Introduction

There is always a danger that reading a book may serve simply to confirm ones own prejudices. However, this highly readable and academic book has provided me with a framework, an historical perspective, and a general overview that has helped me to see some concerns I have with education in a less haphazard way.

I’ve written this review with an overtly personal stance, which is unusual for me. The reason is that this review is partly an exercise in thinking out loud. I hope you don’t find it too intrusive.

Finally, before we get started, this article does not focus on education technology, but on education more broadly.

My concerns

One of the things that I have found very puzzling is why victimhood has such a high status these days. Its most bizarre manifestation is when certain celebrities, who cannot, in any meaningful sense, describe themselves as “victims” nevertheless do so.

Another thing I find puzzling is why any young person would wish to shell out thousands of pounds or dollars for a university education, and then do all in their power to make sure they’re not exposed to any ideas that challenge their own beliefs or what they think they know. It actually really is bizarre, because you could get the same confirmation of your own biases by popping to the local pub every night. And that would be a hell of a lot cheaper.

I’ve witnessed the rise in what the authors refer to as “therapeutic education” with growing dismay over the years. I believe it to be not only unintellectual, but positively anti-intellectual.

And I have a number of concerns about the “solutions” to the largely non-problems like stress, low self-esteem and a whole range of other “issues” which seem to me to be a normal consequence of being a human being.

Just to be clear, before anyone decides to “flame” me, I appreciate that, taken to its extreme, low self-esteem can lead to self-harm or worse. But really that explains one of the reasons why I have concerns. By seeing just about everything through the lens of emotional need and self-obsession, those who do need proper and professional help may get overlooked.

I’ve emphasised the word “professional” because I don’t think the mind is something to be messed with by amateurs. Occasionally I’ve enrolled on a course and the tutor has started off by asking people to share some highly personal information, or vulnerability, or whatever. I never do. I engage in what I suppose might be called passive aggression.

For example, when an ice-breaker activity was to select an object that meant a great deal to you and tell the others in the group why, I selected the huge mug I was drinking from and said it meant a lot to me because it holds 0.75 litres so I don’t have to get up every half hour to fill it up.

Perhaps that sounds perverse, but why would I want to tell complete strangers about something personal? How would the tutor cope if the item was so personal that I had a complete emotional meltdown?

Schools, further education colleges and universities

This book helps to explain the current victimhood malaise (to me at least) by relating what has been happening in different kinds of educational setting. It covers primary education, secondary education, further education, higher education and the workplace. Obviously, I don’t want to summarise the whole book here, but I’ll just provide a few examples from it that I found both enlightening and horrifying.

Primary school

The example is cited of a nine-year old who said that circle time was used to calm people down when they were getting stressed, or were not getting on with each other. I can’t help but be struck by the difference between this and one of the outcomes of a project I was involved in. It involved putting multimedia technology into five primary schools and one secondary school and allowing the schools to use the stuff however they liked. In one of the schools I visited, where the children had been working on a class video, I asked the children what they had learnt from the activity.

One little girl put her hand up and said, “We learnt to talk about our differences of opinion instead of fighting about it.” That raises a broader question: should the focus of education be on dealing with emotions, becoming “resilient”, or should it focus on knowledge and skills? If the former, then one of the outcomes could be that people become insufferably self-obsessed, whereas if the latter then the skills of collaboration and seeing the other’s point of view is likely (at least in my experience) to emerge naturally. I fear we have gone too far down the former route, and a wider outcome of this, as the authors point out, is a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy. If you are constantly telling people that they need help in a therapeutic sense, they’re less likely to become self-reliant.

Secondary school

The authors discuss the spread of various schemes by which students become counsellors to other students. How must it feel to be in a situation where, if you’re feeling unhappy, you can go to a student counsellor (identifiable by a badge they wear) who has had less than three days’ training, and to do so openly (ie in front of other students)? The quotes from students in schools where such schemes operate are favourable, but I wonder if this is not a self-selecting group? What of the introvert student for whom the set-up would be a prime cause of anguish?

Further Education

Instructions to tutors in one institution were to refrain from asking challenging questions in class or writing critical comments on students’ work in case it damaged their self-esteem. Talk about bigotry of low expectations! This is appalling. Even if a student has secured a place at no financial cost, there is still a cost, in terms of the better education that may be on offer elsewhere, time, or lost earnings.

University

Someone asked my advice on choosing a university some years ago. I suggested that after he had identified those that did a course he was interested in, he took into account two further factors:

• Distance from home:

  • the need to have to live away from home;

  • the need to avoid your parents dropping in unexpectedly because they “just happened to be passing”; I recommended two hundred miles.

• Whether the girls were attractive.

Admittedly, I was being somewhat flippant, but the point I was trying to make was that he needed to take the opportunity to be independent of his parents for a few years. To my mind it’s a kind of trial run and preparation for going out into the big wide world and making your mark. How can you do that if your parents are always hovering?

Thus I was rather shocked that, according to this book, parents not only accompany their kids to open days (which I think is reasonable) but even to tutor-student progress meetings. What’s more shocking, to me at any rate, is that the students welcomed this involvement. Unbelievable! And what a criminal wasted opportunity.

Conclusion

There is more in the book about the workplace, and the authors’ recommendations, which I won’t summarise here. It’s a book that provides a helicopter view of what has been happening in education in the UK over the years, and in all sectors. From my reading and viewing, I believe there are similarities with the situation in other countries. I’ve read the first version of this book; there is now a second edition. I haven’t read that, but I suspect it’s a look at how things have “progressed” since the first edition was published. I suspect that “progressed” in this context is not the right word. It’s a good starting point for discussion, and may help you, as it did me, make sense of some of the things that have long troubled me about the direction in which education seems to be going.

Click on the cover here to be taken to the book’s website, where you can read the blurb and the table of contents.