People starting education now will be retiring in 2065 – we are educating them for a future we cannot see, predict or understand. We need to rethink the fundamental principles for educating our children. Our task is to educate their whole being so they can face this future – a future we may not see…our job is to help them make something of it!
Sir Ken Robinson, TED, June 2006
The problem
In recent years there have been severe pressures on the school system in the UK to do more and more:
- The drive for STEM (Science, technology, engineering and maths) skills
- Learning about climate change
- A duty to promote community cohesion
- Developing young citizens
Until recently, schools have been expected to meet these challenges, and many more. But they can’t do it all – on the one hand the National College calls for system leadership amongst school leaders, extending out to be a leader of the whole community. On the other hand rightly there has been a backlash against a perception that schools are being drawn away from their core purpose of teaching and learning.
The new government’s response seems to be to return to a ‘traditional’ core of subjects. Whilst this might be good in narrow educational terms, it ignores the realities and challenges of the world today, and so raises the risks of us going medieval.
An alternative solution: education as resilience
A view of education as resilience is a view that education offers us the capabilities to respond to any of these pressures, as well as responding to new pressures that we know will arise in the 21st century. Though we can be confident that these pressures will arise, we can’t yet predict what they will be. So as well as teaching specific knowledge, we need to teach general tools for adaptability and responsiveness.
At the heart of this general toolbox is critical thinking. Critical thinking allows us to respond effectively to a fast-changing world and manage the information overload that the internet has created. And in this way critical thinking offers a new conception of what it means to be free in the 21st century. Critical thinking equates to freedom from the tyranny of having your opinions decided for you by the newspaper you read, or the adverts next to your email account. It allows you to reflect on your own views, values and aspirations, bringing greater individual autonomy.
So critical thinking offers personal freedom. But just as importantly, a nation of critical thinkers offers social resilience against the shocks of the 21st century. Because we know these shocks are coming. But they don’t need to derail our society, like Hurricane Katrina did in New Orleans.
Our response to shocks like Katrina depends a great deal on how we mentally frame these events. As an example, take this quote from FT enterprise editor Jonathan Guthrie:
What always strikes me as a business journalist visiting a city like Newcastle, a manifest loser in economic terms, is how blithely unworried the ordinary inhabitants are about it. They have robust civic institutions, strong local pride and a well-documented capacity to throw a party. According to one survey on contentment published a few years ago, the most miserable Britons were not impecunious Geordies but the prosperous inhabitants of the south east. The imputed causes were commuting and the insecurity that daily exposure to extremes of wealth and poverty can occasion. Relative economic underperformance matters a lot in the boardroom of the regional development agency. Less so in the pub, football stadium or mosque.
Jonathan’s point is that our response to relative wealth or poverty is not set – it depends a great deal on how we frame the experience of our daily lives, and what we worry about.
The power of critical thinking is that it gives us control over this framing process. Being able to reflect on, and think critically about how we respond to, say, climate-related disasters can make the difference between having New Orleans-style breakdowns in society at ever-increasing frequencies, or recognising and accepting that more destructive environmental shocks are now an inevitable part of our lives, and ensuring that our collective response to these shocks brings our communities together, rather than tearing them apart. In other words, education in the form of critical thinking offers us a route to social resilience.
At their most apocalyptic, some commentators argue that we risk descending into a new dark age over the next few centuries. This may be hyperbole, but it is nevertheless essential that we work today to develop the critical thinking tools that will help us to continue to make social progress in the coming century, which looks to be at least as turbulent as the last one.
