CAPACITY TO EDUCATE

Answers

Capacity Educate

sense of equal access to information, information isn’t always going to be right, but has the agency to critique it, and exchange has the empathy to recognise that’s the world that I want to see.”

There’s no doubt that the topic of education – who should receive it, what its limits should be – provokes strong emotions; but in both conversations, it was clear that practical considerations needed to be addressed as well as moral ones in order for communication to be maximally effective. As two broadly separate (if undeniably overlapping) umbrellas, government and business each have plenty to learn from the other – the latter about scale and accessibility of messaging, the former about clarity and cut-through.

On one hand, even an averagely popular government comes with a built-in degree of authority that most brands could never hope to attain. On the other, and as political strategists know all too well, the average voter is more easily moved by an emotional argument that appeals to their values than a dispassionate list of policies, no matter how much they agree with them in theory. Provocative messaging is something boardrooms tend to be better at than parliaments; for better or for worse, the efficacy of a given educational programme will be determined by the tone and tact of its messaging as much as its accuracy.

“One of the problems that politicians and corporations fall into is trying to educate people by simply explaining things more. I call this the Marillion problem because when I was at university, one of my housemates believed firstly, that the band Marillion were the greatest thing ever to enter the cultural sphere. And secondly, that if you did not agree with him, it was simply because you hadn’t listened to enough Marillion.”

Joe Twyman, Deltapoll