The Widening Gyre: why the centre can no longer hold - and what we must do about it
Yeats' poem 'The Second Coming' presaged where we find our centralised education system today. We need to pay attention and make some changes, fast.
We’ve had centralised governments and systems for as long as there have been governors and systems leaders. The idea of centralisation of authority was first introduced in the Qin Dynasty of China. The Qin government was highly bureaucratic and was administered by a hierarchy of officials, all serving the First Emperor, Qin Shi Huang. Qin Shi Huang owned and controlled all his territories, including those conquered from other countries. This was achieved through a centralised and bureaucratic government with a rigid centralisation of authority.
Through the Industrial Revolution (from which our current education system springs), we saw massive increases in efficiency and profitability through centralised processes. Mechanised cotton spinning powered by steam or water increased the output of a worker by a factor of around 500. The power loom increased the output of a worker by a factor of over 40. The efficiency of steam engines increased so that they used between one-fifth and one-tenth as much fuel. The substitution of coke for charcoal greatly lowered the fuel cost of pig iron and wrought iron production.
However, with every increase in centralised efficiencies, so there was a concomitant decrease in the quality of life for many in society. The Industrial Revolution did wonderful things to productivity and progress, but many terrible things to the individual, creating a stark divide between the rich and poor, leading to violent outbreaks and giving birth to the philosophical ideas of socialism, communism, and anarchism. It also destroyed the environment, with the rapid rise in global warming a direct result of the greenhouse gases spewed from factories and the mass use of petrol driven transportation throughout the world.
The reason this is important relative to the education system that we have been working within for around two hundred years is because, in order to have workers who fit a centralised system (like cogs in a clock), you need to ensure they tick certain knowledge and skills boxes. The education system as it stands today was created largely to train the administrators, lawyers, teachers and accountants needed to maintain social structures. The factory and mill workers of the 19th and early 20th centuries by and large needed little formal education, but those who kept the books and ensured legal processes were followed required a reasonable amount of knowledge to fulfil their role.
For about the first 180 years, this system worked reasonably well. There were such things as jobs for life, students broadly knew what sorts of careers were open to them, and the class system operated without too much friction. There have always been examples of upward mobility, with bright children from poorer backgrounds (like me) being the first in their family to go to university, but in countries like the UK, until the 1980s schools perpetuated the unwritten rule that the middle classes went to university and the working classes did the lower paid jobs that others did not want to do. That was certainly the case where I went to school: I passed the 11+ grammar school entrance exam back in 1981, but because I lived on the ‘wrong side of town’ (aka on a council housing estate) I did not get a place at the grammar and instead went to a very average comprehensive, where I left with very average grades. It was only went I went back to college aged 23 that my academic career finally took off. Better late than never.
The shift
A shift in society began in the mid to late 1980s with the collapse of many state governed structures (like the disempowerment of the UK’s unions and the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989), the growth of the internet, and a rise in globalisation. Since then we have seen a huge change in how we approach the notion of the career. People want to be flexible, to move internationally in the pursuit of professional advancement. Back when I was leaving school, my friends and I were competing for jobs with those in our local area. Nowadays we are competing with the world.
With all the changes that have taken place in the professional world over the last 20-30 years, you’d have thought that education would have noticed and done something about it. That has been far from the case. There have been no discernible changes to schools or universities in that time. Not one pedagogical or structural change.
There was an attempt, back in the glory days of the first New Labour government in the late 1990s, to build a new generation of schools. The Building Schools for the Future (BSF) programme had laudable aims but fell way short of the mark. Schools housed in Victorian buildings would be shut down, and the school moved to shiny new plaza learning buildings, with classrooms swapped for open plan learning spaces. The problem with this model was that there had been little if any training for teachers in how to use these spaces. They were expected to simply adapt their practice. This did not happen, and as a result it was chaos. A number of these schools had classrooms retrofitted at great expense, and there have been very few similar schools built since.
This is a classic example of how the centralised control of things like building design can have disastrous consequences. You can imagine the Labour government sitting down with a think tank or McKinsey and coming up with ideas to reinvent education for the new millennium, without stopping to ask either teachers or students whether they were ready or whether even it was what they wanted. Like many big ticket items, critics have argued that the BSF programme was a symbol of a government trying to do too much too soon, and not taking key stakeholders with them. You could likely say that about countless government initiatives across the UK and indeed the world.
It’s been the same with other elements of centralised decision-making: the National Curriculum for England and Wales came out of the Educational Reform Act in 1988, in response to disparities in provision across the country. It was felt that giving schools too much autonomy had led to a significant variation in the quality and content of education.
A centralised approach also enabled schools to be compared, supposedly further raising standards. However, this curriculum has stopped any degree of teacher autonomy, limits the ability to be creative, over emphasises academic subjects at the expense of creative subjects, can offer a narrow, UK-centric view of the world, and forces teaching to the test. Exactly what we should be avoiding in education.
The nadir of this in my opinion was the introduction of the Ebacc in the early years of the Conservative government in 2010-2011: by forcing every student to take the 5 ‘English Baccalaureate’ GCSE subjects of English, Maths, 3 Sciences, Humanities and a foreign language, arts subjects were sidelined and even removed from some schools.
I can still remember a heated conversation with my Principal at the time, arguing that we should not demote art and drama, that they were critically important subjects for personal expression, thinking outside the box, and self confidence. I was shouted down, the provision was cut, and the school was an impoverished place as a result, with more artistic students being forced to take history, an extra science or French when they were utterly disinterested in any of them.
The UK is not alone. The US Common Core, introduced in 2009 through sponsorship of the National Governors’ Association (NGA) and the Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO), sought to bring diverse state curricula into alignment with one another. The Common Core was influenced by several factors, including a desire for greater global competitiveness in the wake of an explosion of Asian influence, with children in China and Singapore significantly outperforming US children across all benchmarks.
The curriculum also looked to ensure students from high school would be ready for college or the workforce, as well as to maintain a degree of consistency and rigour across a broad and diverse geography.
Again, as in the UK, there are many disadvantages to this centralised, one size fits all approach. There is little account taken of the sheer breadth and diversity of the US demographic, creativity is severely limited, too much pressure is placed on students who are constantly assessed, and there are few resources to effectively teach the curriculum. Many felt it was rushed through, a knee-jerk reaction to the US being put on the spotlight owing to below average PISA rankings in 2009 (placed 14th and 17th in reading and science, and 25th in mathematics).
The irony is that the US fell in the OECD’s table as a result, from 17th overall in 2009 to 25th in 2018. However, the increase in childhood and teen anxiety, eating disorders and suicide has increased. Suicide is particularly stark: the CDC reports that suicide rates for people aged 10-17 increased by a staggering 70 percent between 2006 and 2016. A report by NEA states that factors include “Bullying, academic pressure, family problems, and social media”.
And don’t forget the year on year increase in high school shootings, from 14 in 2009, to 49 in 2022. That’s a more than 10% year on year increase over the period with a total of 456 people killed, including 313 students.
It makes for depressing reading, but there is hope.
The widening gyre
If we look back one hundred years, in his poem The Second Coming, W.B. Yeats gave us fair warning that sooner or later things will break:
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand…
The widening gyre is the distance we move away from stability and safety. The more we push our children, the more unstable they become. Sooner or later, the falcon (student) can no longer hear the falconer (teachers and the system in which everyone is held), and it will not be long before things indeed fall apart and ‘mere anarchy’ is loosed upon our classrooms.
The beautiful, terrifying image of the ‘ceremony of innocence’ drowning explains far better where we are than anything I could write. It is as if Yeats had transported himself to the modern classroom and saw first hand the impact that centralised control has had on our young. And all in the service of what? International league tables, a fear of China overtaking the west as the world’s dominant force? Our children are the collateral damage of this fear. A grim reflection of the modern world indeed.
The ending of this section of the poem holds some hope, and it is this that I dedicate the bulk of my book, Re.Generate to. Whilst I have begun on rather a depressing note, you will see as we progress that there is huge hope in new technologies to finally free us of this burden and bring in a new era of abundance for all. The revelation at hand is the holy trinity of artificial intelligence; virtual/mixed reality and the metaverse; and immersive, real-world, project-based learning.
As we will see when I dig deeper into all three in my book, the combination of new forms of organisational and generative intelligence, new ways to work spatially with digital objects and in new virtual spaces, and meaningful, relevant, real-world learning experiences, is one that will truly unlock the next phase in our educational evolution (or ‘edvolution’ if you will). We could not have had this combination until now, but now it must be had. We can no longer ignore the waves of change that are crashing over us today - and the tsunami hasn’t yet struck. This is only the prelude.
What is decentralisation?
Decentralisation is the process of transferring power and decision-making from a central authority to smaller, more local groups. It’s in the move from global/national to local that I believe we will see the biggest changes in our education system. As we have seen, historically we needed a more standardised system as the human ‘end product’ was required to fit into a handful of roles: doctor, banker, lawyer, architect, teacher, administrator, labourer, and so on. Jobs were usually for life and the skills required changed little throughout one’s career. You might have made it from the shop floor into management or even C-Suite, but the sector in which you worked tended not to change.
Now we have portfolio careers, zero hours contracts, digital nomads, and CVs that to anyone born before 1980 look patchy to say the least. It makes little sense to train for a specialism (perhaps medicine is the one current exception to this), so the notion of a centralised approach to structuring the education system to prepare students for a fixed career seems pointless.
Another reason why we have put up with a globalised/nationalised/centralised approach to systems is that, historically, we have trusted the output that is fed to us by them (or at least had no reason to question its basis in reality). Whether the government, entertainment, or news, in the past we tended to question less the veracity of what we passively consumed. We have of course questioned bias in government and the media for a long time, but concerns over ‘fake news’, Photoshop manipulation, deepfake videos and voice cloning have begun our questioning of the very nature of reality as it is mediated to us through the digital world.
This is already causing us to question what we trust or believe to be true. And if we can no longer fully trust any digitally mediated information, unsure as to whether the news we are consuming, the videos we are watching or the voices we are listening to are a real or machine generated, what choice do we have but to turn our attention to our immediate vicinity, and privilege local over national or global? Doesn’t it make sense to create value systems within human interaction rather than relying on systems that are falling apart owing to an utter lack of trust in what they are presenting us?
These two fundamental changes to how society sees itself have profound implications for education. If we no longer require any authority to tell us what we can and cannot teach our children, and we’re no longer able to trust the majority of what is fed to us online, then we can begin to create truly decentralised organisational structures within which we can operate our schools.
Even the formal notion of a school, with its four walls, its classrooms and its teachers, ceases to be relevant. Small, human scale and community-facing spaces for learning make a good deal more sense, with learning pathways co-created between learning coaches and students. If competencies can be demonstrated through different pathways, assessed in real time through AI, then students can choose their own path through their learning, guided by their human and machine support structure. You could have one hundred students involved in one hundred slightly different pathways, all of them choreographed through AI’s organisational genius.
The notion of voice becomes critical here. When one centralised voice drowns out all others, there is a tendency to keep quiet, play the game, and find your voice in other spaces (such as social media influencing and online gaming). But if we can no longer trust that centralised voice, we have to turn away from it and open our ears to the people around us, in the same physical space, because at least we know they are real (at least until such time that robots are able to mimic humans perfectly: but we are a long way off that just yet).
It feels like we have reached that point now in schools. What we are being told to teach, and how we are being told to teach it, is making less and less sense, so I believe there will be a time coming very soon when we say ‘enough is enough’, vote with our feet, and co-create learning with those who are most impacted by all this: the students.
The importance of student voice
We need to begin by listening to students. We will never truly decentralise until we begin with those at the end of the value chain. We need to invert the current system: rather than the hub being government curricula, teacher training programmes and exam assessment objectives and the outer spokes being schools, leaders, teachers and then students, the student should sit in the centre, with everyone and everything else in support of what they want to do, where they want to go, and how they know they’ll get there best.
Wouldn’t it be something if we could give students from a young age the chance to explore what it is that they love best, and work the learning structures around that? One might love animals, another race cars, and a third space. They could truly explore these interests at a pace that suited them, with the AI matching their current interest, where they are in their learning, and what resources will best help them to progress.
The centre then shifts from the controlling authority to the student themselves. What an extraordinary thing it would be to see learning spaces filled with youngsters all pursuing their dreams, or being exposed to lots of interesting ideas until they find the one they latch on to and run with? Of course interests change and that’s a good thing: the seven year old boy who loves dinosaurs will likely have a passion for video games by the time he’s eleven, and that’s ok.
If the centre can no longer hold, that’s because it can no longer support so many voices, points of view, ideas and possible futures. It is breaking under the weight of so much change and so little trust in anything it is telling us. Does it therefore make more sense to remove it completely, push ownership to the local level, and support students to create their own strong centres, around which they can grow and flourish? Or are there dangers in this?
From Governments to DAOs: how blockchain can support decentralisation
It is all very well suggesting that we can move the organisation of education systems to the local level, but human beings are prone towards messiness, chaos and uncertainty. Simply asking groups of people to create these human scale learning spaces could end in disaster. A certain structure does therefore need to be put in place, but one that is wholly owned and agreed by its members. With schools, these means creating a new form of decentralised organisational unit capable of doing so.
This is the idea of the Education DAO movement, which seeks to move significant control of the daily running of schools to its end users - teachers, students, parents and even the local community. The DAO, or Decentralised Autonomous Organisation, is a new type of organisational structure made possible by blockchain technology. A DAO is an online, digital entity that operates through pre-programmed rules, with decision-making processes often managed by a community of stakeholders rather than a centralised authority.
Stakeholders vote on decisions that are automatically executed through smart contracts on the blockchain. Areas such as resourcing, curriculum and finance could be recorded on the blockchain, and the school could be governed by all stakeholders, including students. The school DAO could potentially introduce its own token as form of internal currency, using it to reward certain behaviours or achievements, or even, in the case of Alan Smithson’s Unlimited Awesome Academy, give students the opportunity to ‘earn while they learn’ through monetising the products of their learning.
If schools remain large, unwieldy structures then it is hard to see how this could work. However, if small, ‘work and learn’ hubs pop up and begin to redefine the notion of learning spaces, and they remain human scale, then it is entirely feasible to see them without the traditional senior leader. It makes sense to keep someone as the overall director of these hubs: people buy people after all, and having someone whose main role is as strategic architect and salesperson of the vision running operations, supported by a small team and working closely with DAO stakeholders, then these hubs will have the best of both worlds.
The role of technology in decentralised structures
As we have just explored, blockchain is one such technology that could enable greater decentralisation to occur. It is trustless, with smart contracts sitting open on the blockchain for anyone to view. DAOs have nothing to hide because they are not beholden to political parties, shareholders or individual owners, so blockchain is the ideal mechanism. Combined with the organisational and generative power of AI, we now have the technology to create localised systems that actually work. This will revolutionise education at every level.
We can imagine these DAO units, driven by local need, responsive and agile, popping up in towns and cities across the world. Each would have their own set of foundational principles but could join other units through online communities to share best practice and support one another. Ownership would sit with users, from students through to teachers, parents and community members. Decisions could be voted on through an online platform, with those with the larger number of tokens automatically having more say in decision-making. Token number would not be determined by how much you had invested into the DAO or how influential your parents might be: students could earn tokens through excelling in their chosen learning pathway or generating revenue for the DAO.
A certain amount of every dollar they earn would go back into the DAO, to sustain its operations and further its mission. This, combined with the notion of a family club membership, where some families would pay a monthly fee to use the working and creative spaces as well as the learning hub, could create an affordable working and learning community resource for all.
AI would sit at the very heart of these hubs, both organising individual learning pathways and the DAO’s finances, communications and marketing. A lot has been written to date about the creative aspects of AI; how it can write essays, poems and marketing campaigns. However, where I believe generative AI is most powerful is in its organisational aspects: it can take vast amounts of messy data and organise it in such a way that it is useful to its human end users. Take assessment and attendance data as an example: an AI system using linear regression can easily organise and analyse the correlation between both and generate actions as a result. Community ‘work and learn’ DAOs will have AI baked into their daily operations as well as being used to support each learner in the DAO.
The dangers of decentralisation
There are of course reasons why we have had centralised education systems and inspection regimes to assess how well any one school performs against expectation. If every community DAO did its own thing, without any external scrutiny, who’s to say that they don’t get it wildly wrong in what they teach children, or impose extreme viewpoints on them? What’s to stop these hubs turning into narrow-minded, parochial and limiting echo chambers at best, breeding grounds for extreme religious or right-wing indoctrination at worst? If we all turn our attention away from the world as we no longer trust what it is telling us, what’s to say we don’t all end up living in isolated enclaves, not caring or interested in anyone or anything outside the confines of our small community?
I think this is where we can turn to technology to help us. If the AIs that support learning pathways understand that their prime goal is to create intelligent, well-rounded, kind and considerate young people, equipped with the tools they need to be successful into an ever evolving future, they and their human partner will work out the best way to do this based on a myriad factors: local and national context, learning style, starting point, interests and cognitive abilities to name just a few. We will soon reach a point where our AI companions will know more about us than we know ourselves, and will work alongside us in real time.
However, at the structural level I believe we will still need human learning coaches in every community learning DAO, not only to support the welfare of learners, but also to act as learning mentors, role models and the architects of immersive projects. These creative and human-centric activities should remain the domain of people, not machines. An online network of learning hubs will spring up, with the best resources and ideas shared openly, voted on by a worldwide community and able to be used freely and without license. This should be the central premise of the Education 3.0 movement: the centre no longer residing in one government or massive tech company, but rather a network of connected nodes, like one massive neural network, a community sharing great ideas like synapses firing around the world.
Finally, I believe we need to collectively agree on one guiding statement that we live and die by. This statement needs to be centred around why any of us went into teaching in the first place. We are the unlockers, unblockers and inspirers. We are the guiders, supporters, challengers and hand holders. We centre our lives around those younger and more vulnerable than we are, seeing teaching not as a job to make money but as a vocation, a calling, something necessary. The cognitive dissonance so many teachers feel centres around the tension between the deep idealism that I would say the majority of teachers have at their core, and the limiting, top down structures within which they work.
We live in learned helplessness because we don’t believe we can do anything about it, so we push our idealism down, which often turns to cynicism. After all, cynics are just idealists who have had their dreams squashed. We therefore need to agree on one simple statement, one guiding light, a home base that we can return to time and again when the world seeks to push us back into some sort of educational homeostasis.
I am not going to suggest what that statement should be. That would be utterly counter to everything being explored in my book. It is not about what one person thinks: it is about what we collectively believe. Out of that will come our North Star. And once we have it, and are supported by AI that is in alignment with it, then the sky is the limit.
*This is an excerpt from Re.Generate, available later this year