Reforming Education: On Becoming a Realo-Fundi

In the early 1980s the German Green Party split into two factions that quickly came to be called the Fundis and the Realos. The Fundis insisted on sticking to fundamental critiques of the status quo and adhering to a profound vision of what a better, greener planet would look like. Anything less was considered a sell-out. The Realos countered that such a fundamentalist stance would never win power or popularity and that compromise was more effective. History records that neither of these polarised positions was particularly effective.

In the field of education, during the 1970s and the early 80s, Fundis were also much in evidence. Penguin published books by radical authors like John Holt (The Underachieving School), Ivan Illich (Deschooling Society), Everett Reimer (School Is Dead), Paulo Friere (Pedagogy of the Oppressed), Jonathan Kozol (Death at an Early Age) and Neil Postman and Charles Weingartner (Teaching as a Subversive Activity) which sold in their thousands to PGCE students and progressive education academics (like me). Inspiring and exciting though these books were, by the mid-80s the education debate had lost out to the reformist Realos (e.g. in England Mick Waters, Tim Brighouse, David Hargreaves). Amendments to the curriculum advocated ‘social and emotional learning’, ‘inquiry-based learning’. ‘active learning’ and so on.

Worldwide, the Realos have been ascendant to this day. The Realos dropped or kept quiet about any Fundi ambitions for fear of ‘alienating the mainstream’. Their achievements have, with a few exceptions (such as EL Education and some of the IB (International Baccalaureate) schools) been modest: often short-lived, patchy, and vulnerable to changes of government: liable to be defunded or sidelined by politicians and others who want to go ‘back to basics’ and do away with this ‘progressive gobbledegook’. The Fundis went to ground, started their own small or alternative schools, and lacked any concrete proposals for system change. The battlefield for the heart of education was left to ‘steady as she goes’ advocates and, currently, a noisy cadre of reactionary politicians and disillusioned progressives who claim quite spuriously that something they have invented called ‘The Science of Learning’ mandates a return to ‘explicit teaching’ and a ‘knowledge-rich curriculum’ based, in England, on the 1950s selective grammar school system.

And here we are, mired in the same old binary mud with neither the Realos nor the Fundis able to drag us out of it. Yet there are overwhelming reasons to say that the present system is, in the evocative jargon of the day, ‘broken’. Anyone with eyes to see and ears to hear knows about the inequity of the ‘forgotten third’ of young people who spend 13 long years gaining no worthwhile certificates and acquiring a disabling belief in their own inability to engage in thoughtful learning and to steer their own lives. We know about the continuing grip of an implicit but strong disdain for vocational as opposed to academic learning and qualifications; about the nonsensical privileging of intellectual comprehension over useful real-world cognitive competence; about the rapid leakage of young teachers from the profession and persistent problems of recruitment. And we fiddle while Education burns, continuing to squander the energy, creativity and incisive indignation of young people.

Cognitive science, far from legitimising a return to ‘chalk-and-talk’ teaching, tells us clearly that what we all know to be the most desirable outcomes of schooling are in fact perfectly capable of systematic cultivation by a different model of schooling. Young people need a core of epistemic – meaning broadly ‘to do with learning, thinking and knowing’ - competence and character that will enable them to navigate a turbulent and risky world confidently and effectively. We know what the requisite skills and dispositions are: curiosity, discernment, determination, imagination, healthy scepticism, honest self-awareness and articulate conviviality. With this trunk of character secured, the canopy of their individuality can spread and bloom, and they have the tools and the appetite to change bits of the world for the better.

And we know how to create the conditions that reliably grow these transferable attributes: a diet of variegated, engaging challenges, well-curated by teachers, that gradually, at an appropriate rate, escalate in their technical, intellectual and social complexity. In the course of grappling collaboratively and successfully with such meaningful and irresistible challenges, producing products and solutions that have genuine value and exceed their own expectations, the necessary confidence and capability naturally develop. Intellectual and disciplinary knowledge, acumen and sophistication develop as side-effects of such endeavours, but on a ‘need-to-know’ basis. Knowledge and understanding are acquired for a purpose, and kids learn how to think, learn and argue like a scientist or a historian as necessary, in the course of pursuing their projects and inquiries.

Don’t schools do this already? A few do but the vast majority don’t. Studying algebra and Shakespeare with high-stakes tests and university entrance in mind does not develop this general-purpose epistemic expertise. What’s learned in school has a strong tendency to stay in school. Many undergraduates learned a narrow bank of highly-supervised exam-oriented skills that undermine their own resourcefulness and creativity and do not transfer to more independent and complex situations.

So schools could and should provide a transparently useful ‘epistemic apprenticeship’ in the arts and crafts of thinking and learning. This is a perfectly understandable and practicable vision for 21^st century schooling; and it is revolutionary. It is a Fundi vision. It challenges teachers to stop force-feeding prescribed swathes of canonical knowledge and become research guides and coaches, comfortable with degrees of trust and uncertainty, yet skilled enough to bring these ‘explorations’ to a successful conclusion for all. FOR ALL. This is a truly inclusive and divergent alternative to the narrow selectionism of the conventional curriculum. It needs to be understood, espoused and trumpeted by everyone in education as often and as loudly as possible. We all need to be articulate and unapologetic Fundis.

But we all need to be Realos too. We have to map out the stepping-stones from here to there. We need to show how small doable adjustments to current practice can keep leading in this desirable direction; not just piecemeal tweaks but cumulative steps toward a different vision of education: what it is for and how to do it. If you don’t remain an out-and-proud Fundi whilst you are doing your Realo steps, it is easy to lose your way or to be ‘picked off’ by stubborn administrators. But equally we must not retreat into the self-righteous impotence of a vision-only Fundi. We have to be daring to make the manageable jumps from stepping stone to stepping stone so that we progressively ‘become the change we want to see’ (to coin a phrase). We have to be radical Fundis and pragmatic Realos at the same time: passionately talking the talk, and walking the talk in manageable steps, both together. If we can do that, the necessary tipping point becomes an eminently achievable objective.

Further reading

Making Learning Whole, by David Perkins (Jossey-Bass, 2009). The End of Education, by Neil Postman (Vintage Books, 1996). How We Learn, by Stanislas Dehaene (Allen Lane,  2020).

Guy Claxton is Emeritus Professor of the Learning Sciences at the University of Winchester. His books include What’s the Point of School? (Oneworld, 2008) and The Future of Teaching and the Myths that Hold It Back (Routledge, 2021).