What can schools still teach that ChatGPT can’t?
Moving fast and breaking things doesn’t work when it comes to children
I once did an exercise with a bright group of teenagers in which I sat them down with a blank copy of their school timetable and asked them to fill in the gaps themselves. What, I wondered, would the school day look like if they reinvented it from scratch?
Nothing, I assured them, was off limits - apart from recreating any scenes from If, the 1968 film about a vicious schoolboy insurrection. If they wanted, they could make up brand new subjects or ditch pointless old ones. They could rip up the whole calendar and start again. Chairs, classrooms, desks, detention, holidays, homework, teachers, textbooks – they had complete tabula rasa to reimagine them all. They could, in short, fundamentally restructure the entire purpose of education for the 21st century.
I sat back, feeling rather pleased with myself, waiting for them to present their revolutionary blueprint for the future.
This is a summary of their findings: some wanted more PE; others wanted less PE. A few argued for Psychology before the Sixth Form; others worried about taking time away from English and Maths. A plurality wanted chips every day; a vocal minority preferred chicken katsu. The only point of consensus was that school should start at 10am on Monday and finish on Thursday, like the rest of the country.
In retrospect, it was probably an ambitious project for a 30-minute session. But as well as revealing my own deficiencies as a teacher, it also shows just how ingrained our one-size-fits-all education remains.
Why has remarkably little changed since the Victorian era? And, if you were to rip it all up and start again, would you still spend so much time worrying about whether a child can wield a small, cylindrical plastic object (unless they want to become a primary school teacher); recall the month of the Battle of Hastings (unless they want to become a History teacher); or tie a tie (unless they want to become an estate agent or a politician)?
Reading, writing and risk assessments
Much of what has survived from the 19th-century model of education is practical, as well as philosophical.
Then, as now, children probably need to learn to read, write (or at least express themselves in ways that don’t involve grunts), count, grow and make mistakes. They need somewhere safe, sociable – and ideally stimulating – to spend the time in which their parents are working and/or slagging off the school on the class WhatsApp group. And, like Labradors, children will generally be happier if fed, watered, exercised and treated with firm kindness.
Once those basics are covered, many of the top-up benefits of a classical education are still relevant today. Curiosity. Critical thinking. An ability to develop a viewpoint on something other than England’s chances of winning the World Cup – and change your mind in the face of conflicting evidence. And self-evidently (I hope), this is all best done alongside human teachers who know their pupils, know more than their pupils and, most importantly, know that their pupils know that they know that they don’t know everything.
Do this well in the humanities and you might just create empathetic, engaged and tolerant citizens who have a sense of what makes themselves – and the world – tick.
(I’m told that children also learn useful lessons in science, but I’m not sure what these are. Something to do with labelling the parts on a flower? And holding out the fingers – or is it the thumb? – on your right hand – or is it your left hand? – to show which way the current – or is it the force? – is flowing in a magnetic field? And maybe other trivial things, like curing diseases, keeping planes in the sky and making a living that doesn’t involve writing Substacks?)
Anyway. My point is that a Victorian headmaster wouldn’t feel too out of place if he spent a day in a modern school. True, he might raise a Whiggish eyebrow at PHSE lessons and ADHD diagnoses and risk assessments and water bottles and restorative discipline – I’m reminded of an elderly relative exclaiming: “I simply don’t understand how you’re able to keep control of a class without the threat of a cane.” But shave that headmaster’s mutton chops and give him a quick INSET over the summer holidays, and I reckon he’d have the parents fooled by the October half-term.
The school of strife
Broadly speaking, this 150-year continuity is a good thing. Schools are Burkean Conservatives, changing in order to conserve. Sprinkle in a little Python alongside the Pythagoras, Mandarin alongside Of Mice and Men, taekwondo alongside the tennis – and you’re good to go. In a world where everything is changing so quickly, there is probably merit in sticking to what we know. We have little idea what sort of jobs we’re preparing our students for, so we might as well give them the broadest possible education.
Even exams still have their place. It’s true that few careers require exhausted people to sit in silence for hours on end, ignoring everyone around them and regurgitating half-remembered facts crammed the night before. Indeed, such behaviour would hopefully see you sacked as, say, an airline pilot or a surgeon. But I wouldn’t want to be under the knife with someone who had to check with ChatGPT which side the appendix is on. Neither would I want to be defended by a barrister who was really good at arguing, but criminally bad at basing her argument on any facts.
Schools partially exist to protect children from the wider world, but their job is also to prepare them for it. Life is competitive. Hard work is (often) rewarded. Cheats are (sometimes) found out. Coursework, just like company reports and presentations, is occasionally left to the last minute – and then copied from someone else and/or a large-language model. In life, as with school, half the battle is turning up, on time, every time, fully dressed, with the right equipment and a vague sense of what might happen to you in the next few hours. And then doing it all over again the next day.
In short, we don’t need to throw out Double Maths – or even Latin – with the bathwater. Some industries, from financial services to retail to healthcare, are ripe for disruption. But when it comes to primary and secondary education, you have one brief shot with each child. Moving fast and breaking things is a fine mantra for Silicon Valley; it’s less effective when it comes to children.
Pens, down
Will schools still change as little over the next 150 years? I doubt it.
Some of that change will probably be top down. Few Victorian employers complained that a mastery of Greek irregular verbs and the rules of the Eton Wall Game were insufficient preparation to govern Bengal. And yet we’re regularly told today that school leavers lack the skills required by a modern workplace. As well as the ability to “hop on a quick call” while simultaneously unloading the dishwasher, I believe these involve attributes like hard work, resilience, leadership, good communication, collaboration with people you don’t like, dealing with setbacks – and not insisting on bringing your whole self to work.
Good schools already nurture these qualities, although this tends to be as a byproduct, rather than the central thesis, of their core offering. I suspect that this will shift.
And as it does so, I imagine schools, parents – and even some pupils – will start asking themselves more challenging questions about how 1,267 hours are spent every year.
What problems were schools designed to solve – and what problems do they need to solve now?
What can schools teach that ChatGPT and YouTube cannot?
What is uniquely human that it justifies gathering 1,000 adolescents under the same roof every day?
I don’t think anyone has all the answers quite yet. But if schools were reinvented tomorrow, I’m pretty sure we’d spend less time asking children to prove what they know – and more time watching what they can do with it.
Less time teaching them how to hold a pen – and more on how to hold a conversation.
Less joined-up handwriting – more joined-up thinking.
Less hoop jumping – more working out which hoops are worth jumping through.
Less remembering; more reasoning.
Less cramming; more curiosity.
Less fearing mistakes; more learning from them.
Because the Victorians built schools for a world in which information was scarce, and we are living in one in which judgment, wisdom and kindness are far scarcer.
And because, as my students inadvertently showed me, the most valuable lessons rarely appear on the timetable.