Moments of truth

A lesson from Harold Hill

Photo by Katrina Berban on Unsplash

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Have you ever wondered why there are so many pseuds, poseurs, quacks and outright charlatans orbiting the sphere of education? I think the only similar sphere is that of business leadership with its doorstop airport-lounge self-help books. In both cases, an enterprising individual can just make stuff up, at length, and not only survive but be acclaimed for it.

Obviously, there are limits to how much will fly in an actual classroom. Kids and reality have a tendency to release the trapped wind of hubris. Even the teachers I profoundly disagree with are usually practical people.

So the very worst pseuds, poseurs, quacks and charlatans avoid classrooms at all costs. Instead, they proffer advice from safely beyond escape velocity in education faculties or the various national and supranational bureaucracies that suck in the dollars of governments and well-intentioned megalomaniacs.

But how do they survive? How can they keep peddling impenetrable continental philosophy, debunked ideas and meaningless abstract nouns and get away with it?

Timing.

This year, our senior students performed in a production of The Music Man, a 1950s musical. The plot of The Music Man revolves around a con artist, ‘Professor’ Harold Hill. He convinces the naive folks of a midwestern town to order musical instruments from him, promising to train their children and form a successful marching band. This, he claims, will divert them from the vice associated with a new pool hall that has opened up in the town. However, Hill is not a band leader, does not know how to train musicians and plans to leave River City after collecting the money from the orders. In other words, he plans to leave before the literal moment of truth.

What are our moments of truth in education? Well, if we can successfully persuade an education system to limit standardised testing, there are very few. If we cannot shake the grip of standardised testing then we can still work the long gaps between its infrequent occurrence. And we can seek to undermine it, claiming it does not measure what is important but, critically, not offering a viable alternative.

Ultimately, the moment of truth will come. But if this is at eighteen when students leave school without adequate skills and knowledge, then the causal chain linking back to a primary school consultant is long and obscure.

Compare this with other, perhaps truer, professions. These professions agree on what defines a successful outcome — a cured patient, a bridge that does not collapse, advice that protects a client from litigation — and these generally operate on shorter time-scales. There are multiple moments of truth that happen frequently and it is harder to hide from them.

How can you spot an educational Harold Hill? I’d suggest that’s pretty easy. Someone who knows what they are doing will tell us how their advice will improve things and how we should be able to measure that improvement. A Hill will invert that process. They will tell us why current measures are not adequate for measuring the kind of improvements their advice will supposedly deliver. In other words they’ll be full of excuses about why we cannot find evidence to support their contentions.

And they’ll be on the train out of River City before long and you’ll be left with a load of trombones.