Nature has no opposites

There are no opposites in nature. No matter how gross, revolting or undesirable something may seem,  everything has its place and fits together in one awesome scheme. Opposites are entirely a human concept.

I had this epiphany this past week when thinking about success and failure, prompted by the UK ‘A Level’ examination results, the pre-eminent requisite for students wishing to further their education at university. These showed an improvement for the 27th consecutive year and fuelled the inevitable, perennial debate afterwards about what this really meant and the extent to which standards are or are not being lowered.

Exams are a primary example of the dichotomy between success and failure. Someone who passes their exams is lauded as a success, while someone who doesn’t is literally said to have failed and carries the stigma of ‘failure’ with them for the rest of their lives. Not only are the terms seen as opposites, but they both are such definite, concrete terms conveying so much inherent emotion. Yet at the same time they are so abstract and subjective.

A student who gets only 3 “A Grades” instead of 4 may still consider themselves to be a failure, while someone who achieves 4 “C Grades” might be delighted and consider this a success beyond their wildest hopes. And all this is further complicated by the fact that no-one claims that exams are perfect, but simply, widely regarded as the best means yet devised to assess student capabilities – in this instance their basic preparedness to enter the workforce or go on to further academic learning to equip them for a career.

Perhaps in light of this, the consistent improvement in results may be a great step towards removing this artificial divide. Yet I doubt whether that has been the intention, and the consequences for our educational platform are in any case too serious for it to be deemed a success. They have rekindled my sense of the urgent need to reconfigure our educational system – not just for the sake of the students whose efforts are sadly undermined by the politics, but for society as a whole.

In the UK this political debate around education is exacerbated by decreasing social mobility and the fact that the ‘professions’ are increasingly dominated by the children of professionals, something attributed to the fact that professionals pay to educate their children outside the state system. Of course this is quite logical when statistics show that students at independent schools are more than twice as likely to do well in these exams than those from public, comprehensive schools. Arguments rage about why this is the case, and all pivot around questions of “success” and “failure.” Perhaps the focus needs to be less on policy and more on core values. Can we learn the lesson from nature and be less confrontational, rather looking at the big picture? I would suggest for starters:

• Looking at life-long learning rather than an age-based, fixed-time approach.
• Putting education into a context of a bigger purpose.
• More emphasis on core, universal life-skills (language, communication, mathematics and science, logic, analysis, reasoning and problem solving.)
• Better integration of core subjects around the ‘softer’ life-skills subjects.
• Increasing the sense of enjoyment and fun around lessons.
• More stringent “capability assessments” but with less of a pass/fail approach and a greater sense of “let’s just see how good you are!”

I doubt that is everything, but it seems to be like a good, natural starting point. What do you think?