I came across this quote, which was attributed to Albert Szent-Gyorgyi, a Nobel laureate biochemist. I have also seen it attributed to Einstein.
The basic texture of research consists of dreams into which the threads of reasoning, measurement, and calculation are woven.
Why does the attribution not matter, but the idea does?
That is because it makes clear that, when undertaking research, dreams come first.
The problem is that we now have a neoliberal education system designed to ensure that dreams are crushed in those at school, as compliance is demanded. What hope then is there for the advancement of ideas or research when the only supposed motive for it is what the Pope recently called "an idolatrous thirst for profit"?
The world desperately needs an education system designed for dreamers.
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The English Government curriculum is a driver of SEND and crushes children into failure and obedient workers.
The curriculum and GCSEs are content heavy critical thinking light.
What keeps it there is when anyone tries to change it the right wing media rush out and accuse of dumbing down and lowering standards.
They don’t want thinkers, just obedient dogs barking at print.
Much to agree with
Imagination is also a threat to Neo-liberal managerialism. The poor dears who practice it can’t hack it at all. It’s hard work, you see.
I find hope in the growing numbers of home educators who are rejecting the current system. This is why I prefer UBI to a job guarantee as it would open this option up to so many more families.
I’ve said for years that we don’t know how to promote creativity in children and adults, but we know very well how to suppress it. Creativity comes in many forms; mathematical creativity is diferent from scientific, both differ from engineering/spatial creativity. And that’s not considering the traditional arts. I think a lot of creativity is rooted in play. But the test is not whether a particular kind of creativity fits into a theory, but whether it produces something new and valued.
I am sure creativity is rooted in play, of all sorts
Desmond Morris agreed with you. Maintaining childish attributes into adulthood is found in many aspects of the human animal.
This makes me want to howl, or keen. I was lucky enough to have teachers who encouraged us to create and think, unhampered by nailed-down curricula. I could see my children had precious little of that past primary school. Critical thinking may be out the window, but so is imagination. It is so damaging and wasteful.
Threads? In the quote?
Thanks and edited
This mirrors so many of my own thought on education, one of its primary purposes should be to produce better, more rounded people capable of independant thought.
Educational systems in many countries are designed not to encourage innovation or inspiration, but to turn out obedient units of labour so that growth might be maximised. Such systems are nightmarish for anyone who cannot comply with them, or who dares question them.
Singapore – the neoliberal education nightmare – is the model for this.
NO! What we need is a laser-like focus on arcane technicalities like fronted adverbials!
On the other hand…
My fellow Yorkshireman Ian MacMillan in his book ‘Neither Nowt Nor Summat’ hit the nail on the head for me a few years ago. I have taken the liberty of typing up some of his comments about his school days that I think capture something of what this is about.
“A van would arrive packed with abstract art and stuffed animals. We’d gaze at the pictures and someone would ask what it meant and Mr. Manley would say. ‘It means what it looks like, lad, and this afternoon you’ll be drawing something like it’, and that’s exactly what we did. We didn’t know it at the time, but this was an education driven by something you’d have to call Love.”
The education authority was run by a chap called Sir Alex Clegg, who at his retirement quoted from a letter of recommendation presented to the Pope by Michaelangelo as follows: “The bearer of these presents is Michaelangelo the sculptor… his nature is such that he needs to be drawn out by kindness and encouragement – but if love be shown him and he be treated really well, he will accomplish things that will make the whole world wonder”.
Note the word ‘love’. Twice. The politics of care, as you would put it, Richard. Education is about basic, essential life skills, for sure, but it’s also about ‘human flourishing’, for which dreaming – and love – are essential.
A great deal to agree with
Thank you
Might a really effective state educational system energetically facilitate individual dreaming instead of herd controlling, submission creating, processing?
Might we seek “Liquorice All-Sorts Education” which results in enabling dynamic, confident, questioning, pro-social future citizens who, like liquorice all-sorts, are both interestingly different and always stick together?
Might our post 1988 Education Reform Act state education system intentionally suppresse analytical, lateral, future and rainbow thinking as well as dreams?
Might it also enable a submerged form of governance which is oligarchy with a facade of democracy?
93-94% of uk pupils attend state funded schools while 6-7% attend private/independent schools.
23% of M. P.s were privately educated
Approximately 57% of members of the House of Lords were privately educated
59% of top rated civil servants were privately educated
62-65% of senior judges were privately educated
43-54% of leading or senior news journalists were privately educated
37-65% of UK FTSE 100 C.E. O. s were privately educated
51% of influential doctors were privately educated
25% of think tank senior leaders were privately educated
P. S. Average costs for a year’s state primary education is at a minimum of £1,000
Ditto secondary education is at a minimum of £2,300
Average school-aged child erducation cost [Years 1-11] approximately £1,579 a year
Primary private school fees £15,000 – £22,000 approx.
Secondary private school fees £20,000-£35,000
Sixth Form £25,000-£40,000
[Data from AI Overview]
P. P. S. “The person who proves me wrong is my friend.” [Socrates]
Steve,
Do these figures prove something about the value of private education or do they prove that for many senior jobs it’s not what you know but who you know (who you went to school with) that counts?
Thinking, like dealing with difficult people, is hard and is why so many don’t like doing it. But if you are inquisitive and have a need to know and want to find out, it becomes a way of life and endlessly fascinating. It’s vital to keep an open mind but not so much that your brains fall out.
Daydreaming, not focusing on lessons? That’s apparently ADHD now. If you don’t fit ‘thier’ system you are ill. Possibly also the reason why most adults are depressed, fed up and yet don’t think they can make any difference and feel alienated by ‘the system.’
It’s utterly human to dream, without dreams, there is no hope, no belief that you can achieve or do anything.
Dreams give us wings to soar high and fly.
The journalist, Leslie Riddoch, one of Richards’ fellow columnists on The National, has produced a film about Finland on YouTube. Finland has a very different approach to education which seems far kinder and more successful.
Agreed
How refreshing to read this post and see so many comments from people whose vision for Education I share.
All in stark contrast to what Reform Scotland are saying in their manifesto for the Holyrood election:
Reform will:
• Reboot the Curriculum for Excellence by giving it a knowledge-based curriculum at its core
• Restore rigorous examination as the primary method of assessment combined with
standardised testing
• Re-introduce the Scottish survey of literacy and numeracy, and re-join all international
education surveys
That is not education.
That is mechanical learning designed to create automatons.
Education has been at crisis point for decades. At Cambridge uni in the 1970s I took the newly devised Education Part 2. This was Thatcher era education, Sir Keith Joseph and Rhodes Boyson at the helm. The publication of the Black Papers, set out their prevailing ideology, and formed the basis of many essays and discussions. After my own wonderfully liberal start in the state system, at primary school in the 1960s, followed by secondary school often taught by dynamic and enthusiastic young 1960s graduates, the Tory reinstatement of “traditional” values was shocking and offensive. There was an unquestioning acceptance that the public school ethos should be the aspiration for all, albeit without the necessary funding for small classes. The overriding belief, beyond the flowery rhetoric, was that the goal of education for the working class should be to fit them for employment . I watched as this continued through succeeding governments of various hues, enforced through the ludicrous SATS that now dominate the school lives of young children, the financial scam that is the Academy system and the stultifyingly fact filled curriculum. If you’d told the 17 year old me that my schooling was the best it was going to get, I’d have been horrified.
Thank you
In response to the questions posed by Kit W-N the follwing comments and questions may be appropriate:
a) Private educations invests consderably more money in children than the state does. Why?
b) If our future citizens aka. children/young people are an important/vital asset, why does the State not do more for them?
c) Might the private education pupil/teacher ratio of 8.5:1 to 9.1:1 compared with the state school p/t ratio of 18:1 to 21.8:1 indicate that private education is significantly more effective?
d) Might the DfE data that shows that 67.8% of private school pupils go to a “high tariff”/more selective university at the age of 19 compared to 34.2% of state educated pupls, indicate a significant difference of educational input and output?
e) Might our democracy be contaminated by the effective, if unstated, power of a small proportion of future and present citizens being educated for confidence, initiative, leadership and control in competition with a much larger group of present and future citizens educated to be unquestioning, lacking in confidence, passive and gullible?
P.S. The direct answers to Kit W-N is “Yes” to both, whilst also suggesting that this matter is sufficiently important and complex to benefit from full spectrum/continuous range questioning for critical thinking rather than binary questioning.
P. S. The original comment was a consequence of concerns that our society may be, and be increasingly, authoritarian. Alas, the attached article indicates that this is so.
https://www.v-dem.net/documents/75/V-Dem_Institute_Democracy_Report_2026_lowres.pdf
The education system, modelled on the new factories of the industrial revolution, has ever been at its core a factory for training workers to feed the capitalist machine. I was listening earlier to Dr Iain McGilchrist in an interview with Nate Hagens they recorded recently who strongly advocates for junking the system of rote learning and replacing it with the development of pupil’s imagination. For him, this is derived in part at least from the writings of mathematicians and scientists many of whom acknowledge that the idea comes first and the work of providing a proof comes after. There is a leap of imagination that comes first. Also many use music or drawing to record their ideas .
It is little different from advertising a beautiful island as a holiday and then inducing people to find the means of getting there – in principle, at least!