Why Do I Need a Teacher When I’ve Got Google

better than the other. He gave each equal footing depending on the task the one doing the thinking was supposed to pull off, which is what you would hope for a pilot. My challenge to you, the teacher of the twenty-first century, is, are you giving equal footing to them too? Do you favour the reassurance of the right or wrong answer to the giddy flurry of a class of 12-year-olds in full divergent swing?
    I have already mentioned ‘The Great Educational Lie’, one of two big aspects of my own schooling I didn’t pick up on until after I left full-time education. The other relates to what I later identified as the secret of my success at school which was, in a well-behaved nutshell, ‘Wait to be told what to do and do it well’. Don’t think for yourself. No independent thinking. Just sit there and be a good boy and you’ll go far. And, in the world of education, I did. Top grades and a top university, the stupid man’s Oxford. But it suddenly dawned on me, and I have been struggling with this all my working life, that the secret of my success at school, as a strategy, will get in the way of my achieving what I’m capable of achieving beyond school. Because while I’m sitting there waiting to be told what to do, others are out there doing it. A lot of them a lot less qualified than I am. The German philosopher Emmanuel Kant 3 wrote about what he called ‘nonage’, something he defined as our ‘inability to use one’s own understanding without another’s guidance’, before adding the challenge:
    Dare to know! (Sapere aude.) ‘Have the courage to use your own understanding,’ is therefore the motto of the enlightenment.
    This is something I feel very strongly about, how my success in education came not as a result of having the strengths of my convictions but knowing how to express the strength of the convictions of others and do it well. Like Marco Pierre White, the great chef, when he said, ‘It started to dawn on me that I had spent my whole career being judged by people who had less knowledge than me’ (White 2006). But it is the single-minded people who often achieve so much more than the broad-minded ones.
    What’s more, learning how and when to break the rules might just save your life. Research by engineers in the aftermath of the 9/11 bombings showed that nearly 2,500 people saved themselves by ignoring fire marshal instructions, using the lifts in the early stages of the alert and not staying put when they were told to. 4 Interestingly, this wasn’t out of belligerence or panic, it was because, in our new connected world, their use of technology meant they knew more than the authorities did.
    The ‘guess my thought and I’ll throw you a fish’ approach to teaching and learning has got to change if we want confident creative thinkers capable of both convergent
and
divergent thinking according to what each individual situation merits. And part of that thinking skill set needs to be the ability to confidently and without malice throw out an old idea and come up with a new one. ‘Every act of creation starts with an act of destruction,’ said Picasso. ‘What might you have to go away and break’, I say to teachers in the sessions that I run, ‘in order to move things forward in the 21st century for the children in your school?’ After all, in the words of advertising guru, David Ogilvy, ‘The cracked ones let in the light.’
    But I bet you, like me, got where you are by the same secret of success that I used – be a good boy or girl and do what you’re told. So, going away and breaking things goes against every bone in our bodies. I was in a Northern town with a chip problem a while back and was talking to an LA advisor about the nature of the presentation I was about to give to a group of teachers. She liked some of the ideas but could see they could be quite challenging to some of the staff in what was a conservative Catholic (as opposed to Conservative catholic) secondary school. ‘Oh yes, the revolution starts here!’ I joked with her. ‘I’d get into trouble for starting a revolution,’ she replied in all seriousness.
    Often we feel in Independent Thinking that our job isn’t so much teaching teachers anything new as it is simply giving them permission to do the thing they would like to do but were scared to in case they got into trouble. But how can we have children who are happy with diverging away from the concrete world of right answers if we’re not modelling to