The beginning of a new school year is an appropriate time to reflect on the possibilities and purpose of education.  Norman Drummond, former headmaster and Founder and Chairman of Columba 1400, shares his thoughts on the potential within the Scottish educational system.

How often do we find ourselves describing how things were ‘in my day’? Amongst typical remembrances at the start of a new school year will be parents whose recollections begin, “when I was at school…..” or for grandparents to say “I remember when your Mum or your Dad started at school.  It seems as if it were yesterday!”

It does seem like yesterday because we all have some experience of school to cherish or bemoan.  Generation swiftly follows generation and it will not be long before this year’s newcomers are leaving school to make their own mark in the world.

When they look back in up to 12 years’ time will they reflect with happiness or with relief?  Will their formative school education have prepared them for their tomorrows or for our yesterdays?  How relevant and useful will these important years have been to them for their futures in the complex multicultural societies of the mid 21st century?

When the Dalai Lama visited Edinburgh University for the Positive Education Conference last November, I was privileged to welcome him and to chair his Question and Answer session.  In response to one particularly piercing question on the relevance of the Scottish Education System, the Dalai Lama paused briefly, chuckled, smiled and said quite simply “Do you know in India they are beginning to find that the British Victorian Educational System is no longer relevant or fitting for their society”.  Those present that day will not lightly forget the way in which he smiled wryly, looked around an expectant Conference and then shrugged his shoulders as if to say “it’s up to you”.

And he is right.  It is up to us in our generation.  If we leave all decision making in education to our political representatives, to commentators or to academic researchers, whose last days in a classroom were either very different or a long time ago, we shall continue with an educational system which well serves results, assessments and league tables but which so often forgets the individual talent, creativity and greatness of young people.

I was reminded of this only last week whilst ascending The Table in the Quiraing in the beautiful Trotternish Hills of the North End of the Isle of Skye.  As the mist swirled and descended we stopped to speak to two German tourists, both very experienced teachers in their local Gymnasium.  During their climb they had been discussing their three children, the eldest an academic researcher, the middle a lawyer and the youngest child “their worry”.  So involved had they become in their educational system, with its constant pressure for academic results and achievement, that they were only now beginning to realise how much they had neglected Frederick, now aged 19 and keen to work with young people from tough realities.  They had allowed themselves to consider Frederick as a problem – even a failure.  It was only on that walk that those parent teachers began to see that the child who ‘didn’t fit the system’ was perhaps the most gifted of all.  What resource of strength and character this young man had shown to come through against the system!  Perhaps they as parents had most to learn about themselves as people, as teachers and as parents from Frederick, the child whose unique learning styles and intelligences had not been fully recognised and about whom they had worried the most.

So often that can be our experience.  It is the different one, the awkward one, the one who ‘doesn’t fit the system’ who calls us to account, who questions the relevance of what we are doing.

Perhaps as parents or grandparents or as members, advisors or enablers of the teaching profession we too have become forgetful of the basic directions we and our young people need to live a life of purpose and meaning.  For ultimately, when all the exams have been set, answered and marked, is not the true barometer of our life measured on tried and tested principles, key qualities and core values of integrity, intuition, insight, kindness, courtesy, creativity, courage, justice, understanding, peacefulness, serenity, perseverance and love?

At a time when research from Save the Children informs us that over a third of all children in Scotland live in an atmosphere of poverty and the Aberlour Child Care Trust have drawn attention to the fact that 1 in 9 children run away from home before the age of 16, how can we hear the cries of other people’s children and allow their needs for their futures to show us the way forward?

Of one thing we can be sure, more of the same will simply not do.  The social and multicultural challenges of the 21st century demand something significantly different. How radical are we prepared to be in ensuring that our Scottish educational system does not continue to trade on yesterday’s gifted worthiness?  How progressive might we be in confidently looking forward with the best interests and all round potential of each individual child in mind?

When Baroness Helena Kennedy gave the Annual Lecture of the General Teaching Council for Scotland some years ago a final question came from a retired Edinburgh Headteacher.  “Lady Kennedy, if you were Minister of Education for a day, what is the one thing you would do?”  Quick as a flash and without hesitation, Helena Kennedy said “If I was Minister of Education for a day, I would stop measuring everything.  I would give teachers the opportunity to do what they are good at and trust them to get on with it – that is, to influence, challenge and inspire other people’s children.”

Perhaps we have a priceless opportunity to discard unnecessary form-filling bureaucracy, to build on curriculum reform in bold and imaginative ways and so place the child at the centre not merely of plans and conversations but of delight and fulfilment in practice.

By 2018, when all of this week’s ‘new starters’ will have left school, might Party politicians feel free to step back from the seemingly inevitable ‘football’ of education?  Might the endless flow of 'strategies', which only tend to overburden already stretched and often tired teachers, have been replaced by a consensus based on mutual trust and belief in the common good?  Would individual politicians then earn considerable respect from the people of Scotland as the somewhat dated party politics of envy and distrust begin to heal?

Similarly might the educational unions have adopted an equally consensual approach? Issue by issue confrontation and piece by piece negotiations are immensely wearing on all sides.  Might all those involved in education reflect a renewed sense of vocation and professional purpose with a corresponding commitment to the 'big picture'? 

Might those responsible for the delivery of our school curriculum have come together in increasingly visible common purpose?  Scotland is a small country of almost 5 million people, perhaps even “the best small country in the world”.  If we are to aspire to that accolade and to recognise the benefits of being a small country, then we can make new things happen.  We have some of the best educational thinkers and practitioners in the world.  Their vision need not be consigned to rarely read conference papers.  Rather, with fewer advisers and more deliverers, we can restore education to its central purpose: realising the inner potential of all our young people.  As John Buchan wrote “our task is not to put the greatness back into humanity but to elicit it for the greatness is there already”.

And what of the curriculum, notably last in this look towards 2018.  Perhaps we have spent too much time in various walks of life, not least in education, in celebrating the cerebral at the expense of the spiritual?  Left-brain sequential thinking has dominated our exam-dependent orders of ranking and flowed unchallenged into the world of work.  So long as in teaching we concentrate on minds rather than hearts we will continue to favour some and to disadvantage many.

Our own school days may seem light years away from such thinking, but it is like only yesterday when we call to mind a great teacher who got alongside us, who came out from behind the desk and who ’lit our spark’ and perhaps a lifelong interest or passion.  It is often outside the classroom and very often one on one that the moment of connection and resonance takes place in the heart of another person’s child.  As the late Frere Roger of Taize said “The little we communicate quite simply to another person, particularly a young person, another person’s child, may find a resonance in their soul which may last their whole life long”

With less measurement, less needless form filling and a realistic balance of required academic subjects for serious in depth study alongside a curriculum of personal development which seriously engages young people from the heart, there could yet be a ‘quiet revolution’ in Scottish Education which by 2018 would again be justifiably a ‘model of enlightened thinking for tomorrow’s children’.

Certainly this sense of a ‘quiet revolution’ has been our experience at Columba 1400 in working with Scottish schools, very often from ‘tough reality’ areas.  In a remote setting such as Staffin on the Isle of Skye, far from the usual day to day worries and expectations, heads, teachers and students can engage in courageous conversations. A new and changed atmosphere develops when in complete openness and with courageous integrity a sense of being on a shared journey releases all sorts of possibilities.

No longer does leadership fall entirely to the Teacher, for leadership we discover is not a pass-mark on a one off course or conference.  Leadership, like life, is a lifelong process of refinement.  Very often it is the pupils who find their own leadership from within and who challenge their Teachers by asking “does it have to be this way?”  When others are inclined to say “why” it is very often the young who say “why not?”  And so can begin all sorts of pupil led initiatives and gatherings which enable members of the school community to feel even more secure in each other, at whatever age and stage, to lead lives of purpose and of meaning.

Those who have read thus far may be tempted to think “that’s a load of soft stuff” but as Robert Kaplan said recently “it has taken me 27 years as Professor of Leadership Development at Harvard to realise that the soft stuff is the hard stuff”.

And if it is “soft stuff”, then it certainly works.  It also endures the cynicism, the indifference and the hostility of others, many of whom on closer examination would say “I want some of that”.

As Ralph Waldo Emerson put it “what lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters, compared to what lies within us”.