Professor Hilary Cremin, the head of Cambridge University’s education faculty, is best known as the woman who fawned over her new hire, Jason Arday, as “the best in the world.” Now here is further evidence that Cremin, and the department she runs, have completely lost their faculties. Cam, the university’s alumni magazine, runs a regular feature entitled “This idea must die.” Last month, in a bizarre, stream-of-consciousness contribution to that slot, Professor Cremin nominated for death….the school system.
“Many schools function a bit like a prison, a factory or the army,” Cremin claims
“Many schools function a bit like a prison, a factory or the army,” she claims. School “has become so much part of our collective psyche that it’s difficult to suggest another way.” Instead, says the professor, we must “rewild” education, “learning in and through nature,” in an “ecosystem of learning opportunities.”
Primary education should still be universal, thinks Cremin, but “from age 12, young people would engage with a mentor on a weekly basis to map out their own learning journey…I’d want education to be happening in science laboratories and art galleries and care homes and startup businesses and farms, while teachers could support students to build up an e-portfolio evidencing their real-world achievements…AI would be used to develop advanced skills and knowledge in ways that are bespoke for every young person.”
The piece draws on a longer book, Rewilding Education, published last year, in which Cremin condemns the “fundamental flaws” of modernity and rails that education is “complicit” in “the worst excesses of…enlightenment thinking.”
As The Spectator revealed last week, Cremin also employs Farah Ahmed, a former activist in the now banned terror group Hizb ut-Tahrir who wrote a chapter for a pamphlet published in 2002 in which she called Western education a “threat” to Muslim children and suggested that Muslims should not be taught science, since they will be “exposed to ideas that contradict Islam.” (In 2010, Ahmed distanced herself from the group, saying that she had not been a member for a few years and did not agree with all of its views as a political organisation).
I’d thought Ahmed’s being given an assistant professorship by the education faculty was simply the usual liberal stupidity. Cheap jokes about replacing one letter of Cremin’s surname sprang to mind. But Professor Cremin’s jeremiads against modernity and the Enlightenment, and her wish to dismantle the school system and send children out into the fields, make me wonder if she isn’t quite as foolish as she looks – if she has another purpose in handing out posts to people who have previously promoted a medieval interpretation of Islam.
Against that, for a department head at one of the world’s top universities, Cremin’s argument in favour of her brave new world is very poorly made. There are no facts, no citations, no attempt to make comparisons – presumably because these are the sort of Enlightenment practices we don’t like at Cambridge any more. As Amanda Spielman, the former head of Ofsted, puts it on X, the piece is “mindblowingly bad.”
In several ways, what’s going on at Cambridge’s education faculty is far wider and scarier than Arday. Cremin is due to leave her job shortly. Her successor, Clare Brooks, has one hell of a repair job to do.
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