Education under the microscope

Every month, the Great Transition Initiative invites its readers to explore a specific question relating to climate change  and how we might best respond - with the author of Journey to Earthland selecting the question and managing the discussion.

Last month the theme selected was “educating for the future we want”.

I’m normally very hesitant about engaging in discussions of this topic – in which everyone professes to be an expert and in which strong prejudices are quickly on display - but I felt it was about time I pulled my disparate thoughts on the subject together, starting with a confession and personal profile. 

I personally enjoyed my (state) schooling and respected my teachers (and fellow-students) - although I had no clear idea about my course of study at university and chose modern languages by default, moving in the last two years to politics and economics.

In the mid 1960s, graduates had the pick of the job market. So I had 4 different jobs in so many years - before getting my dream job as a Polytechnic Lecturer able to indulge myself for about 15 years before students complained that I was failing to give them what they required. A few years later I started a career as a consultant to government bodies in ex-communist countries - and latterly learned a lot about training…..

It’s not so long ago that kids were told that, if they did well at school, they would be rewarded with a great job – which we often kept at for our entire life. Charles Handy remembers how puzzled he was at the emphasis given to pensions when he got his first job at British Petroleum in the 1950s. Handy was the first to raise questions about ”the future of work” and went on to lead what he, later in the 1980s, designated a “portfolio” career – with jobs increasingly on short-term contracts. Education remained important in such a system – but with a greater emphasis on the post-school and university sectors.

With the increasing reality of robotisation, what advice should parents now give their children? Basically, it seems, the same message as the deschoolers of the 1960s…..rediscovering the need for creativity? The speaker in the video is education expert Sir Ken Robinson whose 3 books include "Creative Schools – the grassroots revolution that’s transforming our schools" (2015). 

And, of course, the new fear - which the pandemic has intensified - is that Artificial Intelligence (AI) will further accelerate future losses. A World without Work – technology, automation and how we should respond by Donald Susskind (2019) may make grim reading – particularly when taken in conjunction with The Future of the Professions which the author penned  a few years earlier with his father – but it offers a sound and balanced analysis of what awaits.

One of the interesting points it makes is that AI has developed with the speed it has not by machine intelligence aping human intelligence – but by big data crunching…..Our minds, it seems, remain intact….

And it is the working of our minds that has become the focus of a newfound interest from psychologists (and “cognitive scientists” as they rather grandly call themselves)

I had, in the 1970s, been a fan of Ivan Illich; social critic (Paul Goodman); Education Professor (Neil Postman) and adult educator and philosopher (Paulo Freire) – although working away behind the headlines loomed the more profound figure of psychologist Carl Rogers. And in 1983 fellow psychologist Howard Gardner published the book Frames of Mind – the theory of multiple intelligences whose effects are still being felt today. Five Minds for the future (2006) is a clearer statement 

The public has become increasingly vexed as international league tables have demonstrated national weaknesses in systems which are now seen as crucial for a country’s economic success…..Whose advice should we heed on such things?

- Politicians – who have the authority to make changes?

- Teachers – who have the responsibility for managing the system of schooling?

- Experts – who study and monitor the workings and the performance of the system?

- Parents – who have variable degrees of responsibility, activity and expectation?

- Pupils – who have their own expectations and attitudes? 

When we ask such a question, the variability of the answers is quite amazing. Each country tends to have its own pattern – with the Finnish system regularly quoted as the most successful but outlier country in which highly-trained professionals are trusted to get on with the business.

Most people would probably still respond to the question with a reference to the need for collaboration - few would trust the politicians.  

And yet it’s politicians who set the pace in many countries! It’s hardly surprising that neoliberal Britain sets the most store by competition and choice for schools and parents – with “academies” being the preferred  educational tool for New Labour in the period of its rule from 1997-2010.

Europe is (and remains) more consensual in its approach – with the French elitist system being the exception which is only now being challenged.  

My references are always too anglo-saxon – so I was delighted to find a Dane (Knud Illeris) as the most respected European educationalist and look forward to reading his How we Learn – learning and non-learning at school and beyond (2007) as well as Contemporary Theories of Learning – learning theorists in their own words ed Knud Illeris (2018). And to reading more thoroughly this issue of a European educational journal  

I’m intrigued by how little reference there is to “power” in discussion about schools, education and training and hope to turn to that next

How to build State Capacity

The last few posts have argued that -

- few (if any) societies can any longer claim to be democratic

- we need, very loudly, to be exposing such claims as the falsehoods they are

- a new vision of a democratic society needs to be articulated

- pressure groups should coalesce around the demand for citizen juries

- political parties no longer serve any useful purpose

- we should be insisting that governments start focusing on the big issues which are currently kicked into the long grass

- governments, in other words, should govern

At this point I remember the reaction of The Candidate played by Robert Redford as he realises he has won his fight for a Senate seat – “what the hell am I supposed to do now?”.

It’s bad enough that Ministers have time only to deal with immediate crises – how therefore can we also expect them to find time to deal with long-term issues? Basically by shuffling them onto someone else… But Tony Blair was ridiculed for appointing the ex-head of the BBC to be his “Blue skies thinker”.

At least between 1971 and 1983 there was a body called CPRS (Central Policy Review Staff) which not only undertook strategic thinking but was able to publish its reports quite openly. This could – and did – create problems for government and was soon judged not to be necessary by ideologue Margaret Thatcher…..Its spirit needs to be resurrected!

Arguably the EC’s technocrats have, in this instance at least, been a positive force – creating for member states strategic guidelines which have been used in a multiplicity of fields to give benchmarks and inspire laggards to action….

The tools are at hand. Making a positive case for government interventions may not have been easy in the past 40 years but a few people dared to do so – and to keep developing the necessary tools. I thought Henry Mintzberg was the first Canary in the mine, as it were, with his 1996 Harvard Business Review piece on “Managing Government” which argued that we had gone too far in our rejection of the State. But John Bryson and Barbara Crosby had published Leadership for the Common Good – tackling public problems in a shared power world  a few years earlier – in 1992 (it can be accessed in full by clicking the title). This was also the year “Discovering Common Ground” by W Weisbord was published - a series of case-studies of localities and companies coming together to explore how they might best respond to the challenges they faced. The history of the “search conference” is nicely summarised here.

Mark Moore famously used his position at Harvard’s School of Government to work with senior Public Servants to develop in 1995 his influential notion of Public Value which influenced those working with British civil servants such as John Stewart and John Benington.

Moore and Bryson can be seen as the inspiration for European academics such as Paul t’Hart, de Jong and Mariana Mazzucato who have, more recently, all emphasised the importance of strategic governing. Other trainers such as Matt Andrews have also managed to make the notion of strategic governing acceptable even in places such as The World Bank.

So, for those leaders who genuinely want to know how to go about making their governments more strategic, here are some texts to consider – starting with Bryson and Crosby in 1992. I was, frankly, astounded to find there were so many!!

 

Title	Comment
Leadership for the Common Good – tackling public problems in a shared power world J Bryson and B Crosby (1992)	Exhaustive exploration of the issues involved in any attempt to bring people together to confront major problems they face as a society or group
Creating Public Value; Mark Moore (1995)	What was originally a series of inspiring profiles has morphed into a confusing academic industry which is well assessed in the link in the title
The capacity to govern Y Dror (2001).	A masterclass from someone who advised governments throughout the world
The Art of Public Strategy – mobilising power and knowledge for the common good; Geoff Mulgan (2008)	The ex-Head of the UK Cabinet Office wrote this a few years after he finished his service with Tony Bliar
Future Search – getting the whole system in the room for vision,  commitment, action; M Wesibord and S Janoff (2010)	The third edition of a detailed manual – full of examples from around the world
Understanding policy success – rethinking public policy; Alan McConnell (2010)	Most academics focus on how things went wrong. This was a rare book which tried to identify the lessons of success
Agents of Change – strategy and tactics for social innovation ; S Cels, Jorrit de Jong and F Nauta   (2012)	A Dutch group inspired by Mark Moore
Recognising Public Value Mark Moore (2013)	An update of his 1995 book
The Entrepreneurial State; Mariana Mazzucato (2013)	The first of a trilogy of books from this Italian-British economist who strongly argues the interventionist case
Dealing with Dysfunction – problem solving in the public sector; Jarrit de Jong (2014)	Not the most inspiring of titles for what is a great read from someone who ran a group entitled “The Kafka Brigade”
How to Run a Government so that Citizens Benefit and Taxpayers don’t go Crazy ; Michael Barber (2015).	A clearly written and useful book about the approach taken by Tony Bliar’s favourite consultant
Creating Public Value in Practice – advancing the common good in a ….noone in charge world J Bryson and Crosby (2015)	The update of their 1992 book
“The 21st Century Manager”; Z van der Wal (2017)	An interesting-looking book written by another Dutch academic and consultant who has spent the past  7 years as a Prof at the University of Singapore
Radical Help – how we can remake the relationship between us and revolutionise the Welfare State Hilary Cottam (2018)	an inspiring example of experimental work
“Great Policy Successes” Paul t’Hart (2019)	presents 15 in-depth case studies of policy successes from around the world - each containing a detailed narrative of the policy processes and assessing the extent to which the policies pursued can be regarded as successful.
Successful Policy Lessons from Australia and NZ; ed J Luentjens, M Mintrom and P t’Hart (2019)	The “successful public governance” website at Utrecht University is now running a series of case studies “pour encourager les autres”
"Strategies for Governing - reinventing public administration for a dangerous century"  Al Roberts (2019)	Ideal for politicians – not just because it’s short (140 pages) but because it covers the central issues so clearly
The Good Ancestor – a radical prescription for long-term thinking; Ronan Krznaric (2020)	I’ve included this highly original book – even although its focus is the individual – rather than government
“Mission economy – a moonshot guide to changing capitalism”; Mariana Mazzucato (2021)	Mazzucatto’s latest
Guardians of Public Value – how public organization become and remain institutions (2021) ed A Boi, L Harty and P t’Hart	Another series of case-studies from the Utrecht unit of excellent public organisations and the secrets of their success
Public Value Management – governance and reform in Britain ; John Connolly et al (2021)	Rather too academic. Exclusive focus on UK – no references to Netherlands eg de Jong

First, a confession….I certainly haven’t read them all. Indeed I can claim close familiarity only with Barber, Bryson, Cottam, Moore and Roberts. Each is very different – some being voyeuristic case-studies – others reflecting intense personal experience (Dror and Mulgan) or passionate commitment (Cottam and Mazzucato). But all are worth looking at….

Purposive Government

Who could possibly disagree with the idea of governing with a sense of purpose??

But, as I look back over the past 50 years, I realise that such a notion has been – for all but a few years and in all but a few countries – treated with total incredulity

France was fairly exceptional, in the post-war period, with its system of national planning – although the UK very briefly toyed with the idea when the 1964 Wilson Government set up the Department of Economic Affairs as a rival to the Treasury.

But such aspirations were quickly stifled – with the Heath government of 1970 reasserting the market approach which was fully developed in the 1980s with the Thatcherite privatization programme. 

These forces were so powerful that, during the 1970s, writers on policy analysis seemed near to giving up on the possibility of government systems ever being able to effect coherent change - in the absence of national emergencies. This was reflected in such terms as “government overload” and "disjointed incrementalism": and in the growth of a new literature on the problems of "implementation" which recognised the power of the "street-level" bureaucrats.

Although the New Labour governments of 1997-2010 – particularly its “modernizing government” programme - used the language of strategy and targets, its ideology was an open continuation of the market-friendly and neoliberal policies of Thatcher 

Why “purposive government” is so difficult

·       the electoral cycle encourages short-term thinking

·       the 24-hour media ensures there is always a crisis for governments to deal with

·       programmes and priorities create sticks with which to beat politicians

·       politicians need to build and maintain coalitions of support - not give hostages to fortune. They therefore prefer to keep their options open and use vague rhetoric rather than commit themselves to programmes they won’t be around to gain benefit from

·       The machinery of government consists of a powerful set of "baronies" (Ministries/Departments), each with their own interests

·       the permanent civil servants have advantages of status, security, professional networks and time which effectively give them more power than politicians who often simply "present" what they are given.

·       a Government is a collection of individually ambitious politicians whose career path has rewarded skills of survival rather than those of achieving specific changes

Even before the pandemic, there were voices urging governments to snap out of their focus on short-term thinking and face up to the huge challenges facing all societies – be it the ageing of the population, AI or climate change. But it is not just the realities of politics which makes that difficult – it is the domination over the past 30 years of the financial calculus in business decisions with companies nervously checking the swings of share prices….

In theory Covid – and the realisation it has brought of the dangers of pandemics – strengthens the case for more strategic government. A senior Australian civil servant currently enjoying an academic sabbatical in the US has an interesting reflection on this -   

An important question is whether there is something about the practice of democracy today or the forces it is subjected to which make it harder for democracies to think strategically. It is possible that the ‘professionalisation’ of politics has created a cadre of apparatchiks hardened and motivated by political battle rather than policy challenges.²⁷ Perhaps feeding a rapid news cycle traps government and media alike in a short-term, reactive hamster-wheel that prioritises sensation over substance.²⁸ The rise of social media seems to have hardened partisan positions in the public, which bleeds into politics — and provides fertile ground for nefarious state and non-state actors to stoke for their own purposes using new technologies.²⁹ Moreover, perhaps the nature of the challenges that liberal democracies now face — such as climate change, or a China that is savvy about gaining ground without crossing the threshold of Western military responses — are not immediate enough to trigger the compulsion for national defence that usually switches democracies from tactical to strategic.

 

In the face of such an array of difficulties, it may be tempting for some to reach for a dramatic redesign of democracy as the only way to set the system straight. A better course of action may be to understand how to more routinely trigger democracies’ already existing capabilities to think and act strategically. For these triggers to work, they need to offer something to all stakeholders, and demonstrate value through tangible progress and real outcomes toward the risks and opportunities that democracies are facing. They would need to offer elected leaders something to challenge the current incentives that prioritise short-term competition and partisanship. And they would need to show the public something different — to allow them to feel more confident in the ability of their government to meet opportunities and challenges, and more confident that their society is on the right path.

What is impressive is that the article also recognises the importance of more direct forms of democracy 

One obstacle to a more strategic and ambitious policy in the United States and Australia is a view that there is little real public appetite for it. Voters may say they want vision and strong action, but if this requires more taxes it is a non-starter. In one Australian survey taken before the last federal election, seven out of ten Australians supported more spending on public services, but only very small percentages in each tax bracket felt that they were not paying enough tax.35 Few elected leaders want to take on this issue. However, questions like these may not be getting at the issue in the right way. Connecting taxes and revenue with specific choices over what public money buys may yield different results.

On a much smaller scale, the city of Lincoln, Nebraska, experimented with this concept more than a decade ago. When Chris Beutler was elected mayor in 2007, his administration faced circumstances familiar to many democratic governments large and small: not enough revenue to pay for services and a population hostile to the idea of tax increases, reductions in services and generally distrustful of political leaders.36

Beutler created an initiative called Taking Charge, which brought the community into the budget process as participants, not just observers. They engaged citizens directly on questions of specific trade-offs, like the costs of different levels of snow removal. This appears to have been an open and transparent conversation about the fiscal challenges the jurisdiction faced, and the available choices of cutting services, raising revenue or doing both. When engaged in this way, citizens supported some surprising outcomes. In one 2011 survey, a staggering 84 per cent were willing to raise property taxes to preserve services.37 The city found that citizens were willing to cut some ‘sacred cows’ from the budget when they understood the trade-offs; and — arguably just as important — this process endowed residents with a higher level of confidence in the city government. Not only did Taking Charge give the city’s leadership the space to pursue reform, but it also improved the conversation between public and government.

The challenge is how to take a local government model like the experiment in Nebraska and apply it at a national level, where the issues are more complex and the distance between political leaders and citizens is greater. Indeed, direct democracy is regarded with suspicion by some experts who see it as a pathway to community division rather than as a unifying tool.38 One low-risk, high-payoff way to make a start at the national level would be to identify a specific inspirational initiative each year, such as in exploration or big science. After an information campaign to inform the public about the initiative and what it would mean for them, voters would decide if they wanted to dedicate extra tax to its realisation. 

The Conversation is an excellent site encouraging scholars to contribute concise pieces which has been online for almost 5 years – and has an excellent discussion here on this subject.

Robin Dunbar, an evolutionary psychologist at the University of Oxford, argues that our obsession with short-term planning may be a part of human nature – but possibly a surmountable one. Chris Zebrowski, an emergency governance specialist from Loughborough University, contends that our lack of preparedness, far from being natural, is a consequence of contemporary political and economic systems. Per Olsson, sustainability scientist and expert in sustainability transformations from the Stockholm Resilience Centre at Stockholm University, reflects on how crisis points can be used to change the future – drawing on examples from the past in order to learn how to be more resilient going into the future.

 

People Power

At the moment we cast a vote (or not) every few years - and then blame the government when things go wrong. Patently an absurd way to behave. We should rather choose a pressure group – or even join the relevant political party and get active there… Except that we are just one voice amongst millions….

Lobbyists are paid hundreds of thousands of pounds in retainers to advise companies on how to   ensure that legislation reflects their master’s interests – so what hope do we, the ordinary citizen, have?    

And, indeed, what right – we might also well ask – do we have to expect to be listened to? Psychologists have been lining up in the past decade to tell us how irrational we all are!

And that includes government ministers who are notoriously so rushed off their feet as to be unable to focus on the country’s long-term interests – even if they wanted to…

At the moment, the only people who are pressing governments to take a longer - more strategic – view of things are the Extinction campaigners.  

But the idea of “deliberative democracy” has slowly been emerging – principally via the device of “Citizen Juries” structured on randomly-selected groups of citizens being presented over several days with a range of evidence which is then discussed as at a jury. The Irish Republic used citizen juries before several significant referenda on social issues in recent years – with interesting results.

Indeed pressure groups should be uniting these days to insist that municipalities (in the first instance) experiment with citizen juries – to help build up a head of steam nationally behind the concept…

It’s all very well for academics to talk about the need for governments to develop a more long-term and strategic sense. The Club of Rome is one of the most influential global thinktanks and commissioned the most famous global policy advisor of the time, Yeheziekel Dror, to produce in 2001 a book on the subject - The capacity to govern. It sank without trace.

But that is perhaps too pessimistic a note on which to end....A few years back - before Brexit and Trump -  there was quite a buzz around these ideas of more deliberative democracy and here's one book which nicely summarises that discussion - Can Democracy be Saved?  - participation, deliberation and social movements; Donatella Della Porter (2013)  

How do we get a better world?

Bulgaria goes to the polls tomorrow – a country I wrote about last autumn. A journalist friend gives a good indication of the choice here. This post wants to explore the fundamental question of why, these days, people – particularly the younger generation – should bother going to the polls? Politicians have become fair game in the new millennium – but, for those who cared to look, the warning signs about democracy were evident a long time ago. In 1977, after almost a decade of helping local community activists and of studying the new literature of community development, I wrote a critical article about the claim of the British political system to be open and pluralist  

The modern political party was designed to perform the following functions…

- recruit political leaders

- represent community grievances, demands etc.

- implement party programmes - which may or may not be consistent with those community demands.

- extend public insight - by both media coverage of inter-party conflict and intra­party dialogue - into the nature of govern­mental decision-making (such insights can, of course, either defuse or inflame grievances!)

- protect decision-makers from the temptations and uncertainties of decision­-making. 

Of these five functions, it performs only the first with any effectiveness. Community development represents almost the opposite of everything that a modern political party stands for - is a critique, that is, not just of certain operational deficien­cies of liberal democracy but of its very essence. The modern political party has itself a hierarchical structure and expects others to have the same features. Its members accept this discipline because of their belief in the greater good which, it is assumed, will materialise from the occupation by their leaders of political power and/or the implementation of a particular pro­gramme. And modern parties share, to a greater or lesser extent, a belief in the capability of modern forms of government. structure (and of industrial organisation) viz, that plans and programmes conceived in essen­tially private processes imposed on society by traditional hierarchical structures will achieve specified aims with negligible negative byproducts.

Political parties are about achievement - even if that is only the overthrow of their rivals' dogma (or their own!). They are organised to achieve something - be that power or specific changes in policy. Community development, on the other hand, is about a process. Its theory, in a sense, is one of “permanent revolution" which despite its own gentleness and emphasis on trust and sharing, has to live with the uncomfortable recognition that societies based on modern technology -whatever their form of ownership - will subject minorities to more or less subtle forms of repression and exploitation.

Of the functions listed earlier, those badly performed by local government are the representative, the programmatic and the educational: of these it is perhaps the lack of the educational that is the more serious and where certainly recent com­munity development theory and practice in Britain have performed well

A recent post charged the political class with treating the public like idiots   

 “You have, for the past few decades, made the following assumptions about your fellows –

- They need to be worked hard - but given bread and circuses

- Told what to do and measured by how well they do it

- Given a choice at elections only of those who represent an ever-circulating elite

- you therefore feel that you no longer need to bother even going through the motions of serving up promises and manifesto programmes

- the public is so stupid and so easily distracted that they will believe any of your lies

- you can do whatever you want, safe in the knowledge that you have a servile media which knows that its basic task is to keep the public entertained” 

Countries like Bulgaria and Romania came to democracy in the worst of times – when the very notion of governing was being treated with scorn in the West and “the market” was seen as the answer to everyone’s problems. I vividly remember being invited to speak at a training school in Romania for Young Politicians in the mid 1990s and finding it infested with young americans zealously teaching their counterparts how to market themselves. But absolutely nothing was said about the tasks and responsibilities of governing – let alone the moral aspects. 

Why is it that politics is the one activity – at least in the West - which has managed to resist the call for professionalization?? In China, the political class is thoroughly trained and its progress through the layers of municipalities and companies closely monitored…. 

A recent book was, hopefully, a small sign that some people at least recognise the need for new skill-sets in government. That is, of course, part of a wider argument which people like Mariana Mazzucato have been pursuing for a more positive role for government.