When culture and anxiety keep giving radical schools a hard time, we might need a massive blast. The spaceship of education would then meander through space, bumping into various objects influenced by the gravitational forces of other heavenly objects.
“Culture eats strategy for breakfast.”
Peter Drucker
I’ve been talking to friends and acquaintances for a while about how hard it is to start and run radical schools and to work with children in ways that differ from traditional schooling. It seems so paradoxical to me that we have lots and lots of critical analysis of our school system here in Denmark and around the world – take the books and videos of the late, great Sir Ken Robinson, for example – and yet educators who try to strike out in a different direction or implement different tools and goals for children, immediately face criticism and even absolute shutdown.
Everyone, from parents to teachers to pedagogues to policy makers wants to eat their cake and have it too. They want new approaches, 21st century skills, SDGs (the list is endless) and at the same time they want testability and proof and recognizable learning settings (this list is also endless). And the resistance and anxiety that different educational tools or goals or activities or settings engender are at once real and palpable, and also incredibly frustrating to those of us who are working with them.
But I was reminded yesterday of a quote that I really love, namely, that “culture eats strategy for breakfast”. The author of this aphorism is Peter Drucker, who was a management consultant and worked with private businesses, and his remark refers to the idea that the execution of every business strategy depends on the mindset and culture of the company in question.
I think that this idea also sheds useful light on the struggles of radical schools and educators. Whatever our radical strategy may be and however well-constructed it may be, in the final instance, bringing that strategy to fruition in the real world depends on the culture of those who are working with it.
However, when it comes to education, the culture encompasses not only the employees in the business: the teachers, pedagogues, administration, and management. It also includes educational superstructures in the form of local and national politicians and their advisors and bureaucracy. And it also embraces the families of the children at the school: siblings, parents, grandparents, etc. There are so many stakeholders and so many experiences and expectations!
So, education isn’t just an ocean liner or a supertanker whose course is difficult and slow to change. It’s an entire spaceship, drawn into its course by the inexorable gravity of our culture, the same kind of force that keeps the moon in orbit around the earth.
One lesson here is that changing the direction and means of education may depend on a massive blast, forceful enough to free it from gravity and set it on a new course. This course would – in keeping with the metaphor – have a large element of randomness to it. The spaceship of education would meander through space, bumping into various objects and influenced by the gravitational forces of other heavenly objects. Although the idea of a blast is not attractive, adding randomness to education definitely is. After all, randomness was most likely an important element in human learning before schools were invented!
Another possibility – and here we leave the metaphor of the spaceship behind – is that changing the course of education is itself an educational project for every one of us in society. If we want education to change, we must all change: we must change our culture of education from the bottom up.
For example, we must stop our incessant prying in the form of testing, and we must learn to trust our children and the adults who work with them. And another example: we must be willing to see ourselves, our peers, and our children as more than the sum of formal education achieved, more than their current or potential GPA. The identity project of education must be reoriented.
We must also be willing to try new approaches and tools. We must be open to finding our way through experimentation and by looking to other schools and other educational systems for evidence and practice. Educators from traditional educational systems vastly underestimate the amount of experience and evidence there is for radical approaches to education. But the schools are out there, the educators are out there, and the young people who have participated in and graduated from those schools are out there. We must seek out and soak up the evidence and experiences of all these practitioners.
We should also be careful not to measure the achievements of those schools by our own yardstick, and also not to hold them to higher standards. Those schools need not have produced more successful Hollywood magnates or Nobel laureates to be doing well by their children. We must be cognizant of the educational vision of each school, and we must allow the educators and the learners to set their own goals and define their own successes.
And finally, to effect change in education, we must return to the local level and involve local communities in education. Politicians, policy makers, and government level administrators need to let go of micromanaging education and return power to teachers and pedagogues. And in turn principals and administrators on the one hand, and parents and communities on the other, need to support the work of the teachers and pedagogues.
Both the letting go and the supporting must include self-education: learning about these new tools, goals, and directions. On the intellectual level, there is a wealth of information about radical education available and there are schools to visit and practitioners to question and learn from. And on the practical level, we must all – from the most powerful politician to the most ordinary parent or grandparent – engage in the practices of these new educational efforts.
All of this – learning, letting go, and supporting – is what changes the culture of education, so that our educational system can move forward in new directions. This doesn’t mean that we get rid of one kind of school and move wholesale to another: that might be throwing out the baby with the bathwater. In fact, we can’t really know, right now, in which directions the spaceship of education will be heading. We’ll be making it up as we go along. And that’s a cultural change in itself.
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