Qualifications have become the ‘in’ thing these days. When I was growing up my Dad used to encourage people to ‘get a degree’. It was the done thing. I trooped off to Exeter. And then listened to the news as John Major’s government and every subsequent administration tried to push for 50% university attendance. As Sir Humphrey Appleby, in Yes, Prime Minister, pointed out: “We didn’t raise the school leaving age to 16 to improve the education of the young; we raised the school leaving age to keep youngsters off the job market and reduce the unemployment figures.”

Governments and, apparently most of society, are blinded by qualifications thinking that they show learning. If you read my Linked In blog on an integrated learning you’ll know that I believe we ought to be teaching people to teach themselves.

I have spent many years as a flying instructor. Whilst pilots in the civilian transport world have to be very good at travelling from one place to another with the minimum of risk, military pilots and pilots of emergency service aircraft are likely to encounter situations they have never seen before. They have to be able to adapt safely and efficiently. Essentially they need to have the neural pathways wired to be able to assess a situation, approach it in a logical manner and find the best outcome.

Mark Cavendish in his autobiography talks about how he would do rapid fire maths problems on the way to events to keep his mind trained in being able to react quickly and effectively to events on the road. My old boss on 27 Sqn RAF Chinooks used to make sure that on a combat ready check the pilot being tested was shown something he had never seen before. The boss wanted to see how he approached the problem. This approach was fully justified because over the next few years we deployed at very short notice to Kosova and Sierra Leone, with limited support (on one occasion we didn’t even have a map – our map store had been raided by all the other squadrons).

When I was at the UK’s Joint Helicopter Command Headquarters several years later I was alarmed to hear that it was now mandated that pilots were ‘qualified’ in a whole raft of ‘skills’ before they could progress. It meant, in effect, that due to limited hours and the number of ‘ticks’ they needed, they spent their lives flying with instructors. Take yourself back to when you learned to drive. It was only after you had passed your test and the instructor, or your very nervous parents, were no longer sitting next to you that you really learned how to deal with the open road. You got yourself into scrapes but, strangely, you learned from them. We can’t legislate what learning people take away from each situation but what really makes the difference is ‘listening to your internal processes’ rather than clutching a certificate.

One idea I was reading about the other day was for students to develop their brains by attempting a really difficult maths problem. There was every chance they would fail it but, because they had to generate a whole bunch of ideas of the way forward, their intellectual architecture was vastly improved and they had a raft of new ways to approach future problems. This is the school of learning by expecting to fail.

Interestingly, one night, I was flying with a student who had been a policeman before he joined the RAF. His people skills were excellent; as a bobby on the beat you can’t afford to live in a fog of unawareness. The trip was going well and we had 10 minutes spare at the end. I asked him if there was anything else he wanted to practise. What I was hoping was that he would try something he had never tried before, knowing that I, as an instructor, would have had a bigger safety ‘field’ than him and he could gambol to his heart’s desire. The RAF flying world likes to give marks for every sortie. This encourages students to do the absolute minimum they can get away with to ‘preserve’ whatever mark they’re hoping for. This student naturally declined my offer as, he said, “you’ll have to mark it.” He was sort of right. I wanted him to find the limit of his ability and either nudge it or scare himself (just as a parent does encouraging their offspring to walk or ride a bike) but I knew I’d either have to write about it in the report later or not mention it; and then we’d both be complicit in that particular lie. I couldn’t think, at that time of night, of a way of writing positively about the inevitable mistakes that would have been read by the sort of brain that thinks only perfection is good enough. The event has stayed with me.

Qualifications and marks are like a high jump bar. Getting over the bar is what people want to do but they don’t want to go any higher than absolutely necessary because they might need that energy again. Sergey Bubka, the Ukrainian pole vaulter, inched (poor choice of verb I suspect) the world record up by one centimetre every time he competed because he got a huge payout for breaking the world record. I think it’s a shame that we’ll never know how high he could have gone if he’d really tried because he was clearing those world record heights by a good 10cm.

So, how do we teach people to teach themselves to learn? Explorers set off into a part of the world they’ve never visited before. Their best protections are the simplest core skills: looking, listening, moving carefully, keeping themselves fit, ensuring they have sufficient food and water, keeping escape options. If you hold a child tight by the hand as you approach a road he will pull against you; if your grip slips his momentum may actually carry him into the road. If you let that child make his own way towards the road and the threats he perceives are close enough he will be a good deal more circumspect. With greater experience you will see the traffic threat further off. But how did you learn that skill? Probably through your own near misses, not from something your parents showed you.

Accidents do happen when learning but that’s why children ‘bounce’ when they fall. The more ‘accidents’ you have the less you fear failure and the more you learn. When I used to play rugby I picked up more injuries on the wing where I was subjected to maybe one or two high speed hits in a game than when I was in the forwards constantly bouncing off the heavier elements of the opposition. I was more used to the knocks…and they didn’t happen at such high speed.

Essentially, what I’m saying is qualifications might be a great way for people to show other people that they have attentively listened whilst a lecturer has talked about a subject; or they’ve read diligently about someone else’s thinking on the nether regions of a subject but, if all they’ve done is rearranged someone else’s ideas, how do you know they can actually learn from a new situation? How will they contribute to moving the world forward?