Credit: Caia images/Getty
A new book warns that the school system may be “broken beyond repair”, claiming that it is deepening inequality and making children ill.
We are crying out for systemic transformation: a completely new vision of what education involves, however challenging that may beHilary Cremin
In Rewilding Education, Professor Hilary Cremin argues that modern schooling is defined by an obsession with standardisation and outdated thinking, while it fails to nurture creativity, critical thought, or the physical and mental health of students and teachers.
Cremin, who is Head of the Faculty of Education at the University of Cambridge, draws on decades of experience as a teacher, academic and consultant – as well as the work of other scholars – to put forward a programme for “long-term, radical change”, including a stronger focus on students’ social and emotional development alongside academic achievement.
The book’s numerous proposals include more lessons outdoors, and more projects that connect students to their communities beyond the school gates. Steps such as these, she argues, would help prepare young people to live responsibly – and well – in a rapidly changing world.
Cremin acknowledges that these ideas may be disparaged by traditionalists and policy-makers – as, indeed, they have been before. In 2013, she was one of 100 academic critics of Michael Gove’s educational reforms whom the then Education Secretary branded “enemies of promise”.
More than a decade later, she argues, there is still no evidence that those reforms, like many before and since, have narrowed the attainment gap between wealthy and poorer students as promised. Research shows that the gap widens throughout school, reaching the equivalent of more than 19 months of learning by the end of secondary education.
“Despite decades of reform, I think the school system as we presently configure it may be beyond redemption,” Cremin said. “This isn’t an attack on the idea of education, or on the thousands of brilliant teachers who give the job their all. But government after government has tinkered with education when the basic model is obsolete.”
“If we keep preparing children for the second half of the 21st century using a system designed in the 19th, it could do catastrophic harm. We need to rethink what it means to educate, and what we are educating for.”
Rewilding Education challenges the ‘myth of social mobility’, arguing that education functions more as a sorting mechanism than a levelling force. High-performing school still admit disproportionately few disadvantaged young people, and poverty remains the strongest available predictor of student outcomes.
The chimerical belief persists that good grades will secure students a better future. “None of the ideas driving schools policy really stands up to scrutiny,” Cremin writes, “yet this hardly seems to matter”.
Cremin contends that schools often resemble outdated, factory-style production lines: rigid, standardised and with sometimes militaristic discipline. This, she suggests, suppresses curiosity, discourages critical thinking and disempowers teachers.
Her critique of the effects on physical and mental health is particularly urgent. Cremin argues that schools are making students and teachers ill. She presents evidence linking the loss of physical education and the sale of school playing fields to rising childhood obesity, and notes that even basic needs – such as access to adequate toilet facilities – often go unmet.
High-stakes testing, she adds, is fuelling poor mental health, while zero-tolerance behaviour policies have driven a 60% rise in permanent exclusions since 2015, with disadvantaged students four times more likely to be excluded. Students and teachers, she suggests, sometimes turn to medication to cope with an “ailing system”.
This bleak reality, she argues, demands more than incremental reform. The book calls for a new educational model for a new kind of future – one shaped by the climate crisis, downward mobility, Generative AI and post-truth politics. “We are educating for jobs and lifestyles that will soon cease to exist,” Cremin writes, “while failing to educate for those that don’t yet exist.”
This leads Cremin to call for education to be ‘rewilded’ – a metaphor drawn from ecological restoration. In schools, it implies letting go of rigid, one-size-fits-all structures, and allowing less predictable and more holistic forms of learning to emerge.
Nature plays a central role in her vision. Drawing on thinkers like Rabindranath Tagore, Cremin argues that schools should treat the natural world as a “co-educator”. She encourages outdoor and experience-based learning and suggests that even small changes – like planting trees, creating school gardens or nature-inspired arts activities – could help foster greater respect for the environment.
Rewilding Education also urges a rebalancing towards project-based learning, the arts and civic engagement. Students, Cremin argues, must learn not only to reproduce knowledge, but to act with wisdom and care, and to think critically about complex problems. This requires education for “body, mind, heart and soul”.
She proposes, for example, giving students time to walk and reflect when grappling with difficult questions, and highlights research linking later start times for adolescents – who have different sleep patterns – to better performance and wellbeing. She also champions mindfulness and ‘metacognitive’ approaches, that help children reflect on how they are thinking while they are learning.
In a chapter Cremin anticipates critics will deliberately misread, she calls for greater trust and deeper relationships between teachers and students. Risk aversion in schools, she argues, has counter-intuitively made it harder for teachers to care and support pupils, in favour of rule enforcement and teaching facts.
The book draws on examples from the UK, India, Germany and the US to show how ‘rewilding’ is not just possible, but already happening, in some schools that emphasise education for togetherness, harmony and wellbeing. “Something fundamental needs to change,” Cremin added. “We are crying out for systemic transformation: a completely new vision of what education involves, however challenging that may be.”
The text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. Images, including our videos, are Copyright ©University of Cambridge and licensors/contributors as identified. All rights reserved. We make our image and video content available in a number of ways – on our main website under its Terms and conditions, and on a range of channels including social media that permit your use and sharing of our content under their respective Terms.
source: cam.ac.uk
