…yeah before you abuse, criticise and accuse, walk a mile in my shoes.“
This isn’t my voice, it’s Elvis, singing his own composition in a live recording at The International Hotel, Los Vegas in 1970. In the preamble to his song his full introduction was: “You never stood in that man’s shoes or saw things through his eyes or stood and watched with helpless hands while the heart inside you dies. So help your brother along the way, no matter where he starts for the same God that made you, made him too, these men with broken hearts.”
Now I’m not really sure where I stand on the subject of Elvis the Philosopher, I was still quite young in 1970 but already felt then what I feel now, that leg trembling and philosophy are not comfortable bed fellows. It is fascinating to see what he does with his legs in a tight white suit during this particular performance (and I have just tried to recreate the movement without any success) but that isn’t actually the topic of this blog.
This week I have been given the very privileged opportunity to walk a mile in the shoes of a wonderful group of educators as I completed an evaluation visit as part of a team from the Council of International School (CIS). For obvious reasons I won’t name the school but the process of completely immersing oneself in an unfamiliar environment for a full week is an
extraordinary one. I have been a volunteer on visits of this nature for several years and each visit is very different but the process and the reflections are always the same.
Attempting to understand a school as a paper exercise is really very challenging. Nothing is as you are accustomed it to be. A software system here, a protocol there might resonate but you really need to jump into the paper pool at the deep end and learn to swim in the new water. After several days of doing this, you begin to form opinions and make assumptions about what a school will be like…you make lists of questions, you build hypotheses and, to borrow from the prologue to Henry V (Elvis to Shakespeare might just be the ultimate stretch), you begin to piece out imperfections with your thoughts. Armed with all of this anticipated knowledge, finally, you begin the visit itself (sadly via Zoom at the moment but in luckier days by strolling into the School foyer)…
At this point, everything that you projected turns to dust and you meet the one thing that all the documentation in the world cannot deliver to you: the people. People make places and school people are brilliant folk. I have been lucky enough to work in, or to visit, a great many schools. There are occasionally murky corners in schools, the disaffected cynic, the plastered over classroom that no-one wants you to visit, but these are very few and far between and I think the last 20 years have seen much of that disappear from schools altogether. Generally, schools are fine places to be. Very little is better than spending hours in the company of children at the best of times and the actions and reflections of contemporary young people in schools rarely fails to inspire me.
Golden Age syndrome has it that things were once better than they are now. Well, this may be true for the environment but I don’t think it is true at all about young people. The ones that I meet (and I meet a lot of them) are more articulate, more confident, more reflective, more aware in a global context and more clear that the future is in their hands than ever my friends and I were. We liked playing football and we (more or less) did what we were told. We weren’t entrepreneurs, bloggers, influencers, activists, changemakers, advocates. We played football and sometimes cricket and we tried to conceal our long hair and our flared trouser legs from teachers (Elvis clearly didn’t have this problem at the International).
I think the same metamorphosis is true of teachers and all of the supporting staff who make a school tick. I can still remember peeking into the staff room in the forbidden corridor when I was a student. As far as you could see anything at all through the swirling clouds of cigarette smoke, you might make out teachers asleep in battered leather chairs or teachers knocking clacking ivory balls around a snooker table and from deep in the white mists across the room would come the intermittent thud of darts being buried into an extruding dart board. It really was like that and I’m sure that those teachers worked hard for us but they weren’t Masters and Doctorate qualified, they didn’t have to exhibit IT proficiency to an industry standard, they weren’t asked to facilitate agency and inquiry and conceptual learning and spend evening and weekend on professional learning or syllabus development. My Headteacher, who was also my history teacher, would walk into our lessons carrying a huge leather book from which he would copy as much as possible onto the board during the lesson so that we could copy it from there into our exercise books. That was learning circa 1973 aka the Golden Years (‘“Don’t let me hear you say life’s taking you nowhere…” Now I am channelling Bowie)
It’s easy to abuse, criticise and accuse schools – and banks and hospitals and social distancing ambassadors for that matter – and easy to say that everything is going to pot with education in general and our youth in particular. But I have walked many miles in the shoes of educators and walked a mile alongside hundreds, maybe thousands, of young people. What I have seen, from my long walk, is hope, kindness, aspiration and the joy of coming together to learn. Today, more than ever.
There was no golden age. It wasn’t better once upon a time. It may once have been easier for the privileged few than it is now but our schools and our young people are the future and I think that the future has never been in better hands. It wasn’t after all, the youth of today that made today such a challenging place to be.
