Imagine you have a choice of hiring one of two candidates. Candidate A is highly intelligent while also slapdash and disdainful of the need to follow procedures. Candidate B is the opposite, they’re slow and plodding but they’re committed and will show up and do what they’re meant to do come rain or shine.
Obviously the right choice depends a lot on what the job is. There are definitely roles where the upside of someone doing something brilliant is worth the annoyance of an unreliable colleague. In advertising and software development, for example, there are potentially huge returns to doing something original. However, in many, if not most, jobs it is better to have someone diligently perform the task they’ve been assigned without innovating at all. Your binman isn’t turning everything you thought you knew about rubbish collection on its head and that’s a good thing.
At school though candidate A has a clear advantage; clever and lazy pupils easily outperform hard working and stupid ones at academic study. Of course any pupil can improve somewhat by working harder, but in a range that’s determined by their intelligence. A bottom set will not achieve top set results if they just put their backs into it.
To understand why this matters we should consider three separate functions of school, three processes that run in parallel as we go from know-nothing toddlers in reception to know-it-all teenagers ready to take on the adult world. The first is the instructing function. Schools teach us stuff which, because it’s the most estranged from our bestial natures, is the most valuable of the three and the one we care about the least.
We’re more interested in number two: the sorting function. School arranges us in a queue for outcomes ranging in prestige from Oxbridge at the top down to NEET at the bottom and we’re far more invested in our place in this hierarchy than we are in, say, appreciating the beauty of Shakespeare’s language for its own sake.
The third is the moulding function; it is how we develop and change in response to the school experience in general and our place in the hierarchy in particular. Throughout our education as well as learning English, Maths etc we’re learning how to behave at work, developing attitudes and habits that we’ll take into our adult lives. For clever students operating at the top of the hierarchy, aka the people who will go on to run things, this function isn’t very salient because the message of school is essentially ‘you’re doing great, keep it up’. It’s the official seal of approval for who you are already; there’s no reason to question or think about something this benign.
The moulding function hits very differently if you’re at the bottom of the class. Here the message of school is ‘you’re at the back of the queue for good jobs and opportunities’ and except in rare cases you have no way to change this. Even if you could cast a magic spell on every bottom set in the land to get them to work harder to improve academically, you wouldn’t alter their position because the children above them would increase their own effort in order to maintain their position in the hierarchy. You can see this play out in South Korea where the norm is for school kids to work past 10pm each night but, with everyone doing that, the net result is still a hierarchy determined by intelligence not work ethic.
Very frequently students at the bottom of the academic hierarchy misbehave and truant. This is a very natural reaction to being told ‘you’re at the bottom of the social order here and there’s nothing you can do to change that’. The moulding function is shaping these kids to be anti-social and work-shy.
If it were my son receiving that message I would say to him this: ‘you’re not going to go to university, you have a different destiny, one that depends on a different kind of brain power: the power of graft. Out in the real world success doesn’t hinge on solving equations or interpreting poems, it depends on doing simple things well. Showing up earlier and staying later than the rest and doing it with a smile on your face can make you rich, respected and with a life less stressful than that of a barrister or a brain surgeon’
What would it take for school to give that message to my son and all the losers in the competition for academic success? It doesn’t mean ripping up the curriculum to create a vocational pathway; we don’t have to compromise any of the progress we’ve made on the ambition to make every child as successful academically as they can be. What it does mean is that we need something more than academic study in the school experience. Running a small business, volunteering in the community, putting on events - in tasks like these the link between effort and result is strong, far more so than in the classroom. You need these practical experiences to show children who won’t shine academically that they can still be successful by committing to a task and working hard to achieve it.
It’s an unalterable fact that clever children will outperform stupid ones academically and leave school having learned more and remembered more. But schools do more than instruct children, they mould them and it would be greatly to our benefit if this influence tended to make them work harder. In the competition for a place in the academic hierarchy the returns to diligence are low; in the real world they’re lavish.