The trouble with Cambridge’s education faculty go es all the way to the top

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,” 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.


Andrew Gilligan