What should the purpose of good education be?
When I was pulling together an education strategy for The Children’s Investment Fund Foundation over a decade ago, it was pretty obvious that quality of learning needed to be a core focus.
I say “obvious” because even way back in 2009 the work of pioneers like Pratham, ASER Centre, J-PAL and the seminal QEDC team at Hewlett Foundation was revealing both that (a) poor children were not learning anywhere near as much as they ought to be, and (b) there were simple, scalable ways that could lead to learning gains.
But, knowing that education had to be about more than just ‘hard learning’, I proposed a strategy framed around a core concept of “Educational Achievement”, defined as “the set of capabilities that a child has at any given time and that influence his or her ability to be a productive citizen, including high literacy, numeracy, cognitive skills, critical thinking, knowledge and socialisation”.
The influences of Sen & Freire (among others) can probably be seen quite clearly in that definition, and the inclusion of socialisation was also particularly pleasing as it created the conceptual space for a subsequent foray into pre-primary.
With a strong and clear board approval obtained for that strategy, it was a case of moving on to execution, some of which I have already written about earlier.
And even after I left CIFF in 2011 to join Omidyar Network, I was happy with, and carried, that definition in my head because I felt it captured all the important factors that constitute ‘a good education’.
Or so I thought.
The very first education grant I worked on at Omidyar was to a remarkable after-school organisation in South Africa called Ikamvayouth.
It was 2013. Earlier that year, two excellent colleagues and I had pulled together an education strategy for the Global South, that we wanted to work on in parts of Sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America and India. The strategy had been approved by the Omidyar board, and we were now moving into execution mode.
I was focused on Sub-Saharan Africa, and in particular a handful of countries with South Africa top of the list. Why? Because it was a Middle Income Country with an education system that performed at Low Income Country levels. Because it was an economy capable of spending more than $20 billion a year on education, but the outcomes were both shockingly low and grossly unequal across society. Because it was a society with a rich and deep supply of excellent local talent working to both analyse, and also help remedy, this underperformance.
One of these whom I had been tracking for a while was Nic Spaull. Now a leading expert on education (and rightly so), at that time he had just started his PhD at the University of Stellenbosch. I cold-called him and we started comparing notes on various aspects of South African education.
One of the organisations he talked about was Ikamvayouth. They worked after-school with highly disadvantaged secondary school students, who typically lived in “townships” (the South African equivalent of favelas). And they delivered remarkable results.
Conventional wisdom in education was (and too often still remains) that by the time students get to late secondary school, the deficits are too deep to be made up. Yet Ikamvayouth worked with such students and delivered results in the national high-stakes school-leaving exams (called “matrics” in South Africa) that exceeded national averages, let alone township averages. Yet they did not screen for ability — they asked only that the students attend at least 75% of the time.
This was intriguing. Poor, disadvantaged students towards the end of their schooling, starting with deficits and then turning around their performance so dramatically and so quickly…after more desktop analyses, I cold-called the co-founder Joy Olivier, and after a good conversation, she agreed to let me see their work in person.
On arrival in South Africa, I first also spent time with the excellent Caitlin Baron. At that time, she was running the South African activities of the Michael & Susan Dell Foundation, and we compared notes on various things. I asked her about Ikamvayouth, and she too excitedly echoed Nic’s praise of them. She explained that while MSDF was unable to support Ikamvayouth at that time because MSDF’s strategy did not include after-school, she supported their work personally.
To me this was another good sign. The proof of the pudding is always in the eating, and when people put their own skin in the game, it can bode well.
Joy arranged for me to visit their work in Khayelitsha one afternoon after school hours. I drove there and parked up by the public library where they were based. Spending time with some of their team members, I saw the program in action.
Students would arrive from a variety of schools. Ikamvayouth would facilitate some group sessions in the library computer room, but also the students would cluster into smaller groups. Volunteer tutors (many of whom were former Ikamvayouth alumni) would work with the groups on whatever topics they were struggling with. And the organisation also arranged for mentors to provide support to students (especially those coming into the crucial last year when matrics have to be sat for).
The energy in the rooms, and within the student groups, was palpable.
Afterwards I had the chance to have conversations with many students, without any Ikamvayouth team members present. I asked each why they kept coming to the program, and what did they feel were the biggest benefits they got from it.
There was a range of answers as you would expect. But by far the two most frequent answers were ones I had not been expecting and which blew me away.
First, the exposure to tutors and mentors. As one student put it in words I remember to this day: “seeing what other people, who are like me and come from a background like me, have done with their lives makes me change the way I think about myself and what I can do”.
Second, the exposure to their peers. Specifically, the ability to talk with, and get mutual support from, their peers on whatever topics they were struggling with, whether academic or non-academic. Topics such as sexuality, inter-partner violence at home, absentee parents, alcohol abuse among other very challenging ones.
These points have sat with me since that day. Clearly the Ikamvayouth model helps unlock something intrinsic within the students, and then backs that up with additional academic and non-academic support that helps drive very substantial outcome gains late in their school lives. (You can find out more about their impact here).
At first, the big thing I took away from that was the power of after-school programs, tutoring and mentoring. This has often been ignored, whereas it can actually be a powerful, equitable and cost-effective way of helping disadvantaged children. Especially if it can be integrated into ways that leverage new ed-tech as well as contextually appropriate ‘human last-miles’ (whether coach-based or group-based).
After years of being overlooked as a potentially systematic approach by the education sector, it is now great to see more emphasis being placed on these. Phillip Oreopoulos and colleagues have recently completed a systematic review looking at 96 randomized evaluations and found “consistent and substantial positive impacts on learning outcomes”. It is really worth reading their rich summary.
In Germany, Armin Falk and colleagues have done a fascinating analysis of a mentoring program that works with low socio-economic status families. They find that the program had a substantial effect in changing aspirations and school-tracking decisions (by both children and parents) and thus helped to significantly narrow opportunity gaps and raise long-run educational outcomes. Most excitingly, the effect of the mentoring persisted for at least five to six years even after the initial school-tracking decision was made!
And in the United Kingdom, the government has recently announced a substantial National Tutoring Programme to help disadvantaged students overcome the impact of Covid-19 school closures. With almost $500 million set aside for this, the programme includes both tutoring and mentoring components.
But the most enduring legacy for me of those comments from Khayelitsha has not been this slightly instrumental takeaway on after-school.
Instead it has really been to make me re-assess what the purpose of ‘a good education’ should be. A re-assessment sparked by the Covid-19 pandemic.
On 31st December 2019 there was probably no one in the world who expected that this virus would change the world the way it has done. Changes to the deepest parts of human interaction for every age-group and demographic. Changes that have rippled across societies, and will continue to ripple across time.
People have been required to deal — suddenly and unexpectedly — with massive and deep change, and prolonged uncertainty. It has, in other words, been a huge test for the adaptability and resilience of people.
Many times during these last few months, I have been reminded of the insights that Victor Frankl sparked on characteristics that can help some people survive deeply unsettling change, and others not.
Now I am no expert on anything, let alone psychology — and indeed Frankl’s work has not gone uncriticised. But I have often thought about the observations many have made, that three key features seem to support people to overcome very tough, enduring challenges: (a) agency, (b) community, and (c) purpose.
And I am increasingly coming to wonder whether the purpose of ‘a good education’ should be really to equip children with exactly those three features. That the objective of an education system should to be ‘solve’ for developing those three temperaments.
This is not to take away from factors such as “high literacy, numeracy, cognitive skills, critical thinking, [and] knowledge”. In fact those remain vital components of meaningful personal agency!
But I have come to realise that there is more to education than those. That the other two parts — community and purpose — are crucial too.
Part of this realisation has been from following the fascinating work of people such as Prof. Sarah-Jayne Blakemore and others on the neuroscience of adolescence, and in particular the importance of social brain development.
When I see these insights emerge from neurobiology, I am reminded strongly of the feedback from the Ikamvayouth students on the sense of community they were able to build. I am reminded equally strongly about the significant emotional and mental health challenges caused to children (of all ages) by forced social deprivation from their peers during pandemic lockdowns. And I am reminded of the tremendous resilience that many adolescents have nevertheless shown in dealing with such challenges.
One of the most exciting things that happens in education is watching the unlocking of young people’s own aspirations, attitudes and aptitudes. I suspect this is the trifecta that most motivates people who work in education?
Coaxing this trifecta allows young people to discover their own dreams, to set their own targets, and to form their own purpose. And this process has many feedback loops with the development of their own agency, and their own senses of communities and tribes. Feedback loops that can either be vicious or virtuous.
As one of the Ikamvayouth students says in this beautiful video “a dream or a talent, no matter how brilliant it is, it will die if it does not meet opportunity”. Shouldn’t the objectives of a ‘good’ education system be to nurture both the dreams and the talents, as well as deliver the opportunities?
Covid has been a wake-up call for the entire species that the world is not as predictable as we might think. And when you look into the future, not only are there the very real future pandemics, but also other fundamental shifts coming in all our lives through, for example, climate change or silicon-based intelligence.
If we as a species are to survive and thrive through these, do we not need to make sure that all our children have this trifecta of agency, community and purpose?
What, then, should the components of good education be?
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With thanks to a very special reader for their feedback on a draft of this.
Postscript: I wrote this yesterday (7th November 2020) but then got side-tracked by the celebrations about President-Elect Biden. Clearly the quote above from that young person in Khayelitsha resonates very topically when looking at the personal story of Vice President-Elect Harris as a daughter of Jamaican and Tamil immigrants who was bussed to school. She is not the only example. Barely a week ago it was also announced that the next Master of the second-oldest Cambridge college (Clare, almost 700 years old) will be a state-school educated daughter of an immigrant (Loretta Minghella).
