Jason Fletcher in The Spectator
A letter from Jason Fletcher has been published in The Spectator, responding to the growing debate about screens in schools and the purpose of education. The letter responds to a recent Spectator piece on the growing rebellion against screens in schools. Mr Fletcher draws on Heritage’s experience since 2007 of educating children without EdTech in everyday teaching, and on the educational thought of Charlotte Mason, to argue that attention, living ideas and books remain central to a serious education.
The magazine published an abridged version; we reproduce the full letter below.
Click to access the letter on The Spectator’s website. Note that the article is behind a firewall.
The Full Letter
Sir,
I am pleased to see Lara Brown highlight the growing rebellion against screens in schools and her appeal for an education ‘which cultivates the mind’. It strikes me that an adequate theory of education is a useful thing. Twenty years ago we set about starting a school in central Cambridge, inspired by the great British educational theorist and reformer Charlotte Mason, founder of the PNEU in 1887. Central to the PNEU was a view of the person as ‘a spiritual being invested with a body’ with almost limitless powers of expansion. Their view of knowledge, too, was richer. ‘Information is not education’, they said emphatically, merely to be ‘got up’ for exams. Rather, knowledge is a relation, and an education worthy of a child’s time should be teeming with living ideas. They also saw presciently that the secret to releasing a child’s intellectual potential is the habit of attention. What an asset to the nation it would be, they said, if this power were honed in every child. Indeed. And upon what does such an education depend? Above all, upon books, living books, and lots of them.
Imagine yourself into this garden. Then ask: EdTech? The gamification of ‘learning’? AI powered personal tutors? One shudders. It is a serious philosophical and spiritual failure that we have to wait for the evidence to come in, with so much human potential squandered in the meantime and institutional habits formed that we may yet lack the vision and power of will to undo. May the rebellion gather pace.
Jason Fletcher
Headmaster, Heritage School, Cambridge
Professor of Practice in Charlotte Mason Studies, University of Cumbria
