Learning our place
Learning our place
Chris WrightAltrincham, UK
Purpose – Aims to provide a critique of the present state of mass education, especially at school level, and some proposals for reform.Design/methodology/approach – Examples of key problems identified by author. These include an emphasis on standardisation and conformity, a narrowly utilitarian view of learning and commercial pressures on both teachers and students.Findings – The paper argues that the problems affecting modern schools –in Britain especially, but also in much of Europe – stem from size and centralised control. The author recommends to policymakers a decentralisation of education policy and points to successful initiatives in this area in Denmark and The Netherlands.Originality/value – Useful for educationists, teachers and public policy researchers. The paper calls for a holistic approach to schooling, combining those aspects of “progressive”and “traditionalist” approaches that are of value to the individual student and the wider community.
Keywords: Education, Schools
“Education, education, education” is a statement of political priorities that few of us would argue with. The future of society –arguably even of humankind itself – depends on our ability to rear coming generations in a way that equips them to identify and respond to the challenges they will face; challenges that currently include climate change, diminishing supplies of fossil fuels, population pressure on food/water resources and species extinction, not to mention the phantom menace of terrorism. We are going to need people with the steadfastness to look the problems in the eye, the imagination to see alternatives, the wisdom to find a way from here to there,and the will to do something about it.
Looked at from this perspective it is clear that what an increasingly centralised government means by “education” is something very different. It is obsessed with showing that standards are improving year on year. These standards are defined by an increasingly arbitrary national curriculum in which, for example, children have little concept of how historical events actually relate to one another. The end products of this educational production line find increasing difficulty making the transition into a world dominated by speed and complexity. It is desperate to prove it is inclusive and yet standard testing from the age of five means burdening underachieving youngsters with a sense of failure that can last a lifetime (almost 33 per cent of teenagers leave school at 16, 5 per cent with nothing to show for their 11 plus years in full-time education). It demands excellence, yet by its own admission A-levels are no longer an adequate indicator of achievement.
In short, it is more concerned with image rather than content and, when what is actually achieved in our schools is shown to be wanting, a new raft of initiatives is immediately launched to show that something, anything, is being done to avoid addressing the issue of what education is all about. Meanwhile,the teachers who have to cope with the continual shifting of the goal posts become ever more demoralised and the creativity that is the hallmark of good teaching is gradually squeezed out.
As if that were not bad enough, our children are targeted from an early age as consumers (children as young as two recognise the MacDonald’s logo) and an ever-shifting matrix of fashion defines who is cool and who beyond the pale. To be seen wearing “Nicky no names” labels is to invite ostracism and bullying. The fact that a significant proportion – perhaps even a majority– of overall household expenditure is determined by children’s preferences (including items such as cars) indicates that parents have given up the struggle to resist the ever more sophisticated marketing techniques that assault us all – they are too busy working to keep up with the payments. The emphasis on quality time also suggests a measure of guilt for the neglect that results when adults pursue careers, relationships and affairs – i.e. meeting their own needs – to the exclusion of their children. Obesity,casual sex and drug taking are all symptoms of a culture that has failed to give young people the kind of attention they need from an early age. Far from being a compensation, a glut of material convenience contributes to the kind of rootless, isolated and essentially empty existence that demands ever more as the price of feeling valued.
Growing up is about networks of relationships, both at home and in the wider world that gradually anchors the individual in time (history is important!) and place and gives them a sense of their own uniqueness and importance. In an era when young people are literally drowning under the deluge of information spewing from televisions, radios and the internet, it becomes ever more important that they have access to adults who are able to help them make sense of it all. Lacking the kind of moral compass once provided by Christianity, it is only through the example of others that they can gain any sense of right and wrong. Having role models – real, accessible people – that children can look up to, is our last defence against chaos.
Education in its widest sense must centre on each individual child and depend on parents, formal educators and the wider community (including other children)acting together in a more or less seamless way. It is essentially a human scale activity where the qualities of the people involved and the strength of their relationships is the key. From the dawn of human history parenthood and the rearing of the young has been integrated into the patterns of daily living. Children accompanied their parents to work and made a contribution consistent with their age. Playing with other children of all ages, listening to stories and having access to a range of adults, all of whom had the child’s well being at heart, led to the community’s wisdom being absorbed by a kind of osmosis.
As societies became ever more complex, however, the division of labour combined with a social stratification that physically separated groups from one another, created a need for a common grounding in particular areas (reading,writing and arithmetic, for example) to ensure the proficiency needed to keep the show on the road. Young people may have been withdrawn from society for increasing periods of time (and be expected to make little or no contribution to the economy while they did so), but schools were sufficiently small, rooted in the communities they served and sufficiently close to the natural world, to ensure that individual identities continued to be formed in the organic ways of previous ages. Today, by contrast, schools dwarf the transient communities they are located within and have little connection with them (and less still with the ecosystems that are the precondition of life itself). They are huge institutions dedicated to turning out single age cohorts as efficiently (as defined by the current obsessions) as possible and only incidentally committed to the real individuals who comprise them.
As production lines providing the cannon fodder for a world fragmented by the increasingly global, institutionalised web of organisations that define our lives, the system may work (in the short term), but as a way of nurturing individual sensibilities in a way that will enable them to relate to their surroundings in the new and more creative ways that are needed if our culture is survive, it is hopelessly flawed. Nothing short of a renaissance in our understanding of what it means to be human is required, with a new emphasis on relationships and the local communities that sustain them, and a reengagement with world that lies immediately around us. We need to find our place in the world. Education will indeed be our number one priority, but it will not be education as we know it today; it will be part of a universal trend to rediscover the wisdom inherent in the human scale.
(Chris Wright is a novelist and founder of Action for Sustainable Living. He lives in the North of England. E-mail: chriswright@iasco.sagehost.co.uk).
