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

mind, the conclusion of the 2008 research is telling, giving the subject of this chapter:
    This study highlights the mutual interplay between school failure and psychological functioning. It is suggested that school adaptation in adolescence be considered a mental health issue.
    (McCarty
et al
. 2008)
    So much for those who feel ‘capable but don’t feel loveable’. What of those, then, who feel ‘loveable but not capable’? These are the types who are the life and soul of the party but ask them about their aspirations and expectations and they are full of the ‘I didn’t do well at school, I’m not very clever’ justifications to explain away why they haven’t achieved as well as others. Or rather, why they think they haven’t. I went to a parents evening once for my seven-year-old daughter where the class teacher was at pains to point out how ‘average’ she was at literacy and numeracy but ‘what a delightful girl she was to have in the class’. It was only at the end of the interview, when I broached the topic of subjects like art and dance that the teacher said, ‘Oh yes, she’s very good at them!’ This is ‘loveable but not capable’ training in action.
    In a similar vein, there is the story of one of the UK’s most successful ever clothes designers, Sir Paul Smith. Smith left school in Beeston, Nottinghamshire at the age of 15 with no qualifications, partly because he didn’t see the point and partly because of what was, at the time, undiagnosed dyslexia. 12 He wanted to be a professional cyclist until a serious accident put him in hospital for six months. A new circle of friends opened the door to him on a whole new world of fashion and design which he merged with his father’s experience as a ‘credit draper’ making blazers for the likes of Brian Clough’s Nottingham Forest Football Club. (‘Cloughie was really clever because he realized that instead of all arriving in tracksuits, blazers would give you the edge on the other team because you looked like a team and you had a certain attitude,’ says Smith. 13 ) From cycling to work at a fabric warehouse in the Midlands to Fifth Avenue via Savile Row and Buckingham Palace to pick up his knighthood, you would think such achievements would be enough proof to anyone about how clever they are. But this is not the case with Smith. In an article in
The Observer
he says:
    Dyslexia had a big effect on me. … My biggest regret is my lack of education … I tend to feel inadequate if I’m at a dinner party and thesubject starts getting heavy. Then it’s on with the court jester jacket I’m afraid.
    (
Observer
, 25/09/05)
    We all know people who have achieved a great deal but still carry around with them this burden of stupidity all their lives. But it is an unnecessary burden. What are you doing to make sure no child leaves your care with such a burden?
    Although not actually part of the Hippocratic Oath as many believe, the phrase ‘Primum non nocere’ is one that all doctors are taught in medical school. It means ‘First, do no harm’. 14 Maybe there should be something similar for teachers too. I know that the vast majority of us never deliberately set out to do harm but how many of us do so inadvertently? With a better understanding of the power that a teacher has, an understanding that draws on what is known in neuroscience, psychology, sociology and any other ‘ology’ you care to mention, the twenty-first century teacher begins to understand just what Spiderman’s Uncle Ben meant when he said:
    With great power comes great responsibility.

Chapter 17
What’s the real point of school?
    According to the writer John Mortimer:
    The main aim of education should be to send children out into the world with a reasonably sized anthology in their heads so that, while seated in the lavatory, waiting in doctors’ surgeries, on stationary trains or watching interviews with politicians, they may have something interesting to think about.
    I saw a colleague of mine put a task to a group of primary headteachers a while back. It was for them to answer the simple question, ‘What is the point of education?’ As you may expect from a group of primary headteachers, most of the answers came back as, ‘To educate our children’, ‘To bring the best out of them’, ‘To help them fulfil their potential’…. While I am sure that such answers were the genuine reasons why
they
were in education none of them is the answer as to what the