A few weeks after completing my A-Level exams, when my peers were partying hard and preparing for university, I wistfully returned to school to seek out my old sixth form tutor. Results day was way off but I knew with certainty that I had squandered the last two years and was becoming consumed by a kind of nihilistic fatalism.
For context, from beginning to end, school was an oppressive and lonely experience for me. For many of my teenage years I was depressed. Of course, no one knew this at the time. Not even me. Vulnerability, transparency, integrity, self-awareness– these were not celebrated character traits in that time and space. Bullies, feral and unchained, lurked around and down every corner and corridor. And dogs can smell fear. So, masking, machismo, bucking up and getting on– biting back– was key to survival. Navigating the ever changing landscape of student politics, keeping up with cultural trends and conforming with expected behavior norms was beyond my will and capabilities. The social static was just too thick and disorientating. As a dyslexic (albeit then undiagnosed) heavily distracted by complicated family affairs, most of my lessons felt impenetrable, uninteresting and/or unimportant. What’s more, only a handful of teachers were even remotely personable; whilst fewer still demonstrably attempted to bridge the gaping student-teacher divide.
After almost seven years of turmoil, I didn’t really know why I was taking myself back to this place. At least, not consciously. I had woken up that morning with a screaming, dire need for answers to questions unknown to me. So, in a state of border-line mania, I was led by my ‘Id’ towards the familiar. I knocked on the door of my old tutor room chaotically contemplating what I wanted to say, if anything at all. My form tutor opened the door a quarter way and peered round. “Good morning”, she said sprightly. “Hi”, I responded informally, thinking this had gotten off to a good start. Then she squinted, gazed at me for a while stupefied. “Sorry, err… who are you? Can I help?” she asked sincerely it seemed. “Oh! Er, er… I’m… I’m sorry” I squeaked, then spun around, pigeon-walked to my car, dissociatively drove the 13 miles home, and erased the interaction from my surface memory.
Years later I rediscovered this episode whilst speaking with a therapist. Clearly this was a cry for help. Now I know that in that moment a part of me was looking for a purpose. I felt alone, worthless, an inevitable failure, without direction and was hoping that a familiar face might provide some sort of guidance– any guidance. Yet, that familiar, ‘safe’ person who had supposedly been my form tutor for the last two years didn’t even recognise me. Or, at least, pretended not to recognise me. Alienation shifted to desolation. Loneliness swallowed me whole. I spent the best part of the next four years meandering aimlessly, miserably from one dead-end job to another, uninspired, facile, vacuous, unemotional yet combusting internally.
That is, until by chance I developed a kinship with a couple of other young outlanders– colleagues who, unlike me, had just about survived secondary school and sixth form and had recently graduated from university. They were ambitious, curious, driven, hilarious, so hilarious! Moreover, they saw me for who I was and, rather unexpectedly, concluded that I was not fulfilling my potential. You see, I was consistently leagues above the rest of my team in KPI and, so they told me, something didn’t quite match up. It took them just shy of six months to convince me to quit that job and go back to school.
At 21, then, I enrolled at a new college, far away, wherein it was instantly and unmistakably clear that the teachers– all of them– knew, cared and fought hard for their students’ interests. My teachers were inspiring, warm and quietly authoritative– quite a contrast from the squadrons of disinterested, didactic, nicotine effusing authoritarians I was used to. They were a part of the school community, not apart from it. They were life-coaches who frequently challenged me to think otherwise about myself and the world. They were experts in their fields and expert teachers to boot. They were everything they were asking us to become: thoughtful, honest, critical, compassionate, skeptical, diligent, inspired.
Curiously, within just a few weeks of attending, the careers officer tentatively suggested that I might consider applying to Oxbridge. “Am I in a parallel universe?!” I thought– “me? Oxbridge?!” Baffled, I did so. Unsurprisingly, I didn’t get in. With my track record I was never going to. But the message was blissfully clear: my teachers saw me, knew me and believed in me. Crucially, they saw what I could become with only the right combination of intellectual nourishment and pastoral support. And that reassurance turbo-rocketed me towards my actualisation. Suddenly, unbelievably, I entered a mode of life consumed by curiosity, awe and drive. Almost 15 years on, I remain so. Today, I am awash with gratitude, fully aware of the fact that those friends and teachers saved me. In those moments, my life changed miraculously and dramatically for the better.
So, now, as a teacher, what do I take from this history? Two quotes instantly come to mind here. The first, from William Yeats, is well cited and understood: “Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire”. The second, a quote often attributed to Gandhi, deserves more attention: “Be the change you wish to see in the world”.
Culture trickles down from the top. Whether student culture is studious, ambitious and inclusive or brutalizing, cynical and exclusionary– that says something significant about the hidden curriculum and, moreover, about school leadership. If we as teachers wish to foster intelligent, driven, conscientious, curious, anti-racist, and anti-sexist young people, then it is not enough to merely advocate for such characteristics. Many young people of today are highly socially attuned and therefore competent at identifying pretense. There is little point in publicly condemning sexism or promoting inclusivity in the classroom, if in the staffroom we oppress staff members of the opposite sex or allow ourselves and others to become entrenched by factionalism and cliquery. Similarly, students will struggle to buy into our behavior policies and dress codes if we ourselves are not consistently conscientious and well-presented. And our students will find navigating challenging conversations extremely difficult, if we ourselves consistently fail to demonstrate patience, calm and empathy during heated and more stressful moments. If left unchecked, hypocrisies such as these inevitably filter into and have deleterious effects on wider school culture.
What this tells us is that successfully and authentically promoting personal growth in others often requires us to start by working on improving ourselves. This is the starting point for any teacher or leader who wishes to positively affect culture. As Paul Dix (2017: 2) argues, borrowing a line from Peter Drucker, when it comes to fostering well-rounded, aspirational young people, “culture eats strategy for breakfast.” Performatively modeling excellence when it is fashionable, convenient or when doing so compliments the curriculum is not enough. No, we need to be excellent; we need to be the very people we are asking our students to become; we need to be the change we wish to see in our schools.
References
Dix P (2017) When Adults Change Everything Changes: Seismic Shifts in School Behaviour, Independent Thinking Press.
Megapedagogy 
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