Finally – a real voice for students
ESSA (English Secondary Students Association) has just launched a really exciting initiative in partnership with Channel 4, that asks students to submit videos of their views of education in the UK.
So-called ’student voice’ in schools all too often results in successful students confirming or repeating the agendas of the adults in their school, in what has become known as ‘ventriloquism’. Real voices of real students (and not just those who are succeeding in the school environment) are hard for adults in schools to access even where the intentions are genuine and the processes thought through.
This is why ESSA’s initiative is so exciting. ESSA, founded by RSA Fellow Rajeeb Dey, is a charity run for students by students (and this it staken seriously – their board of trustees are all aged between 11 and 19) and supports young people of secondary age to exercise real student voice, and to take action in their schools on issues they care about.
This time they are asking students to submit up to 3 min videos for their chance to appear on Channel 4 and win an award and prizes including exclusive training opportunities with media professionals from PR agency Porter Novelli; Channel 4; Form Films etc. The findings will be fed into a Manifesto to present at party conferences in Autumn.
The inevitability of cheating
The director of admissions at Cambridge University has announced that because of the profusion of companies and websites offering to write personal statements, these essays submitted as part of applications are no longer marked by admissions tutors. Externally marked, supposedly reliable, A Level grades are what count now because it is, apparently, impossible to tell any more if the student has had help writing their personal statement.
But t’was ever thus? The fact that any students can now purchase help online doesn’t change the fact that any coursework, personal statement or other non-exam based performance has always been open to accusations of plagiarism, cheating, or parental or teacher involvement. As one independent school teacher told Roderick Smith, director of admissions at Birmingham University, “Of course we help our students with their personal statements, their parents are paying £7,000 a term!”
So is the difference now that any student with some money can now use the internet to get someone to write their statement for them, rather than just those with access to teachers and parents with the right cultural capital?
Perhaps the more interesting, and less well trodden, question to ask is what systemic problems give rise to such circumstances, and how we might change them. It seems obvious that a system in which there is a single, linear ladder of success for students, in which externally marked exams are valued over teacher judgements, and in which the careers of teachers are judged by the success of their students on this ladder, makes some form of ‘cheating’ inevitable. A system with a broader view of success, that promoted a love of learning and fulfilment of potential over instrumentalism would not only serve students better, but also perhaps mitigate these kinds of problems.
Can education prevent a future economic crisis?
As economists search their souls, a view is emerging that human social and psychological factors should have a far more central role than the hard science of economic modelling gives them. If that’s the case, while stimulus packages and regulation are all as we cope with the aftermath of the crisis, in the longer run it may be that we should look to education to save us from ourselves in future.
Incidentally, I say this as one of the select band of people who, in a small way, predicted the financial crisis. And it’s a status I hold in common with a taxi driver who gave Robert Shiller a lift recently.
Shiller was giving a seminar at the RSA this morning (and will be speaking here again on Thursday) about his new book Animal Spirits. He happened to mention that he was in a cab with a taxi driver in New York. As they drove past the big cranes working on a series of new developments, the driver turned to him and said something along the lines of ‘there’s something wrong here - it can’t last’.
For my part, I have had the deposit for a house set aside for several years now, and have been resisting calls from my family and friends to buy a property. I know very little about economics, but I had a completely unscientific idea that the plethora of property obsessed shows on TV were both reflective of and actively selling the idea that prices would go up forever. And that idea, well, it just didn’t feel right. It felt like people’s descriptions of the early 1990’s. So I held off.
In their zeal for accurate scientific models economists missed the housing bubble coming. Shiller argues this was, at least in part, because they don’t account for human psychology (’Animal Spirits’ he calls them, and which are the title of his new book) which in fact plays a major role in driving economies. So me and the taxi driver managed, however dimly, to see something coming when they didn’t.
Shiller makes the simple point that people tend to respond to stories, not facts. If people see data that contradicts a dominant narrative they tend to dismiss it, or rationalise it away somehow. So, in a boom we ignore the fact that house prices have gone done as recently as the 90’s.
Today, now the bubble has burst, we have an equally damaging narrative about pessimism for the future, and a lack of trust in financial institutions and political leadership.
If human psychology is central to driving markets, it would seems that some degree of boom and bust is probably inevitable. But we could manage the consequences better if we solved two problems.
1. How do we help people deal critically with the dominant stories around them, and avoid groupthink?
2. Part of dealing with a bad time is to behave responsibly in the good times. But in such times, the pressure on politicians is to deregulate and spend, precisely because we feel good. How can we create the conditions where democratically accountable politicians can resist this popular pressure?
I have two suggestions as to how education could, in the longer run, further the above ends:
1. Realise that history might be the best popular guide to financial future: just as geography as a subject has connected intimately to the challenges of climate change and international development, so history could play an important role in informing our stories about our economic present with our past. History could help develop a shared understanding of good times and bad times, and the painful social realities of inflation and deflation. We should stop boxing financial education in, and let it permeate the curriculum in this sort of way.
2. We should decouple the story about greater wealth from the story about happiness and wellbeing - we can use education to embed the idea that happiness and wellbeing are just as linked to helping others and pursuits with intrinsic worth (learning musical instrument as opposed to earning more).
Is this a line of thought the RSA should pursue?
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