Teach Secondary Issue 14.7

What’s education for, anyway? From facilitators for economic activity to centres of cultural enrichment, there seems to be a surprisingly wide mix of views as to what the purpose of school actually is... I love listening to radio phone-in chat shows. Recently, though, I’ve noticed a trend. No matter what the topic – knife crime, drug use, the ‘small boats crisis’ – there comes a point in almost every debate when a certain type of person rings in. “ What we need to do is get schools to educate people, ” they say, with the air of a prize turkey announcing to the flock that Christmas might not be ideal. I don’t knowwhy it grates so much every time, but I’ve a good idea. The caller, acting with the best intentions, genuinely believes that schools have no interest in educating young people about the issue(s) in question. Worse still, they seem to think that we actively promote the kind of behaviour they want to see stamped out. Do they believe we actually teach knife skills and joint-rolling techniques, or encourage an uncritical belief in anything found on social media? Evenmore bizarrely, they appear hold us responsible for the actions of society’s older members too. When a 50-year-old businessman gets caught fiddling his taxes, somehow it’s our fault – for not better educating 16-year-olds who have yet to even enter the workforce...? ABOUT THE AUTHOR ‘I, Teacher’ is a secondary teacher, teacher trainer and writer challenging binary teaching narratives. For more information, visit tinyurl.com/ts-ITC or follow @i-teacher.bsky.social School as childminding All this got me thinking, what do people really think education is for? Ask 10 people that and you’ll get 15 different answers. Some say it’s about getting kids ‘work ready’. These are the same folks who’ll worry about the economy, and then complain that schools don’t ‘teach Council Tax’, or ‘how to get a mortgage’ – as if the point of education is to prepare everyone to be an HR assistant in Hounslow. Others will tell you that education is about culture – the passing on of shared values, great works of literature, art, science and moral thought. ‘ What’s the point in knowing algebra, ’ they’ll sniff, ‘ if you’ve never read Shakespeare? ’ To them, education is a civilising force, an intellectual National Service that prevents us from becoming wild, TikTok- obsessed goblins. Then you’ve got the parents who, quite understandably, see school as a means to an end, a logistical necessity. Somewhere their child goes to during the day so that they can work. Economically, at least, Early Years education is primarily seen as childcare, with nursery enabling parents to engage in the workforce. This idea, this stigma is hard to shake off. Even when parents understand that our job, as secondary teachers, is to develop subject knowledge and critical thinking, that sense of school simply being child-minding never fully disappears. It underpins the belief that we’re just there to keep kids occupied until they’re old enough to work or apply for student loans. Of course, the government has its own ideas – test scores, performance data, outcomes, outcomes and outcomes . At this level, it’s less about children than it is about numbers. So what is education for?What should it be for? Messilyhuman The best answer is the most uncomfortable – that education is for helping people become . Become more informed, more thoughtful, more capable of understanding the world and acting within it with clarity and integrity. This doesn’t always look like a qualification. It doesn’t have to involve knowing the GDP of China, or when the Treaty of Versailles was signed (though it might). It’s something messier, more human and frustratingly hard to measure. When you teach someone how to analyse a poem, you’re not just ‘teaching poetry’ – you’re teaching themhow to spot nuance. When you explain photosynthesis, you’re not just ticking off a biology objective – you’re giving them tools with which to marvel at the world. When a pupil finally cracks a tricky maths problem, that’s not just learning; that’s resilience in action. But try including any of that in a DfE slide deck. Doesn’t have quite the same ring as ‘ raising attainment through targeted intervention ,’ does it? The simple fact is that we don’t all agree on what education is for – and therein lie most of our day-to-day problems. Unless society can agree what education is for, we’ll keep expecting schools to fix the unsolvable, while ignoring the small miracles that happen each day whenever a child learns to think that little bit more clearly than they did yesterday. Because trust me – that’s education doing exactly what it’s meant to do. 43 teachwire.net/secondary O P I N I O N