Don’t chop down the tree of knowledge

The current buzz in education is all about how our students are going to be working in industries that have not yet been invented. In other words, we can’t prepare them for what is irritatingly called ‘the world of work’ because we can have no clue about what that world will be.

They tell us, as though it is new, that the schoolchildren of today will have something like a thousand jobs before they retire (aged approximately 96). And, as a result of these ‘facts’, they conclude that we actually have no idea at all how we can help them. The answer seems to be to stop teaching them knowledge and to begin to teach them ‘transferrable skills’.

It seems to me that good writing and communication are as transferrable a skill as any on the planet. That being able to read, understand and extrapolate from a piece of writing is as relevant now as it was when a bread recipe was painted on the oldest known tomb of an ancient Egyptian woman. That being able to do sums and understand the basics of physics and chemistry are as valuable now as ever. But apparently not.

We all know Dickens’s Hard Times mockery of the forcing of knowledge upon ‘the little pitchers before him, who were to be filled so full of facts’, but I still believe that the only way to begin with maths is the reciting of your times tables. The modern movement away from facts, though, is also deserving of satire. Taken to its extreme – which is where some educators would have it – children only learn through experience. They have to discover everything for themselves. This might make sense when doing the multiplication tables. But it is still going to take forever to keep stacking up tins of dog food, or whatever they will be using, rather than just getting the general idea of multiplication and learning the basics.

How long did it take the world to throw up an Isaac Newton? Is every child going to have to sit under an apple tree, have an apple fall on their head and then be able to make the connection? Why can we no longer just tell them about gravity and leave them to discover the next thing?

Going by this model of education, we will inevitably be starting again with every generation, thereby being pulled backward into the primeval swamp. But it is not just the folly of the method that enrages me. If we adopt this approach, we are also denying our children centuries not just of knowledge, but of cultural inheritance. Even if you allow that they will (all) magically reinvent the alphabet, learn to read (and want to read), find the vanishing heavens that are libraries… how will they know where to begin?

If a child is interested in science, I can suggest they read John Wyndham for fiction, Bill Bryson’s A Short History of Nearly Everything for non-fiction, look at Leonardo da Vinci’s scientific drawings – all this is just from that now maligned package called knowledge. Plus, I have passed on my knowledge, thus showing that, despite my old-fashioned education, I have a transferrable skill.

The day they tell me that I cannot teach the subject I love, guide the children towards books they may love, help them write better, communicate better and become wider-thinking humans, is the day I will finally hang up my mortarboard.

While adaptability, courage and curiosity are all vital to anyone’s chances of survival, there is joy in knowledge to which the youngest and least able of children can respond as wholeheartedly as the Isaac Newtons of the classroom.