What gets us into trouble isn't what we don't know," wrote Mark Twain, "it's what we know for sure that just ain't so." There are two things we know for sure that just ain't so in education.

First, education is mainly about curriculum content. There may have been a time when this was true, but knowledge alone is simply not enough anymore. At a time when the half-life of useful scientific knowledge is thought to be less than seven years, we are recognising that it's not so much what you know when you leave school that matters, as what you understand about how to solve new problems and challenges.

The kind of world young people will inherit from their parents makes it foolish to focus our view of education on curriculum content anymore. We need a shift of focus from learning to learning to learn. This means helping pupils to navigate their own way through a vast maze of knowledge and help them understand how to make sense of it.

Secondly, education can't happen without assessment. We live in a world that values what it can measure rather than one which is able to measure what it really values. This places an unhealthy emphasis on goals and results. Anything which is incapable of neat measurement falls by the wayside as insignificant. We ignore the fact that some of the most remarkable and reliable processes in life take place without precisely definable outcomes and the need for constant assessment. Many of these are natural processes that take place as long as the conditions are right and the relevant stimuli in place.

Behind these observations lie important questions about what learning is really all about. Columba 1400's experience in working with young people has revealed some powerful insights into the nature of learning. For example, we have found that you cannot separate what is being taught from who is doing the teaching. Our ability to learn is intimately linked to the kind of people who are involved in the process of teaching. Each of us can remember individuals who have influenced or inspired us. Though we may not be able to say exactly what it was that had the impact, we know that something in the quality of their relationship with us or in the way in which they presented their subject struck a chord within us.

The fundamental challenge in education today is not content, entitlement, assessment or even resources. The challenge lies in methodology and understanding how young people can best be inspired to achieve their potential. Until we are clear about this there's not much point in agonising over content. To put it another way, before describing the kind of things schools should be doing, we should carefully define the kind of people who should be doing it and how they should set about what they do.

We need to understand far more about what it is that characterises those who have a positive impact and influence on young people. At Columba 1400 we have found that those who have this kind of impact do not use special techniques but are fundamentally a certain kind of person. There is a quality about them which enables them to engage with fellow human beings in an authentic and genuine way. The implication here is that the teacher's personal development may, in fact, be a more significant factor in the educational process than so-called professional development. I'm not suggesting we should reject one and accept the other, but that the two must be given equal and adequate emphasis.

Our focus needs to be more on the process of learning than on outcomes. The role of the teacher is, first and foremost, to nurture the conditions within which learning is most likely to occur. This means creating the environment and type of relationship with a young person that engender curiosity and learning. This will certainly involve accepting a level of uncertainty we are not used to in education.

An ancient Greek proverb tells us that a society becomes great when its old men plant trees in whose shade they will never sit. The short timeframes of modern political debate and decision-making do not fit well with this type of thinking. The cycles within which we expect change to occur are naively brief and artificial.

However, the possibilities are profound, as they offer the chance to tap into the neglected potential of young people in a way that is currently not happening. The challenge is to find how to plant seeds of change in a way that allows future generations to nurture them to full growth. And that is more likely to be a challenge of personal faith than of political will.

Dr Jonathan Long is associate director of Columba 1400.

Copyright © 2007 Newsquest (Herald & Times) Limited.

July 17 2007