Chapter 22: When Functioning Conceals Failure

On the Difference Between Activity and Learning

One of the most disorienting features of the educational system examined in this volume is that it functions — and this functioning, which might be expected to constitute evidence against the diagnosis that the preceding chapters have been building, is in fact one of the most important dimensions of the problem that the diagnosis is trying to name. Classrooms operate with the specific regularity that institutional life requires. Syllabi are completed on the schedules that curriculum planning produces. Examinations are administered with the procedural consistency that certification systems demand. Students progress from one year to the next, accumulating the credentials that progression through the system provides. Institutions continue to recruit, to graduate, to satisfy the accountability requirements of the bodies that oversee them. From a distance, and even from considerable proximity, everything appears to be in order in the specific way that systems appear to be in order when they are producing their intended outputs on schedule and within the expected parameters of institutional performance.

This functioning is not false, and dismissing it as mere appearance would be both intellectually dishonest and practically counterproductive — it is real, it involves the genuine effort and sincere commitment of the many people who operate within the system, and it produces outcomes that are not without value even within the critique that this volume has been developing. And yet it is, precisely in its reality, part of the problem — not in spite of the fact that the system functions, but because of it, because a system that functioned badly in obvious and unmistakable ways, that produced visible disorder and immediate failure and suffering that could not be attributed to anything other than the system itself, would invite the kind of serious corrective response that genuine dysfunction reliably generates. A system that functions smoothly, that produces recognisable outputs on schedule, that satisfies the accountability requirements that govern it and meets the expectations of most of the people who engage with it most directly, makes its failures very difficult to see from inside the functioning — and the difficulty of seeing the failures from inside is, as the chapters on normalisation and invisible design have already examined, one of the primary mechanisms by which failures of this kind persist.

Activity Mistaken for Progress

The system produces activity in abundance, and it is important to be specific about this abundance because the specificity matters for understanding why the activity is so consistently and so consequentially mistaken for the thing it accompanies rather than constitutes. Teachers teach in the full sense of delivering instruction, managing classrooms, assessing work, and producing the documentation that institutional accountability requires — they are genuinely active, genuinely committed, and genuinely expending professional effort in the directions the system rewards. Students study in the sense of completing assigned work, preparing for examinations, attending lessons, and producing the outputs that progression through the system requires — they are genuinely engaged with the demands being made of them, even when the demands are not the demands that genuine learning would make. Tests are taken, results are recorded, parents attend meetings and receive reports, reforms are announced with the specific vocabulary of educational renewal that the chapters on reform have already examined, and all of this activity is real activity involving genuine human effort rather than the simulation of effort — and yet it is activity that can occur, and consistently does occur, in the absence of the specific thing the activity was supposed to be producing.

Because activity is not the same as learning, and movement through content is not the same as understanding, and compliance is not the same as growth, and the consistent production of all three of the former does not constitute evidence of the presence of any of the latter. The economist Joseph Stiglitz, writing about institutional behaviour in contexts considerably broader than education, observed that systems can be highly efficient at producing the wrong things — that the measure of efficiency depends entirely on what is being measured, and that a system evaluated against the wrong metrics will optimise with considerable sophistication for outcomes that the metrics reward while producing something quite different from what the metrics were supposed to represent. An educational system that efficiently produces compliant, test-adapted learners who can navigate the specific demands of the assessment architecture that has been built around them may be performing with considerable effectiveness by the measures the system applies to itself — and failing, with equal consistency, to produce the genuine understanding, the genuine intellectual confidence, and the genuine human formation that it claims to be organised around.

The Specific Failures Hidden by Functioning

This volume has traced a number of specific patterns that the system's functioning consistently conceals, and assembling them in a single place before the diagnosis concludes allows their relationship to each other to become visible in a way that examining them separately does not fully permit. The child who scores well on examinations but cannot explain what their score represents in terms of genuine understanding — who has mastered the performance of competence without developing its substance — is invisible to the system's primary instruments of assessment because those instruments were designed to detect the performance rather than to distinguish it from the substance. The classroom that is quiet in the specific way that managed compliance produces quiet rather than the quite different way that genuine absorbed engagement produces quiet is indistinguishable, from any external observation point, from the classroom in which genuine intellectual work is occurring — because the system has not developed the observational vocabulary or the assessment instruments that would make the distinction legible from outside. The teacher who delivers lessons competently, who satisfies inspection criteria and produces the documentation that accountability requires, but who no longer teaches in any sense that is meaningful to them or fully alive to the children in their care — who is going through the institutional motions with the professional adequacy that the system rewards and the inner withdrawal that the chapter on moral injury described — is producing outputs that the system registers as success even as the human reality beneath those outputs constitutes a form of failure whose cost is being paid by everyone in the room. The parent who is satisfied by a good report card but senses, in the way that the chapters on children absorbing adult anxiety described, that something important is not being addressed — who feels the specific unease of someone whose child is performing well and not thriving, whose results are good and whose relationship to learning is becoming increasingly transactional and increasingly anxious — is receiving from the system's instruments of communication exactly the reassurance those instruments were designed to produce, in the absence of the genuine information about their child's development that genuine formation would require the system to be able to provide.

Each of these is a form of failure that the system's own metrics cannot detect not because the metrics are poorly designed in any technical sense but because they were designed to measure the surface of educational activity rather than the depth — and the surface, under the conditions that the preceding chapters have documented, can be entirely intact while what lies beneath it is substantially compromised. The examination captures performance but not understanding, and the two can diverge with a consistency that the examination cannot see because it was not built to look for the divergence. The rank captures relative position but not genuine growth, and growth that does not produce positional change is invisible to an instrument calibrated to measure position. The completed syllabus captures coverage but not coherence, and a learner who has been covered by a syllabus without having genuinely integrated its contents is not distinguishable, by the instrument of syllabus completion, from a learner who has genuinely understood what the coverage was supposed to produce. The functioning of the system guarantees only that these surface measures will be collected and reported — it says nothing whatever about what lies beneath them, and the consistent production of the measures is, in a system whose failures are hidden by its functioning, the primary mechanism by which the failures remain hidden.

The Danger of Partial Recognition

Perhaps the most consequential risk in the entire landscape of educational reform — more consequential than the complete absence of recognition, which at least has the clarity of not claiming to address what it cannot see — is partial recognition: the acknowledgment that something is wrong combined with the inability, or the institutional unwillingness, to locate the source of the problem at the level at which it actually operates. Partial recognition is the specific epistemic condition in which something has been seen clearly enough to generate concern but not clearly enough to generate adequate response, and it is the condition that the history of educational reform examined in Chapter 5 has been reproducing with remarkable consistency across decades of genuine effort and genuine investment in change that has not produced the change it intended.

When the problem is located in individuals rather than in the structures that produce the outcomes those individuals are responsible for, energy is directed toward individual correction — more training for teachers, more motivation for students, more involvement from parents, more discipline in classrooms — and the structural conditions that would produce the same outcomes with or without any individual correction remain entirely intact. When reform is offered as the response to recognition, it produces the surface-level rearrangements that the chapter on reform without redesign documented — new language, new frameworks, new training cycles — without altering the underlying design dynamics that generate the pattern the reform was introduced to address. When the problem is partially seen, the response is partial in ways that are worse than inadequate because they are convincing enough to absorb the energy and credibility that genuine structural change would require, replacing the urgency of genuine response with the appearance of response that has already been made.

Donella Meadows, in Thinking in Systems, identified a family of systemic patterns in which individually rational decisions by the actors within a system combine to produce collectively irrational outcomes that no individual actor chose and that serve no individual actor's genuine interests — patterns whose persistence is explained not by any individual's irrationality but by the structure of the system within which the rational individual decisions are being made. Educational systems exhibit a closely related pattern: the teacher who covers the syllabus because the examination requires it and the professional accountability structures penalise the alternative, the parent who seeks additional coaching because the comparative social environment makes not seeking it feel like negligence, and the school that emphasises examination results because the market for schooling rewards the emphasis — each of these is an individually rational response to the structural pressure that the system generates, and their combination produces an outcome that is collectively irrational, that serves none of their genuine interests, and that no individual actor within the system initiated or is in a position to unilaterally reverse.

↳ Chapter 23 draws the full diagnostic inquiry to a close and articulates what genuine recognition of this problem requires as a response. The transition from diagnosis to philosophy — from this volume to Volume II — is the most important step in the GAKHUR project.

If a system can function smoothly while failing systematically — if activity can conceal the absence of the genuine learning that the activity was supposed to be producing, and compliance can masquerade as growth in ways that the system's own instruments are not designed to detect, and the consistent production of measurable outputs can coexist with the consistent failure to produce the unmeasured reality those outputs were supposed to represent — then what it would take to see past the functioning to what the functioning is actually producing is not primarily a better set of assessment instruments, not more rigorous inspection frameworks, and not more sophisticated reform programmes: it is the willingness to ask, honestly and without the protective reassurance that the system's functioning tends to generate, whether the activity and the learning, which the system has consistently presented as the same thing, are in fact the same thing — and to remain with the discomfort of the answer long enough to understand what a genuine response to it would require.