“65% of today’s students will be employed in jobs that don’t exist yet – so we should focus on teaching transferable skills rather than outdated and potentially redundant knowledge.”
Nothing to disagree with there, right? Well actually, yes. As a primary school teacher, what I find so troubling about this is not that MPs (Dan Jarvis, Tristram Hunt and Mary Creagh), business leaders and academics have parroted this stat ad nauseum for years, despite it being almost completely made up, as a recent episode of Radio 4’s More or Less made clear. What worries me is the strand of leftwing thought it represents – that the teaching of knowledge is rightwing, regressive and redundant, and should at all costs be resisted.
In fact, the reverse is true. Knowledge must be embraced in our schools and society. It is the key weapon with which progressives can fight regressive politics.
There’s nothing wrong with teaching skills like those prescribed by the RSA’s Opening Minds – problem-solving, reasoning, debating, thinking creatively and critically. But without knowledge, critical thinking is redundant. Ask me to consider people’s fantasy Premier League teams and I could write an essay citing statistics and giving reasoned advice; but show me several pieces of priceless artwork and ask me the same thing and you’d get little of substantive merit. I say that not to pat myself on the back for successive victories in my Fantasy League, but merely to point out that the skills themselves are not really transferable. They depend on high levels of knowledge.
This has real-world consequences that go well beyond what should be taught in school. There was astonishment on both sides of the Atlantic when the public did not punish the lies of Donald Trump and the leave campaign. Yet with a recent survey showing that 66% of young people think filibustering is a sexual act, do voters really have enough knowledge to think critically about what politicians say? No wonder “alternative facts” can gain such traction.
Knowledge plays a key role in debating with – and hopefully changing the minds of – those who hold racist, bigoted and ultimately false beliefs. Without some knowledge, some acceptance of facts, we’re just people with different opinions shouting at each other. And it is knowledge of a subject that allows people to think critically about the divisive and cynical claims made by populists.
There is nothing new here. Scientia potestas est – knowledge is power – is an idea so famous that it is known by even those who have very little of it. This wisdom, first cited in an Arabic book in the 10th century, is also born out by longitudinal studies, such as the National Child Development Survey (NCDS, 1958), which show that differences between people in their knowledge acquisition show clearly in life outcomes. Knowledge is crucial to the fight against inequality. Yet I’ve seen first hand that – barring a few notable exceptions like David Blunkett and James Callaghan – its prioritisation has been abandoned by the left.
Progressive education’s uneasy relationship with knowledge is long and complicated but can be traced back to Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who suggested that teaching knowledge corrupted the innate virtues of children. One need look no further than Pink Floyd’s “We don’t need no education. We don’t need no thought control” to see how that idea has permeated through society. It reached its apotheosis with Labour’s revised national curriculum in 2007, which explicitly focused on skills over knowledge, and the Department for Education and Employment being renamed the Department for Education and Skills in 2001.
The left’s aversion to knowledge-based education is, of course, complicated – but the role of postmodernism is without question. Social constructivism has understandably gained much traction on the left. This is the idea that what we know, and what knowledge is, is inherently linked to the context in which it is “known” - therefore knowledge, facts themselves, change as time and social context alters. It’s a concept which helps much historical and contemporary analysis.
But as with so many things, a valid and important criticism has been diminished by a societal game of Chinese whispers. It is used by too many, with too little understanding of the concept, to dismiss all knowledge and facts as somehow malleable, open for debate, as subjective as any opinion. When the left has been openly questioning what constitutes a “fact” for so long – as noble as the intentions may have been – it’s no surprise that the far right has leapt upon that idea for more malign intent, leaving us with little to combat it.
I despair every time I’m asked by a parent why we are teaching knowledge when the kids can just Google it? If knowledge hadn’t been so sidelined, would we so readily celebrate politicians who are, or pretend to be, uninformed, illiterate buffoons – not mentioning any names, but it rhymes with Horace Bronson. Without this downgrading of knowledge, would demagogues and manipulative politicians have found it so easy to besmirch experts in recent years?
And it is this sidelining of knowledge that contributes towards the dangerous trend of refuting and rejecting traditional sources of information. While many on the left celebrate this as evidence of critical thinking, when it is combined with an ever increasing rejection of the importance of knowledge you are instead left with the opposite: a large group of people who are willing to accept alternative facts from dubious sources provided that they conform to their current beliefs. It’s no surprise that there’s been a surge in conspiracy theories, from 9/11 no-planers, to those who think the Earth is flat. Everything is up for grabs. In societies where access to facts is limited – whether by the state or the populace’s own desire – dangerous misinformation can run rampant.
Luckily, as the psychologist Daniel Willingham points out, people want to believe what is true. While we are all biased to accept things that conform to our current beliefs and to reject things that don’t, doubt – a key tool of the right – can only flourish when we have insignificant knowledge. When we doubt things, fear, social conformity and group dynamics can be used to influence and manipulate us. But when this is competing against overwhelming levels of knowledge these things have far less sway.
Educational policy in the UK and the US has in recent years taken huge positive strides regarding the role of knowledge. In both countries, reforms based heavily on the work of ED Hirsch have sought to harness the power of a knowledge-rich curriculum. In the UK this was of course pioneered by Michael Gove – although he may have missed the irony of championing this and then denigrating experts at every turn.
We cannot as progressive educators define ourselves through simply opposing things. When we believe that something is right, when it is evidence-based and when it will bring about greater levels of equality, we must say so. Before I’m denounced as a heretic by my colleagues in the NUT, let me make it clear I disagree with Conservative education policy on countless matters, and their approach to knowledge should be far more nuanced. But we must acknowledge that by reclaiming and revelling in the value of knowledge we can push back the tide of extremism. This will require action from society at large – not just teachers like me. In our schools, media and homes we must ensure that knowledge is once again held up as the key tool for enrichment and advancement. Only by celebrating knowledge can progressive politics triumph at the ballot box.