"Becoming Me" or; Children Can Only Aspire to What They Know Exists (pt2): Xperienceships meets Professor Dr Ger Graus OBE

Welcome to the second part of the interview the Xperienceships team had with Professor Ger Graus as part of our World Of Work for Educators series. We're excited to have his thoughts and opinions on the changing face of careers, and to hear about his work with younger people to embed diversity and choice in career education. 

This second part focuses on the shift that needs to happen with career exploration in education. We should ask children at a younger age, who they want to be when they grow up as opposed to what they want to be, and also to shake up the traditional stereotypes. 

You can watch a two minute clip on our Youtube channel or read on for the full second part of our interview.

Xperienceships: You've done so many things. When you look backwards, there is a line of purpose and passion that's run through your entire career, but you acknowledge that the nonlinear parts are the most interesting, and they're often the ones where you pick up the most useful pieces.

Ger Graus: I agree, there is one line in my career, and that line is children. We have a strange thing about schooling, because we have a government at the top that decides what children should be taught. And it then charges its civil service to make that happen. The civil service forces schools to do this in a certain way. And because it doesn't trust teachers, it then has an inspectorate, and it tests the children to publish the results in a league table and then punish you if you don't make that. And tests, they've got nothing to do with the kids.

You can have a conversation about schooling without mentioning the word child once. That has to be fundamentally wrong. The line, if there is a line that runs through my life, it is about children, and it is about knowing your children, not testing your children. 

X: To go back to your comment about “seeing it to be it”. Why is it important that they start this exploration at this age for you?

G: When I had our offices at Manchester Airport, (this was prior to 9/11), in Terminal 2, we used to have classrooms. The kids would come into the airport and we asked for British Airways pilots to drop in on occasion and come talk to the youngsters.

What that did was to allow children to make their own connections between what they're taught at school and what goes on in the real world. It always comes back to purpose, right? Typically there are about 60 activities in KidZania and they're made real through sponsorship. We know from research that the youngsters favor the activities which are branded and the answer is very simple, they are real. 

You allow a number of things to happen. You allow children to imagine. You can take your youngsters and you can bring them to a place where they can go around on their own for four hours. They can do jobs, they can earn money, they can save money, they can spend money, they can invest money to get interest and learn all those things. They can do it with their mates and you're not allowed to interfere as the teacher. If you went to a group of head teachers and said that, they would declare you insane and ask for somebody to come and take you away. So this is exactly what KidZania is about. 

I'll never forget a conversation which I had with three 9 year old girls who were sitting outside the newspaper proudly holding their front page, which they produced. 

"Tell me about English at school," I asked them. "Do you like English at school?"

- "Sometimes," they said. 

- "What is it? You don't like writing. Why don't you like to write?" 

- "Well, because my book comes back and it’s got red pen marks over from the teacher and they tell me what I do wrong."

- "Okay, I get that. Tell me about the newspaper." 

- "This is brilliant. We put it together ourselves".

One of the things we do is we make learning visible. You can't really show off a grade, can you? But when you can show off is the bit that says Look What I Did. 

You take what is being taught, which is what we should call schooling. We then connected it with what has been learned and experienced, which is what is education. We need to very clearly distinguish between the two, distinguishing the two doesn't make schooling bad all of a sudden, schooling is more about being taught than it is about learning. 

The fact is that it’s just the way it is now and it's not right but we've got two choices. We can either wait forever for change, or we can be subversive and find other ways for the children to have those experiences.

Wherever in the world I go, I talk to youngsters and ask them to tell me why they go to school. The answer I get is because I have to, and I don't think it's a very good answer. We need to put the youngsters in a position not to tell them, we need to put them in a position whereby they can find that for themselves. And we need to do that from a very young age. 

We did global research at KidZania, with a sample of 600,000 children across five or six countries. I asked the analysts: I want to know who these kids are. You know, are they 4 or are they 14 years old? Are they boys or girls? Are they rich or poor? Are they from urban or rural areas? Which country are they from?

Data analysis came, and the headlines of that analysis were: First, all stereotypes are set at the age of four, and probably earlier. Pilots 95% boys, cabin crew, 90% girls, and so it goes, entirely predictable -also entirely predictable around ethnicity sometimes. Also entirely predictable around those youngsters' socioeconomic backgrounds. The second finding was that there's almost no change between 4 and 14.

As a father of two girls this is a thing that doesn't fit easily and it is that globally, regardless of their background, almost all girls choose activities below the age range. So nine year old girls do seven year old activities, 9 year old boys to 10 year old activities, and there's clearly a confidence issue there. 

It bugged me a great deal until I noticed as an adult one Saturday morning I was in a park in Sheffield with my daughter and I noticed that whenever the little girl went climbing, adults there got closer to climbing frame, and would go "careful, careful, careful, don't hurt yourself". And whenever the little boy went into the climbing frame, all the adults would go "Go on, go on, go on, what's taking you so long?" So that happens at 18 months. 

So children can only aspire to what they know exists. Children from disadvantaged areas will not choose the aeroplane, the operating theatre, the television studio, the radio studio, or the theater as their first choice; they will choose being a courier, working in the supermarket and cleaning windows. That is a problem. Kids from more disadvantaged areas need their horizons widening. And you don't do that by telling them, but you do that by giving them a jigsaw of experiences, so that they can make up their own mind what they like and what they don't.

X: And how are you doing that now at KidZania? We’re really interested in how we stop gendering career choice. And we've been looking at it from a high school perspective, but what you're talking about is doing it much earlier.

G: One of the things from a high school perspective is to work with your primary schools. Take a step back and go back to those four year olds where the stereotype is already set, right? What we then do in schools is we wait for another 10 years until they're 14. And then we start talking to them about what they might want to do with the rest of their lives. 

We allow that stereotype to cement for 10 years, and then we kid ourselves that we still make a difference. I think that’s one thing.

The second thing is, we need to stop calling it Career Education. Actually, I don't think it's about career education, I think particularly at a younger age, I think it's about future awareness. Because it's also about becoming me. 

We should stop asking children, what they want to do when they grow up. I think we need to start asking them: who they want to be when you grow up? because that's a much better question and it has values.

When I was a little boy, growing up in Holland, I had a shirt with a number 14 at the back. Over that number, it didn't say 'footballer'. It said Cruijff. I didn't want to be a footballer, I wanted to be him. I wanted to be my granddad. I wanted to be Martin Luther King. I wanted to be Christian Barnard and be a heart surgeon. I wanted to be my German teacher. I didn't want to be a German teacher. I remember when I was older and I was at university thinking, How do I become like him? What is it he did? What’s his education?

So the question, “Who do you want to be when you grow up?” is a much better question. 

And then I think we need to imagine exemplification. Imagine that you're teaching maths in a secondary school. Please don't do: "if A is 2 and B is 3, what is C", but exemplify it. Constantly refer to the outside world because when our schooling system was set up the way it is in the industrial revolution, it was really clear why they were doing things. 

It had to do with welding and measuring and working in the factories or whatever else. And all of that has changed. Yet we keep plowing along with schooling them 9am-4pm and 6 weeks off in the summer, because they all have to help their parents out with harvesting. So we've stuck with all that stuff, right? 

Exemplification is the best way and exemplification can be to not talk to them about careers, invite people in and ask them what they're interested in, ask them what they don't know. And challenge them ?

Part three of our interview with Prof Graus will be up in May. Follow us at Xperienceships for more great articles in our WOWEd - World of Work for Educators Series.