The Globalnet 21 meeting last night turned out to be extremely interesting. As we were leaving our evening's instigator Pam suggested giving the evening a rating that followed strategic principles. While a low vote is obviously bad to give a high vote would give an unrealistic impression of the evening that might seem hard to believe. Naturally Francis quickly jumped in to say that if we thought the evening deserved full marks then we should give the rating we believed it deserved. Personally I considered it an extremely valuable experience that helped to consolidate a lot of ideas that had been floating around in my head for a long time with a lot of fantastic input from the other attendees.

Whilst it was Pamela McClean who essentially led the evening it was the organisation given to the evening by Steve that helped the evening to be such a success. Our topic of discussion was education and rather than following the tired technique of brainstorming ideas Steve used a couple of differently structured methods to get us thinking. Initially we began by filling a couple of A2 sheets with post it notes full of short notes on what education meant to each of us. As there were around. Dozen of us we took a few minutes to do this. I outlined the effect that would be had on a laptop by 20 people educated in IT compared with 20 people who had no education in IT whatsoever. I think enough of us have had computer related issues that we are well aware that in one of these instances the laptop would benefit greatly, whereas in the other it would soon be a laptop in name only as it became upgraded to the status of being an extremely expensive doorstop. I then asked, what would the result be if we were talking about billions of people and a planet instead of a laptop. I quickly realised that whilst writing this lengthy analogy everyone else was quickly filling the sheets with ideas and thoughts. Despite having crippled myself with such a lengthy comment it seemed that I might have been close to the sentiment that had brought most of the members of the group to the meeting.

Having loosened up with these brief post it notes we next listened to Pam explain what it was about the group that excited her. We were to follow this by then each listing our own thoughts about the group and what we hoped to talk about during the evening. After prioritising our thoughts the group took it in turns to state their number one priority.

The artist at whose home we were meeting, Ray, began with the idea that what he most wanted was to find a way to end greed. This is something that is of huge concern to so many of us at the moment. While the newspapers love to demonise the poor it is difficult to hide the fact that most of our current fiscal problems are caused by greed. The motivational force of the free market, pronounced as being ‘good’ by Gordon Gecko, with whom our current treasury department obviously agree, is plainly the principle cause of discontent when our country is compared with others where greed is less tolerated. I was slightly surprised that I had not even considered a primary purpose of education to be the promotion of more selfless attitudes. Another group formed across the other side of the room which was also concerned with how education could be used to address the problems that are currently facing society. I found myself in a smaller group between these two groups with substantive aims in which we felt that the procedural approach to education was the most important thing on which to focus. Francis arranges a large number of meet-ups for Global net 21 on many other subjects beside education. One I have planned to attend later in the month is to be held at Westminster and specifically deals with the subject of poverty. I had come specifically to discuss education and was glad to find others who were similarly interested in discussing the way we learn. The girl who had suggested our group within the group was another artist and as such comes from a more rebellious section of society. I had to agree that the way in which we were all taught as children tended to turn people away from books and education. It seemed that the quality we had in common was the desire to escape the education system we had been through as children only to later discover that we actually liked learning, we just did not like being taught.

We had all come with the impression that there was something wrong with the way that education is delivered. My own long term dream is to become an itinerant lecturer and take schooling out of the classroom and into the real world. Once upon a time the great artists would gain their training by sitting in a studio and copying the masters. The idea of taking an easel out into the countryside and painting landscapes is relatively recent. I feel that the rising mobile technologies and universal geographical internet access that the future promises us will give us the ability to similarly take schooling out of the stuffy classrooms in which it currently resides and out into the world for which it claims to prepare you.

As I discussed what could be done to bring the fun back into education with this young artist and an English teacher who bore a slight resemblance to Sean Connery. Connery in his years of wisdom, not Connery as Mr Universe or James Bond, we hit an interesting point several times. The first time it was mentioned it had been said that one does not need to know a subject in order to be able to teach it. It is well known that the best way to learn a subject is often to teach it oneself. In my first three months of teaching I learnt twice as much as I had learned during my degree. The next time we hit upon the point we had mentioned that teachers were generally selected according to the fact that they did know the subject. This is on the face of it a sensible policy. There seems to be less emphasis on the necessity of a teacher to be able to teach. Naturally a college or school is going to wish to choose teachers who both know their subject and also know how to teach. Of the two it is the former that is usually considered to be the more important quality. I am sure we have all had lectures from teachers who have been terrible at teaching but might be brilliant when it comes to research. When it comes to history I am sure that many of you will remember the disaster of David Starkey teaching a group of school children in Jamie Oliver’s Dream School. David Starkey is undoubtedly brilliant at what he does, unless what he does is trying to get a classroom full of school children to enjoy history. In the episodes I saw this went very badly indeed.

The third time that the problem of teachers (Incidentally I am one, as was pseudo-Sean- Connery) came up was when we thought about the way in which teachers often do not have the confidence to admit a mistake. It is as though the teacher has a belief that they are infallible and they are not allowed to make a mistake. Often of course, teachers do not make mistakes. I am certain there are teachers out there teaching younger students who will know their subject inside out. The problem is that they may not know it so well when teaching older students. When teaching adults we accept that sometimes they are going to know more than us. When they do their research projects they really ought to know more than us or they are not doing it correctly. We must be facilitators to their learning. When teaching infants it is easy to know everything that they need to be told as they do not have much knowledge yet and they are only able to take in a limited amount. In between there are a number of years where the system does not work so well.

During our teenage years we are naturally rebellious anyway. One of the best students I teach is an incredibly ambitious and hardworking student and even reasonably bright for their younger age, yet even they are a rebellious troublemaker. I cannot criticise, I am rebellious myself, however I think they call it cantankerous at my age. Teachers will often argue their point and try and cover up their faults and mistakes. They are often not fooling anyone. I remember when I was a teenager one of my English teachers mentioned the word, ‘necromancy’ and asked if the class knew its meaning. As my original christened name was ‘Tarot’ I was familiar with taromancy and knew that ‘mancy’ was a suffix that was applied to methods for predicting the future. I further knew that necromancy was a method of predicting the future that relied upon communication with the dead. My teacher poo-pooed this assertion and stated that the correct etymology of the word was that mancy was a way of saying magic and that necro was derived from negro and meant black. Necromancy was therefore not speaking with the dead to predict the future but was just plain ‘black magic’. As I knew this was wrong I researched it further and discovered of course that necro came from a Greek root and was a word that pertained to death, as in necropolis.

This was probably the first time I realised a teacher could be wrong. I am sure we thought all sorts of unpleasant things about them before this but we had a childish belief that they were infallible. Nowadays I realise that there is nothing wrong with being wrong but I still think that being so insecure as to argue with a child over whether you are right or wrong is not a positive trait in the teaching profession. Children are essentially being taught to never admit failure, regardless of how beneficial it will be to your task. In fact I recall now that many businesses that end with the very greatest losses after bankruptcy do so because the directors are unable to recognise and admit their failure until far too late.

So we had figured that teachers do not need to know their subject. Teachers usually are chosen because they do know their subject rather than whether they are able to teach it. Teachers do not always know their subject as well as they should but will often not admit to this. The lessons we had as children were marred and the enjoyment was taken out of them because regardless of whether the teacher knew the subject, they often did not know how to teach it in a way that we found enjoyable.

At university, students can choose their own direction and focus on art, golf, law, literature, hospitality management, or any other number of subjects that reflect their personal interests. The result is that students at university usually have far higher satisfaction levels than students at school. When one considers that the original skhole in Greek meant ‘leisure’ this does not make sense. The curriculum that is so strictly followed in schools across the country is there for a good reason. If you do not have the curriculum then how do you know that the students are all getting a good education, there may be so many mediocre teachers out there. Of course there are many flaws with having a universally required curriculum. The homogeneity of our education is a problem. A blacksmith could have told you 2000 years ago that one gets the strongest sword by mixing the soft pliable metal with the soft but brittle. A modern manager will tell you that the best team has a diverse skill set to draw upon. Yet educators train everyone to try and make them as similar as possible. In addition to this there is the fact that many teachers find themselves teaching things that may not be of interest to them where something equally adequate would have interested them so much that they would have delivered fascinating and vivid lectures. The curriculum, designed to protect us from mediocre teaching is in fact a trap in which the mediocrity of teaching is raised still further.

At times most of us have been blessed with a fabulous teacher. I often hear people tell me about an amazing teacher who filled the lessons with fun and made them want to learn more about a subject. I hear far more often that teachers bored people to death and made them think that the subject could well have been the most boring thing that they have ever had to try. Our discussion revealed that teachers often consider students to be an inconvenience that prevent research. My suggestion that perhaps teaching establishments should be separate from research establishments was shot down for a number of reasons. Another solution that was offered was the idea of a teaching tag team. There would be one teacher who would possess the knowledge and there would be another teacher that was skilled with bringing learning alive. In a way I am reminded a little of the Michel Thomas language learning tapes where the expert, Michel, will teach but the tapes really on the learners to get the lessons across to the listener. Teachers know what it is like to know about a subject but they do not know so well what it is like to not know the subject. It is hard to remember the days before I understood my subjects.

If all our teachers were like John Keating who was played by Robin Williams in the Dead Poets’ Society then we would all enjoy our education so much. If all our teachers were like that then the first thing that they would do would be to throw away the curriculum. There is value in the curriculum but when teachers love their subject and the students love hearing about the subject from the teachers then the curriculum is not necessary and if it exists at all should be far broader than it actually is.

The tag team teachers was an idea that I loved. Perhaps it is a bit fantastical but nevertheless I think that our group was moving in the right direction. It would be interesting to see how much further we could take the idea. What more we could do with it? I think that the best way to reach a reasonable idea is to reach for something extreme and bizarre and then refine it until it is perfect. Though even if we did not refine such ideas they could not be more bizarre than the extreme ideas that have actually been put in motion in the real world during our history.