John Connell: The Blog

There are strate­gies that teach­ers and schools can employ to ensure that tech­nol­ogy becomes pur­pose­ful and sys­tem­atic. There can be lit­tle doubt that its poten­tial is very great, as it pro­vides the oppor­tu­nity for effec­tive teach­ing of skills, of find­ing and using infor­ma­tion within a con­text of high stu­dent inter­est. This unique com­bi­na­tion is too great a value to be wasted.

Celes­tine Kemu­nto Nya­mari lives in Kenya, where she attends St. Theresa’s Girls’ Sec­ondary School in Kithimu, a cou­ple of hours drive North-East of Nairobi. Celes­tine took part in the first student-led Edu­ca­tion Fast For­ward debate (in Novem­ber last year) as a guest debater and is set to join EFF6: From Learner Voice to Emerg­ing Lead­ers on Jan­u­ary 28, 2013.

The knowl­edge nec­es­sary to func­tion suc­cess­fully and fol­low a career was seen to already exist: it could be handed down from experts and lead­ers to learn­ers and work­ers. In the Indus­trial Age, cur­ricu­lum devel­op­ment was a mat­ter of select­ing the most impor­tant knowl­edge to trans­mit to stu­dents; experts decided what knowl­edge to mass-prescribe and in which sequence.

Jane Gilbert and Rachel Bol­stad (amongst many oth­ers) ques­tioned the tra­di­tional con­cept of cur­ricu­lum devel­op­ment in their 2008 book Dis­ci­plin­ing and draft­ing, or 21^st cen­tury learn­ing? Rethink­ing the New Zealand senior sec­ondary cur­ricu­lum for the future. Their words are quoted in a new White Paper, spon­sored by Promethean’s Jim Wynn, and authored by Gavin Dykes, Michael Fur­dyk, Sara Has­san and Jen­nifer Cor­riero for Edu­ca­tion Fast For­ward, enti­tled From Learner Voice to Emerg­ing Lead­ers (down­load­able PDF).

The authors agree with Gilbert and Bol­stad and state their posi­tion clearly:

…this model of cur­ricu­lum devel­op­ment is dif­fi­cult to main­tain given that: it is no longer pos­si­ble to accu­rately pre­dict the type of knowl­edge youth may need as they move through life, the rapid pace at which tech­nol­ogy is chang­ing and new knowl­edge is devel­op­ing, the rate at which career pos­si­bil­i­ties are pro­lif­er­at­ing (ones with which we are famil­iar and ones we have yet to imag­ine), and social, eco­nomic and envi­ron­men­tal chal­lenges are becom­ing increas­ingly complex.

They ask the question:

How can learner voice help address these uncertainties?

And the seem­ingly sim­ple answer?

By giv­ing learn­ers an authen­tic say in what and how they want to learn.

The White Paper will under­pin dis­cus­sion at the next Edu­ca­tion Fast For­ward debate, to take place as part of Edu­ca­tion World Forum in Lon­don at the end of this month. The paper, which will be pre­sented by Sara Has­san, of Tak­ing IT Global, join­ing the debate from Toronto, is an excel­lent sum­mary of the issues sur­round­ing this crit­i­cal ques­tion, and the authors have been able to offer a com­bi­na­tion of sound think­ing, prac­ti­cal advice and a way for­ward for those in edu­ca­tion (still too few, I would say) who believe that cur­ricu­lum design, ped­a­gogy, the role of tech­nol­ogy and national edu­ca­tion policy-making all should be influ­enced and shaped by the voice of the learner.

The event will com­bine a live pres­ence at EWF and a global pres­ence via the magic of Telep­res­ence, An artic­u­late group of young edu­ca­tion lead­ers will debate the issues around ‘From Learner Voice to Emerg­ing Leaders’.

The pri­mary aim is twofold:

And it will all take place across a truly inter­na­tional matrix of con­nec­tions, cross­ing coun­tries, cul­tures, and communities.

The event itself takes place on Mon­day 28^th Jan­u­ary at 11am and you will find the link to the live video broad­cast on the day itself on the Edu­ca­tion Fast For­ward page on Promethean Planet. Promethean’s Chief Edu­ca­tion Offi­cer, Jim Wynn, will be open­ing the EFF6 debate, which will once again be mod­er­ated by inde­pen­dent edu­ca­tion con­sul­tant Gavin Dykes. Dis­cus­sion will be led by Sara Has­san and three stu­dent pre­sen­ters. Clos­ing the debate will be Michelle Selinger, Direc­tor of Edu­ca­tion at Cisco.

Twit­ter users can fol­low the debate itself using the hash­tag #eff6, while there will be some inter­est­ing dis­cus­sion around many of the key issues in the debate using the hash­tag #learn­ing­mat­ters.

Finally, a reminder that you can down­load the White Paper.

Howard Gard­ner, speak­ing in a video on the DML Cen­tral site:

I don’t believe for a moment in tech­no­log­i­cal deter­min­ism. I believe any tech­nol­ogy can be used benignly and malig­nantly. You can use a pen to write beau­ti­ful poetry. You can also use a pen to poke peo­ples’ eyes out.

Gard­ner doesn’t ‘believe’ in tech­no­log­i­cal deter­min­ism, in the same way that some­one might choose not to believe in a deity or the exis­tence of Santa Claus. Fair enough. How­ever, the exam­ple he gives to sup­port his unbe­lief is not only mis­lead­ingly sim­plis­tic but also spe­cious. A pen used to poke an eye out is not being used as a pen and is there­fore not a pen at that moment in time. It is merely a pointy stick. If he had said that the same pen can be used to write beau­ti­ful poetry and also to sign the death war­rant of an inno­cent per­son, his argu­ment would have been a lit­tle more cogent, but still only within the some­what nar­row lim­its to which he chooses to restrict his notion of tech­no­log­i­cal deter­min­ism. We expect bet­ter from a Har­vard professor.

This much we can agree on: tech­nol­ogy is only tech­nol­ogy when it is being put to use. Oth­er­wise, it is merely pas­sive arte­fact. At the level of the instru­ment (such as the pen), tech­nol­ogy can be used for good or ill. But that is not a con­di­tion unique to tech­nol­ogy; it can be posited for vir­tu­ally every prod­uct of the human hand or mind. Richard Feyn­man put it suc­cinctly when he quoted a bud­dhist proverb:

To every man is given the key to the gates of heaven. The same key opens the gates of hell.

I made that point in a post back in 2006 when I com­pared cer­tain char­ac­ter­is­tics shared by edu­ca­tion and tech­nol­ogy: they are both instru­ments that can be put to good and bad uses; they are both instru­ments that can be truly trans­for­ma­tive or deeply destruc­tive. Given those shared attrib­utes, I used that post to appeal for care in how we choose to bring about their con­junc­tion. But these are attrib­utes that bear no rela­tion to whether or not tech­nol­ogy is deter­min­is­tic; hence the prob­lem with Gardner’s position.

If we want to see how truly deter­min­is­tic tech­nol­ogy can be, and is, we must ele­vate our point of view so that we can see beyond the indi­vid­ual instru­ment and allow our­selves to com­pre­hend the broad vista of the tech­nol­ogy land­scape within which that sin­gle instru­ment is utilised. Whether a pen can write beau­ti­ful poetry or con­sign a per­son to their death really tells us noth­ing about how, at a much broader level, sys­temic shifts in the under­ly­ing nature of tech­nol­ogy undoubt­edly do influ­ence soci­etal inter­ac­tions and, quite sim­ply, how we do cer­tain things, amongst them, edu­ca­tion. To try to pre­tend, for instance, as Gard­ner must inevitably do with his ‘unbe­lief’ in tech­no­log­i­cal deter­min­ism, that the way we learn — or for that mat­ter, the way we teach — can remain the same in the dig­i­tal era as it has been for cen­turies of print is just naive.

Karl Marx, writ­ing in The Poverty of Phi­los­o­phy in 1847, under­stood that bet­ter than the good pro­fes­sor obvi­ously does today.

The hand-mill gives you soci­ety with the feu­dal lord; the steam-mill, soci­ety with the indus­trial capitalist.

The dig­i­tal era — the com­puter, the net­work, the Inter­net, the Web, social tech­nol­ogy, uni­ver­sal search, and so much more — changes rad­i­cally all of the rela­tion­ships that are crit­i­cal to how we learn and how we teach: the rela­tion­ship between teacher and learner; the rela­tion­ship between the learner and infor­ma­tion; the rela­tion­ship we all have with the con­cept of learned author­ity; and the social rela­tion­ships between our­selves and the rest of the human race. It is of course a hugely com­plex process of deter­mi­na­tion, with nuance lay­ered on nuance, but it is undoubt­edly true that broad global shifts in tech­nol­ogy, such as that between print and dig­i­tal, deter­mine how learn­ing can hap­pen and there­fore should (and inevitably will) deter­mine what it means to teach.

Almost every­one involved in edu­ca­tion agrees that lead­er­ship is important.

That, how­ever, is where agree­ment ends and debate begins. Beyond that point, we cross a tur­bu­lent land­scape where com­pet­ing def­i­n­i­tions of lead­er­ship abound, where the very nature of lead­er­ship is the stuff of argu­ment, where con­flict­ing philoso­phies of edu­ca­tion each gen­er­ate their own under­stand­ing of what makes for an effec­tive leader and how a good leader should behave, and where notions of how we must go about edu­cat­ing and train­ing the next gen­er­a­tion of edu­ca­tion lead­ers scat­ter in every direc­tion at once.

But such obser­va­tions are not a coun­sel of despair. Far from it! Just as edu­ca­tion itself can never be a sci­ence in any accepted sense – it is a sphere in which bat­tles will always be fought between philoso­phies, beliefs, ide­olo­gies, cul­tures, prej­u­dices and his­to­ries – so these same bat­tles are reflected in the ever-restless and excit­ing debates and dis­cus­sions around lead­er­ship in education.

What­ever our own stand­point might be, we should accept that one voice is often miss­ing from this unruly dis­course: that of young peo­ple, the very group most often affected by the deci­sions of edu­ca­tion lead­ers. Just as they are absent from edu­ca­tional debates gen­er­ally, so youth­ful voices are too often muted when the topic is the lead­er­ship of the social good that is utterly cen­tral to their futures: their edu­ca­tion.

Edu­ca­tion Fast For­ward (EFF), an orga­ni­za­tion, spon­sored jointly by Promethean and Cisco, that brings together lead­ing global experts and change agents from the world of edu­ca­tion to dis­cuss ‘the top­ics that mat­ter most’, wants to begin to change that by bring­ing together some artic­u­late and intel­li­gent voices from the world’s youth to dis­cuss issues that are rel­e­vant to young peo­ple them­selves and to their edu­ca­tion.

In July 2012, in the most recent of the five debates orga­nized by EFF to date, a group of elo­quent and youth­ful voices debated the topic ‘From Learner Voice to Global Peace’. The young peo­ple were located all across the globe and came together pri­mar­ily through the won­der of Telep­res­ence (TP), a high-definition video con­fer­enc­ing tech­nol­ogy. The dis­cus­sion that day was not only intel­li­gent and thought­ful: it was truly inspir­ing for every­one involved.

The full debate can be watched and lis­tened to on Promethean Planet.

And now, in Jan­u­ary 2013, dur­ing the annual Edu­ca­tion World Forum, to be held in Lon­don, another group of excep­tional young peo­ple (includ­ing some of the voiced from EFF5) will come together through the magic of TP to talk about ‘From Learner Voice to Emerg­ing Lead­ers’. Those of us involved in EFF have some hopes and expec­ta­tions of what might come out of the event, but we are also highly aware that there must be a gen­uine space in amongst our pre­sump­tions for the hopes and expec­ta­tions of the young peo­ple them­selves to come to the fore dur­ing and beyond the dis­cus­sion.

The pri­mary aim is twofold:

Issues such as the struc­ture of the cur­ricu­lum, how edu­ca­tion is deliv­ered (includ­ing dif­fer­ences in this across the world), the rel­e­vance of edu­ca­tion to their lives, how we might encour­age real change in the rela­tion­ships between peo­ple in edu­ca­tion sys­tems, seek­ing to realise the extra­or­di­nary value that can be sought by tack­ling education’s chal­lenges with peo­ple rather than doing it to them. We need all pol­icy mak­ers to take on board the knowl­edge that they are mak­ing deci­sions now that will affect the gen­er­a­tion ahead, and per­haps more than one gen­er­a­tion ahead.

And all of this will be hap­pen­ing across a truly inter­na­tional matrix of con­nec­tions, cross­ing coun­tries, cul­tures, and com­mu­ni­ties. I will be blog­ging again in the New Year with details of the date and time, and with infor­ma­tion about the key speak­ers, young and not-so-young, who will be lead­ing the discussion.

Watch out for that!

Typog­ra­phy from Ron­nie Bruce on Vimeo.

“.…you’ve got to speak with it too.”

Tay­lor Mali, poet.

Won­der­ful, and of course true!

In a piece in the Inde­pen­dent, in 2011, Gor­don Brown wrote:

.…the inter­na­tional aid sys­tem for edu­ca­tion is fail­ing the world’s children.

He was intro­duc­ing his UNESCO report — Edu­ca­tion For All: Beat­ing Poverty, Unlock­ing Pros­per­ity.

On a num­ber of occa­sions over the past 6 years I have been able to watch the work of UNESCO at close hand and in the process gained con­sid­er­able respect for the orga­ni­za­tion. In keep­ing with that, I do believe that this report is  a superb, detailed and com­pas­sion­ate sum­mary of the state of edu­ca­tion for mil­lions upon mil­lions of chil­dren across the devel­op­ing world. It offers a descrip­tion of a state of affairs that should bring shame to the rest of the world — we are fail­ing all those chil­dren very badly.

Early in the report, he states that:

No edu­ca­tion sys­tem any­where in the world is bet­ter than its teachers.

And he goes on later to say:

Teach­ers are the back­bone of any edu­ca­tion sys­tem. Ulti­mately, learn­ing is the prod­uct of what hap­pens in class­rooms through a rela­tion­ship between pupils and teach­ers. That is why no edu­ca­tion sys­tem is bet­ter than the avail­abil­ity, acces­si­bil­ity and qual­ity of the teach­ers it pro­vides, and the level of sup­port that it deliv­ers to those on the front line of edu­ca­tion in the classroom.

With I Am Learner in mind, this begs many more ques­tions than it answers, but it would be churl­ish in the extreme not to accept the core point being made, that good qual­ity teach­ing should be cen­tral to a good edu­ca­tional pro­vi­sion, and most espe­cially for the edu­ca­tion of young children.

It is a dis­mal and unas­sail­able fact that there is a mas­sive short­age of good qual­ity teach­ers across the devel­op­ing world, espe­cially, but by no means exclu­sively, across the coun­tries in sub-Saharan Africa. Accord­ing to Gor­don Brown’s report, the world’s poor­est coun­tries need some­thing like 1.8 mil­lion addi­tional teach­ers over the next three years alone to pro­vide even basic pri­mary edu­ca­tion to their chil­dren, as well as around 4 mil­lion more class­rooms and all of the most basic items of equip­ment that we might expect to find in those classrooms.

Brown is absolutely right there­fore to state that:

The world is today fac­ing an edu­ca­tion emer­gency. That emer­gency does not make media head­lines. But it has dis­as­trous human, social and eco­nomic con­se­quences. It is con­sign­ing mil­lions of chil­dren to lives of poverty and dimin­ished oppor­tu­nity, hold­ing back progress in health, rein­forc­ing dis­par­i­ties linked to wealth and gen­der, and under­min­ing prospects for eco­nomic growth. And it is destroy­ing on an epic scale the most valu­able asset of the world’s poor­est nations – the cre­ativ­ity, tal­ent and poten­tial of the young generation.

An edu­ca­tion emer­gency indeed, and one on a vast and mas­sively con­se­quen­tial scale for human­ity world­wide. It requires equally vast and pro­longed global invest­ment to put right.

Else­where in the report, Gor­don Brown enthuses over the poten­tial for har­ness­ing tech­nol­ogy to improve edu­ca­tional pro­vi­sion. How­ever, he believes that:

New tech­nolo­gies do not offer a quick fix for sys­temic prob­lems in edu­ca­tion sys­tems. What they do offer is a vehi­cle for improv­ing access to oppor­tu­ni­ties for edu­ca­tion and the qual­ity of ser­vice provision.

The last thing this global emer­gency needs is any kind of quick fix. But I do believe that there is a poten­tially pow­er­ful appli­ca­tion of dig­i­tal and net­work­ing tech­nolo­gies that could play a sig­nif­i­cant role, along­side all the other big invest­ments needed, in con­tribut­ing to a much bet­ter qual­ity edu­ca­tion for many mil­lions of the poor­est chil­dren in the poor­est coun­tries around the world.

From Mas­sive Open Online Course to Mas­sive Open Online Class­room (MOOCl)

Any­one with even the remotest inter­est in higher edu­ca­tion of late will be aware of the MOOC. The basic con­cept of the Mas­sive Open Online Course (a term devised by Dave Cormier) is a sim­ple one, but the impli­ca­tions of the MOOC for the future of higher edu­ca­tion in par­tic­u­lar are the stuff of a debate that is wash­ing around global edu­ca­tion at the present time.

I will trust that any­one read­ing this already knows what a MOOC is, although I will not nec­es­sar­ily trust that every­one knows that there are MOOCs and there are MOOCs. If your knowl­edge of the con­cept of the MOOC is restricted to those ‘deliv­ered’ by the likes of Cours­era or Udac­ity, then I would urge you to go back to grass roots and read some of what you might find, for instance, in MOOC.ca, set up by Stephen Downes to host news, infor­ma­tion and dis­cus­sion around the con­cept, in the writ­ings of George Siemens, Dave Cormier, already men­tioned, and oth­ers. Open, exper­i­men­tal and con­nec­tivist in nature, the MOOC is an explicit and con­scious attempt to use the incred­i­ble affor­dances offered by the Inter­net to change the nature of education.

The massive-ness, open­ness and online-ness of the MOOC are all givens, of course, and are all crit­i­cal to the effect that the devel­op­ment is hav­ing at the present time. But I, for one, am less sure that the course-ness of the con­cept has to be a given too. I would recog­nise that the fact that the MOOC is built around the course is prob­a­bly what is keep­ing the con­cept fairly firmly within the broad arms of higher edu­ca­tion, for the moment at least. As Mar­tin Weller has written:

…after a decade of OERs, it’s inter­est­ing that we’re com­ing back to edu­ca­tor con­structed courses…

Class­room instead of Course?

When I look at the sit­u­a­tion faced by those mil­lions of chil­dren world­wide, in a con­text of poten­tial mas­sive global con­nect­ed­ness, and yet in cir­cum­stances where so many of them have no access to good teach­ing, I can’t but help won­der how the MOOC might be taken, re-shaped, and made into some­thing that could begin to ame­lio­rate some of the worst effects of that gen­er­ally awful situation.

I recog­nise, of course, that such a sim­ply stated change is, in fact, any­thing but sim­ple. The course is a gen­er­ally uncom­pli­cated thing, usu­ally (although by no means nec­es­sar­ily) lin­ear, struc­tured, a com­pre­hen­si­ble process in which ideas or con­cepts or infor­ma­tion are intro­duced, dis­cussed, dis­sected, re-shaped, com­bined, under­stood; it can be a sin­gle unit of ‘instruc­tion’ or a whole pro­gramme of learn­ing, or some­thing in between; and it can be deliv­ered or pre­sented (taught) by a sin­gle teacher or in some senses by every­one on the course (as the orig­i­nal con­cep­tion of the MOOC seeks to achieve).

The class­room, even the vir­tual, con­cep­tual class­room, is a quite dif­fer­ent beast. It is a ‘place’, a plat­form; it is the site where courses can hap­pen, where teach­ers can offer lessons across all dis­ci­plines, where learn­ers can go to access learn­ing, debate, insight, exper­tise, author­ity; it is a meet­ing place in which edu­ca­tion can hap­pen; it is the locus for teach­ing and learn­ing activ­i­ties of all kinds.

I believe we have many, per­haps most, of the ele­ments already that would have to be brought together to cre­ate the MOOCl. Instinc­tively, how­ever, I feel that a MOOCl would not be nearly as sim­ple as a MOOC to start up and sus­tain. It would require an oper­a­tional core of a kind and scale that is prob­a­bly not true of the MOOC, although that oper­a­tional core, I would sug­gest, need not be a sin­gle orga­niz­ing unit: it could be an open, dis­trib­uted affair, sym­pa­thetic to the ori­gins of the MOOC. It should offer access to masses of great teach­ing and learn­ing resources — the Khan Acad­emy is an obvi­ous exam­ple of what could be utilised, but so too could the thou­sands of other high qual­ity, freely avail­able teach­ing and learn­ing resources that increas­ingly throng the web, and across so many of the world’s major, and not so major, languages.

So far, so what? All of these resources are avail­able today. But the MOOCl would have to incor­po­rate some kind of orga­niz­ing layer, a sim­ple inter­face that would allow any indi­vid­ual any­where in the world not only to access the resources as such, but also to access courses, com­mu­ni­ties, teach­ers (who can be, and prob­a­bly will be, other learn­ers), exper­tise and guid­ance. The MOOCl might also be a device for those teach­ers who already are on the ground, so to speak, in the poor­est coun­tries, to grab hold of and use as a means of enhanc­ing their own teach­ing exper­tise. The MOOCl would be the teacher’s global men­tor, guide, teach­ing assis­tant, just as much as it would be the learner’s teacher too.

Again, you might say, this sounds like a descrip­tion of the World Wide Web. But the MOOCl would have to be more than sim­ply ‘avail­able’: it would have to be set up in a way that would allow it reach out in a proac­tive way, to find its way into those places in the world where we know there are young chil­dren who cur­rently have few or no teach­ers to help them learn, where there are few or no teach­ing and learn­ing resources. This will require much thought, huge orga­ni­za­tion, and of course invest­ment. Is there a role here for the big phil­an­thropic foun­da­tions as well as gov­ern­ments? I believe so.

But what of access to the net­work, access to con­nected devices? Of course, the MOOCl would have to be capa­ble of being used across the world’s mobile net­works and acces­si­ble on mobile devices — Gor­don Brown’s report tells us that mobile cel­lu­lar pen­e­tra­tion has reached 50% in the devel­op­ing world and is still increas­ing fast. The cell phone is the default access device for many mil­lions of peo­ple in the world’s poor­est coun­tries, and that is likely to be the case for many years to come.

How much of this can be done in the same spirit as the orig­i­nal MOOC? I don’t know, I sus­pect not much, but I would love to be proved wrong. I know I am merely scratch­ing the sur­face with an unde­vel­oped and poten­tially still­born idea — but if the acute minds of thought­ful and cre­ative peo­ple can come up with the MOOC, I would like to think those same, and other, minds could be applied to how we can turn the Mas­sive Open Online Course into the Mas­sive Open Online Class­room to serve the des­per­ate des­per­ate needs of so many mil­lions of chil­dren in dire eco­nomic and edu­ca­tional poverty across the world.

Sim­pli­fi­ca­tions are legion, and emo­tions are a factor

“Schools kill cre­ativ­ity”, “Does Google make us stu­pid?” are press-worthy attention-grabbers, but the real­i­ties are more nuanced, for a world that refuses to deal with its nuanced self.…Everyone brings in their own biases to an edu­ca­tion con­ver­sa­tion (this author included), but most often fail to be aware of them as the biases they are.

My good friend, Charles Fadel, has offered his per­sonal list on www.thefivethings.org

They are all inter­est­ing points, but two in par­tic­u­lar caught my atten­tion because, to me, they are two sides of one coin. His point above is so true when we look at most edu­ca­tion ‘debates’ being con­ducted today, espe­cially, but by no means only, in the tra­di­tional media. Nuanced edu­ca­tional debate is a rare thing indeed in the press, and that includes the so-called qual­ity press. But too often, even in debates between peo­ple who ought to know bet­ter, the crude attention-grabber is king and the impor­tance of fine dis­tinc­tions, sub­tleties, shades of grey are thrown by the wayside.

Charles’ next point is equally valid, where he crit­i­cises the pre­pon­der­ance of ‘or’ debates over ‘and’ debates:

Con­ver­sa­tions about edu­ca­tion abound with false dichotomies, and abso­lutist views, that must be transcended.

The lack of a balanced-conversation mind­set leads to many OR debates; for instance:

- Knowl­edge vs skills
– Science/Technology/Engineering/Math (STEM) vs Humanities/Arts
– Didac­tic vs con­struc­tivist learn­ing
– For­mal vs infor­mal learn­ing
– All tech­nol­ogy or no tech­nol­ogy
– Char­ac­ter devel­oped at school vs at home

The bal­anced real­ity is that these are all AND propo­si­tions, work­ing in con­cert with each other, and rein­forc­ing each other, in a judi­cious, impact­ful feed­back loop.

It is just eas­ier, I sup­pose, to take a stand at one extreme or the other in an argu­ment. It is far harder to con­clude that both sides have merit, and then to set out your argu­ments for lean­ing more in one direc­tion than another, or set­ting out the par­tic­u­lar cir­cum­stances in which one side might have more merit than the other.

Scep­ti­cism is healthy; cyn­i­cism and bad faith are not.

Dis­putes and con­tro­ver­sies and dis­agree­ments abound in every sphere of human knowl­edge and activ­ity. That is the very nature of human dis­course. The world would be a dread­ful, bor­ing place if we all agreed with each other all of the time on every­thing (some peo­ple, strangely, would define their heaven in just those terms). A lit­tle less dis­agree­ment here and there might avoid wars and blood­shed and point­less death and destruc­tion, but that pos­si­bil­ity does not appear to be a uni­ver­sal like­li­hood any time soon.

Dis­pu­ta­tion and debate dif­fer in kind though from one sphere of activ­ity to another. We can, for exam­ple, con­trast the kinds of dis­putes that sci­en­tists might have with dis­putes between reli­gious ‘schol­ars’: the for­mer might arise out of dif­fer­ing inter­pre­ta­tions of evi­dence whilst the lat­ter are more likely to be debates char­ac­ter­ized not only by a com­plete lack of evi­dence but often by a con­tempt for same.

My own prin­ci­pal sphere of activ­ity, edu­ca­tion, is an intense and con­stant bat­tle­ground of crossed swords, con­flict and con­tention, and it falls, I would attest, some­where between those polar­i­ties of sci­en­tific and reli­gious debate. The vigour of the man­i­fold dis­putes in edu­ca­tion is a func­tion of its intrin­sic nature as one of the human­i­ties, as an activ­ity aris­ing out of the human condition.

As one of the human­i­ties, there is sim­ply no absolute right or absolute wrong in edu­ca­tion. We make judge­ments and take posi­tions based on our rea­son­ing, of course, but also based on our val­ues and prin­ci­ples, philoso­phies and ide­olo­gies, inter­ests and self-interests, prej­u­dices and, indeed, big­otries. There are, oddly, very many peo­ple — teach­ers, writ­ers, philoso­phers, politi­cians, thinkers and non-thinkers alike — who will tell you, cat­e­gor­i­cally, that their stand­point on any par­tic­u­lar aspect of edu­ca­tion is unequiv­o­cally right, and there­fore that any dif­fer­ing take on the same issue is plainly wrong. Some­times, these same peo­ple will point to ‘evi­dence’ that ‘proves’ their stand­point, all the while for­get­ting that under­tak­ing research on edu­ca­tion is a bil­lion light years away from under­tak­ing research on par­ti­cle physics (for exam­ple). Edu­ca­tional research is in the same league as research in phi­los­o­phy or soci­ol­ogy or anthro­pol­ogy: out­comes are heav­ily depen­dent upon the ques­tions asked and the posi­tions taken by the researchers. Evi­dence is use­ful, of course, but it will rarely if ever con­sti­tute ‘proof’ of any­thing in edu­ca­tion — it gives us a start­ing point, if we are lucky, but never absolute validation.

Those who under­stand this dis­tinc­tion under­stand there­fore that they can never claim any absolute valid­ity for their views on edu­ca­tion, since they recog­nise that their per­spec­tive on any or all edu­ca­tion ques­tions is inex­tri­ca­bly bound up in the val­ues they hold, in the polit­i­cal ide­ol­ogy to which they ascribe, in the psy­chol­ogy of their own learn­ing expe­ri­ences through­out their lives, in their (or their family’s, or their community’s) self-interest, whether con­scious or uncon­scious, and in so many other impon­der­ables in their lives.

Such peo­ple under­stand that they must argue and debate their stand­point con­stantly, and that they must be pre­pared to lis­ten to other’s views, to learn from oth­ers and to change their own views through debate with oth­ers. Equally we are per­fectly jus­ti­fied in seek­ing to explain and affirm our own philoso­phies in edu­ca­tion, and even to seek to per­suade oth­ers to see learn­ing and teach­ing and ped­a­gogy and all aspects of edu­ca­tion as we hap­pen to see them.

Don’t mis­take my argu­ment as one that endorses unal­loyed rel­a­tivism: we must always be will­ing to make crit­i­cal judge­ments on the basis of our expe­ri­ence and, yes, on the basis of what­ever evi­dence we can lay our hands on (going far beyond just the out­comes of aca­d­e­mic research). But we use expe­ri­ence and intel­lec­tual argu­ment and evi­dence to sub­stan­ti­ate and sup­port our own judge­ments, not to ‘prove’ that we are absolutely right and oth­ers are absolutely wrong. We must con­tinue to judge, to eval­u­ate, to dis­tin­guish between good and bad logic. Edu­ca­tion, as a human­ity, has to be based upon rig­or­ous intel­lec­tual analy­sis and rea­son­ing, as well as on moral and eth­i­cal considerations.

It is in that flux of ideas and con­flict­ing opin­ions gen­er­ated, main­tained and devel­oped by thought­ful, autonomous and ratio­nal minds that the beauty of coher­ent edu­ca­tional debate lies. We need not respect oth­ers’ views, but, mostly, we do need to tol­er­ate them (I am with Frank Furedi when he decries the mod­ern ten­dency to equate tol­er­ance with accep­tance and respect, and even the trend towards devalu­ing the mean­ing of respect itself). The caveat to such tol­er­ance, of course, will be the extent to which we feel that oth­ers’ views on edu­ca­tion are actu­ally phys­i­cally or emo­tion­ally harm­ful to chil­dren, to young peo­ple, or to learn­ers generally.

And that is a whole other debate in itself.