Guy Claxton

The purpose of education is to create young people who will want to treat us kindly and look after us willingly when we are old. This will be good for us, good for them, and a very good use of public money. The subtext of schooling is always to create certain attitudes - typically the dysfunctional ones of passivity, compliance, dependency and credulity. But potentially the useful ones of kindness, trustworthiness, and the ability to engage cheerfully and productively with disappointment, confusion, uncertainty and complexity. Google call it ‘learning agility’. I call it the ability to ‘flounder intelligently’. Kindness and intelligent floundering. That’s what we are after!