The tyranny of common sense: Tristram Hunt's attacks on Green education policies

Anyone with a passing interest in education who is unfamiliar with Ken Robinson's work should familiarise themselves with it now. His famous speech, How Schools Kill Creativity is the most popular in TED talk history, having received more than 30 million views worldwide.

So what are Robinson's views? Well, he regards our current education system as fundamentally outdated and still rooted in what he refers to as the "industrial" model. Children, he says, are still "batched" according to their age group and work their way through the schools system as though it were a factory production line. All children are taught the same subjects, take the same tests and are then graded, like products, according to a single, universal standard. This rigid system rewards those with the skills that enable them to perform well in exams while children who fall short of the universal standard typically end up feeling like failures.

The problem is systemic, so it will produce the same results again and again, no matter how much you tinker with the curriculum, or how brilliant or well-trained the teachers are.

The attempt to introduce competitiveness into the schools system via league tables has only reinforced this problem as school leaders inevitably become fixated on driving up “standards", which in practice means forcing more children to do well in tests. Needless to say this has sucked all the joy out of teaching, which only makes it harder for inspirational teachers to make a difference in children's lives.

Robinson argues that we need a flexible, decentralised educational system that would coax out children's natural talents rather than hammering them into shape.

"Human resources" he says "are like natural resources; they're often buried deep. You have to go looking for them, they're not just lying around on the surface. You have to create the circumstances where they show themselves. And you might imagine education would be the way that happens, but too often it's not."

The common sense fallacy

The thing is, visionary though Robinson is, he is fully aware of the obstacles to change. The problems in our education system are deep-rooted and it might take generations to bring about the reform that he talks about.

Innovation is hard because it means doing something that people don't find very easy. People say "it can't be done" and, as a result, proposals for radical changes are dismissed as ideological fantasies.

Robinson refers to this phenomena as the “tyranny of common sense", which he believes is the great obstacle for transformation in education.

Tristram Hunt's attack on the Green Party this week aptly demonstrates how this tyranny of common sense has taken hold in mainstream party politics. When radical ideas are raised in a political context, not only are they dismissed, they are actively ridiculed as “madness."

Conservative forces will always oppose real change on “common sense" grounds. Politically speaking, it's a fairly effective strategy because it taps into the electorate's natural tendency to want to play it safe.

People, as a whole, tend to be quite risk aversive. Numerous psychological studies have shown that we value protecting what we already have above gaining something new, even if what we have isn't all that good. This principle is known as the "loss aversion bias".

But while this does help to explain why people are naturally cautious, it shouldn't justify our political leaders being paralysed by the same tendencies.

Because of this mentality, which plagues political discourse in the UK, change is either painfully slow or non-existent. False common sense logic has been used to oppose practically every major social change in history, until it actually happens, whereupon it immediately forms part of the status quo and is adopted by mainstream politicians as their own.

Compulsory education, when it was first introduced in the form of the 1870 Education Act, was a radical, revolutionary change too. And of course many people opposed it at the time. These "realists" and "straight talkers" argued that working class children were incapable of learning to read and write and we shouldn't be wasting valuable public money on something so pointless.

My point is that conservative views are very much a product of their time. Fast forward a few generations and suddenly what once appeared normal and logical becomes completely absurd, even extreme.

Our education system has clearly come on a great deal since the late nineteenth century, but fundamentally we are still educating children in the same way. This needs to change.

We don’t need to look too far to see that most of what I am talking about can be achieved. The much-praised education system in Finland, for example, has all the hallmarks of the kind of setup that we should be moving towards here.

The Finnish national curriculum is only broadly defined, with freedom given to highly qualified teachers, who typically love their job. Because teachers aren’t stupefied by the pressure of having to meet, and document, endless targets, teaching is one of the most popular professions. Figures show that there are 10 applicants for every place on a primary education course, even though the starting salaries are fairly modest. Only a small number of teachers abandon the profession.

In Finnish schools there are no league tables and no exams until the age of 16, which further liberates teachers, and students, creating a learning environment that doesn't stifle children’s natural creativity. Compulsory schooling starts later, at 7, because there is an understanding that forcing children to start school too early inhibits their natural capacity to demonstrate divergent thinking.

But it goes further than this. Underpinning the Finnish system is an entirely different paradigm that aims to rebalance inequality by prioritising the needs of those who are most in need of education. The best resources and the best teachers are set aside for those with the greatest needs.

And, for the record, all this socialism hasn’t resulted in lower standards as the free market ideologues always predict it will. Finnish students score comfortably higher than British students year-after-year in OECD education reports across the board for all subjects.

The catch is that Finland started to put these reforms into place 40 years ago, which proves what we already know: change doesn't happen quickly.

I appreciate that many of the changes proposed by the Green Party may require immediate changes that could be quite painful in practice: for example bringing back more power into the hands of Local Education Authorities again. It is important to calibrate what we want to achieve in the long term with what is achievable now and work together with the dedicated professionals who live and breathe in the current education system.

But there are things that can be phased out right away. The notion that competition drives standards, for example, can be dispensed with immediately.

There are those, like Michael Gove, who will look to the OECD tables and see the ultra-competitive East Asian "tiger" economies like China, South Korea, Japan and Hong Kong dominating the rest of the world according to all educational indicators. These models, like ours, are still driven by competition and standardised testing. But it would be very foolish indeed to look to these countries as a benchmark for how to run schools here.

For a start, I have witnessed first hand how schools in East Asian countries educate the life out children, leaving them utterly spent and often emotionally scarred by the time they get to college. Furthermore, strong educational performance in these countries often owes a lot to bloated private education sectors and very little to an effective state school model. The overwhelming pressure for children to succeed creates a two-tiered education system whereby children go to state school in the day and paid-for night schools in the evening to 'top-up' their learning. This reinforces inequality as those who can't afford better private education are inevitably left behind, or are forced to endure punishing schedules to keep up. Suicides are common, especially in South Korea where they are often directly linked to exam stress.

The competition model is not the way to go. We need to quickly abandon the notion that this is the way to improve the quality of education.

Of course this won't happen under Labour, who are pretty much on-song with the Tories when it comes to competition and “driving standards". Its because Hunt is locked into this mentality that he accuses Natalie Bennett of speaking a language of “low aspiration and defeatism" on education.

I find it ironic that when academics and modern thinkers like Sir Ken Robinson lay down their bold visions of how to fix our education systems in a non-political context, they receive standing ovations and rapturous applause. Yet when a political party emerges that basically advocates the same kind of educational revolution, they are attacked from all quarters as regressive lunatics because they want to “turn the clock back" on years of (pointless) reform. The hypocrisy is quite staggering.

Change will never happen as long as there is zero political pressure. The emergence of the Green Party as a serious political force reflects the fact that people are realising, for once, that they can actually vote for the kind of policies they believe in.

Labour are responding to all of this as though it is some sort of existential threat that needs to be destroyed, hence the establishment of its “anti-Green unit" headed-up by Sadiq Khan.

The latest attack by Hunt bears all the hallmarks of the anti-Green strategy, which is to tag the Party’s policies as backwards, regressive and (of course) unrealistic. It wasn't an accident that Hunt used the expression “flashback to the 1970s" to describe the Party's education policies.

It is easy to see through these attacks, but the 1970s remark is particularly absurd when you consider that the current comprehensive school model, which Hunt essentially wants to preserve, was adopted nationally in… the 1970s.

So much of what Hunt said fails to stand up to scrutiny. His view that it is "madness" to make school compulsory from a later age is also bizarre when you consider that children in the vast majority of other countries start school later than we do. The Greens' proposals, to make the compulsory starting age 6 is in-line with other well-known socialist paradises like Germany, Japan and Canada. For quite a few countries, like China, Denmark and Brazil, the starting age is 7.

Of course there will always be a debate as to what is in the best interest of children here in the UK. But the point is that Labour are increasingly showing that they don't want to have a debate. Reading between the lines, it appears that what the Party's bug guns really want is to foreclose the market for party politics and return to the glory days when it was just them and the Tories. Destroying the Green Party is seen a necessary part of achieving that goal.

This is an incredibly short-sighted strategy that is alienating progressive voters and, in some cases, burning bridges altogether. At this rate, if Labour fails to galvanise sufficient support on the left to beat the Tories they'll only have themselves to blame.