In an age of robots, schools are teaching our children to be redundant

Illustration by Andrzej Krauze


GeorgeMonbiot in The Guardian


In the future, if you want a job, you must be as unlike a machine as possible: creative, critical and socially skilled. So why are children being taught to behave like machines?

Children learn best when teaching aligns with their natural exuberance, energy and curiosity. So why are they dragooned into rows and made to sit still while they are stuffed with facts?

We succeed in adulthood through collaboration. So why is collaboration in tests and exams called cheating?

Governments claim to want to reduce the number of children being excluded from school. So why are their curriculums and tests so narrow that they alienate any child whose mind does not work in a particular way?

The best teachers use their character, creativity and inspiration to trigger children’s instinct to learn. So why are character, creativity and inspiration suppressed by a stifling regime of micromanagement?

There is, as Graham Brown-Martin explains in his book Learning {Re}imagined, a common reason for these perversities. Our schools were designed to produce the workforce required by 19th-century factories. The desired product was workers who would sit silently at their benches all day, behaving identically, to produce identical products, submitting to punishment if they failed to achieve the requisite standards. Collaboration and critical thinking were just what the factory owners wished to discourage.

As far as relevance and utility are concerned, we might as well train children to operate a spinning jenny. Our schools teach skills that are not only redundant but counter-productive. Our children suffer this life-defying, dehumanising system for nothing.


At present we are stuck with the social engineering of an industrial workforce in a post-industrial era

The less relevant the system becomes, the harder the rules must be enforced, and the greater the stress they inflict. One school’s current advertisement in the Times Educational Supplement asks: “Do you like order and discipline? Do you believe in children being obedient every time? … If you do, then the role of detention director could be for you.” Yes, many schools have discipline problems. But is it surprising when children, bursting with energy and excitement, are confined to the spot like battery chickens?

Teachers are now leaving the profession in droves, their training wasted and their careers destroyed by overwork and a spirit-crushing regime of standardisation, testing and top-down control. The less autonomy they are granted, the more they are blamed for the failures of the system. A major recruitment crisis beckons, especially in crucial subjects such as physics and design and technology. This is what governments call efficiency.

Any attempt to change the system, to equip children for the likely demands of the 21st century, rather than those of the 19th, is demonised by governments and newspapers as “social engineering”. Well, of course it is. All teaching is social engineering. At present we are stuck with the social engineering of an industrial workforce in a post-industrial era. Under Donald Trump’s education secretary, Betsy DeVos, and a nostalgic government in Britain, it’s likely only to become worse.

When they are allowed to apply their natural creativity and curiosity, children love learning. They learn to walk, to talk, to eat and to play spontaneously, by watching and experimenting. Then they get to school, and we suppress this instinct by sitting them down, force-feeding them with inert facts and testing the life out of them.

There is no single system for teaching children well, but the best ones have this in common: they open up rich worlds that children can explore in their own ways, developing their interests with help rather than indoctrination. For example, the Essa academy in Bolton gives every pupil an iPad, on which they create projects, share material with their teachers and each other, and can contact their teachers with questions about their homework. By reducing their routine tasks, this system enables teachers to give the children individual help.

Other schools have gone in the opposite direction, taking children outdoors and using the natural world to engage their interests and develop their mental and physical capacities (the Forest School movement promotes this method). But it’s not a matter of high-tech or low-tech; the point is that the world a child enters is rich and diverse enough to ignite their curiosity, and allow them to discover a way of learning that best reflects their character and skills.

There are plenty of teaching programmes designed to work with children, not against them. For example, the Mantle of the Expert encourages them to form teams of inquiry, solving an imaginary task – such as running a container port, excavating a tomb or rescuing people from a disaster – that cuts across traditional subject boundaries. A similar approach, called Quest to Learn, is based on the way children teach themselves to play games. To solve the complex tasks they’re given, they need to acquire plenty of information and skills. They do it with the excitement and tenacity of gamers.

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The Reggio Emilia approach, developed in Italy, allows children to develop their own curriculum, based on what interests them most, opening up the subjects they encounter along the way with the help of their teachers. Ashoka Changemaker schools treat empathy as “a foundational skill on a par with reading and math”, and use it to develop the kind of open, fluid collaboration that, they believe, will be the 21st century’s key skill.

The first multi-racial school in South Africa, Woodmead, developed a fully democratic method of teaching, whose rules and discipline were overseen by a student council. Its integrated studies programme, like the new system in Finland, junked traditional subjects in favour of the students’ explorations of themes, such as gold, or relationships, or the ocean. Among its alumni are some of South Africa’s foremost thinkers, politicians and businesspeople.

In countries such as Britain and the United States, such programmes succeed despite the system, not because of it. Had these governments set out to ensure that children find learning difficult and painful, they could not have done a better job. Yes, let’s have some social engineering. Let’s engineer our children out of the factory and into the real world.

Yanis Varoufakis and the Greek Tragedy

Jeremy Corbyn is vital to Labour’s future – whether he’s leader or not

Maya Goodfellow in The Guardian


Is Jeremy Corbyn’s inner circle plotting to replace him? Will he go before the 2020 election or will he stick it out? These questions may sound appealing, but do they miss the point of Corbyn? Is he the person who will take the Labour party to where many want it to be? Because Corbyn’s leadership isn’t solely about him: it’s about the left’s long-term goals of transforming Labour into a leftwing populist party. The kind of party many have long yearned for.

Over the weekend, rumours began to swirl about whether Corbyn’s departure was imminent when it emerged that Labour had been testing the appeal of frontbenchers in the north of England. Despite the tone of some of the reporting, it’s normal for political parties to try to get an idea of how people in different parts of the country perceive shadow ministers. But while these reports captured the headlines, another more telling piece of Labour news received far less attention: the fight over whether the “McDonnell clause” will pass at Labour conference.


Were someone from another wing of the party to take over as leader, the problems that plague Labour would remain

The clause is a change to the leadership rules that would lower the number of nominations leadership candidates need from MPs to get on the ballot paper – something the bulk of the parliamentary party opposes. Their efforts to stop a leftwing successor making it on to the ballot should Corbyn resign – thereby denying members the right to vote for such a candidate – were bolstered over the weekend through two internal elections for conference delegates. This is a struggle within the party that many activists see as far more important than the last two leadership contests; it’s one that will define Labour’s long-term future identity as either a party that manages the status quo or one that pushes for radical change.


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Corbyn’s victories in 2015 and 2016 were a symbol of a move towards a more progressive Labour party; he was saying things that my generation had never heard uttered by a mainstream, frontline politician. But his leadership has been spoken about as if it were some sort of power grab made possible by crazed Trotsky entryists. In his book on Corbyn’s move from the back to the front benches, Richard Seymour charts how this rise was made possible by Labour’s long-term decline and a wider crisis in parliamentary democracy.

Corbyn’s leadership must be set against a history of plummeting interest in parliamentary politics, and the rapidly expanding disconnect between the state and the people. This sense of disenfranchisement has been exploited by the far right and was made possible by New Labour’s years in power. Their aim wasn’t to transform the political system; they chose to ameliorate the symptoms of the free-market economy, which handed power to corporations at the expense of people, rather than try to change its structures. Similar policies across Europe have led to struggles for all social democratic parties – Corbyn offered an alternative route.

Recognising this context does not mean ignoring Labour’s current woes, not least their confused approach to Brexit. Take immigration. It’s one of the main issues dragging British politics to the right. While certain MPs have remained adamant that they must listen to voters’ “legitimate concerns” over immigration, even when those concerns are unfounded, Labour’s current leadership has not yet offered a strong pro-migration message. Many Corbyn supporters have been pressuring them to do so. The left’s aim isn’t to maintain an uncritical defence of Corbyn but to keep working at the project that was started when he was elected leader – that is, breaking with an economic consensus that breeds inequality, and crafting a leftwing form of populism that speaks to people without scapegoating migrants.

Were someone from another wing of the party to take over as leader, the problems that plague Labour would remain. The old tactics of managing the country’s problems, instead of trying to solve them, wouldn’t suffice.

Given the challenges facing Labour and Corbyn, there is a propensity for people on the left to fall into despair. But the long-term goal is transformation. While Corbyn’s election in 2015 and then again in 2016 felt like the way to achieve this, his supporters have realised it was only the beginning, and that Corbyn is an essential part of the journey as the left seeks to cement much-needed change within the Labour party.

Finance and facade

Tabish Khair in The Hindu

REGULATION NEEDED: “Finance capital is the storm, and our governments can and will do nothing about it."  

Imagine a mythical planet not visited by the Little Prince. This is a planet divided up into a thousand and one sections with walls between them. There are doors in the walls, and windows of course. But there is no roof to the planet. Everyone on the planet is affected by storms that cross the skies, sometimes devastating this section, sometimes that. Sometimes the storms afflict all the sections, but in different ways: flood in one place and hail in another; cyclone on one, landslide in another.

A man-made storm

The denizens of this planet are peculiar: they are mostly unable to look up. As such, many of them cannot see signs of a gathering storm. The few who can are helpless. What can they do about storms? This is also true of the various presidents, prime ministers, monarchs and dictators who govern the different sections of this planet. Many of these leaders even believe that the storms are necessary: some good will trickle down. So all they can do is regulate the doors and windows of their sections, and the citizens inside them.

We are living on this planet today. With one difference: most of the storm clouds circling us are man-made.

Finance capital is the storm, and our governments can and will do nothing about it. If you are running a national government but cannot really regulate financial speculation and finance capital as the main source of power, what is it that you can do? Regulate people — as citizens and as foreigners. That is the condition, in slightly different ways, of almost every country in the world today.

When liberal capitalism died

Sometime in the 1980s, a strange thing happened to classical liberal capitalism. It was murdered. No one noticed the crime. Today, we are living with the dead body of liberal capitalism, which is why leftist critiques of it also fail. What we have today is said to be neo-liberalism, but neo-liberalism is almost as different from classical capitalism as night is from day. Actually, neo-liberalism is partly a misnomer: it has little to do with liberalism.

Liberalism insisted on the separation of the state and the market, and decried government interference in markets. Neo-liberalism believes that governments should intervene in markets — but only on the side of banks, finance capitalists and lending agencies. Every time financial speculation creates a crisis, governments are expected to tax their citizens and use that money to save banks and financial institutions. Even if one argues, as some do, that liberal capitalism was always to some extent state capitalism, this signifies a major shift.

We have known since the 19th century that money makes better sense than production or services in capitalist societies. Goods and services fluctuate in demand, but money has to be employed no matter what good or service is on offer. Hence, it makes sense, finally, to traffic only in money. Financial speculation is built into capitalism. 

But when financial speculation takes over, as it started doing from the 1980s, an entirely different situation comes into being. Today, financial speculation far outstrips global trade. Finance capital tyrannises not just social capital but even industrial capital. Most of the capital used for such financial speculation does not need to be invested in production or services; it can just be moved around in, as U.S. President Donald Trump said about his taxes, ‘smart’ ways. Most of this capital is not even in the shape of cash, which is cumbersome to move. It is sheer numbers, including digital money, and many types of debt and credit.

Mr. Trump’s victory is the assault of finance capital on not just social capital (welfare, public facilities, etc.), which has long been battered, but this time also on industrial capital. Mr. Trump might actually try to ‘bring jobs home,’ but what this will lead to is greater curbs on industrial capital — not only leaving finance capital free, as his Wall Street appointments have indicated, but probably forcing more industrialists to convert industrial capital into financial speculation. Demonetisation in India might be a sincere attempt to fight corruption, but it will also reinforce the ascendency of finance capital, regardless of what the government wants.

Maurizio Lazzarato points out in Governing by Debt that all national governments are basically employed in collecting taxes from their citizens and cutting on social services, in order to keep paying national and other debts to financial organisations. National leaders have come to believe that ‘economics’ is an independent field, far from politics, when actually economics is the new politics of neo-liberalism. That is why governments are employed to tax citizens in order to repay financiers and banks, and governments are also employed to smoothen the paths of financial speculation.

A necessary façade

In this context, the nationalist policing of ‘undesirable foreigners’ is a necessary façade — to obscure the lack of governance of global finance. Xenophobia is inevitable in such a situation, because national leaders cannot even talk of the real storm — invisible finance capital; they can only regulate the bodies on the ground. The general scepticism of politicians — on which Mr. Trump, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and so many others have ridden to power — arises from the fact that politicians only govern people today. They cannot govern global finance capital. Instead, finance capital governs politicians.

Politicians have abandoned much of actual politics to the economic ideologues of neo-liberalism, and they cannot even confess it to ordinary people.