31 May 2023

Continuing our conversation about the purpose of public education we discuss creating a public education system suited to 21st century life and beyond. Valerie Hannon is an independent writer, researcher and consultant in education and works with innovative educators around the world to devise and design new models for learning. She argues the new promise of education needs to be more about the collective common good. 

Show Notes

• Purpose statement for public education

Transcript

Intro: Teach is produced on the traditional land of the Kaurna people. The South Australian department for Education would like to acknowledge the traditional custodians of the land and pay our respects to all elders past, present, and emerging.

Dale Atkinson: Hello and welcome to Teach, a podcast about teaching and learning in South Australia. My name's Dale Atkinson from South Australia's Department for Education, and today I'm joined by very special guest, someone who's CV almost defies summary in some respects, a woman who has advised education systems around the globe and the OECD. Valerie Hannon. Thank you very much for joining us.

Valerie Hannon: You are very welcome. Thank you for inviting me. I'm looking forward to the conversation.

Dale Atkinson: Well, we've had you here today because we've gathered together all the principals and preschool directors within South Australia’s public education system for a discussion about the purpose of public education as much as anything, and to get a sense of where we need to go as a system and within individual schools.

What is in a brief summary, the challenge that public education is facing at the moment?

Valerie Hannon: It's facing the challenge that it was designed for a different time and for different purposes, and we have just rolled them on and rolled them forward with tweaking at the edges as though it will do for the 21st century. And the truth is they won't. Mass education, government funded, is a relatively new phenomenon. And the concept of the school, how it was, how it used resources, how it used time, people, space, we're all pretty much laid down in the last century, or even in some cases, the one before that. And those conventions have been very strong.

And I think if you look at systems, whatever they might be, economic or health systems or housing systems, there have been so many fundamental changes and yet education, has remained resilient and in a sense, you know, that's a kind of strength because people have a lot of confidence in the idea of school.

They went there, they know it's a kind of centre for a community, in many cases. You look at poll data about trusted professionals, teachers rate pretty high compared to say, politicians or journalists. So it's been a resilient system, but it's out of time. And the issue is not just, oh, well, let's refresh this, bit more technology, so forth for the 21st century, but rather the human species is in such a predicament and faces such extraordinary challenges, I would argue never seen before by our species. That we have now, I believe a responsibility to try to be what I call good ancestors. No, not what I call that. It's obviously indigenous people. Always had a sense of seeking to be good ancestors and we're not, because our education systems and the institutions within them are not enabling young people to shape the future that they need and that they want.

Dale Atkinson: Little bit about the old promise of education, being around social mobility and spoke a little bit about your personal journey.

Valerie Hannon: You listened my keynote.

Dale Atkinson: I certainly did. Now, you mentioned that you believe that's a false promise with an overvalue on the academic capacity as opposed to other skills and attributes that young people need. What should the new promise of education be?

Valerie Hannon: I think the new promise needs to be grounded in the new purpose that your colleagues are exploring today and what they look into their hearts and determine fundamentally is a good life in the 21st century and hopefully onwards.

So the old concept of the good life, which was, I mean, the Greeks explored it explicitly. We tended not to. There's a, there's a kind of hidden tacit, image, if you like, of wealth. I mean, actually, if you look up success, certainly in some dictionaries it says fame, money, and power. Is that, is that it? Is that the deal?

Dale Atkinson: That's a very narrow descriptive.

Valerie Hannon: Indeed. Indeed. But the underpinning kind of skeleton or frame for education is founded I think on a highly individualistic notion of getting on, of succeeding, of doing better. Yes, social mobility, making as much money as you can. And my argument, I think, in that of many other commentators internationally now is that we need to move from the I to the we. We need to think much more collectively about where we stand as humans on the precipice of some enormously dangerous crises, which are existential threats. And then unless we start to think A. more collectively about the common good, less about our own singular possibilities and be longer term rather than short term, then I would say we're toast.

Dale Atkinson: Yeah. You've talked about the rebalancing of the value of the head, the heart, and the hand, which I think is linked a little bit to the argument that you were making just there, which is education systems have been grounded in this idea that funnelling children into academic achievement into university and into certain roles within society based on the capacities that we're able to assess through examination effectively.

How do we as teachers, as leaders of schools approach that idea of balancing the head, heart, and hand. What are we going after in the classroom with these kids?

Valerie Hannon: That's a really great question, and I think you heard some of it in Geoff Master's contribution to this conference after I spoke. Let's be clear. I mean, the, the first thing is you have to really explore, interrogate these ideas and make them meaningful to yourself. If you're just adopting the kind of motto, head, heart, hand, you know, it, it can be like, icing on the cake or frills or, or as Martin put it kind of at the periphery, let's, let's hope it rocks up.

These, the concepts say of being able to form and sustain and develop great relationships, which is at the heart of great lives. The capacity to understand a different relationship with our planet, which we have systematically violated and continue to do. That's a question of the value frame that young people acquire through their learning career.

And no amount of tech fixes or development of bio flight fuel carbon catcher will solve our problem unless young people start to perceive their relationship with a natural world in a very different way. And understand humanity's relationship to other species, for example, and Mother Earth herself in a very different way.

So that's, that's a huge agenda. And it is about heart, and it is about values and dispositions as well as knowledge and skills. I mean, look, I, I believe in knowledge, don't get me wrong, so we're not tossing out the concept of bringing minds to become the most intelligent they can be. But I think we want to broaden our concept of intelligence and understand that we need to be and grow in many different ways.

I will insist on the value frame being absolutely front and centre in all of this. And don't talk to me about knowledge as being sort of preeminent. And I've also seen enough of short of sheer intelligence at work, kind of slicing and dicing concept. Look, in our lifetime, who was it who created, say, the financial meltdown in 2008?

It wasn't the illiterate people. It wasn't people with low education qualifications. It was extremely greedy people with MBAs and PhDs.

Dale Atkinson: With a narrow set of capabilities, perhaps a very limited moral compass.

Valerie Hannon: Precisely so. So all of this needs to be in scope, hugely in scope. And I think one more thing on this, if I may think that the, the COVID pandemic was an eye-opener in many ways, wasn't it?

But one of the things across the world people clocked was that, you know, who is it who keeps society running? Who makes sure that we get food on the table and gets it delivered and stocks the supermarket shelves, who is in there in the hospitals, nursing people who perhaps don't make it. Head, heart, hand. And we disvalue those people.

So I, I think I mentioned in my keynote, as book, which I really recommend to your listeners. Called The Tyranny of Merit by Michael Sandell and a Harvard professor, ironically, who absolutely knocks to pieces this idea of a meritocracy built on intelligence and where that's brought us to. So how do teachers recentre this?

Well, and Martin Westwell touched on this, it's about bringing into the centre that which is at the periphery, and you can only do that if you get real clear about your new purpose and a narrative that surrounds that because that will enable you to create the kind of balance within your, your school offering. I think that is what we might be looking for.

Dale Atkinson: It strikes me as you are talking that to some degree the children and young people that we're educating are ahead of us in some of these areas, particularly around consciousness of environmental sustainability in the future of the planet, a recognition of the importance of democracy and democratic institutions. Do we need to be a bit better at listening to and following their instincts rather than continuing down the same path that we have been?

Valerie Hannon: Well, naturally we do and not just listening but involving them in designing solutions, which I think you in South Australia are in the lead on, I really do. I haven't come across more sophisticated means of exploring the understandings of young people and their potential contribution that I'm seeing here. So absolutely no question about that.

I mean, I'm heartened by what you say about young people's sensitivity to the fragility of democracy. I hope that's true. But the data, if you look at a number of sources on this of young people out of school from sort of 17 onwards, is that there's a real kind of indifference about democracy. So something like, would you be prepared to fight for democracy?

And the graph of people who said that they would is on the slide, is going down. On account of democracies disappointed quite a lot of people I think, so I hope you're right that young people care about that. I want to believe that. But we need to help them to do it. And we won't do that by kind of dry civics lessons about our government institutions.

We need to get much more relevant, much more participative for young people to explore forms of democracy and indeed, practice it like a muscle. But you are right, of course, on many aspects, young people are more sensitised. They're angered by the short-termism and the irresponsibility, the egregious lack of care for their future that adults have demonstrated, and they want to do something about it if they get half a chance.

Dale Atkinson: What you're speaking about, I think, is really reinforcing the role and function of teachers within society and the importance and pivotal nature of the role that they have. It's an incredible privilege and responsibility, isn't it?

Valerie Hannon: I believe it is. And becoming ever more challenging. So naturally, I argue for a kind of societal response to what teachers do in terms of both of remuneration and frankly respect. We need to work at that. It's really important. But with the advent of in increasing technology in classrooms, I'm all for it, and I think we should deploy it and exploit it to the max, but the skills of teachers are becoming or need to become ever more sophisticated and ever more central.

So this morning at our convening, people were asked to talk about purpose and so forth and again and again this understanding, this insight that relationships are at the heart of deep learning was surfaced, and that's spot on for some young people. As we know, the, the school will be the place where they form the most important relations, that perhaps the most, the loving relationships, maybe the only place where they get respect.

So for all my criticisms of the current, you know, kind of model of schooling, I believe passionately in the importance of the institution of schools, I think they're critical to flourishing and thriving societies for a whole range of reasons, which probably haven't got time to, to enumerate here but I think part of that is to create this public space, which, which by the way, you know, becoming rarer and rarer as we zoom more, as we buy our stuff online, as we shop less, you know, where'd you go in the public space to meet people not in your family and not like you?

So the whole concept of the school is a really critical space for connection and making relationships, I think is more important than ever.

Dale Atkinson: Yeah. You have looked at schools and education systems across the globe to identify what a future school would look like. What is innovative about the approach of those exemplar, future schools and what's the common thread across them?

Valerie Hannon: Well, to be clear, in the research I've done on this, I, I didn't sort of set out to look at schools who are innovating because who's to say that their innovations would be sustainable or be successful in the long term or would be part of the future?

It couldn't just be me saying, I think so, and I'm not in the crystal ball gazing business. So my method of going about this was to start with the future, what we know about the kind of trends affecting our future, and look at the work of a whole range of organisations, which were futurists, think tanks, research organisations, intergovernmental organisations. Whose business was to say, here's how the future is looking, and if that's the case, what does that imply about what education should be doing?

And I synthesised out of that some design principles for schools. And these design principles were not around curriculum, pedagogy and assessment, which is the way we usually chunk it. They were around values, they were around operational philosophy, which is by the way, where curriculum and all that comes in. But they were also around learner experience. So three sort of clusters of design principles. And then with our research team, we went out, we had look for schools who were exemplifying these design principles. All of them actually with a very clear view to preparing their young people for the future that they want.

So if you ask me, values were very upfront around purpose, again, come back to that, that word, very much framed on understanding how equity is essential for a thriving future, that schools need to be absolutely relevant to young people's lives as they're lived. That they need to be learning centred in that they employ all the best research about how learning becomes powerful. And it's powerful. That they deploy technology cleverly not, you know, obsessively, sometimes a paintbrush is the best piece of technology. And that they are ecosystemic, which perhaps is not a word, familiar with colleagues, but meaning that they, they reach out, they see the school as a kind of base camp from which learners reach out and to which they bring terrific learning resources. And then finally they really do focus on the learner experience. Cause if it doesn't change the learner's experience, doesn't really mean a damn. And how do the learners experience it? Well, it should be, they should have a sense of being included, that they should be known where collaboration is the norm. That's how people do things here. You know, we collaborate together so we become powerful learners. That it is personalised, Geoff Masters talked a lot about that today, and obviously that's very challenging in public schools, but we're finding better ways. And I'll finish with this, that learners should feel empowered. Not disabled, not humiliated, not disregarded, but actually the school is a place where they become empowered.

Dale Atkinson: Well, I think it's a lovely, powerful message to finish on. Thank you very much for your time, Valerie Hannon.

Valerie Hannon: Thank you.