The problem, says Sir Tony Robinson, is not education itself. The problem is our understanding of what education is.

“I remember, in the early 1960s, there was a radical bishop called John Robinson who said that, if you wanted to get a purchase on faith, you’d ban the word ‘God’ for 50 years,” says the actor and television presenter, best known for playing Baldrick in the BBC series Blackadder. “I think it would help if we used a different vocabulary for education from the one we’ve got now. We really want to think of education outside the narrow strictures of exams.

“And, if education was really much more integrated into the whole of society - if it stopped being a posh word for ‘babysitting’ - we’d value teachers more.”

Robinson will be speaking about his own education, and his love of history and discovery, as part of the annual education technology show Bett, held in London next week.

The thrill of discovery

As a child, he says, he always derived a thrill from discovering new things and increasing his understanding of the world. But he hated the formal restrictions of school.

“I used to bunk off school,” he says. “And I’d just go down to South Woodford library and read. I read a lot of Robert Graves and Graham Greene when I was 14. I read Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. Out of that, I started reading Heidegger, and I had a go at Wittgenstein. I don’t remember a thing about them, but they taught me that you don’t need to be intimidated by words. You can work it out.”

‘We’ve got these really, really bright kids, and they have absolute contempt for school’

School, he assumed, was nothing but an obstruction between the person he was and the person he wanted to be. It was only when he was in his mid-twenties that he realised education was, in fact, the link between these two versions of himself: it would enable him to discipline and organise his thoughts.

“And that was my big discovery,” he says. “That was my road to Damascus moment. I hadn’t got that that was what education was.

“I’m fascinated by the idea that we’ve got these really, really bright kids, and they have absolute contempt for school, while school just passes them by.”

Part of the problem, he believes, is a broader societal tendency to understate the importance of good teachers. “Teachers get exhausted, teachers get tired, and an awful lot of good people leave the profession. And then, suddenly, there’s panic again, and we have to start paying teachers well again.

“It’s the same with all public sector workers: we celebrate them a bit, and then it becomes financially difficult to keep celebrating them. Fashions change. People become disenchanted with something, and then people point fingers at teachers and say, ‘It’s all your fault’.”

He cites as an example the claim made in 2014 by Michael Gove, who was education secretary at the time, that dramatisations of the First World War, such as Blackadder Goes Forth (pictured, above), merely perpetuated the idea that the war was a series of mistakes perpetrated by an out-of-touch officer class.

Robinson believes that Gove’s claims were nothing more than an unfair attack on teachers. “The idea that kids will see a comedy series about the war and think that’s how it was is absurd,” he says. “It’s like saying that you shouldn’t teach Wilfred Owen, because then kids will think the whole of the First World War rhymed. It’s such a literal way of thinking.

“A decent teacher will use it to impart certain things - to bounce certain things off them - so kids can get excited about something.”

When he was nine years old, he developed a love of poetry thanks to an elocution teacher (“Not a word you hear very much any more,” he says) at his primary school. “She came into school twice a week and your parents paid five shillings a term so you could get rid of your East London accent.

“I realised from her what a physical thing poetry was: the muscularity that was required from your lips and your tongue and the bellows of your diaphragm. She would fling herself around the room - and encourage me to do the same - while reciting the poems of Walter de la Mare and John Masefield.”

A cunning plan

But we are unlikely to value teachers, he believes, until we see education as something integral to life - something that permeates it - rather than as something that is done to children between the ages of 4 and 18.

“Education is something that these people - teachers - do to our children,” he says. “If they do it well, they’re doing it properly. “And if they do it badly, then we put them and the children they teach under a series of microscopic slides, and force them to do exams at 7, 11 and 16.”

‘It’s a very radical and exciting time. If we want to change, then we have to change our institutions with it’

Ideally, he believes, we should step back from education as we know it, and instead think about what is best for children in the 21st century. “We’re living with enormous change,” he says. “We don’t know where we’re going to be in five, 10 years’ time.

“What’s Trump doing as president? Can that in any way be described as a good thing? No. But it does demonstrate the enormous turmoil that we’re living with at the moment.

“And we understand the role that technology is going to play in that. It’s a very radical and exciting time.” He pauses. “It’s not radical like a sulky 1960s Trot. But it’s exciting. If we want to change, then we have to change our institutions with it.”

@adibloom_tes

Sir Tony Robinson will be speaking at the Bett Show on Thursday 26 January. For more information, see bettshow.com