So much of the current debate about education feels disconcerting. It isn’t only that the loudest voices often seem to belong to those farthest from the classroom; it’s that the arguments themselves seem to miss the point. Education has become a strange narrative of competing absolutes – of sides to be taken – when, in truth, its effectiveness often lies in the tensions between them.

A City of Dualities
Visiting Edinburgh after a busy term at school, I was struck by the stark contrasts of this historic city. Walk from the Grassmarket, up West Bow to the Royal Mile at dusk and you feel the city’s two distinct faces at once: medieval wynds slip into shadow while the New Town sits across the valley, orderly and brightly lit. Robert Louis Stevenson described a sense of “a double existence” here and he felt strongly that this place could hold opposing truths without needing to reconcile them.

It’s no surprise, then, that The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde was conceived here. The story’s real-life precursor, Deacon Brodie – respected, upstanding craftsman by day, shadowy thief by night – still haunts the city’s gothic edges and lends his name to a pub on the Royal Mile. Stevenson’s tale endures because it captures something recognizably human: the restless pull between order and freedom, certainty and volatility, tradition and change – the same tensions that define every school.

The Dualism of Educational Debate
Literary scholars often interpret Jekyll and Hyde through the lens of dualism, “the belief that the world can only be explained through the coexistence of two opposing and irreducible principles.” Modern education debates echo this same structure – two halves locked in argument, each claiming to define the whole:

– Knowledge-rich curriculum vs skills and competencies
– Direct instruction vs inquiry or project-based learning
– Rigour and challenge vs wellbeing and joy
– Zero-tolerance discipline vs restorative practices
– Phone and AI bans vs digital citizenship
– Teacher autonomy vs curriculum fidelity
– Coverage and pace vs depth and mastery
– Ability groupings vs mixed-ability classes

We talk as if we must choose sides, as if one half of our educational nature must suppress the other. Pick a side, the dogmatists tell us. Edinburgh reminds one that it is possible to hold dichotomies in tension and to design for both. In the tradition of Scottish thought, there’s even a name for this – Caledonian Antisyzygy – the “duelling polarities within one entity”. Perhaps this is the mindset schools need now. The strength of a school lies not in its uniformity but in its ability to accommodate tensions creatively, intelligently, and humanely.

Personalisation: The Art of Integration
Schools are not battlegrounds for competing ideologies; they must be ecosystems for diverse learners. Learning is personal, and personalisation is not the soft middle ground between extremes. It is the disciplined art of integration: the precision of doing the right thing at the right time for each student. Sometimes, for instance, this is direct instruction; sometimes it’s inquiry. Often a digital tool will improve the task; at other times a pen and paper is the best approach. True personalisation requires schools to provide:

– Sharper clarity, not looser aims. We define the knowledge students must secure and the skills they need to demonstrate, then tailor appropriate pathways and strategies to get there. We should always ask ourselves: is this worth learning?

– Stronger evidence, not weaker standards. Frequent, low-stakes checks show who’s mastered what. Teachers calibrate next steps; students learn to judge quality and correct errors, and see learning as a cognitive process.

– More structure for agency, not less. Choice isn’t chaos or less rigorous. We teach students to make good choices: how to use appropriate strategies, when to struggle productively, and how to verify the effectiveness of selected strategies for future reference.

– Deliberate balance, not either/or. Cognitive load matters. Sometimes you need to drill to automaticity; sometimes you open the task and aim for transfer. The art and craft of great teaching is sequencing both. The goal of transfer should always be present.

– Tool-aware learning, agency, accuracy and transfer. We should be disciplined in our questioning whenever AI is in the mix. Agency: what should be me vs the tool?; Accuracy: how will I check it?; Transfer: what did I learn that I can reuse in new contexts?.

– Flexible pathways to success, hospitable school culture. Learners must have clear standards balanced with the freedom to explore and grow in the context of engaging and meaningful learning experiences. Crucially, schools must develop and nurture a school culture that provides what David Price called “a hospitable habitat for learning.”

Nuance Endures
Places like Edinburgh remind us that nuance endures, that opposites can coexist without cancelling each other out. The Old Town’s atmospheric, meandering streets and the New Town’s reassuring symmetry aren’t competing opposites; they’re two sides of the same entity. Unlike Stevenson’s story, everything isn’t a black and white battle between good and evil, right and wrong. Learners deserve schools that have the confidence to balance competing truths, resist false dichotomies, and invest their energies in learner-centred ambition and purpose.

Notes
Robert Louis Stevenson. The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. 1886.
Shubh M Singh &  Subho Chakrabarti. A Study in Dualism: The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. 2008.

See more about the sometimes controversial notion of Caledonian Antisyzygy here.