On Monday, Tracey Burns visited Leerpunt, and a large part of her professional life so far has been devoted to looking at trends that influence education. It was a strong contribution that could feed the idea that we live in times of change. But… that is, of course, a huge cliché, and she presented it in a very nuanced way. There are also, of course, things such as artificial intelligence, social media, geopolitical shifts, demographic changes, and climate change. The list is long, and all these topics also regularly appear on this blog. And then it is not illogical to think that if the world changes, our institutions should change too. That is why it is often fashionable to say that schools must change as society changes. Universities have to adapt to AI. This talk will be about education and… stability.

There are plenty of reasons. The labour market changes, so education and training have to change with it. The hard data Tracey cited shows that this change is certainly there, though less than the often-cited 65% (22% in her slides). In fact, it seems almost impossible to name an institution that is not affected by all of this: not just schools, but also the courts, the military, the media… But today I want to sound a different note, partly inspired by an older blog post.

There is of course a core of truth in this. Suppose institutions never change; in the end, they will probably become museums of themselves. But since that blog post from last year, I have increasingly been wondering whether we are overlooking something important: what if one of the functions of institutions is precisely that they do not constantly change?

Why do we actually have institutions?

That question may sound stranger today than it is, or should be. By now, we have become so used to judging institutions by their ability to renew, transform, and adapt that we sometimes forget why we, as a society, have institutions in the first place.

A classic answer to this question is given by economist Douglass North: institutions structure human interactions. In doing so, they make other people’s behaviour predictable (to some extent), thereby reducing uncertainty.

Thanks to institutions, you do not have to renegotiate every morning what a school is. You do not have to reinvent the justice system for every conflict. And while people have been saying for years that degrees will become irrelevant, a degree today still means about the same as it did yesterday. Money you receive today can still be used tomorrow. A university has rules about what counts as knowledge and how knowledge is assessed. Collectively, we have expectations about what a doctor, judge, teacher or journalist is supposed to do.

As you were reading the last paragraph, I’m sure your initial reaction was that this set of expectations would never really be stable. You would be right; they change. It’s important to note that because they don’t change every day, we are able to rely on them. Indeed, institutions are pretty stable reference points, and let’s be honest, they aren’t coming by any more readily in today’s changing world.

And what if precisely that is under pressure?

In recent years, there has been a lot of discussion about declining trust in institutions. People are said to have less trust in politics, the media, science, government or education. For instance, in Belgium, where I live, education has long been one of the last beacons of trust. But I’m afraid that due in part to poorer performance, that trust may now also be under pressure.

So it makes sense that people want to restore that trust, and you have probably already read or heard many of the proposed solutions. More transparency, better communication, more participation. Or one of my favourites: closing the gap, especially in politics. We have been reading about that gap for decades now. And yes, these may all be sensible things. But maybe they come too late in the story.

Because what if trust isn’t really the first problem? What if something else comes before it? What about a loss of institutional stability, perhaps. I sometimes wonder whether, over the past decades, we have come to judge institutions more and more by how well they adapt. Organisations have to become agile, schools have to innovate, governments have to transform, and universities have to respond to new needs. The words can be different, but the idea behind them often isn’t: if you don’t change, you fall behind.

And yes, that sounds pretty logical. The world around our institutions is changing faster, so shouldn’t our institutions change faster too? I’m just no longer sure that follows. Because what if, by constantly asking institutions to change, we gradually weaken one of the reasons we have them in the first place?

Not everything has to change at the same time

The German sociologist Hartmut Rosa describes how modern society is characterised by acceleration. Technology accelerates, social changes follow each other more quickly, and the pace of our daily lives also increases. That acceleration can reinforce itself. Because the world changes faster, organisations have to respond faster. But because organisations respond faster, people once again experience more and more change.

Perhaps, therefore, we do not only need institutions that help us deal with change. Perhaps we also need institutions that ensure not everything changes at once.

A school can prepare children for a changing world, but at the same time it can be a place where certain expectations remain surprisingly constant. School as free time, or rather, as Masschelein and Simons once wrote: slowed-down time.

At school, you arrive on time. An adult has and takes responsibility for children. You learn things there that you would not choose on your own. Sometimes you have to make an effort. Not everything that matters is immediately useful. You meet people who are different from you. There is knowledge that existed before you were born and that is passed on to you. These are not innovations of yesterday or tomorrow, but things that have been around for centuries. And that also gives them value.

The school does not have to look like the world

As I am completely ignorant about justice and politics, I will confine myself to talking only about what I know a bit. How many times have I heard gurus talk about educational reform through this kind of statement? “The world changes, hence the education should change.” In my opinion, this kind of argument is logically flawed. The fact that the world changes does not prove that education needs to change, and, of course, not at the same speed.

Take the current favourite thing to haunt education: AI. It now seems difficult to deny that students will live and work in a world where AI is ubiquitous. From this, it can follow that schools should teach students how to use AI wisely. But something else can just as easily follow from it. Think along with me: precisely because more and more thinking outside school can be outsourced to technology, it may become more important today for students to learn to think and do certain things themselves at school.

Precisely because information is immediately available everywhere, knowledge in your own head may become more important for assessing that information. Because technology increasingly predicts personal choices and preferences, a common curriculum may become more important for keeping society together. And what about the possibility that, at a time when so much communication takes place digitally, the physical encounter between students and teachers may become more valuable?

What I mean is that change outside an institution can just as easily be a reason not to change certain elements. I now realise that this may sound like an enormously conservative argument, so…

Stability is not standing still

A plea for stable institutions can quickly sound like a plea for conservatism. As if everything used to be better, schools should return to what they were in 1950, and universities or governments should close themselves off from society. That is absolutely not the argument I want to make. To me, stability is not synonymous with standing still. Also, stability is not, by itself, a value. How many unjust institutions have proven to be remarkably stable?

In fact, I suspect that an institution sometimes has to change in order to remain stable.  Within research on institutions, there is an interesting term for this: institutional maintenance. We shouldn’t assume that institutions simply continue to exist. People maintain them. Rules are applied again, norms are passed on, new situations are interpreted, and practices are sometimes adapted.

A tradition that literally never changes can disappear because it no longer works. At the same time, an institution that constantly changes can disappear because nobody knows what it stands for anymore. Right, it is a constant balancing act, which I can probably best summarise like this: what has to change so that the core can remain?

I think such a question will lead to different, and perhaps better, answers in practice than the question of how we should move forward amid huge societal changes.

Perhaps we need to learn to maintain again

Language does shape how we think about these things. Innovation sounds positive. Transformation sounds ambitious. Agility sounds sensible. Even disruption sounded downright attractive for a while, although I suspect Zuckerberg has long regretted ‘move fast and break things’, despite the billions in his bank account. Maintenance, on the other hand… I have to admit it sounds much less sexy. We tend to admire the inventor, not the person who keeps everything working.

I have also never been invited to a conference called Maintaining Education 2035. And imagine a school leader proudly announcing that they have managed to keep something more or less the same for the next ten years. Would that get much applause? Actually, wait. It might. But I don’t think the school leader would describe it that way.

Still, maintenance may be one of the most underestimated things we do as a society. Bridges need maintenance, don’t they, dear friends in the Netherlands? Legal systems do too, don’t they, my beloved Brussels? The same goes for scientific standards, even during an AI storm and scandals such as Arday and more recent ones. Democratic procedures need maintenance too, which is one reason why I was glad to hear who won this year’s Nobel Peace Prize. And yes, I think all of this also applies to education as an institution.

And maintenance isn’t just about keeping rules in place. Professional norms matter too, as do shared stories, rituals and expectations, and sometimes even buildings and symbols. They help make clear what kind of place this is. This is what we do here and why we do it. And, importantly, this is something you can still count on tomorrow. We will still be here. Without all of that, an institution can gradually become little more than an organisation.

The difference between an organisation and an institution

When discussing this difference, you need to be aware that an organisation tries to achieve objectives. But an institution does more and must do more. It also embodies norms and expectations that extend beyond the people who happen to be working there at the moment, since an institution is larger than its present iteration. A school is therefore not just an organisation that produces learning outcomes. A university is not just an organisation that produces degrees and publications. A court is not just an organisation that processes cases. They carry something from yesterday into tomorrow. It has taken a while, but now I really have to mention Hannah Arendt and her plea for both conservation and progress. Education has something fundamentally conservative about it for Arendt. As adults, we bear responsibility for the world we pass on to the next generation, so that progress is possible, because that generation will, in turn, make its own choices.

Perhaps trust comes later

And that brings me back to trust. It may be a gamble, I realise, but perhaps we sometimes try to fix the wrong thing. When people have less trust in an institution, it seems obvious to ask how such an institution can regain the trust that was lost. But you cannot simply ask for trust. And you certainly cannot communicate it back into existence. How I wish that was true.

It seems that trust in institutions is built on the realisation that they do what they need to do, and do it consistently. It acts as predictably as possible. There will be no sudden change in what the rules mean today compared to yesterday. Not every new political, technological or social phenomenon results in a new direction (I can hear a sigh now, but it could be my imagination). Trust in institutions could also result from professionals’ awareness of what is expected of them. And even if you have an issue with a particular decision, at least you understand the logic behind it.

Maybe trust comes later, then. Maybe it grows when people experience that an institution is reliable, that it doesn’t change course all the time and that people know what they are doing. I don’t know if this is the case, but perhaps we sometimes call something a problem of trust when something else happened first. Perhaps some stability was lost along the way.

Beacons move too, but not with every wave

People in education like to use metaphors. I plead guilty, as the image of a beacon may be enormously useful for ending this essay. A beacon does not stand outside time. It has to be maintained. The lamp can be replaced. The technology changes. Sometimes it even has to be moved. But all of this only makes sense for a beacon because it does not drift along with every wave.

I think we need to learn to look at our institutions that way again. Let us not see them as obstacles that must constantly be adapted to an ever-more-rapidly changing world, but as structures that derive part of their value precisely from continuity. Something we can fall back on, something we can build on.

That does not mean that schools, universities, governments, science, media or the courts should shut themselves off from change. It does mean that change is not automatically the answer to change. Sometimes you have to change, certainly. Sometimes you have to adapt, of course.

But sometimes the most important thing an institution can do is continue to exist.