Anthony Seldon, Master of Wellington College, is one of the Professors of Education of The College of Teachers. In his Professorial Inaugural Lecture, he delivered an analysis of the UK’s education system. Professor Seldon is deeply in favour of rigorous assessment, but believes that so much external testing is not helping to educate young people and has come to determine and drive the curriculum, and that right and wrong answers – facts – have come to dominate exams with the effect of squeezing out originality, imagination, individuality and flair. The text of his lecture, which was held at Wellington College in 2009, is given below.

 Can I begin by thanking The College of Teachers for the great honour they have bestowed upon me?

 “Now, what I want is, Facts. Teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts. Facts alone are wanted in life. Plant nothing else, and root out everything else. You can only form the minds of reasoning animals upon Facts: nothing else will ever be of any service to them. This is the principle on which I bring up these children. Stick to Facts, Sir!”

The words are, of course, famously spoken by Thomas Gradgrind from Charles Dickens’ Hard Times, which first appeared initially in serial form exactly 155 years ago. 

Dickens was reacting against rational and utilitarian values being promulgated at the time in Victorian society, which were leading to a stress on rote learning at the expense of imagination and creativity. 

Dickens is talking of events long, long ago, and is describing an imaginary mid-19^th century school and a 19^thcentury teaching. We learn that Gradgrind is “a man who proceeds upon the principle that two and two are four, and nothing over”. He is a man “with a rule and a pair of scales, and the multiplication table always in his pocket, ready to weigh and measure any parcel of human nature, and tell you exactly what it comes to”. 

Gradgrind is a local bureaucrat who has set up a school to teach his own soulless values. The teacher is called Mr M’Choakumchild. 

Gradgrind is in full flow upon visiting Mr M’Choakumchild’s class, and asks one of the pupils, Cecilia Jupe, for the definition of a horse. Cecilia, who Gradgrind describes as “girl number twenty”, is unable to satisfy her teacher. “Girl number twenty unable to define a horse!”, explodes Mr Gradgrind. “Girl number twenty possessed of no facts, in relation to one of the commonest of animals!” 

He turns to a boy student, improbably called Bitzer. “Bitzer”, said Thomas Gradgrind, “your definition of a horse”. 

“Quadruped. Graminivorous. Forty teeth, namely twenty-four grinders, four eyeteeth, and twelve incisive. Sheds coat in the spring: in marshy countries, sheds hoofs too. Hoofs hard, but requiring to be shod with iron. Age known by marks in mouth.” 

Gradgrind smiles expansively. He has heard what he needed to hear, and swings round defiantly on poor Cecilia Jupe. “Now girl number twenty”, said Mr Gradgrind, “you know what a horse is”. 

Cecilia is of an artistic and sensitive bent. She likes animals and horses. But Gradgrind will hear nothing of allowing her or other pupils to draw or paint horses or to put them on the classroom walls. Nor will he let them paint representations of flowers. 

“You won’t paper a room with representations of horses. Do you ever see horses walking up and down the sides of rooms in reality – in fact? Do you?” The class look befuddled and do not know what response to give their demanding teacher. 

“You are not to see anywhere what you don’t see in fact: you are not to have anywhere, what you don’t have in fact.” He singles out poor Cecilia, and condemns her to banish thoughts of creativity or imagination. “You are never to fancy”, he tells her. “Fact, fact, fact.” 

Dickens is describing a 19th century school, but he is also describing 21^st century schools. Whether in Brighton or Burnley, Beijing or Bogotá, Bracknell or Bangalore, schools are dancing to Gradgrind’s drumbeat of facts, facts, facts more than ever. 

155 years on, the spectres of Thomas Gradgrind and Mr M’Choakumchild strut the classrooms of the world. They threaten to engulf every man and every woman who parades their talents and virtues before their classes in school, and every wise and far seeing bureaucrat and official who walks tall in central government, state and local government offices the width and breadth of the globe. 

Schools are evaluated, and valued, by their academic results, and by improvement in them. This is the touchstone, the Mecca, the Holy Grail. But, from India to Iceland and from Angola to Auckland, national exams themselves have become more and more formulaic. Assessment, by testing and exams, has come to determine and drive the curriculum, and right and wrong answers – facts - have come to dominate exams. 

Facts have a place, but only a limited place, in education. The facts children learn today will become superseded. We need to educate minds as well as teach facts. The 21st century will be very different: we need to educate people to be flexible, with human skills and a deep sense of value. 

The domination of exams has happened because of the need, perfectly reasonable in itself, for examination bodies to produce reliable and fair tests to assess children. 

The search for ever greater reliability and comparability, has made exams more and more predictable and safe. The scope for originality, for imagination, individuality and fl air, has been squeezed out. 

In the name of fairness, we have embraced dullness – and so close are we to it that we do not even see what has happened.

School districts, individual schools, principals, faculties and departments, and teachers, have become valued according to one measure alone: their success at passing these exams. What happens to the needs of children like Cecilia Jupe, who seek individual expression, creativity and imagination? Because every child in the world seeks these things. 

How has she been transformed into ‘girl number twenty’? How do we account for the victory of Mr Gradgrind? To answer this, we have to understand why schools were created, and how they have been shaped. 

Religious authorities have founded schools the world over, and have seen them as training grounds for doctrinal purity and obedience. At best, they fill the children with love and wonder: but all too often they have narrowed, not opened, children’s minds and hearts. 

What of Governments, who have founded and funded millions of schools? Have they not sought to open our children? Their primary objective has been to produce a workforce capable of making their countries economically competitive, defend them against invasion, and ensuring that their populations are law-abiding and biddable. 

Employers were some of the earliest founders of schools, because of the need to train apprentices and skilled craftsmen. Employers still exercise a powerful influence over the content of schooling – we can see it today in the new-style Diplomas. 

But employers do not see schools as developing the whole child but rather as a production line turning out a trained workforce. 

Finally, higher education has sought to make schools in their own image. Academics see students as “Mini-Me’s”, with the better ones being earmarked as researcher fodder for their own writing. But very few students want to become academics. 

In Amsterdam last week, Tristian Stobie, Curriculum Developer for the International Baccalaureate (IB) Organisation, admitted that a criticism of the IB Diploma was that it was determined too much by the requirements of universities in the US, UK and Australia. 

Universities in Britain have huge power over the 6th Form curriculum. Despite their protestations to the contrary, most universities do not value academic breadth or co-curriculum and personal achievement. By failing to do more to acknowledge and reward breadth, universities are not encouraging school pupils to stretch themselves beyond their A Levels. 

A Tutor of Admissions at an Oxbridge College recently admitted to one of my colleagues at Wellington: “We are not looking for broad-achieving and rounded students at this College; in fact, we are not rounded people ourselves”. 

Universities should be places of broad intellect and self-discovery. Populated by students who choose to go to them, and have selected their courses, they should be places of delight. But they are far from fulfilling these aims. 

Most students in Britain regard university as a right, not as a privilege. They are often unable to answer convincingly the question, “Why are they here?” Increasingly, higher education institutions are becoming training or instruction grounds for professions – law, accountancy, business – courses which sit uneasily with purer subjects like English, History and Natural Sciences. 

To many students, universities are not places that broaden them out. Many leave universities prematurely, or are disillusioned by the experience. Unsurprisingly, American universities, which do far more to offer a broad education academically, culturally and sportingly, are rising in popularity with British students. 

This is not to criticise university teachers, any more than I am critical of school teachers: both groups need to be paid and rewarded much better. Their work and good will is more vital to our society than we currently acknowledge. 

Yet they deserve better. Money must be found for them: investment in computers is all very well, but they will never, ever replace the teacher, any more than they can replace the parent. 

Students at universities in Britain are showing signs of significant mental distress similar to that of school children. They are showing more signs of depression, eating disorders, self-harming, and alcohol/drug abuse, than at any point in recorded history. They also have better resources, more computers, better buildings, and more money in their pockets than at any point in their history. 

What has been lost? Why has affluence and knowledge not brought us wonderful schools and remarkable universities? 

As T.S. Eliot asks, “Where is the Life we have lost in living? Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?” What we have lost is the purpose of education and the purpose of life. That’s all. Let me explain.

What we have forgotten is the purpose of education. With healthcare, it is fairly easy to agree what are the aims of doctors and hospitals – preventing illness and curing sickness. 

It is far harder to agree on the purpose of education. It is far easier to say what has gone wrong, than how we are to re-imagine schools and universities for the 21^st century. 

To discover the way forward, we need to go back. Back to the derivation of the word ‘education’: it comes from the Latin word, educare, meaning ‘to lead out’.

What is being led out, and from whom? The faculties that lie within each human being are being led out, and the process is done primarily by parents and by teachers – our focus today is on teachers. 

Teaching is utterly pivotal to education. As the great psychologist, Lev Vygotsky, said, the role of teachers is to help pupils construct their own understandings. 

Let me offer five ways forward to allow the 21st century to be vastly different to the factory education of the past. 

We need urgently to rethink what we think of intelligence. We have allowed our schools to become obsessed with a very narrow definition of intelligence, and one that renders the majority of our pupils believing they are failures. 

55% of children are currently leaving British schools with fewer than five A-C grades at GCSE including Maths and English. 

This is utter madness. We are spending more money on schooling, we have more and better qualified teachers, we have had greater focus from Number 10 from two successive Prime Ministers, we have a tighter control over the curriculum and inspection of schools than ever before in history. 

Based on the work of many, including the educator Kurt Hahn, and the Harvard psychologist Howard Gardner, at Wellington we base our entire schooling on the belief that each child has eight aptitudes or intelligences. They form an octagon, and they are in four sets of pairs, the logical and linguist, the cultural and the physical, the social and the personal, the moral and the spiritual.

All of these intelligences are valid, perhaps even equally so. Schools have concentrated on just the logical and linguistic intelligences. Worse, they have done so in a thumpingly pedestrian way. 

Is it surprising that truancy levels are so high, and schoolchildren are saying they are less interested in school than ever? 

Schools need to ask the question, along with Gardner, “not how intelligent is a child: but rather, how is the child intelligent?” All children, like all adults, possess these eight faculties. All need to be ‘led out’ by schools. 

If schools did this better, and based it on challenge, on discovery, and on learning, rather than on memory of facts, on dull repetition and on instruction, then schools would become places of delight which pupils valued. 

Playing fields need to be brought back, orchestras and music placed at the heart of the curriculum, dance for everyone, physical exercise, outdoor adventure and challenge the right of every child. 

We should not have needed Jamie Oliver to tell us that children need to eat better food and to exercise more.

Once children start to believe schools are places where things are being done for them, rather than done to them, their interest would revive. Schools would become places of delight, of excitement, and of harmony. 

Second, external testing and examinations need to be severely cut back: the abandonment of testing at Key Stage 3 was a move in the right direction. 

The biggest curse has been league tables. These have had four main drivers, all of whom have gained from their existence: government, able to claim year on year ‘improvements’; exam boards, eager to gain new business by showing improved results; the media, able to publish and comment on fatuous indicators of ‘top schools’; and, I regret to say, some Heads, who have distorted education at their schools and impoverished the lives of some children, to show meaningless league table advance.

No single fact has had more damage on British education than league tables and the construction put on them by a press, who should have known much better. The press claims to be acting in the interests of the consumer. I have yet to meet any discerning parent who does not think that they are junk, utter junk. 

Testing and examinations have spread in Britain and elsewhere in the world, because of a lack of trust – of schools, Heads and teachers. Government officials have sought, through exams and testing, to make education ‘teacher proof’ around the world. 

But as Professor Geoff Thompson has written, “the inevitable consequence of exams is that teachers will teach to the test”. 

Long ago, we gave up teaching History in Britain: we teach History GCSE; the teaching and learning of Biology has been replaced by instruction for Biology AS level; the teaching of Maths by the teaching of Maths A level.

I do not advocate avoiding rigorous and constant assessment: Professor Dylan William of the Institute of Education has argued persuasively about the role of formative assessment or ‘assessment for learning’ in raising standards.

Rather, I am arguing that the curriculum must determine the assessment, rather than the assessment determining the curriculum.

This is utterly key. 

We do not need so many national external exams – we could perhaps get away without any until the age of 18, as they do in America until they sit SATs and APs. 

GCSEs and A Levels should be swept away in favour of exams like the International Baccalaureate, with its Primary Years Programme, its Middle Years Programme, and Diploma level. 

Where GCSEs and A Levels concentrate on assessment, IB concentrates on the curriculum; where the former focuses on teaching and instruction, the latter is centred around learning; where the former is national, the latter is international; the former on memory of facts, the latter on discovery. 

We also need to learn to trust teachers again, to trust heads, and to trust schools.

Third, we need to take well-being of students at school and university level far more seriously. It is a truism that mental illness amongst school pupils and university students is now at epidemic proportions. Yet many educators and far too many commentators in the media continue to sneer at what they do not understand. 

Some have sniped at ‘happiness’ classes because they allegedly teach children to be selfish: but the core message is that the best way to feel good is to do good to others. 

The whole aim is to help each child find harmony within themselves, harmony with others, and harmony with the environment. 

The teaching of well-being is grounded on an increasingly strong research base, centred on ‘positive psychology’, founded by Professor Martin Seligman of Pennsylvania University in 1998. 

In five years we have moved from a world where it was faddish to think about the teaching of well-being, to one where it is now irresponsible of school heads and university Vice Chancellors not to ensure it lies at the very heart of their institutions. 

Fourth, we need to get back to human scale in schools. It is madness to have huge anonymous state schools, where the children are not known. 

A core factor making the independent sector in Britain the most successful of any school sector in the world - apart from their independence, which all schools should have - is the comparatively small size of the schools, and the fact that senior schools are broken down into manageable units called ‘houses’, usually containing between 50 and 60 children. 

21^st century schools must be personal, and each child and their parent must be known as an individual. In factory schools, they were on the production line: the parents dropped them off at age 5 and picked them up at the age of 16 or 18 with periodic ‘works outings’ along the way. 

In the 21^st century school the parent and child lie at the heart, with warm and strong personal relationships with the school. 

Finally, schools must be places for spiritual delight. In Gradgrind’s world, there were only facts, and he could not conceive of anything outside his mind. 

Richard Dawkins is right in much of what he says about religion: many who have followed religion have behaved deplorably. At the heart of all religions is love: anyone who acts without love, is not being true to his or her religion. Nothing that bad people do in the name of religion condemns religion, any more than bad scientists condemn science. 

For every Mohammed Atta, there is a Chief Imam Zaki Badawi. For every Dr Mengele, there is a Robert Winston. 

Children, like adults, need spiritual meaning if their lives are to be worthwhile. It comes not from material possessions, but from that which transcends the material: human love, beauty in art or in landscape, the sheer wonder of just being as opposed to having. 

At the end of “Hard Times”, Gradgrind’s daughter, Louisa tells him, ‘How could you give me life, and take from me all the inappreciable things that raise it from the state of conscious death? Where are the graces of my soul? Where are the sentiments of my heart? What have you done, O father, what have you done, with the garden that should have bloomed once, in this great wilderness here!’

Walk on every head teacher, every inspector and every local and central bureaucrat who has squeezed the lifeblood out of education. 

Walk on too the holy trinity of Richard Dawkins, Dan Dennett and Christopher Hitchens. 

They and Gradgrind are natural bedfellows. They cannot conceive of any truth beyond their own interpretation of the world. They do not even see that it is only an interpretation. 

My best response to them comes from the Tibetan Book of Living and Dying by Sogyol Rinpoche: “Confined in the dark, narrow cage of our own making which we take for the whole universe, very few of us can even begin to imagine another dimension of reality.” Patrul Rinpoche tells the story of an old frog who had lived all his life in a dank well. One day a frog from the sea paid him a visit. 

“Where do you come from?” asked the frog in the well. 

“From the great ocean,” he replied. 

“How big is your ocean?” 

“It’s gigantic.”

“You mean about a quarter of the size of my well here?” 

“Bigger.” 

“Bigger? You mean half as big?”

“No, even bigger.” “Is it . . . as big as this well?” 

“There’s no comparison.” 

“That’s impossible! I’ve got to see this for myself.” 

They set off together. When the frog from the well saw the ocean, it was such a shock that his head just exploded into pieces. 

21^st century schools and universities need to be holistic, driven by the curriculum rather by assessment, grounded in well-being, human in scale, and spiritual to their heart. 

At the end of “Hard Times”, Gradgrind realises the folly of his thinking. Too late to save his children, his daughter Louisa tells him. 

Dickens’ message is as timely and urgent for us in 2009 as it was in 1854. It is that soulless, loveless, desiccated education damages children for a lifetime. It diminishes their chances of living a life full of meaning, full of love, full of hope.

Education should be an opening of the heart and mind. This is what education means, it is this, or it is nothing. 

Will the 21^st century see factory schools and universities or will it see human schools and universities? 

I would love to be optimistic.

 

This lecture may be downloaded as a PDF.