'Schools are failing on a breathtaking scale'

Public voices All this week we print views from teaching's frontline. Today: how fresh ideas are stifled.

Tim Baddeley, modern languages head, Monkton Combe independent school, Somerset.

If you ask anyone what they think our young should actually learn, it is hard to get an answer that does not have exams as the reference point. Similarly, the "subjects" into which knowledge is artificially divided have but a utilitarian value in terms of where they can lead, rather than value in themselves.

The reason why schools have become so miserable is that they have lost their way. The cynic would say that they were invented during the industrial revolution to keep children off the streets and that children were taught what basics they needed to perform as economic units. Perhaps that is still true.

The idealism of the post-war period towards educating the whole child was discredited when it became clear that good, imaginative practice in the hands of some incompetent schools was producing alarming and well publicised ignorance.

It was left to macho politicians to talk up the value of exams and the national curriculum as a means of raising standards, as if educating a child was that simple.

The last 20 years has seen the near death of genuine discussion about what we might want to learn for.

Schools are now beginning to fail on a breathtaking scale: they produce indifference to learning, fear of knowledge, unhealthy stress and cheating, and dysfunctional relationships in peer groups and across the generations.

Yet we have a remarkable ability to keep going, even when existence is dire and the game is up. Industrial education will crumble as all bad ideas do, because it doesn't fit the way our brain has evolved in its learning patterns.

The first people to develop a better way will reap huge rewards: not just in employability but in human happiness. That is why the government's stranglehold on education is so destructive: no generic alternative to industrial schooling is allowed to grow. Political monoculture will lay waste the human landscape.

Yet all over the English-speaking world there are good people who have fresh and intelligent ideas (such as the 21st Century Learning Initiative, www.21learn.org). Even the growing home-schooling movement is quietly showing success.

Discussion throughout our society should be encouraged, and experimentation too. Meanwhile education is like a patient who is getting sicker with each new prescription. We need to talk.

Nicholas Tyldesley, head of history at Birley Community College, Sheffield

Teachers should retire at 50. It is surprising that the Department for Education has not been actively promoting this strategy. At a stroke it would rid schools of the staffroom whingers who remember the days before the national curriculum; it would allow fast trackers to escalate through promotion scales; it would let teachers connect more effectively with the youth culture of students and it would facilitate adoption of new technologies and e-learning without the brake of dinosaurs and Luddites. In managerial terms, creating a profession on short-term, limited contracts would let keen young teachers develop their talents before being burnt out.

However much one can agree with the trend for keeping people in the workplace beyond the current limits, an exception ought to be made for teachers.

Teachers need to be physi cally fit and intellectually sharp to survive the day to day harassment. The sheer grinding admin can, as well, beat the most enthusiastic down.

The standard school is based on a historical model of adult control and hierarchy that is increasingly under critical scrutiny. It is an ineffective organisation to deliver education.

There will be a backlash to the current practice of putting students through the testing hoops, simplistic measurement of achievement and of teachers as technicians, not charismatic performers.

Only when schools change to take account of distance learning, e-learning and life-long learning can we think about the contribution of experienced teachers.

Until then we should face reality: teacher burnout at 50-plus is holding our students back.