The Seduction of Destruction

Creation is difficult, slow and boring.

Destruction is easy, fast and exhilarating.

This asymmetry poses a profound risk to education.

Creation does not offer the much-sought dopamine hit, it doesn’t get the most retweets (or whatever they are called since Twitter ceased to exist) and it rarely brings pleasing calls of celebration or applause. Rather, creation is, more often than not, an act of quiet devotion; think of the architect who knows he will never see the cathedral he has envisioned and the countless brick layers who understand they are building greatness for generations who will follow even though they will long since have died.

Destruction, by contrast, is thrilling. A single spark and the archive goes up in flames. The eager pile-on quickly snuffs out important ideas. The childish kick destroys the sibling’s sandcastle through spite and resentment.

And in this asymmetry lies a challenge for all those who believe children have both the right to inherit humanity’s past and the responsibility to think carefully before placing mortgages on the unborn.

This asymmetry manifests starkly in education: it takes years to design a coherent mathematics curriculum, but only a minister’s signature to discard it overnight.

To acculturate a child is to gift them their birthright: the music, mathematics, stories, symbols, and scientific revelations crafted by countless dead hands, the ethics and values, the aesthetics, the philosophies iterated over millennia. We do this not because the past was perfect, but because it was hard won.

This is why curriculum design must be deliberate and coherent, ensuring every pupil encounters Shakespeare, Pythagoras, spiritual music, the periodic table, and the architecture of democratic ideas, rather than leaving such treasures to the accidents of postcode or personal interest.

We do not seek to freeze culture in amber, but to hand forward its most precious insights so that they might be questioned, re-expressed, built upon, and renewed. This is why we teach, such that our pupils do not start afresh or are left to navigate their lives blind to the accomplishments of their forebears. We teach as part of the slow, cumulative process of humanity’s ascent.

Humanity faces extraordinary challenges ahead, which we will be able to face and overcome if we build on our achievements to date.

Those who build must do so patiently and deliberately. But those who wish to tear down are unencumbered. It is quicker to denounce than to refine, easier to repudiate than to celebrate. There is a certain adolescent glee in dismantling what came before, a sense of purity or righteousness in rejecting the imperfect inheritance of past generations. But such sixth form politics masquerading as virtue is often just vandalism.

We see this in education policy and initiative repeatedly. The fashion for rapid reform, for scrapping of what works because it bears the fingerprints of a previous minister. The fetishisation of novelty. The politics of vengeance disguised as vision. We continually replace the architecture of curriculum, pedagogy, and professional culture not because it is broken, but because it is theirs; a different party, a different trust, a different name on the cover. It is bonfire policymaking.

Instead, good policymaking should be evolutionary rather than revolutionary: improving schemes of work rather than binning them entirely, enhancing training rather than rewriting it annually, and measuring impact through pupil learning rather than merely through the satisfaction of political headlines.

Surely, we can do better? The challenge we face collectively demands grown-ups. It demands leaders who resist the seduction of the wrecking ball, and instead choose the harder path of stewardship. This means leaders who consult widely before reforms, who trial changes on a small scale before system-wide rollout, and who are willing to admit when inherited practices already serve pupils well, even when their originators are those you hate.

 It is no insult to progress to acknowledge debt to the past. Quite the opposite. To build well is to know what must be preserved, what may be reformed, and what should be discarded with care, not contempt. To make something beautiful and durable, we must think not only of the child before us, but of the children yet unborn. We place mortgages on their future with every policy enacted, every reform initiated. What do we want them to inherit? Dust and slogans, or tools, truths, and traditions?

It has always been fashionable to reject and risible to seek wisdom. Wisdom is hard. It requires reverence for those who came before, humility in the face of complexity, and a deep, abiding commitment to pass on, not just critique. The classroom, the trust board, the policy paper, these should be focussed on continuity and conversation across generations. Leaders must recognise their roles as custodians rather than reformers.  They must do the hard graft of building in service of the future rather than their own benefit.

We will be judged not by what we denounced, but by what we sustained; not by what we burned, but by what we built; not by the noise of our dismantling, but by the quiet, careful strength of our stewardship.