We are organisms and your mechanistic
model of the purpose of education fails
to rise to the heights and wonders of the
organic model that young people across the
land cry out for, as do their parents. Because
it is not enough for young people to emerge
from school with a string of exam passes
and for us to pat ourselves on the back,
thinking that the box has been ticked and
the ‘job done’. This is only a part of the whole
education journey. Families have a key role in
the development of the finished product. So
too do schools.
Academic attainment and exam success can
never be more than part of the story of the
profound moral responsibility of schools to
children, parents, society and the nation.
I would argue that schools that make
children and their parents believe that exams
are all-important are cynical and negligent.
Worse, they are ignorant. Because, as both
of you Michaels so rightly and so regularly
say, school provides a once in a lifetime
opportunity. That opportunity is all the more
precious when young people come from
disadvantaged home backgrounds, which do
not provide the same chances for enrichment
as those from more affluent backgrounds.
The work of education, as the linguistic root
suggests, is to ‘lead out’. Schools need to lead
or draw out of young people all their talents
and aptitudes. We cannot and must not
define this task purely in terms of academic
success. Not the least because a focus on
mere academic success often drains the
lifeblood out of academic subjects, creating
heavy and dull minds. Human intelligence
anyway is multi-faceted. No one has stated
this more clearly and eloquently than
Howard Gardner of Harvard in his work on
multiple intelligences.
As a headmaster, I know that what is not ‘led
out’ of young people, what is not nurtured,
by the age of 16 or 18 may remain dormant
in that person for the rest of their lives.
At Wellington College, the fee paying school
in Berkshire which I head, and at Wellington
Academy in Wiltshire, the state school we run
in a relatively deprived rural area, we aim to
‘draw out’ a wealth of different qualities or
intelligences from our young people.
ethos magazine
Following EM Forster, who famously awarded
‘two cheers for democracy’, I am calling for
‘two cheers’ for your duarchy, defined as
governing by two persons. I’m withholding
the award of the third cheer until you
recognise – surely it is just a question of time
- that education is more than a mechanistic
process which achieves its highest state with
the maximisation of exam performance.
Exam success is a necessary but not a
sufficient condition for being an educated
human being. This is because human beings
are not machines but flesh and blood, with
capacious minds, with bodies, with emotions,
and with a soul.
We have adapted Gardner’s work into our
own bespoke model which we call the ‘eight
aptitudes’. It is made up of an octagon with
four sets of paired intelligences: the logical
and linguistic, moral and spiritual, personal
and social, and creative and physical. At
Wellington Academy, the logo, which all
students have on their blazers, is of the
eight interlocking aptitudes. At Wellington
College, the library at the heart of the school
has eight separate areas championing each
aptitude. Each has a dominant colour from
the rainbow: the eighth area, the spiritual,
has white as the dominant colour, made up
of the seven blended colours.
The development of good character lies at
the heart of all that we do. At Wellington
College and Wellington Academy, we
are not just trying to maximise the exam
performance of our students, good though
we are at that: we are seeking to maximise
the chances of our young leading happy,
successful and healthy lives. We are preparing
them for university, with curious, disciplined
and appreciative minds. We are preparing
them for work, for family life and for society.
Our focus on character seeks to open their
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