By
Valerie Hannon:
Kids are living their lives now, they’re not in a dress rehearsal for some future state.
Alec:
This is High Tech, High Unboxed. I’m Alec Patton, and that was the voice of Valerie Hannon, co-author of the book Thrive: The Purpose of Schools in a Changing World. I’m going to be honest, I tend to avoid education books with broad sweeping titles. Not saying that’s a good thing or a bad thing, but it is a personal tendency. But I used to work with Valerie at the Innovation Unit in London, and her co-author, Amelia Peterson, has also done a lot of work at the Innovation unit, and I was interested in reading what they both had to say. So I bought the book and I started reading. By the time I was halfway down the second page, I knew that not only would I be reading this book to the end, I would be doing an episode about it. Here’s what I read. In short, we’ve been so preoccupied with asking the how of education, We’ve forgotten to ask the question of what for.
National narratives around economic competitiveness or preparing for the knowledge economy can now be seen to be woefully inadequate In light of the enormous challenges our species faces, some of them existential. All of these will impact our children’s lifetimes, let alone those of our grandchildren. Reflecting on the scale and direction of these shifts, the book proposes the following. Today, education has to be about learning to thrive in a transforming world. Something to know about me is that like a lot of us, I think every day about how little time we have left on a livable planet unless we take drastic action. And a lot of us so far, I haven’t done much about it other than training myself to compartmentalize my despair.
Which is to say, yes, I strongly agree. Education needs to be about learning to thrive in a transforming world, and that includes my own education, not just young peoples. And yes, this book has earned its broad sweeping title. Valerie and Amelia will say more about that in just a bit. I’m very excited to share this interview with you. To start, I’ll let Valerie and Amelia introduce themselves.
Valerie Hannon:
So I’m Valerie Hannon. I’m from London. I have been an educator all my life. Teacher, researcher, manager, director of education, working for the Department for Education here as an advisor on creativity for a while. But then co-founder of Innovation Unit, which as the title suggests, was established to help schools and other public bodies find ways to innovate what they were doing. And from the co-founder of the Global Education Leaders Partnership. But now, really I’m a writer, writer, speaker, and where I can be activist.
Amelia Peterson:
And I’m Amelia Peterson. I’m currently part of the faculty of the London Interdisciplinary School and new university developing an undergraduate bachelor’s in arts and sciences focused on complex problems. And early on in my career, I worked at Innovation Unit with Valerie and have just stuck around wherever I can getting chances to write with her.
Alec:
I want to ask about your title, thrive, the Purpose of Schools in a Changing World. And you make this very specific point that setting thriving as the purpose of education is different from aiming for success. It’s different from aiming for happiness, it’s different from aiming for wellbeing. Say more about what thriving means as a goal for education.
Valerie Hannon:
Yeah, I will. And it was the generating impetus to write the thing in the first place. Because as you well know, I’ve been working the field of innovation in education for many a decade. Being inordinately old and seeing so little progress, such glacial progress, that one sort of led to despair and asking myself, “Why is there so little change in this resilient model?” This resistant model, which does in my view, such a disservice to many young people. And I concluded that the problem… There are many problems, but a fundamental problem was that we do not debate what the fundamental purpose of learning now is.
It is taken for granted. There is a tacit and/or more powerful for being explicated, understanding about what learning is for. Concepts around success, and that is out of kilter with our new reality. And so I was looking really for an answer to the question, what is learning for? Which was grounded as I said previously, and something which is kind of inarguable, really. Not ideological. So if you start with things like equity or excellence, these are highly contestable concepts and goals.
But if you talk about thriving, a biological metaphor, there is something in that, I think, which suggests being all that this species can or is meant to be. And of course the other point about it is that you only look at it for five minutes before you realize that you can’t think about it in an individualistic, a singular way, that you are driven to understand that thriving has interdependent levels.
If the planet fries, then we’re all toast. If we live in dysfunctional societies, we all suffer. If you can’t make interpersonal relationships, the evidence shows, then your life is not likely to be the best that it might be. And of course, at the heart of it all as an individual, unless you thrive in your head and in your body, then what can you contribute to the world? How can you enjoy your life? And all of these four are so closely related. Interdependent, hence, excuse me, hence the title.
Alec:
And then in fact, it goes sort of full circle that one of the things that the book is particularly compelling on, I think, is the extent to which our sense of individual wellbeing is grounded in our relationship. Not just to other people, but to the ecological systems of which we are a part. And so with that as a kind of a governing concept, I wanted to read you a Neil Postman quote from your book that seemed really, really key when I came back to it, going through it to prepare for this in interview once again, jumped out at me. Which I’ll read it even though I’m sure you’re intimately familiar with it.
“The question is not does or doesn’t public schooling create a public? The question is what kind of public does it create? A conglomerate of self-indulgent consumers, angry, soulless, directionless, masses. Indifferent confused citizens or a public and viewed with confidence, a sense of purpose, a respect for learning and tolerance. The answer to this question has nothing would ever to do with computers, with testing, with teacher accountability, with class size and with the other details of managing schools. The right answer depends on two things and two things alone. The existence of shared narratives, and the capacity of such narratives to provide an inspired reason for schooling.”
Valerie Hannon:
That was seminal and very influential. But Postman was writing, and actually this comes back to a remark you made earlier, at a time when our relationship with the planet was kind of taken for granted. And it was all seen in terms of our relationships with each other and the kinds of societies we created. So he was of his time and brilliant in his time. And I feel the same about Jack Delore and his work on humanistic approaches, which is quoted to this day and was brilliant.
But for me, we now need a post-humanistic approach, which locates us, as I tried to suggest in the quote that you refer to earlier in the interview, that it’s not all about us, it’s not all about our societies. It’s bigger than that. It is certainly how we relate to this planet, but to other species as well. And setting ourselves kind of aside from those, and preeminent the adjudicator, the steward even now seems, I think to many people, to be a rather, if not quite antiquated, but insufficiently alert to the new circumstances that we face and are new insights and there’s a degree of humility. Now, I think as we reflect upon these issues.
Amelia Peterson:
I think there is though something really important in the way that he picks out narrative and the way that Valerie really develops that in the book that it’s about purpose as something that we live by rather than a goal. I think that was also the thing about thriving is that it’s not something that we kind of aim for. It’s not an end of education. It can also be a way we describe how we want every day in school to be. And that’s, I think still a really hard shift for us to make, to think about the purpose of education as something that we kind of live on a daily basis rather than as something we sort of aim for and ultimately have some kind of metric or some indicator that tells us whether we’re getting there or not.
Alec:
The model of you’re going to do what we say for 12 years and at the end of it you’re going to be a functioning adult and citizen.
Amelia Peterson:
Yeah, I think there’s still a real tendency to say, okay, well how does this convert into what young people get at the end of it? And obviously there are really important conversations to be had about assessment and credentialing and things like that. But I think the bigger emphasis one can have with something like thriving is what’s also about how we are together on a daily basis, and what kind of things we’re thinking about and doing. And it doesn’t all have to be about what are the kind of outputs at the end of it.
Valerie Hannon:
Yeah, part of it’s recognizing that that kids are living their lives now. They’re not in a dress rehearsal for some future state. Their lives are happening now. They experience the quality or lack of it now, and all of that is a developmental build, which creates the future adult. But today’s experience matters. So it is a much more dynamic concept, I think, much more active and dynamic concept than working towards some set of outputs. As Amelia says, at the end of your 12 year stint of incarceration.
Alec:
There’s so many examples of amazing schools and amazing nonprofits and kind of uncategorizable education things that you describe in the book. And so I was wondering, as I was reading, which of the ones that since then have stayed with you?
Valerie Hannon:
I think what stayed with me has been the vision, really, of educators who 10 years ago understood the imperative of placing learning to stand in a different relationship with our planet and our other species on those that we share the planet with right at the heart of formal schooling. And the need to engage with many, many other partners and players if you are to make that a reality. So I think of the green schools, I think of even little things like farm roots in Canada. All of those who in their different ways appreciated very early on that you need to locate that form of thriving to ensure that we have a future at the heart of any kind of design curriculum.
That is the piece that’s sort of foremost in my mind, allied with the kinds of organizations which recognized how that focus led directly to the other end of our spectrum about thriving intra personally. The sense of wellbeing, the sense of agency, the sense of identity and purpose. So I’m not being specific about any examples, isn’t it? It’s a bit invidious to pick any single one out, but it was those groups of educators who appreciated that very much against the grain of what their national systems were prioritizing and prescribing.
Alec:
I’m really glad you brought that up. A line that really stayed for me in the book is Paul Clark is a patient man, at the beginning of chapter five, and this permaculture educator who’s been doing this work for 20 years. And finally other people, larger groups are recognizing the importance of that as I’ll quote the book again, “That we need to recognize that we are insoluble a part of a bigger ecology of which we are not the center nor the ultimate or preeminent adjudicator and beneficiary.” That’s the thing that really I got most excited about reading the book. A humanistic but beyond humanistic framework for learning and for education really, really jumped out for me. Amelia, what about you?
Amelia Peterson:
I think in many ways that same theme, that is the one that feels top of one’s mind at the moment, but it’s also just the more kind of democratic schools. Some of the schools that were illustrating different kinds of agency similarly, many of them have been around for a very long time, but equally there are places which are just more recently trying to go down some of that road of giving young people a bit more space to make decisions.
And one of the reason that stuck with me a lot is because I still grapple with how far we should go in that direction. I think particularly after the last year, 18 months, two years, as lots of young people have had kind of more time on their hands and they’ve been trying to figure out how to learn from home, and teachers have been trying to figure out how to connect with them and support their learning from afar. That question of how much direction and monitoring do young people need versus how much do they need to figure out how to manage themselves and their time and their learning is one that I’ve been thinking through a lot.
Alec:
And let me ask, because I feel like this is something that I get… I don’t fully grasp, is to what extent does democratic functionally mean unstructured?
Amelia Peterson:
Yeah, great question. So I think it does very much depend on the model, but most essentially it means young people having a say in as many aspects of the school as possible. And that that kind of extends beyond some of the pieces around being given particular decisions to make via things like elected councils, but it’s also extends to some aspects of curriculum.
And by no means are all democratic schools allowing young people to make all the choices about what they learn, but that there is some central role for the students in deciding what they learn. So I think it is a… It’s different kind of balancing act depending on the school, but it’s about a model that extends beyond that more kind of limited or restricted role for a representative form of democracy in schools, to something that is more about all of the individual students having more of a say in the kind of direction they’re going in.
Valerie Hannon:
Can I come in there Alec and say that we focused on that piece, democratic schools, not actually as an end in itself, but because in interrogating what thriving societies look like, and that was always our question, What does it mean to thrive at the planetary level? What does it mean to thrive at the societal level? What’s bedrock here? And not just ideology. Well, what we recognized or from evidence was that thriving societies, if you judge them to be those that satisfy the sort of key indicators that no one could argue with.
Like things like homelessness or suicide or levels of incarceration or levels of abject, desolation, things like that, then it’s not the richest societies which are the most thriving, but actually the most equitable. And our argument runs how do you drive towards equity in societies? Well, it’s imperfect and it’s disappointing, but the best route thus far, we think, is through democracy. And so how do kids learn democracy? Well, not through civic lessons about institutions, but by practicing it. So it was that through line, if you like, which took us to think about how do we enable kids to learn to reinvent democracy. And what do schools look like? Who are trying to do that in practice in real time?
Alec:
Is there a school that comes to mind that you particularly thought, wow, that’s what I pictured in my head. That’s what it looks like.
Amelia Peterson:
No, I… We’re really are going to avoid saying this, because I think one of the key things in the book is there isn’t a model. So I think it is about working out what you want to prioritize. So I get excited about a couple of different examples. On the one hand, I get quite excited by something like the Pacific School of Innovation and Inquiry. NBC, which is a bit more around individual students or small groups of students taking more of a lead in deciding what they’re going to focus on and how they’re going to frame some of their learning on their projects.
On the other hand, I think I get probably even more excited by some of the school within a school examples like this, the one in Boston where larger groups of students are having to work together to make some decisions that are more about the running and the organization of their learning and school time.
On the one hand, I think there’s a lot of benefit that comes from individuals being able to really figure out things that they care about and that are really meaningful to them. On the other hand, I think when it comes to some of the things Valerie was talking about, learning how to reinvent democracy, that does require a lot of time being in a group of people who all have slightly different interests, slightly different motivations, and trying to figure out what is the right kind of structure, what is the right kind of learning process for us all to make some progress together.
Alec:
I hope it’s not an oversimplification to say that the sense I got from your book is that the shared narrative that’s currently providing a reason for schooling is neoliberalism, broadly speaking.
Valerie Hannon:
Yeah.
Alec:
And I’m curious, first of all, can you just unpack a little bit what that means in the context of the book?
Valerie Hannon:
Well, I’ll start and Amelia will no doubt finish, it is that the fundamental structuring of society is around markets. It is they which assigned value, the purpose of education is to be successful in those markets, whatever they might be. And preeminent is the idea of economic success, education, creating economic success both for individuals in terms of job markets and also for societies in terms of competitive trade and production.
Alec:
I was once in a classroom, not at a high-tech school, I want to make sure I say, that had a poster up that showed a garage full of very expensive cars and it said, “This is why you go to college.”
Valerie Hannon:
Yeah, I like one. Yeah.
Alec:
Which I feel like is the summary of that concept.
Valerie Hannon:
Yeah, but I mean, let’s be clear, lots of schools sort of throw in a dash of citizenship or a sliver of wellbeing or the social emotional curriculum in the margins. And noting the fact that almost every parent who’s asked, what do you want for your kid will say, “I want them to be happy.” Nevertheless, proceed with this agenda. So what we try to do at the front of the book is to show why that no longer plays. It certainly won’t play if we wreck our home planet, but in any case, there is a multiplicity of other reasons to suggest it’s profoundly unsatisfying and unsustainable. Extractive capitalism is doing us all in, in a phrase.
Alec:
And making us less happy as it does it.
Amelia Peterson:
But I think the really challenging bit here is that it’s one thing to be able to identify some of the challenges that come with kind of competition as being something that underpins school systems. But on the other hand, there is a big basically collective action problem where if some people are moving away from this while others aren’t, there is a bit of that risk of the feeling of, okay, well is this going to leave the same kids losing out as who do currently?
And so I think part of it is also trying to replace the idea of meritocracy basically with something that still offers, well, here is something that we can try to realize and commit to for the kids who currently are underserved by schooling. So I think that’s where thriving also needs to be something that is robust enough to be able to hold societies to account to say, are kids getting enough from their schooling. Because we know otherwise you can throw the competition stuff out the window and with it can go the chance for any kind of quality provision for a lot of kids.
Alec:
And when you say competition, do you mean… Are you talking about the sort of school choice?
Amelia Peterson:
I mean every level. At the moment, I would say, but within schools, competition between individual students is one of the main ways we think about incentivizing effort. And then between schools, competition between schools is one of the main ways we think of driving quality. And we’ve seen over decades that that tends to just widen inequalities. So we sort know that that’s not fully working, but we have to be very confident that there is something else that can be robust enough for us to hold each other to account for the provision that we have as societies so that it’s not just a case of, okay, well there are going to be some schools who are really in a position to run with this, and they’re going to be others that are sort of left to flounder.
Alec:
I don’t know if this is possibly an unfair question, but it is something that I thought about reading the book. What’s your sense of how we get there? If we picture a world in which if you talk to anybody… Right now, if I talk to somebody in the street, if I grab somebody off the street and I said, “Hey, why do kids go to school?” Well, they might now say, “So that their kids… So that their parents can currently go to work.”
Valerie Hannon:
Which is very interesting, isn’t it? Because we’ve always been quite kind of sniffy about the custodial function. But man, do we miss it when it’s gone. And We recognize it is actually very important and we ought to take that into account, balancing it with an increasing level of kids, certainly in the older age ranges, I would say sort of post 13, 14, taking increasing responsibility for how their time is used and not just being present in school to be monitored and all of that.
So, sorry, Alec, I jumped in there and interrupted you because I’m just so interested in the way in which Covid has done that. But yeah, you’d be right to say… To ask a parent and expect… They would say, wouldn’t they, “I want my kids to be happy.” But they’d very rapidly move on, I think. Most do, to saying and to earn a good living, they need to be get a house, they need to be able to raise a family, to be able to eat well, to maybe travel, not so much so anymore.
I think, honestly that the recent two huge phenomena we are facing have changed people’s views, covid and the climate crisis. And both of these have brought into people’s faces the idea that we are fragile, that things are not steady state, that we are in now the age of disruption and hyper change, and our kids are copying for it. And I know many people, I hear them all the time almost in tears when they start to talk about the legacies of our generation.
And if you’re a grandparent just thinking about these, I happen to be now so this cuts, thinking about what those little kids are going to have to try to navigate if they get a chance to, and this is serious stuff. This is not theory, and suddenly it’s real. And I think that as a result, people are really asking some of these questions a lot more seriously, certainly than they were when the book was just an idea. And that’s what, now seven years ago?
Amelia Peterson:
Yeah, I think on your question, Alec, I mean, I think there’s two things that can really help us move. So I mean, on the one hand, I think there is still a question of resources. I think when we think about the investments into education, we’re still… Yeah, it’s a bit of a mixture of stuff not going to the right places and there’re just not being enough. So I think is… There’s some reallocation that needs to go on both between the different layers of systems and the actual schools.
I think more can get down to kids. And also there’s perhaps a bit of reallocation that can go on between schools because I think a lot of this stuff does just require resources. On the other hand, I think the other thing that can really move us along with, as Valerie has mentioned, the fact that we just have these very visible crises that people globally are going through is the kind of reckoning with institutional racism, I think does bring with it more engagement, and thinking about the legacies of colonialism and the fact that our school systems and people are bored of hearing the kind of factory model thing. But more deeply than that, the kind of assumptions about efficiency and what makes a good citizen and what makes a good society.
The fact that a lot of that can be questioned with much more legitimacy as in public debate. I think it’s much more legitimate now to question some of those basic assumptions. And that does really create an opening to make the time that is necessary to start doing some things differently in schools.
Because I think it’s only once we set aside some of those assumptions about what does good look like and that it’s about making sure that every day there’s certain efficient things happening and there’s enough output going on, and that we can step back a little bit and create some different kinds of outputs from schools. I think when people get to see more of what does it look like when kids spend really long amount of times working on projects they really care about, that’s just a whole different way of thinking about what does great learning and education look like. And I’m not saying by any means that projects are the way to do this.
Alec:
It’s all right, Amelia. You’re welcome to say that on this podcast.
Amelia Peterson:
I can say that. Yeah, I mean… But I think just opening up that space for other things to be seen as legitimate is something that is… I feel a lot more space for that than I ever had before.
Valerie Hannon:
Yeah, let’s say there are four. Covid, climate, race, and I think increasingly gender. And I don’t think it’s come fully to its flowering yet, but Me Too. And then in this country, a movement called Everyone’s Invited, in which girls, young women are calling out the misogyny of many institutions, at least underlying patriarchal sexism that just is endemic, opens up a really interesting space too, in terms of what we take for granted.
Alec:
And those four are profoundly interconnected.
Valerie Hannon:
Of course.
Alec:
One thing I thought reading this was, okay, well how do we get from where we are now to a situation where every school in America or every school in the UK, students are learning practices that are directly relevant to regenerating their local environment? Like what does the path from here to there look like? Or could it look like?
Amelia Peterson:
Yeah, great question. I mean, I think for me, this is a lot about, first of all, more of a consensus that knowledge matters a lot, but that no particular knowledge matters so much that we should spend all our time in school trying to make sure that everybody has learned it. So exactly as you say, it’s kind of a really important shift that constantly falls down this everlasting well of the kind of knowledge versus skills thing.
And as soon as one tries to say it, it sort of sounds like you’re saying that knowledge doesn’t matter, but it’s like, yeah, knowledge is fundamentally important, but it’s just that it’s not the same bits of knowledge necessarily that everyone needs to have. I think once one can make that break, it’s then thinking about, okay, well what do adults need, or teachers need to be able to think more about, okay, well, what is the knowledge that’s going to be most relevant in my community, in my context?
And a lot of that might be shared. A lot of that might still be fairly similar across different kind of places, but there’s going to be quite a bit, which is more locally specific, and that’s where the role of partners and local learning ecosystems and some of the pieces in that part of the book become more relevant because there are a lot of organizations and individuals, people like Paul Clark we mentioned earlier, who’ve spent a lot of time trying to figure out what does it take to make my particular place work and how could it work better? So giving teachers more time to engage with those sort of people and bring some of their knowledge into schools, and for teachers to have time to learn some more of their knowledge. Yeah, that’s where I see some of that scale coming from.
Valerie Hannon:
Yeah, I have a build on that I think, which is that it’s sometimes said, you often hear it, oh, I find you can get education out of politics or politics out of education. How good would that be? Which in my view is completely naive and wrongheaded actually, because it is a very fundamentally political question. Because how one educates the upcoming generation is fundamental to the nature of the society, and therefore there should be some kind of democratic input around that.
Alec:
That seems like a strong note to end on. Amelia and Valerie, thank you both so much for taking the time to talk about this. Everybody should read Thrive: the Purpose of Schools in a Changing World. I really, really enjoyed it. I knew I was going to enjoy it, and I enjoyed it even more than I expected to.
Valerie Hannon:
Thank you, Alec, for the invitation. It’s been an absolute pleasure.
Amelia Peterson:
Yeah, thank you, Alec. Great to talk.
Alec:
High Tech, High Unboxed. It’s hosted and edited by me, Alec Patton. Our theme music is by Brother Herschel. The book we were talking about today is Thrive: the Purpose of Schools in a Changing World by Valerie Hannon and Amelia Peterson. It’s published by Cambridge University Press, and there’s a link to it in the show notes. Thanks for listening.
