Navigating Complexity in Education - A Conversation with Dave Snowden

Welcome to the Future Learning Design Podcast.

If you use children as ethnographers in every school within a country, then actually that gives you better data than you're getting with most of your market research at a government level. But also you can engage people in change at all levels of society, and you don't get these one-size-fits-all educational initiatives which are never going to work anyway.

Hi everybody, thanks for joining me for this episode of the Future Learning Design Podcast. This week I'm very happy to be speaking with Dave Snowden, who is the founder and chief scientific officer of Cognitive Edge. His work is in the area of naturalizing sensemaking, seeking to base social science research and practice in the natural sciences. He's generally considered to be a pioneer in the application of complex adaptive systems theory to a range of social issues and in the development of narrative as a research method.

Method.

Earlier in his career, working for IBM, Dave began work on the Cynefin framework in 1999 to help manage intellectual capital within the company. He continued developing it as European Director of IBM's Institute of Knowledge Management and later as founder and director of the IBM Cynefin Centre for Organisational Complexity. Dave holds a variety of academic positions. He's a visiting professor at the University of Canberra, Hong Kong Polytechnic University, and University of Pretoria, and is a visiting fellow at Warwick University, Nanyang University, Università Cattolica in Italy, and the Singapore Management College. Dave's Harvard Business Review cover article with Mary Boone, A Leader's Framework for Decision Making, was selected as the 2007 Best Practitioner Oriented Paper in Organizational Behavior. And earlier this year, Dave Snowden, with friends, published the book Cynefin: Weaving Sensemaking into the Fabric of Our World.

Hello.

Hi, Dave.

Hello, Dave. How are you?

Hi.

Listen, thank you so much for doing this. I was, I really appreciate it. I know this is perhaps your, not your normal playground, let's say, in terms of education, but you know, it's brilliant to have you.

Thank you. That's all right. I always enjoy podcasts. They're fun.

Brilliant. Well, it really is a huge pleasure to have you with me on the podcast, and I've been really interested in ideas around complexity for quite a long time and how they apply to education, but then it wasn't really until I discovered Kinevan that actually I could see how practical that is as the framework. And it's, so I've been quite obsessed with it, let's say for a little while now. And I think it would be great perhaps to start, cuz many of my listeners won't necessarily have heard of you or your work. And so perhaps if we could start with just a general question, but one of the ways I've heard you explain it is the children's party. And I think almost every one of my listeners either involved in organizing children, either as an educator or, or as a parent. So I think that will resonate with them. Perhaps you could describe it in those terms.

Okay, no problem. Basically, Cynefin is a framework to support decision-making and situational assessment, and it argues that different environments require different approaches. And that's in strong contrast with the last 30 or 40 years in management theory, which has assumed there is a magic or silver bullet. You know, it's servant leadership or it's adaptive leadership or whatever. What Kenevan says is, well, kind of like, you've all got a point, but dependent on the context, different things will apply.

Yeah.

So there's a— the fundamental Kenevan framework is based on 3 different types of system: ordered systems, complex systems, and chaotic systems. And critical to understand is there are phase shifts between this, which I'll explain in a minute. So an ordered system is one with a very high level of constraint. So you've got high levels of predictability, you've got high levels of certainty, you can plan forward over a reasonable horizon, people understand it, there's known expertise. E is kind of like we know what to do. And that's the traditional domain of most management science. Chaos in Cynefin, and chaos isn't used consistently between different disciplines. So everybody has to define it. Chaos in Cynefin is a state of no effective constraint, which means it's only ever a temporary state in human systems anyway, because constraints will nearly always come in. Yeah. And then complex systems, the best description is to say complex systems are entangled. Alessia Gioraro has a wonderful phrase, like bramble bushes in a thicket, or like a mangrove swamp. So everything is entangled with everything else. If you pull one thing, you get unintended consequences elsewhere in the system, and therefore you haven't got predictability. Now, there are two ways to understand this. One is a straight metaphor, the other is an illustration. So you can think of those three as solid, liquid, or gas, and that also explains a phase shift. So if you heat water to 100 degrees it doesn't immediately become steam. You have to put more heat in before it becomes steam. Yeah, that's called latent heat. Similarly, when it snows, the atmosphere warms up a bit because heat has been thrown out for liquid to become solid. Yeah, so order, complex, and chaos are phase shift boundaries. Things are— they're always one of those, and there's an energy gradient, a switch required to move between them. Yeah, yeah. Also, for anybody who remembers the high school physics, there's an equilibrium point between pressure and temperature. It's called the triple point, at which it's equiprobable that things could become solid, liquid, or gas. And in Kenevin, that's the domain of confusion, or the aporetic domain in the middle. It's the area where you could move into any of the three. And then we also make a division in order between clear— in the UK, we drive on the left, in Germany, they drive on the right— and complicated, where experts know, but not everybody will see it. Right, so that's not a phase shift. Now the other way I've described this, and this is, you know, a mixture of metaphor and reality, is to think about how you would manage a children's party.

Yeah.

And there are kind of like 3 approaches to this, and they're based on order, complex, or chaos. So the chaotic approach is kind of like zero constraints, just open up your house, let the children do whatever they want. Yeah, they'll probably then discover drugs and alcohol and go on a personal experience of self-discovery. Your property may burn down in the process, but all property is theft and it was socially constructed in the first place. I don't recommend this. I've got a friend in California who did it once. He'd just come back from Burning Man and had this belief in spontaneous self-organization and discovered with young kids that meant spontaneous combustion. So I don't recommend that one. The approach generally adopted by anybody who's been on a management course or done an MBA, which is too many these days, It is of critical importance to agree clear learning objectives for the party in advance of the party itself, and those learning objectives should be aligned with the mission statement for the party, which of course you've designed with all responsible adults before the party. As the children come into the party, they're given Disney badges, and on the back of it, the party value statement, so they're aware of them throughout the process.

Yeah.

And you basically start the party with a sort of clear statement about what you need to do and when people should do one, and everything is highly organized and structured. That ain't gonna work. Yeah, and we all know it isn't gonna work. The complex systems approach, on the other hand, is much different. We create some boundary conditions, like, you know, don't run onto the road, but you don't actually say that. You say, don't go onto the drive, because you know kids will break the boundaries a bit anyway. So you pull them back a bit. Yeah. And you create some reasonable ones. And then we throw in catalysts or attractors to see what will happen. Yeah, we bounce in a ball, we have a video game. And if you get a beneficial pattern of play, then you actually give it more energy, you push more kids towards it. If it's negative, you pull them away. Yeah, yeah. And that's the key concept. What you're doing is you're managing the emergence of beneficial coherence within attractors, within boundaries.

Yeah.

And the key thing to understand here is the catalyst. The football is a catalyst, it's not the attractor. What it does is it creates a pattern of play that people will fall into. And that's how you manage complexity.

No, I think it's such a powerful metaphor for it, partly because for in education, that second one of the management kind of approach is so resonant with me and with any school leader listening to this, because that is how we manage education right now, I would say.

I can give you two other cases on that. I mean, when I was at school, our headmaster was also the English teacher. I mean, headmasters taught in those days. He never prepared a lesson plan in his life, but he knew Shakespeare by backwards. He came in, he got straight A's even from kids who would never achieve them.

Yeah.

Because he inspired them to learn. He wouldn't survive the modern educational system. Yeah. Yeah. And the other illustration I often give is the educational system has decided people need to be taught things when there's some things which are better for experience. So when I went to school, I still remember, I mean, went up to secondary school at 11. I can now wear long trousers. I mean, we had to wear shorts in those days, even in British winters.

Nice. Yeah.

Yeah, the winter of 1964, I still fondly remember, all right? You know, walking 2.5 miles to school with shorts. Brilliant. Um, but then we debated. So I walked to the front of the class and I was given a record card and it said, you support capital punishment. This at the age of 11.

Yeah.

And I had to speak for 7 minutes without preparation for something I thought. Yeah. Even at 11. And we did that every week from 11 to 18.

Yeah, amazing.

Now that made us generalists because we read everything. We didn't know what we were going to get. We learned how to argue. Things we didn't believe in. Yeah, we didn't need to be taught to be critical. There was a game because actually if you were good at this, you got status. Yeah, I mean, I went on to debate almost professionally at university. Yeah, you got status out of it. But the point is you learn by doing over an extended period of time, and that generation is more critical. And I think we got over-object focus. And there's some other statistics on this if you don't know it. All right, and I can give you the reference for later.

Yeah, please.

Whenever people are working for explicit goals, it destroys intrinsic motivation.

Yeah.

I mean, and that's a meta study of all studies of motivation. Where do we have the most goals? Education. Where do we need the most intrinsic motivation?

Absolutely.

And one of the things that I was interested in, in what you talk about is this, the difference between that kind of idealized future state like we've articulated everything and we're trying to now map backwards from this articulated future state in order to take all the steps to get there, right? So that's what, that's often the way schools and education systems are run. How does that differ from your, where you talk about directions, right? Directions.

It's substantially different. I mean, I think, I think part of the problem with that is what you see happens in the '80s and '90s. And I blame Tavistock for a lot of this. You, you get the introduction of systems thinking and also the introduction of psychological approaches coming from Freud. It's all about systems and manipulation, right? And it's deeply problematic. And the trouble with systems thinking is it takes an engineering metaphor. It comes from cybernetics, from system dynamics, from MIT. And therefore they want to know where— the way you handle uncertainty, you see this in Peter Senge, right? You handle uncertainty by defining your endpoint.

Yeah.

Now what that means is people focus on the endpoint. Now, if the system is complex, you don't know what the endpoint is because everything is constantly changing.

Yeah.

So people went from forecasting to backcasting. Yeah. Project forward to let's decide how we come. What we do in complexity is called sidecasting. And there's a wonderful metaphor there with trout fishing, right? Okay. So we cast around in the present to see what's possible and what's very difficult.

Okay.

Yeah.

And we have a sense of direction, but not targets. And that also means and this is what we're doing in the NHS and elsewhere, is you have vector targets, not outcome targets. So you still measure, but you measure— a vector target has 3 elements, direction, speed, and energy, right? So basically you can set that as a target for a school. Are you going in the right direction at the right speed for the right resources? But you can then readjust the vector based on what you discover on the journey. Yeah, the trouble with goals is it— I mean, I'll give a university example. I'm on several universities, all right, where I visit in chairs. We have very senior people dedicated to manipulating the ref, of course.

Yeah.

And you see the same in schools. Yeah, we, you know, the classic cases of kids not being allowed to sit exams because it will destroy the targets. And that, that's Goodhart's Law or Strathern's Variation: measures which become targets cease to be measured.

Yeah, yeah. And it's just, you just end up gaming the system in order to get the outcome that is desirable.

Yeah, and you dedicate resources to that, which is why I say headmasters no longer teach, which I actually think is a mistake, right? Because of the volume of work they've done. And we didn't have a bad education system back in the '60s. It managed quite well.

Yeah.

And it managed, you know, because it didn't have all of these measures and targets and reporting and structures. And there was a highly competent inspector who helped people out. Rather than encourage schools to put posters outside to say where they sit on tables, which I think is abhorrent.

Yeah. It's one, one question then connected to that, I suppose, is I spoke to Olli-Pekka Heinonen, who's just going over to take the lead of the International Baccalaureate, but was the, was working at the Education National Agency in Finland. And he said he'd done some work with you. So I'd like, I'd be really interested to hear a bit about what that meant and looked like, but then also thinking about Is this only for the leadership and the policymakers who are making decisions, or do you think there's a role for understanding these kinds of dynamics for everybody, even for young people?

Yeah, there is. I mean, it's quite interesting. I remember working with the Singapore Civil Service, and they were all saying— and I mean, the Singapore Civil Service is highly educated, all right? They have an elite educational system. And they said Kenevan was too academic. So I got a bunch of what we used to call fifth formers, Yeah, in my day they're called something else now, right?

Yeah, well, grade 11.

Yeah, I've got no bloody idea. I think first and second and sixth was a lot better.

Depends what country you're in. Yeah.

And we taught them Canavan, and this is Assumption English, which is a middle-ranked school in Singapore. It's not like, you know, the elite, right? And I got them to do the presentation to the committee of civil servants, and it just demolished them.

Amazing.

Because they understood it, they could explain it. They used a wonderful metaphor of toilet rolls and teachers' time, which was just brilliant. The civil servants are still talking about that one.

Wow, amazing.

I mean, one of the things about Cynefin is it's designed to be drawn on a table napkin from memory. And there's other frameworks I've developed. They all follow that principle because then you can understand them quite simply, or you can get more and more detailed. We can add in liminality, we can add in aporetic, and you go down. So I think that's one component, but I think the other key thing, this is in the EU field guide we just published jointly with the commission, right? It says the role of leadership is to coordinate, not to make decisions. And I think that's the problem we got. It's not that you don't have a hierarchy, but the hierarchy thinks it makes the decisions. And that wasn't the way when I was in management, right? The people who made decisions were middle management.

Yeah.

The responsibility of leaders was coordinate, link, connect.

Yeah.

Tend to set a direction. The only time you make decisions as a centralized leader is in a crisis, and then you've got to be able to make them very quickly. Yeah. But most of the time you need to distribute that. And I said, I think that's one of the issues. And one of the things we do, which if anybody's interested in, we can talk more about, is we measure attitudes. We develop software for that because attitudes are lead indicators. Compliance is a lag indicator. And we developed a lot of that working in Singapore on attitudes to discipline and attitudes to academic attainment. So we can do that using kids as ethnographers.

Yeah.

Because actually children are brilliant as ethnographers. So you can then represent it for a school, for a district, for a country, all from the same source data. And that's ability, and that's narrative-based. The ability to say, I want more stories like these and fewer stories like that is one of the ways we make vector measures real for people. And I'll give you the example, all right? If I go to nurses and say, how did we make patients safer? They'll get defensive. If I've got a whole body of patient stories and I say, I need more patient stories like these and fewer like those, they can engage in it.

Yeah, that's really interesting. And I've heard you talk about the self-interpreted micro-narrative. Maybe just to unpack that idea of ethnography, ethnography a bit more? Like, what does that mean for children as ethnography? Because even that won't necessarily be familiar to everybody, but that idea of the micro-narratives.

And the great irony on this is it actually came from work on counter-terrorism. I worked for a former national security advisor in the States when I was in IBM for about 10 years, right? And I used to say there's no difference between a terrorist, a citizen, and an employee. Yeah, they all represent the problem of asymmetry. Okay. Yeah, if you're a centralized authority, you've got all of these independent decision makers who are— yeah, so that's the concept. So we've done a lot of this. We're doing it in Europe at the moment. We've done big stuff in Malmö. We've done stuff in South Wales. And actually, we're about to launch this in the States on a post-election peace and conflict project.

Nice.

So what we do is we create a pack for a class in a school. Yeah, this sort of 16, 17-year-old bracket is ideal for this because you can do things after people pass the age of 16. Yeah, you've got a duty of care, but it's not to be 16.

Yeah, yeah.

There is a bit by country, but it's that group. Right. And also in cognitive neuroscience terms, interestingly, they're close enough to puberty to be open because the brain starts to lock down by the time you meet your early 20s.

Yeah.

So we make them ethnographers on their iPhones. Yeah. I mean, the famous one we did in Pakistan is we got 50,000 micro-narratives in a week.

Amazing.

And kids went out from their schools with their iPhones and we told them, find the person in your grandparents' and your parents' generation you most admire. Yeah. Ask them for the story that they think you should remember from their life. These are called sacred stories in anthropology.

Nice.

And then they help the adults self-interpret their own story. And we do this in a way which is non-gameable. We don't ask explicit questions. We get people to balance positive qualities, which again has a lot of cognitive neuroscience behind it. Nice.

Yeah.

Now what that allows us to do is to draw fitness landscapes or maps of attitudes or beliefs. And the one we did in Pakistan actually showed that radicalization was going from the UK to Pakistan, not the other way around.

Oh wow.

Because we were looking at attitudes to justice and identity, but it was a, it was an open source program because the kids were fascinated by the subject, right?

Yeah, of course.

Yeah.

Uh, the one we did in South Wales, we then, having got the kids to do that, we create a narrative map of attitudes to say employment, and then we put young people with people from their grandparents' generation to come up with interventions to change it. And if they came up with a good intervention, they got put into a trio with somebody from government to make it happen. Imagine you start to do that in schools. You basically put 11-year-old with 18-year-old, put them with a teacher if they come up with a good idea.

Yeah.

And you can get a huge amount of data very quickly. Yeah. And, and that's a big program.

Yeah, it's so interesting. And there's so many levels of benefit because there's huge amounts of learning for the student in that. But then as you're saying, there's also that gathering of data to then be able to understand a landscape as well.

Yeah. And kids understand it. So I mean, a nice thing from a classroom and we're, we're packaging it up at the moment. Right. So this is something we are going to make available to all schools before too much longer. Brilliant. I mean, there's a requirement in the BAC, for example, right? At least the Welsh BAC, which is the one I studied.

Yeah.

That you have to get kids involved in the community. You have to teach them statistics. So we can basically give a school the pack which says this will do the community engagement, the ethnography, and the kit. And by the way, we'll give the kids a certificate to say they've done a program in distributed ethnography. I mean, it turns out that's the thing the kids want.

Yeah.

Because it improves their CV for university or for a job.

Sure.

And I think that's something I'm quite excited by at the moment. It's a big focus.

Yeah. And also, as I said, I think that also helps them to then understand why this is important. Because clearly they need some context for why distributed—

It's actually interesting. We did one in Ohio, all right, on adult obesity, right, which was funded by Victoria's Secret because everything in Ohio is funded by Victoria's Secret. There are multiple ironies on that, but one of the reasons I did it, I said, if we want to approach childhood obesity, you don't talk with children directly. Let's get the children to investigate adult obesity, and then the children change their eating habits. So one of the ways I think we should be handling social problems is this widespread engagement. It's like one of the things I'm proudest of in Wales at the moment is the Future Generations Act. Yeah, because we passed legislation which says you can't do anything without taking the needs of the next generation. Well, let's move that on a stage, right? If you use children as ethnographers in every school within a country, then actually that gives you better data than you're getting with most of your market research at a government level. Yeah, but also you can engage people in change at all levels of society, and you don't get these one-size-fits-all educational initiatives which are never going to work anyway because one size never fits all.

Yeah, no, exactly. And that idea of it being self-interpreted, and because, you know, so often it's like some kind of consultation exercise where you grab a few people, interview a few people, and it's, you know, therefore supposedly you've got some kind of representative data.

That's a power issue. We actually saw it. I mean, two examples that we saw it in Granville, right, is that people were brought in to tell the stories, and their stories were taken away for political purpose. Power belongs on the interpretation of the story, not on the story itself. And this is a whole epistemic justice issue.

Yeah.

And what we do on consultation is we listen to people, we only hear what we want to hear, we then say we've consulted.

Exactly. Yeah.

And I won't say which minister— I remember being consulted by one minister, right?

Yeah.

And I thought this was important, it was kind of the future of a really important service, and I got 15 minutes with the minister because they wanted to say they consulted side. So my name was listed at the end of the document and it's just totally cynical. Yeah.

The decision had already been made.

Yeah.

Um, so I, I'd love to go back to that idea of generalists as well, cuz Ed Fiddow, I spoke to who's set up this London interdisciplinary school and they're really pushing this idea of polymaths and interdisciplinary learning at the, at the undergraduate and postgraduate level. But then there's also obviously a lot of conversation going on about interdisciplinary learning in schools. And I just wondered at what level do you think, you know, young people are ready for that kind of interdisciplinary, complex interdisciplinary?

I think they're ready for it much younger, but I think we get it wrong, right?

Yeah.

So for example, I mean, when I was going to university, you have people like Keirin Lancaster-Mike who was setting up effectively transdisciplinary courses. Yeah, yeah. And I did physics and philosophy, but that was a traditional joint honors, and I could do a free ninth. Yeah. And so on. And then we had free studies at Lancaster, which was an interesting experiment.

Interesting.

But I think, I don't think there's many polymaths left in Britain under the age of 55. But I think one of the reasons is when I was at sixth form, right? So I do A-levels, right? And I do them in pure maths, applied maths, physics, geology, whatever. But there isn't a single book that the English sixth haven't, aren't studying, which I haven't read.

Right?

And I wouldn't have survived in the sixth form if I hadn't read that. And the same with history and the same with those subjects. Right. And we had art societies and science societies because we had the space to do that because we weren't being driven module by module, exam by exam.

Yeah.

So we had the space to explore. And I think the critical thing about an A-level, we saw this when Americans came over to Lancaster University, we had to put them back a year.

Okay.

And so they would come to study philosophy and they'd come into the same year and we'd put them back a year.

Right.

Because the one thing the A-level did is you understood what it meant to know a subject. So you knew what you didn't know about the other subjects. The problem with this superficial training as journalists is you think you're an expert and you're not. So this ability to have this deep and shallow, and I think that needs to be done much younger. So for example, I mean, I come out of that period and I'm still reading history books, I'm reading novels, and I'm listening to politics. Whereas to be honest, my children are much more narrow. My daughter's an anthropologist, I can talk about that. My son's an accountant. But they don't see the need to work beyond their disciplines. Whereas as my generation did. So I think you need to move that back.

Yeah. And why do you think that's important in terms of being able to do that?

Because it's synthesis, all right? So it's the ability to see connections between things.

Yeah.

Now, to some extent, this is also cognitive. I'm partially dyslexic, which is why I ended up doing sciences, not history and English at school, because it wasn't diagnosed, all right? Yeah. Until spellcheckers came along, I had a real problem. And if the spellchecker doesn't spot it, I don't spot Yeah. But the thing about dyslexics is you make connections between things because I read a whole page at a time. I don't read sentence by sentence. Yeah. And that's how dyslexics— and then you see patterns, right? So I think one of the things that generalists do is they see patterns between disciplines.

Yeah.

Now there's things we can do to complement that, but it's the ability to think, hang on a minute, I read that book about Trollope and that's what's happening now politically. Yeah. Because actually it is. We're going back to the Pallisters at the moment. But it's that complex associative meaning that you can bring across, which gives you flashes of insight and understanding. And I think that's one of the big issues I think schools have lost is they've lost the societies. And that's where it happened because, and it was an evening activity and you went and you listened and you expected to do that and you learned in different disciplines.

Yeah. Broadens out. Even if you've got a narrow academic focus, you've got this other stuff happening. Yeah. And I've heard you talk about the the Kenebin Centre, an MSc that you were setting up? Is that something that's still happening?

Yeah, we're still trying to get a university to accept that. I think we may get there. It's also partly my time because I've got to write it.

Okay.

But no, the thing we're looking for at the moment, I mean, we may be doing it with University of North Texas, discussions there, but I've got to put more time into it. But what we want to do is that you do a master's degree in which you study the undergraduate introduction courses in sciences and humanities.

Right.

And then you integrate them together in a thesis. Nice.

So the idea is there.

I just need to get a university open enough for the execution.

Yeah, and I guess that connects with your idea of naturalizing sensemaking somehow, because I wanted to ask you about that, because I think, you know, your fluffy bunnies and, you know, these other things that you disparagingly talk about in terms of perhaps we've lost the rigor in terms of the basis on which we make decisions.

I mean, oh, we have. You can blame postmodernism for a lot. You know, I keep trying to explain this to postmodernists. They're responsible for Trump. Yeah, if you say that all truth is equally valid, then sorry, some of the truths may not be your liberal ones, all right? Sensemaking I define as how do we make sense of the world so that we can act in it. And that's the key. Yeah, so there's this concept of sufficiency, and it's one of— it's now acknowledged as one of 5 distinct schools of sensemaking. Naturalizing is a reference back to the naturalizing tradition in philosophy, in which you root what you do in the natural sciences.

Yeah.

So we use the natural sciences as a constraint. So you can't use traditional scientific method on human systems. There's too many variables. Yeah, but we do know that human beings— that 83% of radiologists will not see a picture of a gorilla in an X-ray because they're not expecting to see it. Yeah, yeah. And we do know the way that systems are defined by interactions. So if you want to change culture, you change interaction. You don't try and change people. Yeah, again, that was a big mistake of Tavistock and post-Freudian stuff, is they're trying to change individuals when actually changing interactions— as any teacher knows.

Exactly.

It's who people are next to which matters. Exactly.

You want to change the classroom, you change where people sit.

You're right.

Right. Yeah.

I think that, and that's what we mean by an enabling constraint is there are things that we know through natural science, which we can build on. And that's what naturalizing sensemaking is about.

Yeah. No, that's brilliant. And, but then also not perhaps getting too stuck in that scientific kind of approach, because like I've also heard you talk about your worries about STEM and the loss of the arts.

Oh God.

Yeah. Right.

But that's me using science. All right. We know from evolutionary science, science.

Yes.

Yeah, art comes before language in human evolution, and we know the reason for art is to allow abstraction and radical innovation. And, and it's actually quite scary. I mean, Australia's done it and the UK is now proposing it.

Yeah.

Is they're making the humanities and the arts only available to the rich elite. Basically, they're defunding the humanities. Yeah. So if you want to do something which makes you a toiler in the vineyard of cyber the state will pay for you. If you want to do something which means you might understand the bloody politics, they won't fund you unless you've gone to a private school. Yeah. And that's where we're going at the moment. It's very dangerous.

Yeah. And that is, yeah, I mean, because then it's the cultural capital that you've already got from your family background or your access to other resources then plays into that. Yeah. But I, that's a definite trend that you see, I'm seeing educationally across the world. And but having that, it's this functionalism. Exactly, exactly.

And I think part of the I mean, part of the issue, to be honest, and I think this is a quandary for many of us, right? I was one of the last to go to a grammar school.

Yeah.

All right. Now, the culture of the grammar school meant that you were driven to achieve.

Yeah.

And only 5% of us went to university, um, and we were fully paid. Yeah. Right. Now, if you look at that, that generated more political leaders. BBC did a really good documentary on this, and most of the current economic growth of Britain is based on pure science from 40 years ago. Brasser did that work, all right? What we're now doing is we're looking for short-term functionalism in education.

Yeah.

Yeah. And we also destroyed the polytechnic sector. We made them universities. Yeah. I think one thing we've got to work out, I've been a socialist all my life, all right? And will die a socialist, is you've got to work out a way by which you can have an elite education, which is meritocratic.

Yeah.

Because it is simply not true that everybody has the same intelligence. Or the same ability. So how do we handle that? And the culture of a school makes a big difference in terms of the way it works. And you look at what happened. I mean, a lot of the leadership of the trade unions came from the top class in the secondary model, right? And then they become middle to low grade in a mixed school. And I'm not saying we need to go back to that sort of elitism, but we haven't thought about this in the way that we do things.

Yeah. And there's that kind of attitude that actually, yeah, everybody should be accessibility and inclusion for everybody. But then sometimes that ends up, you know—

I think access is different from progress. So it was quite interesting, my mother, fascinating character. I mean, she was scary. I mean, she was born above a whorehouse in Cardiff Docks, fought her way out with education, went to university in a mixture of Bristol and Hamburg in 1947 and had to wear a passport around her neck so she wouldn't get raped by British and American soldiers.

Oh my goodness.

And we'd had to read the whole of the Bible and Shakespeare by the time we were 11, because otherwise we couldn't stand up to the family debates. But that was a South Wales working-class class tradition, which also is in the miners' libraries and everything else. And we've lost that. And we've lost that sort of desire to see things differently. Right?

Yeah.

And again, I'll come back to one of my big concerns about, you know, this is Tavistock, Freud, but it's also market research. What political parties have gone from is they've gone away from, we believe in this, to what do the voters want us to say so they'll vote for us. And that's a downward spiral once you go on that. Yeah. So, and I think schools remain at the heart of this, but it's that 15, 16, 17-year-old age group we need to engage.

Yeah, no, definitely.

And then, but then difference and debate is difficult within that context because, you know, you've got these populist kind of messages that people want to, you know, you've also got, I mean, you've got problems on that in terms of diversity, but that's where I think using kids as ethnographers is much more valuable because then they see things from different perspectives and training kids to ask open questions and listen to people. Is something that they learn by doing as much as anything else.

And it's a bloody important skill, right? Yeah, yeah, good. Thank you. I mean, there's, there's huge amounts we could go into, but I'm conscious of your time, so— but I really appreciate this as just maybe kind of a bit of a whistle-stop tour through some of the core ideas. And then I'd really encourage people to— I think your, your new book that you just brought out is just, is really beautiful, even for the illustrations. It's done running, but it's got so many amazing ideas in it. And the field guide as well that you brought out.

That's free to download.

Yeah, I found that really useful as well. So thank you, Dave. I really appreciate it. Yeah, brilliant.

Okay.

All right.

Thanks for your time.

Cheers.

Thanks.

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