the training budget and allow people to buy from a wide reading list, arther than institute expensive mentoring programmes. Then there's socil media a rich source of advice and guidance provided daily. This makes people more self-reliant, rather than being infantalised.

5. Absence of proof

Little (1990:297) warned us, on mentoring, that, “relative to the amount of pragmatic activity, the volume of empirical enquiry is small [and]... that rhetoric and action have outpaced both conceptual development and empirical warrant.”  This, I fear, is not unusual in the learning world.

Where such research is conducted the results are disappointing. Mentors are often seen as important learning resources in teacher education and in HE teaching development. Empirical research shows, however, that the potential is rarely realised (Edwards and Protheroe, 2003: 228; Boice, 1992: 107). The results often reveal low level "training" that simply instruct novices on the "correct" way to teach (Handal and Lauvas, 1988: 65; Hart-Landsberg et al., 1992: 31). Much mentoring has been found to be rather shallow and ineffective (Edwards, 1998: 55-56).

6. Fossilised practice

Practice gets amplified and proliferates through second-rate train the trainer and teacher training courses, pushing orthodoxies long after their sell-by, even retirement, date. Mentoring has become a lazy option and alternative for hard work, effort, real learning and reflection. By all means strive to acquire knowledge, skills and competences, but don’t imagine that any of this will come through mentoring.

Conclusion: get a life, not a coach

I know that many of you will feel uncomforted by these arguments but work and life are not playthings. It’s your life and career, so don’t for one minute imagine that the HR department has the solutions you need. Human resources is there to protect organisations from their employees, so is rarely either human or resourceful. Stay away from this stuff if you really want to remain independently human and resourceful.

English translation of Les Adventures de Telemaque https://archive.org/stream/adventuresoftele00fene#page/41/mode/thumb

Little, J.W. (1990) ‘The Mentor Phenomenon and the Social Organisation of Teaching’, in: Review of Research in Education. Washington D.C: American Educational Research Association.

Warhurst R (2003)Learning to lecture Paper presented at the British Educational Research Association Annual Conference, Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh.

http://www.leeds.ac.uk/educol/documents/00003330.htm

Erikson (1902 – 1994) lifelong identity crises, 8 stages

Eric Erikson a German psychoanalyst and psychologist, spent most of his working life in the US. He expanded Freud’s childhood developmental theory, well beyond the first few years of life, into a lifelong development theory of identity, with an emphasis on the adolescent ‘identity crisis’ and the role of the ego.

Eight stages

Inessence, Eriskson’s advice is that internal conflicts occur at each of his eight stages in life. If one fails to resolve the crises that arise, they can adversely affect the later stages in one’s life.

Stage 1: Trust vs. Mistrust (Oral-sensory, Birth-0-2)

The Oral Sensory Stage, requires the development of trust through the maternal relationship and if this bond is not fulfilled may lead to a sense of rejection or worthlessness.

Stage 2: Autonomy v Shame & Doubt (Muscular-Anal, 2-4)

Autonomy develops as we go through the ‘terrible two’s and we affirm our ability to defy, walk and talk, with an emphasis on toilet training. Here we overcome shame.

Stage 3: Initiative v Guilt (Locomotor-Genital, Preschool, 4-5)

Pre-school involves initiative overcoming guilt through play, imagination and mimicking adults.

Stage 4: Industry v Inferiority (Latency, 5-12)

At school, the child must develop self-identity and self-worth within the context of a new environment, through industry, to overcome a sense of inferiority. Education kicks in here as the teacher must, like the parent, engender a sense of worth.

Stage 5: Identity v Role Confusion (Adolescence, 13-19)

The big one, where roles are confused until identity is established. The tables are turned as we have to rely on ourselves, rather than others for our identity. This can lead to idealism at the expense of realism.

Stage 6: Intimacy v Isolation (Young adulthood, 20-24, or 20-40)

We’re into adulthood where intimacy overcomes isolation through love, friendship and possibly marriage.

Stage 7: Generativity v Stagnation (Middle adulthood, 25-64, or 40-64)

One develops a career and purpose in life, as well as taking on the role of a parent and carer. One’s sense of purpose can stagnate into regret or be generative.

Stage 8: Ego Integrity v Despair (Late adulthood, 65-death)

One looks back with either a sense of disappointment, even despair, or a positive outlook with a sense of worth and wisdom, as one face s death.

Criticism

He knew Freud’s daughter Anna and took Freud’s basic theory, modified it, with more emphasis on the ‘ego’ and less on sexuality. But Erikson’s schema suffers from being primarily descriptive, with little evidence to back up the underlying pairs of conflicting forces. His evidence is loose and anecdotal, relying too much looking at the lives of a few famous people from the past. His paired conflicts have been criticised as being oversimplifications, dualist in nature, if not moralistic in tone. There is also doubt about the age ranges and whether all of this occurs in such a rigid, sequential order.

Conclusion

Erikson has been influential not only among early years’ practitioners but also among those who study adolescence. ‘Identity crisis’ has entered our language as a general term for confusion about the self. Nevertheless, in the end, it is a reframing of the Freudian concept of the ‘ego’, driven forward by dualist conflict. What Erikson does is draw attention to the different needs of people at roughly different stages of their lives. Education and learning are heavily influenced by internal conflicts and external social pressures. Whether we need Erikson’s precise staged, theoretical framework is another question.

Bibliography

Erikson E. (1950) Childhood and Society

Erikson E. (1958) Young Man Luther. A Study in Psychoanalysis and History

Erikson E. (1968) Identity: Youth and Crisis

Erikson E. (1969) Gandhi's Truth: On the Origin of Militant Nonviolence

Erikson E. Kivnick H. (1986) Vital Involvement in Old Age

Erikson E. Erikson J.M. (1987) The Life Cycle Completed

Coles, R. (1970) Erik H. Erikson: The Growth of His Work. Boston: Little, Brown & Co.

I'm a Celebrity let me fix your education system!

I took part in a debate on ‘What should be taught in our schools?’ in London last night - a strange affair as the audience were a bunch of unashamedly snobbish toffs. You could tell at a glance the Toby Young/Katherine Birbalsingh acolytes. Fair enough, it was her book launch.

I was the final speaker and having heard a stream of unpleasant attacks on working class kids, decided to abandon my planned speech and go on the offensive. I was pretty annoyed by Toby and Katherine’s torrent of elitist anecdotes and the usual right wing obsessions with Latin and Shakespeare. But what annoyed me most of all was the assault, by both, on vocational training and working class kids in particular. People were actually braying ‘Hear hear’ or what sounded like 'Hair hair' in those awful 'aspirational' accents, whenever they launched their petty attacks on kids who were learning how to be hairdressers, plumbers or work in hospitality. Toby Young was straightforwardly racist in his caricaturing of these kids, fair enough, he's as bald as a coot, so he has an excuse for not knowing much about the art of dressing hair but these are the people who serve him and his ilk in restaurants and fix up their homes, as men like him are usually as hapless in real world tasks as they are arrogant in dismmissing those who know about such things. I was, furious.

My response

In any case, this was my response. First, I ponted out that something odd has happened to the education debate. It’s become cool for Oxbridge types to bellow out their superiority (they always mention within a few minutes that they went to Oxford or Cambridge) and to see the state system as largely dysfunctional. They start with a deficit model that caricatures students as feral, teachers as feckless and head teachers as foolish liberals. They parrot this pathological view of the state system.

Why does this happen? Because the education debate has a habit of descending into late night middle-class, dinner-party talk; all anecdotes and bitching. As if we didn’t have enough on our plate with the direct assault on the state system by Ministers, the debate has been further hijacked by D-list celebrities, wannabes, actresses and a TV chef. The D-list celeb Toby Young, wannabe (Katherine Birbalsingh), actress (Joanna Lumley) and TV chef (Jamie Oliver), who in turn has rolled in a bunch of minor TV celebs to show us how it should be done. We have nothing to learn from these people, absolutely nothing. Why? Because they are devoid of ideas. It’s all criticism, platitudes and anecdotes. The plural of anecdote is not data.

Toby Young is obsessed with Latin. Once again, he trotted out a set of ridiculous claims and anecdotes about why Latin should be compulsory in schools. But as I’ve posted enough on this subject, with a full set of evidence against these claims, let’s put that to one side. His only other real claim was that Marc Zuckenburg was a classicist and that, apparently, was why he was one of the richest men in the world. Really! Brin and Page of Google and Besoz of Amazon, all went to Montessori schools, do my three entrepreneurs trump yours Toby? This is just crap causality. I repeat, the plural of anecdote is not data. I think what annoyed him most was me calling him a D-list celeb - but he's worse ahn this, he's a D-level thinker in education and downright nasty and racist towards the poor.

TV Chef thinks education is a risotto

I also had a go at the the Jamie Oliver nonsense, a TV chef, putting a curriculum together as if it were a recipe for a risotto. (I’ve submitted a brilliant idea to Channel 4; Rick Stein, now he can fillet a good fish, why not have him head up surgery for the NHS?) Was there anything more dispiriting than watching the pompous David Starkey start his lesson by saying to his class, “You are all here because you failed.” Then without the lad saying anything, Starkey pointed to Conor and said, “Come on you’re so fat you couldn’t move… With Jamie’s food there’ll be lots of dieting opportunities”. I would have applauded Conor if he had simply marched up and decked him. “You think it’s funny making jokes about me” replied Conor, rightly seething with resentment. As it was, Conor simply gave as good as he got and after the class was lucid and reasonable. “He didn’t even know my name”. Two girls after the class, got it spot on about Starkey, “He’s a bit rude.” He is more than rude, he’s a pompous, old snob who then had the cheek to write a stinging article about these young people and the state system in the Telegraph, showing his true colour. He had no remorse, because he’s a megalomaniac who can’t teach, “I have nothing but contempt for the new-style head teachers…gives you a sense of why things have gone so wrong in state education”. Typical of Starkey, everyone’s to blame but himself.

Simon Callow gets irony bypass

Simon Callow then threw Shakespeare at them, or rather some confusing and ambiguous questions, that got predictably confusing answers. When he asked them who they’d like to be in life, he didn’t like it when they mentioned Bill Gates and Katy Price. Then, suffering from a serious loss of irony, blamed ‘celebrity culture’ for the downfall in education! He can hold the attention of a paying audience, but not a roomful of kids. He was, well, hopeless. I loved the feisty girl’s final comment, “He can’t help the way he talks”. At the debate last night the headmaster from Winchester was similarly obsessed by Shakespeare. Then in rolls Rolf Harris. Good start but was too busy doing his own thing and didn’t spend enough time with the kids. He just looked lost. Robert Winston took a chainsaw to a dead pig (budget no object in this schools), but the kids saw right through his theatrical antics. Ellen McCarthur, had the advantage of a 30 foot yacht. Now how many state schools have or have access to a yacht? And next week we have Mary Beard, teaching, you’ve guessed it – Latin. This whole idea is way out of hand and nothing to do with the real world .

Inner-city London skews

Toby and Katherine are the poster boy and poster girl for these attacks on the state of state education. Note that all of them, bar none, live and work in London. The only common denominator is this ‘inner-London angst’ that every middle-class Londoner has about schools. But there’s a problem here. Inner London is not representative of the state sector as a whole.

First we have the richer kids creamed off into the public schools, second, you have the faith schools, set up to educate the poor, but largely taken over as the sharp elbows of the middle class get to work, even lying about their faith, to get in. So, as the evidence shows, from the LSE and Institute of Education, they achieve what they achieve through selection. Around 65% of Westminster’s secondary schools are faith based but the national average is only 17% and it’s less than 5% in many other areas of England. The net result is extreme social sorting. These are inner London skews.

On top of this we have an editorial class who also live in inner London and have exactly the same concerns. Toby and Katherine have no trouble in getting on radio and TV or into print, because the TV folk and journalists all live in London, and have the same worries about their kids, You can read it between the lines, the barely disguised fear of young black kids and a barely disguised fear of working class culture. In an interesting faux pas, Mary Beard revealed that neither she nor Jamie Oliver had suggested Latin, it was a member of the production team who was an Oxbridge classicist.

We’ve even had Joanna Lumley, only two days ago on the BBC, telling us how to run our schools, her only educational credentials; the Lucie Clayton Charm Academy, a finishing school and ’modelling’ agency for girls. At least it was vocational. This isn’t some ab fab, celebrity author, TV chef debate. It’s a serious business with serious outcomes and needs. And don’t think it’s not having an effect.

Bad news

We end up robbing the Building Schools for the Future budget, launched in 2004, to pay for Toby’s schools of the past. A decision now judged to have been an ‘abuse of power’.

We end up recommending Latin as a compulsory subject in our schools despite the fact that the evidence points to it NOT doing what many claim it does. It doesn’t help you learn other languages, it’s a hindrance.

We end up with a class-based attack on vocational learning, long the great apartheid fracture in the English system, Rather than listen to Tomlinson we relegated vocational subjects to Diplomas and the whole thing collapsed – again. Toby and Katherine regret the fact that we teach vocational subjects in schools. In one disgusting incident Toby had a go at BTECs in hospitality and hairdressing, and oh how the coiffured, restaurant-fed ,well-to-do ladies in the front row laughed and shouted, ‘hear, hear’. It was unabashed snobbery at its worst.

Education policy should NOT be skewed by a self-selecting group of inner London types who have their own idiosyncratic concerns, backed up by an editorial class that has the same concerns. In my lifetime, we’ve seen the creation of the abolition of the 11+, that most brutal of segregation policies, the raising of the school leaving age to 16 (remember this only happened in 1972), the rise in University participation from 12% when I went to University to 45% in just this year, higher staying on rates in schools. We’ve had the Open University, Learndirect’s 2.8 million learners, both offering ‘second chances’. This is real progress. It’s not perfect but it’s progress.

PS To Miss with Love

This was Katherine’s book launch and at the end she read out a strange passage from the book that was a long rambling exchange between her and a pupil, who for some weird reason called ‘Munchkin’. Katherine has a habit of demonising the children she has taught by giving them names like ‘Gruesome’. Those at the LWF conference heard her rant against this particular student for a full half hour. As Stephen Heppell said when he took the stage “I was beginning to feel quite sorry for poor Gruesome”. And that’s her problem. For all her claims to love teaching and the state system, she is, at heart, someone who does a lot of talking and not much listening.

The whole book is written in a faux-novella style, a confusion of fact and fiction (She even makes up a husband in the book, who doesn’t exist in real life.). And maybe this is the problem. Journalists have not warmed to her because she’s so dogmatic and seems to rely on nothing more than autobiographical anecdotes. Like David Starkey, she blames everyone (Fiona Miller got a booting in her speech) and everything but herself for the problems. It wasn’t her fault that the school she taught at imploded, as prospective parents fled the scene after her Conservative Party Speech. The main problem is her outrageous claims that the state system has collapsed. This is so extreme, as to be laughable. But it was a view held by many of the people in the room last night. To be honest, I’m not sure that she’s cut out for teaching. She has this bi-polar tendency to proclaim love in one sentence then follow it up with downright bile and hatred in the next.

10 lessons learnt at WISE in Doha

Loved the speedy little birds that darted back and forth in front of the speakers and across the heads of the crowd at the WISE conference in Doha, Qatar. A good omen, as Twitter was to prove pretty useful. Symptomatic of the old world versus the new was the constant reminders to ‘switch off your mobiles’. How are we meant to tweet and collaborate, if not through the technology? For those Twitter sceptics – remember that this was how many who couldn’t get to Doha knew what was happening.

This culture clash surfaced time and time again at the conference, characterised by 10 Manichean oppositions;

1. Monologue v dialogue

2. Global v local

3. Private v public

4. Closed v open

5. Teaching v learning

6. Religious v secular

7. Old practice V new science

8. Assessment v attainment

9. Horizontal v vertical

10. 20^th C v 21^st C.

Contention is good, and perhaps we could redefine the dialogue next year by having these oppositions as themes, to stimulate debate and discussion and a forward looking dynamic.

1. Monologue v dialogue

Nima, our earnest BBC host for the next three days was being very ‘presenterish’ with lots of pregnant pauses. I personally think she’d be better off not using a script fed through an earpiece, as it makes her sound inauthentic. I met her later, and she’s quite informal and good fun. This is, perhaps, the problem with education, all too often a series of earnest, didactic monologues, rather than dialogues. But I liked her “Who dares teach must never cease to learn”.

The format of educational conferences, with their endless speeches from the great and the good is a bit tired. Are future problems really going to be solved through lectures - or discussion? Don’t get me wrong, this was a great event, but the real action was among the hundreds of amazing delegates, rather than the speakers. Too many simply read from notes or described their own pet projects. Few addressed global problems head-on.

Nima introduced a stellar series of video introductions including Kofi Annan, Nancy Pelosi, Ellen MacArthur and others, with lots of effusive congratulations on winning 2022 FIFA World Cup bid. This would remain a three day theme, although I’m not sure what it has to do with education. Although, as I was staying in Zidenine Zidane’s room in the ‘W’ Hotel, an almost religious experience, I didn’t mind. If education were as popular as football, we’d be pleased as punch. In any case, the Qatar 2022 win was a real force for good among 1.3 billion people in the Islamic world.

Lessons learnt 1: More dialogue not monologue

Encourage people to use their mobiles and Twitter, don’t let speakers read from written scripts, have more head to head debates, more organised discussions.

2. Global v Local

Martin Burt, from Paraguay, laid siege to the idea that traditional schooling was suitable for the majority of the world’s poor. Just building schools is not the solution – people LEAVE schools and drop out of schools. How is quality education to be funded when governments lack resources? You can’t just say give us more money. Money in education has doubled but results not doubled. Too many children just get ‘schooled’ then leave into a life of poverty. They aren’t taught the skills they really need to improve their lives. He wanted to inject entrepreneurial spirit back into school by linking the curriculum to work and business start-ups. Learn maths so that you can understand a break-even point.

In Paraguay, a vocational school built by aid was closed down as the government wouldn’t pay for teachers. They turned around this school by delivering entrepreneurial and vocational skills. Students learn how to DO things; how to deal with public, set up shops, manufacture jam, do the maths for breakeven points. This addresses relevancy, motivation and aspiration – hence the zero dropout. It appeals to the dignity of the poor people they serve. They learn to earn.

Now he has a point, but as many delegates pointed out, the model can’t be used across education a whole. The point is not to turn everyone into ‘little capitalists’.

For example, the Chinese government are investing massively in online for science and technology by 2020. Innovation matters through pedagogical reforms. 100 key academic higher institutions have been identified as the key to China’s development, as they need high quality human capital. We saw examples from Haiti, New Orleans, Pakistan, Denmark, UK, Africa – all with different needs and political contexts.

The lesson here is not to blindly import models from one system to another. I spoke to a guy in Guatemala who described Mormon archaeology and US Christian education in Mayan ruins, hugely resented by the local Mayan population. Another delegate, from rural Brazil, thought Burt’s ideas were OK but no real solution for education as a whole in most countries.

The lessons learnt from post-Katrina New Orleans, were that the trauma of disaster had become the catalyst for change. He saw education as a marathon not a sprint. Good line, I thought, but it’s mostly a treadmill. Similarly in the presentation from Haiti, where a new approach is arising like a Phoenix from the ashes of disaster. In both cases, the previous systems were moribund and broken. Only time will tell, whether these newer approaches, involving Charter Schools and fresh government policies will work.

Lesson learnt 2: Global v local – one size doesn’t fit all

There is no ‘one size fits all’ model for either funding or curriculum choices. It depends on the political, economic and cultural context.

3. Private v Public

Strong voices were heard from the private sector lobby, some of whom (Microsoft, CISCO) has sponsored the conference, about the failure of the public sector to deliver. We heard from the World Bank about Human Capital Banking. Yes, I felt more than a little disgust at the term. His idea was to raise money through a Global Education Bond, like carbon trading. My doubts include the political stance the World Bank takes in these circumstances. However, if it could be offset against debt, we may get somewhere.

But, as one delegate stated from the floor, we must move beyond this simple private v public argument. The private sector has just been bailed out by the public sector. If education is the way out of the current crisis why did crisis start in most educated countries? What went wrong in those top Universities & business schools? We were led astray by a highly educated elite. Education could be accused of causing the problem.

3. Lesson learnt: Private v Public – it’s not a war

Both sides have their faults, and in reality education is, and should be, a mixed economy. Above all, it should match the goals it sets and not be overly politicised.

4. Closed v Open

Imagine a future where there’s access to free education and resources for everyone. A future where learning and assessment are free. A future free from institutional protectionism. Education is largely delivered through formal instruction in expensive institutions; schools, colleges, Universities etc. Contrast this with the way we actually access knowledge in the real world; Google, Wikipedia, YouTube, OER.

We’ve had 3 generations of open learning, the attempt to open education up to new people, places, methods and ideas. Gen 1: No entry qualifications – the massification of education through print/radio/TV. Gen 2: Web, blended and flexible approaches. Open access. Gen 3: OER – open resources – knowledge a public good. Initiatives include: CORE – China, LIPHEA – East Africa, OER Africa, JOCW Japan, The Vietnam Foundation, Virtual University for Small States of the Commonwealth, Open Learn.. OER promises much more than it currently delivers in terms of shaking up the status quo.

Cecilia d’Olivera Exec Director of MIT Opencourseware explained that OER is more than traditional course materials, it’s also online textbooks, online lectures, online games, complete online courses, software, virtual labs. But at heart it’s really about these c-words – consortia, community, collaboration, copyright cleared content and courseware.

OER initiatives include: Connexions Curriki – collaborative platforms. Khan Academy – 1600 free Youtube resources for younger learners – non-profit. NPTEL – India. Flat World Knowledge – open textbooks with a business model. Online Learning Initiative – full online courses Carnegie Mellon. OU – led to explosion in rest of world but not UK. UNISA. Athbasca. The list goes on and on.

MIT’s traffic is 1.5 million visits per month, so that 70 million have used the content to date. Fewer than 10% are educators, Self-learners 43%, Students 42%, Educators 9%, Others 6%. The dominant use is the advancement of personal knowledge at 46%. Guy from Taiwan translated MIT courseware to through network around the world by crowdsourcing. So what explains the failure of institutions to take advantage of this?

Cecilia suggests that it needs to be easier to find and that language is still a barrier. Sorry, but I don’t buy this. It takes seconds to find this stuff on Google. Fact is, they don’t want to use it. NIH (Not Invented Here) is the real barrier to use. Sure content isn’t enough; we need other services – study groups, certification, assessment etc. But what we really need is an embrace by government. This is happening in China and India.

Prof VN Rajasekharan Pillai gave us the run down on IGNOU Open Course Portal - 40,000 text, 1600 videos, 80,000 users, one of world’s largest educational resource repositories with a special YouTube channel. Anyone can register and use resources, there are no entry qualifications, no restriction on duration – you only pay for certification – the revolution is here.

This is driven by huge demand. By 2020 India needs to provide employability skills to 500 million! The only way to satisfy this demand is through unconventional ideas. OER will transform education, so we need sustainability plans for these initiatives. People will use it if people see advantages for themselves. This means Open Assessment combined with Open Courseware. Knowledge and learning are trapped inside accrediting institutions. Until we break that mould we’ll be pricing learning out of the hands of the masses, especially the poor.

We need acceptance, not sniffy elitist statements about quality from the current establishment. This is happening, take the OU in the UK, now the largest University in the UK, or NIIT in India – it just takes time. Even in traditional system there’s a hierarchy and brand marketing. It took Oxford and Cambridge a thousand years to develop their brand – give it time – it’s a marathon not a sprint. Let’s not keep it as a treadmill.

OER needs to focus less on Universities and more in schools, further education and adult education. Openschooling already uses distance learning and free content with 20 subject areas in Africa. Other examples are Hippocampus, Monterey and Currici with 50-60k users per month accessing MIT content in schools.

We could also use the OER model for teacher training – that will act as agent for immediate global change, with more teachers being trained quicker and cheaper. Online teacher training has already started through Hibernia in Ireland and the UK. There certainly needs to be more off campus, not contact, models. The trend is for both, that’s the future.

Lesson learnt 4: Closed v open - Private money should be targeted at Open Resources

Education is a closed shop. Technology opens it up. Rather than funding schools and schooling, let’s fund the future model of open resources in the global classroom. In OER we are at the end of the beginning – so what’s about the next ten years? How do we turn this all into a quality education? Quality of teachers a big issue. Training, retraining and CPD – that is the challenge- at all levels. Above all OER needs to move from the development of materials to use of materials.

5. Religious v secular

The star of the first plenary, for me, was a challenge from Dr Ben Achour on how education (or lack of it – I’m not sure which) can cause mayhem. First the brutal murder of men, women and children in their Christian church in Iraq. Second, the “prison or concentration camp” that is Gaza, where he saw 8-10 year olds being taught in a sweltering sea container, as the Israeli embargo on building materials prevented schools from being rebuilt. Surely, he reminds us, that denying children education, or educating them in hatred is not the way forward.

Right from the start this raised a key question for me. Should education be secular? Christian fundamentalism in North and South America, Islamic studies as a compulsory school subject in the Middle East, Ultra-orthodox Judaism in Israel – are they really such forces for good?.

In the next session Charles Clark, a UK Minister for Education, who introduced Whiteboards wanted to see education cast its net forward, not back. He admitted that there was always a tension in education between going back or forward, mentioning Gove’s recent mad policy of reintroducing Latin into UK schools, which is going back 2000 years! However, his suggestions were more ‘status quo’. Nothing really new: look at system holistically, quality of teachers counts (not class sizes) accountability etc. Although he did mention the importance of ‘work experience’ and thought that the gap between education and work was too wide. His parting shot was an appeal for more focus on pedagogy – but he left it there and I’m not sure that he had any more to offer on that issue.

My question to the panel was, “If, as Charles claimed, education must cast its net forward, and not backwards, then is religious education in schools a forward or backward step? Should education be in the business of opening up young minds and not closure?

Only Charles answered, but he fudged it. “Well, there’s good and bad religious education…….” If we continue to fudge like this, rather than challenge and discuss assumptions we’ll get nowhere.

Lesson learnt 5: Religious v secular – keep education secular

It is often assumed that all education is good, it is not. Much religious fundamentalist education, in any religion, is bad. My own view is that we educate for autonomy, and that education should be secular. What a bold step this would be for an international organisation to state, rather than accept education as indoctrination.

6. Teaching v learning

On the final day, while young people were rioting in London and attacking a Royal’s car shouting “off with their head” we were talking about ‘teaching’ not ‘learning’. Putnam was right to say the young no longer trust us, and that we need to win back their trust.

However, if we had a Wordle slide for the whole conference, the largest two words would be ‘teachers’ and ‘teaching’. There was too little talk about’ learners’ and ‘learning’. I know it’s an old chestnut, but it signals a failure to move on. To be fair the Conference gave the Learner’s Voice group, 24 students, a stand, but they themselves were shocked at the lack of real collaboration. They were really active on twitter, videoing delegates (including me) and asking smart questions from the floor. We could have done with a few of them on the stage.

Typical of the teacher-oriented adults was the Microsoft guy, who really only related a couple of anecdotes, and talked mostly about classrooms and teachers. (CISCO did the same.) The plural of anecdotes is not data. He did have a useful suggestion - use student driven learning, namely learning outside of the classroom. On student assignments, he claimed that most teachers don’t know how to do this – too true. But let’s be clear, the future of technology in learning is NOT Microsoft, Cisco and Intel, it’s Wikipedia, Google, YouTube, iTunes, Facebook, Twitter and OER.

Lesson learnt 6: Teaching v learning – more about learners and learning

Think more about learning and learner voices, not teaching and teachers. Think OER, Wikipedia, Google and Social Networking, NOT Microsoft, CISCO and Intel.

7. Old practice V new science

Educators largely assume that our experience and common sense guides us well and tells us all we really need to know. Sorry, we need to wake up. However, the session on cognitive science was a case study on how not to impart information. The three presenters simply presented their incredibly narrow research areas or jobs, and provided little in the way of real and practical advice for practitioners. There were two interesting presentations on ‘plasticity’ and ‘natural pedagogy’. The problem here was that both were presented in isolation, and seemed to contradict each other. In fact they don’t. The mind is NOT a tabula rasa, completely open to plastic change through formal and informal learning. That’s taking us back to a behaviourist agenda. The mind is prepared and hard-wired to learn.

Education and health are the two main pillars of public spending but while medicine demands objective, evidence-based [proof before use; education wallows in a sea of pseudoscience and pop-psychology (learning styles, Maslow, NLP. Mozart effect, R/L brain theories). Half a century of cognitive science is now ready to be used. We know a lot about memory, deep processing, elaboration, reinforcement, practice and media selection but we apply very little of this.

Why does educational psychology seem to have lost its way lack impact? A question from the floor nailed the problem: teacher training. Questionable selection techniques, practice in the absence of evidence, and lecture based courses the norm. This is the fulcrum around which new approaches to learning could be delivered, but the courses are fossilised.

Barbara Wanchisen of the National Research Council recommended www.nap.edu. The reports are free e.g. How people learn, Knowing what students know etc. Although science evolves on its own, there are serious roadblocks: laws, large population to reach, tension between communities. The exception seems to be the military, who really do absorb and apply cognitive science. Other resources are www.ies.ed.gov www.nsf.gov www.nas.edu

Lesson learnt 7: Old practice V new science – revolutionise teacher training

We need to weed out old theory and practice and feed the system with fresh findings from science and research. This means reshaping teacher training around learners and learning, not just teaching.

8. Assessment v attainment

Do we need an OECD Nuclear Arms race in education? Is it wise to create league tables at a national and international level? Do they create a rising tide or do they create a great deal of angst and rushed policies?

This 4^th round of PISA covers 65 countries in a 3 yearly assessment of 15 year olds, with between 3,500 and 15,000 samples from each country i.e. over 400,000 students.

Conclusion 1 – socially equitable education systems do best. Curiously, the PISA results, released during the conference, confirmed that open competition in education is not a driver for improved performance. Doesn’t this put into question the very PISA approach to the quantification of education? In the UK, successive governments have been keen to use PISA as evidence for action, but selectively. Now that PISA has shown that equitable systems are best, will they promote this as policy? Of course not. They will cherry pick as usual.

Conclusion 2: Money is NOT the determining factor in educational performance – it explains only 10% of output. Was increased spending matched by better outcomes, not generally, apart from S Korea, who switched from small elite to a more equitable approach.

Conclusion 3: The top performer is Shanghai (not even a country) based on its innovative, forceful collaborative approach to schools development, something in which few other countries excel. They paired good and bad schools, have no group learning within their classrooms and focus on complete classroom discipline.

PISA has some useful signposts but it’s as skewed as the Leaning Tower of Pisa, when it comes to data and conclusions. Small countries are clustered at the top. Indeed there seems to be a correlation between size and homogeneity of country and results. The outputs like the tower are tall and narrow, focusing on reading, maths and science. It quantifies what is easiest to test. To be fair, that’s why PISA has a raft of initiatives around other measures; PIACC (adult skills tested via computers in 26 countries results 2013 on problem solving, cognitive abilities etc.), AHELO (assessing HE outcomes, not just research), OECD (review of evaluation and assessment frameworks for improving school outcomes (2009-2012), TALIS (International survey of a randomly selected 200 schools on teaching & learning).

Lesson learnt 8: Assessment v attainment – improvement, not league tables

Unfortunately, PISA has become an object of fear in many countries, promoting, in general, an atmosphere of failure, and skewed towards the developed world. The press and politicians focus on league position, rather than improvements, but it does point towards some basic policy shaping recommendations around equitable education, quality and collaboration.

9. Horizontal v Vertical

We had a presentation by Jeffrey Sachs that presented education as a series of horizontal layers of sedimentary rock – primary, secondary, further, higher. The problem with this structure is that education for the learner is vertical. The poor learner has to punch their way through these layers of impermeable rock to get anywhere, and most simply give up tunnelling, with only a few surviving.

Few talk about the core rationale for education. Sure it leads to better economic and health outcomes, especially the education of women. But some education (fundamentalist Christian, Judaic and Islamic) also leads to strife. I’d prefer to see education defined in terms of social good through individual empowerment. I have always held that education is about personal autonomy, autonomy in terms of abilities which help you make a living, contribute to society and have en enriched life. But education is so often about attendance not attainment, assessment not attainment. It’s about institutions, not the person. It’s about teachers not learners.

Lesson learnt 9: Horizontal v Vertical – don’t pander to horizontal interests

We could really address a core issue here. What is education for? The current models can soak up cash (often doubling budgets) with very thin improvements in outcomes. Equitable systems seem to work best, but we want to encourage competition and private sector driven hierarchical systems. Collaboration and sharing work, but our institutions share nothing.

10. 20^th C v 21^st C

There was one depressing aspect of the summit, the oft repeated refrain that students are badly in need of something called 21^st century skills. A series of presenters ‘lectured’ us on how a new set of skills have emerged around collaboration, social skills, and problem solving! It was deeply ironic, if not tragic. The very idea that ‘teachers’ and ‘lecturers’ have the skills to teach the very things that the average 12 year old has in abundance, was laughable. What are my children going to learn from baby boomer models of collaboration and social interaction – nothing.

We get ‘talked at’ in schools, ‘lectured’ to in HE, suffer the stupid ‘breakout group’ method in training and spend far too much of our lives in useless, often unnecessary ‘meeting’s’. This was the baby boomers approach to collaboration and sharing. Compare this to the immediacy of mobile, txting, messaging, posting, commenting, tweeting, social networking, blogging, team-based gaming, skyping, filesharing and crowdsourcing. We have more to learn from them, than them from us.

The very phrase ‘21^st C skills’ is a symptom of our prejudiced thinking, as if there was a sudden shift in cognitive need around the decimal system, and that we 20^th century adults had it sussed, if only these 21^st century kids would listen to our advice. We invented the treadmill that is the current system and need to sit back and learn from them on sharing and collaboration. The people who really are shaping learning through pedagogic shift are not educational theorists but the smart young people who invented Google, Wikipedia, Amazon, Facebook, Twitter and OER models.

And to those who say that we educators need to be in control of this attention sapping technology, I’d say it’s none of your business. What learners do with their spare time and technology is their business. ‘Teachers’ and ‘lecturers’ don’t own the minds of learners, their role is one of nurture not control. Hey, teachers, leave them kids alone!

Lesson learnt 10: 20thC v21st C – we have more to learn from them than them from us

Let’s be clear, we have little or nothing to teach them on this front. Neither can we predict the skills they’ll need. Since 2000 we’ve had an explosion of wireless broadband and mobile technology, fuelling a renaissance in communication, collaboration and sharing. The average teenager has already amassed years of daily, if not hourly communication skills, shared thoughts, photographs and videos, collaborative game playing, constant dialogue, filesharing and they write something every day, if not every hour. They understand collaboration and sharing at a far deeper level than their teachers and parents.

Last word…

Sorry, if this was rather long, but the summit did make me think, reflect and in that sense was a great success……thanks to all the people I met there: Graham Brown-Martin, Derek Robertson, Stephen Heppell, Charlie Leadbetter, Jay Cross, Dan Sutch, Marc Prensky, Andy Smart, Lee Heeyoung, Rob Crawford, Sharath Jeevan, Suhair M Ayyash, Samer Bagaeen,Mrko Mahkonen, Inacio Rodriguez, Farid Ullah Khan, Keith Kruger, Dilvo Ristoff and many, many more....