By Sebastian Egerton-Read
The first blog in this series can be found at:
‘My school days were the best of my life’. This well established cliché might well lead some to question the fact that I am writing a series of blogs criticising our systems of public education. However, besides the tactical reasons that parents use this cliché when talking to their children, it is actually a telling statement when investigated properly. When asked about what particular element of their school days were ‘the best of their lives’, people will very rarely say anything like ‘I loved my Friday afternoon Biology lessons’. Now of course, everyone remembers favourite teachers and favourite lessons, and of course some people genuinely do enjoy their time at school. However, far more common answers to this question are based around the desire to learn and the idea of missing the social element of school life. The first of these is interesting because it shows that the desire to learn and discover our talents isn’t limited to our school years, and that the opportunities for people to discover their passions are often even more limited once they leave education. I am not arguing that nothing valuable is taught at school. However, this yearning for learning is almost certainly at least somewhat routed in the fact that schools are only catering for a limited level of learning and they are not equipping the majority of people with the ability and belief to take their passions and interests on after education.
The other happy reminiscence from school is the social side. Of course once people leave school, keeping in contact with friends becomes more and more difficult and it is perhaps one of the novelties of school that you are able to see your friends so often. Work life is somewhat like this and in some cases exactly like it, but in most work places the work force is smaller than a school, and encourages social interaction even less. This is also very useful for highlighting the lack of logic in the way we run our schools. Classroom activity is dictated by a culture of individuality; talking (accept for at specific times) and ‘cheating’ are condemned above virtually anything else a child can do, and this is continued in the way that they are tested. This rigid structure of learning is extraordinarily detrimental to many children’s learning. This brings us to another cliché: ‘two minds are better than one’. It is almost unanimously accepted that people collaborating produce better results than people working alone. Separation is actually a completely unnatural state for human beings to find themselves, we are a co-operate species after all. There is almost an admission of this in the way that we run our schools too. At break times pupils are encouraged to go out and play with their friends. During these breaks, pupils do the exact opposite of what they were doing during their lesson time, socialising in groups and in most cases completely forgetting the subject matter that they had been learning. Simply put, pupils need a break from their lessons, partly because they are largely un-stimulating. From a practical point of view our minds cannot work endlessly without a break, but there is no real reason for our schools to follow such a rigid structure. School effectively divides itself between fun time (breaks) and boring time (lessons). This socialising during break times, which is actively encouraged, is the natural state of human beings, and yet group work only plays a minor role in school life. In fact, it plays such a limited role that when group work does crop up, it becomes a chore for students and they come to resent it. The results of this can be seen by the extremely limited participation in many seminars and group discussions at universities. The desire to assess pupils individually has led us to educate them out of their natural state, not only sacrificing social and personal health, but also failing to maximise people’s potential and talents.
This lack of logic and constriction upon people’s ability to explore their talents can be found in so many of the ways that our schools are run. One of the most damaging is the way in which mistakes and being wrong is stigmatised in the classroom. It is made so that one of the worst things that a child can do is be wrong. This is not something that we are born with, if you challenge young children to do something, they will have a go regardless of their chances of success. By the time they reach adulthood this willingness to be wrong has gone, and this is part of the reason that group discussions don’t have truly active participation in the later school years. Being wrong becomes an embarrassment and a shame, and so people do whatever they can to avoid it, especially in public. There is a serious problem with this. A willingness to risk getting it wrong is essential to being creative and reaching potential. To complete this blog’s quartet of clichés these two sum this idea up: ‘as long as you don’t try new things, you can’t learn new things’ and ‘if a first you don’t succeed, try and try again’. These clichés are engrained in our society, and yet we do not follow them at all. Being right or wrong in schools is everything; it determines which class you are in, your grades and then eventually your credentials when you enter the wider world. To say that the stakes are high is a huge understatement and therefore it is hardly surprising that a willingness to be wrong diminishes throughout a person’s education. The biggest problem with all this is that those very ideas of right and wrong are based on only a very narrow vision of intelligence and this anaesthetises the creative and adventurous potential of our school pupils.
One of the biggest justifications for the rigid structures of our education systems is discipline. It is argued that children need to be introduced to the idea of discipline and authority in order to prepare them for the adult world. However, it is clear that our systems of discipline simply do not work. This can be tested by a couple of simple questions. Who receives least discipline? High-achieving well behaved children. Who receives most discipline? Lower achieving, so called disruptive children. Most children, who receive the label ‘bad’, maintain this label throughout their education. I do not mean to suggest that the key to achievement is no discipline or that things like politeness principles are not important for children to learn. However, it is quite clear that children who are receiving regular discipline are not benefitting from it in terms of their education performance and certainly not in terms fulfilling themselves and finding their talents and passions. There are two serious problems with our methods of disciplines. Firstly, disciplinary methods like detention and separation makes those individuals exclusion even more dramatic and unnatural than the school system makes it anyway. Secondly, we have to seriously question just what we are punishing. The first major reason for a child being disruptive is their situation at home, whether it is a tumultuous household or simply a lack of support and encouragement. What does punishing this actually achieve then? Clearly schools are not able to fix the social problems that individual children have. However, surely it should be a place where young people are stimulated, a place where they have a break from whatever unpleasantness they might have in their lives at home and not a continuation. More attention and personalisation is a necessity in cases such as these, not less. The second largest issue is distraction, often prescribed as ADHD. This blog will not get into the various debates about ADHD. However, it is not too much of a jump to suggest that distraction is often the result of an over prescriptive, impersonalised and un-stimulating curriculum. They are distracted by things that are much more interesting and stimulating to them, and it is impossible to blame them for that. So in this case we are effectively punishing children for the faults of our schools and education systems, faults that we are responsible for and not them.
This blog has focused on a just a few examples of the ways in which the running of our schools restricts the abilities and talents of the pupils attending them. There are many more examples of this; in fact it is amazing how many aspects of our education systems appear contradictory to what is logically the best thing for both human nature and creativity. This shows itself in things like the rigid conformities of bell systems and strict timetabling, and the extremely limited numbers of different learning styles that are facilitated in the classroom. If we want to maximise human potential, we must create a learning environment that encourages creativity and stimulates, not one that suffocates and repulses our children as they make their way through their education.
No comments:
Post a Comment