Katy Hamilton

A few days ago, a friend directed me to a fascinating article on the ever thought-provoking Aeon magazine site, about stupidity at work. Not the sit-on-the-photocopier-with-your-pants-down kind of stupidity – nor indeed the stupidity of getting something catastrophically wrong and landing your superiors in hot water. This is about the kind of stupidity that is encouraged in many workplaces, and requires employees – even those who have apparently been offered the job for their intelligence and creativity – to check their brains at the door. The enthusiastic problem-solvers quickly learn, author André Spicer tells us, that they are there to conform to bureaucratic guidelines and do what they are told. Seeking to improve things, either in-office or for clients, is not the main aim of the exercise.

Whilst this might be a rather depressing read, it is probably not a complete shock to anyone who has ever worked in a large organisation in which the management hierarchy is stacked twenty feet high. The levels on which decisions are taken might be completely different from those on which they are implemented, and that can have a serious knock-on effect on their practicality and their effectiveness. Such as in the following scenario.

Imagine you are teaching a course on music appreciation. Not an A-level or GCSE, not a degree module or BTEC – just a class on music appreciation. No qualification is dished out at the end. There are no exams or essay assignments. You run it for people who love music and would like to know more about how it works, and who wrote it. And you teach this course at a college for further education, a hub of courses on all manner of subjects, which is carefully run to ensure high levels of teaching and a varied and imaginative approach to helping students learn.

You’ve planned your course, and you’ve figured out a range of methods you can use to keep everyone engaged, help those less confident with certain technical terms, get an idea of how well your students are following and absorbing what you’re telling them. These things should all be documented so that you can prove you are taking a thorough approach to the material. Did I mention? Further Education Colleges are all inspected by Ofsted. So you need to keep your paperwork up-to-date.

Thus far, tedious as putting these forms together can be, I can sort of see the point of the bureaucracy. Although I am not required – have never been required – to make lesson plans for undergraduate or postgraduate classes, where courses are assessed and students are paying astronomically more money to do them. Still, perhaps the TEF will make us all equal in our piles of paperwork.

Here’s the really good bit, though. My music appreciation courses are held during the day. During working hours on weekdays. Not surprisingly, therefore, almost all of my students are retired or nearing retirement and only working part-time. They come out of interest, intellectual curiosity, and a desire to learn. And once I’ve planned which Schubert song we’re going to talk about, and how we can help the students who struggle with notation, and what listening exercises might be used to glean their level of understanding…. I have to make a list of how my course is going to improve their Literacy, Numeracy, ICT skills and – my favourite – their Employability.

I don’t blame my employer for this in the slightest. They need to comply to the system they have been told they must work within (and are extremely supportive in helping with the whole sorry exercise). But I find it completely crazy that, based on my knowledge of nineteenth-century music and my ability to communicate it to other people, I should be required to document how the course is going to improve a 70-year-old’s employment chances and whether they can master Google.

The reason such idiotic systems are in place, I suppose, is that it’s easier to have a single system that is laughably inappropriate for certain subjects if it happens to line up with others nice and neatly. The people making the system were evidently several light years away from the people who would have to use it, and obviously like seeing the world in nice neat categories. Since the current priority of all education, as far as government policy and general rhetoric seems to be concerned, is that learning is only useful if it leads to getting a job (unless you’re not British, of course – oh, but I’m not allowed to say that, because I’m also supposed to be promoting equality and diversity in the classroom). And anyway, we don’t trust experts, do we? Those peculiar individuals who seem to want to keep on getting to know things long after they could have found a nice comfortable office role somewhere. Particularly if they’re not from the UK (there I go again… silly me…). Why on earth would someone want to learn just because they want to know and understand more about the world? Why would someone who has come to the end of their working life wish to seek out knowledge rather than retreating into their house and surrendering to daytime telly? Education is a simple equation: money in + good grades = nice job with a decent salary. After that, everything’s irrelevant.

I don’t know about you, but I can’t help thinking that someone else needs their basic skills checking. Because if this is a contemporary take on social equations, we are all in serious trouble.