Our children are being born into intensely stimulating and yet extremely challenging times: the present is full of utopian potentialities, but tinged with dystopian uncertainties.
It is my opinion that our current mainstream education system utterly fails to equip students with the skills necessary to capitalise on the incredible array of opportunities available to them in our postmodern age, and it fails, equally as utterly, to instill in them character to cope with its contradictions.
This is the final reason I’m quitting teaching, and in one sentence it can be summarised thus: our modernist education system is not fit for our postmodern age.
Five ways in which our education system doesn’t fit postmodern society
Here I’m talking mainly about mainstream, formal, school-based education in the United Kingdom. I’d be interested in knowing how much this fits with other mainstream education systems.
NB - the first point is much longer than the rest, I simply had more to say on this!
1. The top-down, National Curriculum doesn’t fit with our diverse, postmodern, individualised society
Here in the UK, all state funded Local Education Authority schools have to teach the National Curriculum, which stretches from age 3 (yes, that’s three years of age) all the way up through various ‘key stages’ to 16, the age at which most students sit their GCSEs.
One of the most worrying things about the National Curriculum is that it effectively gives a small handful of government officials the power to decide the content of what children learn at school, as evidenced by the case of the then education secretary Michael Gove effectively rewriting the history curriculum to give it a more classically British focus. (He since had to redraft it again following outcry from academics, but it illustrates a potential problem which may recur).
However, to my mind a much larger problem is the subtler form of control that comes with the framework of ‘key assessments’, through which children are assessed at a very young age according to a series of ‘developmental markers’. Seriously, teachers have ‘targets posters’ for 3 year olds:
I remember a few years ago dating someone with a 2 going on 3 year old child, who was a perfectly lovely child, very sociable, kind, amazing dexterity skills for her age, but hopelessly uninterested in anything to do with letters or numbers, and I couldn’t help but thinking how horrendous that child would find school once they were labelled as ‘subnormal’ according to various criteria.
I since found out through discussions with a friend who has a very ‘gifted child’ that his has been labelled as ‘lacking communication skills’, basically because he’s too bright to be interested in what most of the other children are interested in!
The point: with a framework of assessment that assesses everything from age 3, every kid is going to be labelled as a ‘problem’ according some metric.
Fast forward a decade and every student has to sit GCSEs in English and Maths, and while I recognise that these are important subjects that some students need to do in order for us to have a certain level of technical ‘evolution’, the idea of subjecting every student to them, when a quarter of them are going to end up failing just seems unnecessary, especially when there are so many jobs which don’t require either of these GCSEs.
However, possibly the worst aspect of the National Curriculum is that it’s so narrow, focussing primarily on ‘classic subjects’ such as English, Maths and Science, that other subjects get pushed to one side, which just seems out of sync with a society which is supposed to ‘value diversity’.
NB - it’s not all schools that stick to the National Curriculum: Academies and free schools are not required to stick to it, neither are private schools, and some do focus more on more creative aspects of education. And then there are the ‘radical alternatives’ such as this idea of a hacked education, in which ‘Logan’, in the video, basically makes up his own syllabus…
_Now I’m aware the above is great if you’re middle class, and maybe kids from less well educated backgrounds need more ‘structure’, so I’m not suggesting we move to a totally home--schooled system, just that we need to move away from a one size fits all, narrow, over-assessed National Curriculum: there is certainly more room for a little more diversity in there! _
2. The examination system is an outdated means of assessing in an information age where ‘everything is at your fingertips
I’ve really already summarised my main gripe against exams in a previous post: 7 reasons why exams might not measure your intelligence, but here I just want to emphasise the ludicrous situation of assessing students on memory, when technology has evolved to provide us with a rich vein of information at our fingertips, and in the vast majority of jobs, you can get by with being able to consult a credible source if you need to do so!
Surely rather than wasting time assessing students on their ability to memorise information, we should be devising ways of assessing students ability to assess the credibility of information?! Now that should be a skill taught as standard in all schools, unfortunately (?)sociology is not on the National Curriculum!
3. The physical environment of the school and classroom in no way mirrors today’s collaborative work-spaces
As Ken Robinson argues (see the video below), the current school system was conceived in the industrial era, and they seem to have been modelled along the lines of factories…different classrooms or ‘learning areas’ have different functions, where specific learning, or ‘leisure’ activities take place, and students are organised like workers: they are timetabled and monitored as they are expected to be ‘in one particular place’ at any given time.
There is also something ‘factory like’ about the way we educated children by ‘batches’ - they come in when they are 3 or 4, progress through a series of ‘key stages’ and come out graded.
While this may have suited (for pretty dark reasons) the needs of the industrial era capitalists (at least from a Marxist perspective), which required a passive and docile workforce, this experience of education in no way prepares students for the much larger proportion of jobs which today require creative and collaborative working!
I thoroughly recommend this TED talk by Ken Robinson if you wish to explore this further:
4. The 20-1 ratio in many classrooms is a barrier to encouraging individual self-discovery
I wrote about this in a previous post in this series - 24 teenagers sitting in a room - the general gist being that 20 students is a perfectly ridiculous number, born out of ‘available resources’ rather any consideration of what an ideal number is for teaching. For collaborative work, much smaller groups are optimal, for individual work, obviously individuals, and for lectures, well, you may as well stick them online, 20 just tends to distraction.
What I’ll add in here is that, from a teacher’s perspective, there is no way you can realistically get round to every student, get to know them properly and give them real quality input: all you can do is pay lip-service to really encouraging each individual’s unique potentiality, all you can do is help students through the same old uniform curriculum.
5. Age Cohorts
A very brief, but quite profound point to end on: schools are the only institutions where we group people by age. How is this supposed to prepare children for a future in which they will be working cross-generationally?
Surely it's good to subject children to other age groups for at least a period of the week, rather than have them just being educated with their peers. This would probably help with all sorts of issues - reducing bullying, helping 'differentiation' of learning being just two examples.
Conclusions
Because of all the above reasons, I'm left with the uncomfortable feeling that the education system isn't really about helping students fulfill their potential at all. This may well be the aim of many with in the system, but I don't think the system is really organised in such a way that it's possible for one individual, or even a whole school of dedicated individuals (at least those beholden to the national curriculum and working within a state budget) can really make a difference.
It's time for alternatives... Oh dear... sounds like another series!
If you like this sort of thing, you might like my other posts in the series... start here: Hub Post - 11 Reasons I’m Quitting teaching.