The illusion of schooling

If one wanted to start an education system for a one-language, socially and financially stable, smallish country (Say 23 million inhabitants – about the same size as some world cities) what do you think should be the shape of its schooling system? Before active learning centres called classrooms can be established, there is a number of organisational requirements to ensure that these classrooms operate with as little turbulence as possible.... right? And...children need to develop their learning habits from birth as seamlessly as possible. Right? The natural inquisitive joy of learning that very young children show, needs to be nurtured, fostered, expanded and developed for their entire school life and beyond. Right?

What happens in class each day is so crucial. Who, then, would be better to arrange a design for an efficient and effective schooling system than ordinary, everyday classroom teachers? Okay? Why not?

A wise government asks itself: Who are the most capable, most experienced, most needs-sensitive to design a world-class system of schooling? Ordinary, practicing classroom teachers? Practicing academics ? A group of any Ph.Ds who are smart? A group of elected and politically chosen Ministers of Education? Officials with a background in public service and, maybe a bit of school experience? A group of politicians...Senators perhaps? Rich corporate business men (e.g. Rupert Murdoch, Bill Gates, Koch Brothers)? Lawyers (e.g. Joel Klein, Julia Gillard)? Bankers?

To date, countries, seemingly keen on impregnating classrooms with mediocrity leading to backwardness, have tried all of the above groups..... except the first ....those in charge of our children’s future every day of every school year. Their turn?

Starting Age

The age to start ‘formal’ (as it is called) schooling needs to be consistent for every child. Of course. How to start the school-learning life of each individual is so important. Each child is different, but a common starting age makes administrative sense, and to have a small population start from a variety of ages is plain crazy. That’s if the rituals of ‘formal’ schooling have any meaning. Right? Extremely silly. So some high-octane thinking about starting age is needed before any thing else gets off the ground. It would be pretty silly, wouldn’t it, to have a common curriculum with prescriptive overtones for schools before you knew their exact shape?

Contemporary and earlier research as well as school experience show that the best age for a child to begin experiences that classrooms provide is at about age 7. All educationally advanced countries start at this age. Starting earlier than this curbs childhood curiosity, problem-solving capacity, ability to play (non-work) and starting too early can have a life-time effect on confidence, curiosity, attitude to occupational interests, social/ cultural competencies, general expectations and other serious developmental attitudes.

Many busy Mums don’t like the idea of helping, guiding, tolerating kids at home for a few more years, however.

Developmental psychologist Gordon Neufeld suggests that four, five, six year olds are not ready to learn (as schools expect them to do) because the prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain that control feelings, is still under construction. ’It only gets wired at between five and seven years of age.” He reckons that monkeys and elephants can be taught to perform if that’s what you think your child should do. Is that the reason for starting school earlier than necessary? It seems so.

School-based child development, as an responsibility of the state, can (and should) be divided into three phases 1. Early Childhood (Ages 0-7). 2. Middle Childhood (Ages 8-14). 3. Late Childhood (Ages 14+). Of course, the middle and late childhood ages are usually called Primary and Secondary schooling. It’s the pupils of these legislated levels of schooling for which governments take most responsibility through law. Only a government that sponsors fairness, likes children, has faith in their potential and wants them to develop their learning potential, considers what it does with its children very, very seriously (e.g. Finland). Other governments tinker. Australia has a variety of starting ages, most of them around the 4-5 years with different names for the first year...Prep., Kindergarten, Reception, Transition. Pure gimmickry. Surely. Can’t the first year of ‘formal’ schooling be called Year 1 with a non-prescriptive curriculum to match?

The pre-school early ages (aka Early Childhood) in an advanced society concentrate on happiness, get-along-ability, developing curiosity and inquisitiveness, enjoying childhood for seven years under the control of parents. The first of these, happiness, deserves more consideration than it is given. Pre-school agencies that offer help to Mums and Grand-mums would be as diverse as possible. Parents make the choices and decide the pattern of learning to best suit their little ones. Children can then move to ‘formal’ public schooling with confidence and a true sense of inquiry. A progressive country then ensures that a network of well supervised, experience-based public schools set a standard for all other kinds of schooling.

It’s at the real school level that parents learn to challenge their own beliefs. Do they continue to believe in schooling as a developmental agency where each child’s potential is warmly challenged to its highest degree, or a place where each child is force-fed material and is regarded as a passive, obedient receptacle of information that someone else has decided each should know? Many governments and their agencies are incapable of lateral thinking, so they adhere to anachronistic forms of schooling that actually demonise the learning process from Year 1. Wide scale blanket testing is a typical example.

Parents and some teachers, even, believe that if one knows their tables and spelling and grammar then they are set for life; and that a school is a good school if its children do well collectively on certain performance categories. This New York based genius is now embedded in Australian political savvy and in some ‘educators’ belief systems. This act of worship has its genesis in a firm belief that we each have a fixed measure of intelligence.

Americans have loved this notion since 1916 because they can number it, score it and grade it. Fixing firm scores is embedded in American thinking. Australia follows American ideas as faithfully as possible, and is now moving back with it to the original idea that the wheat should be sorted from the chaff and schooling arrangement be made to suit. The father of IQ branding, Lewis Termin wrote the guidelines for how poor performers should be handled:

Children of this group should be segregated in special classes and be given instruction which is concrete and practical. They cannot master abstractions, but they can often be made efficient workers, able to look after themselves. There is no possibility of convincing society that they should not be allowed to reproduce, although from a eugenic point of view they constitute a grave problem because of their prolific breeding.” (“The Measurement of Intelligence” pp91-92, 1916 – cited in ‘Eugenic Legacies Still Influence Education” by David B. Cohen)

It’s a dangerous legacy. It ignores the conscious integrity of learning in the teaching/learning (aka Learnacy) context of a school. It infers that testing can sponsor improvement in attitudes towards learning. Dangerous. It instinctively implies that a New York lawyer knows more about how to rear and encourage our children than we do. It implies that spending more school and private time on test preparation is preferable and more effective for child development than spending time on exploring the beauty of mathematics, the intrigue of our fascinating English language, the wonders of science.

Parents and teachers bow low to the near-sighted, narrow-minded, illogicality of totalitarian control. They tend to laud or approve by their silence, the efforts of those governments which just throw money thoughtlessly at ‘education’; and make whimsical alterations to system structures without finding out what happens in the classroom and what the ones within the classroom feel about any change. Is a tight and demanding prescriptive curriculum with common core objectives in a strict age-grade, subject-centred organisational mode, the only way to school our children and does it help them with their general education? Should children at school be treated as students or as pupils?

There are so many important questions to be asked. Until we do, our learning-destructive Klein system remains; and our children pay the penalty.

Despite the irrefutable evidence that children progress faster and achieve higher when they are loved and unthreatened; and when teachers are highly regarded for what they do and respected for their opinions, we continue to approve of our Orwellian forms of control by our silence. Our culture of silence says that we salute authoritarianism at the expense of enlightenment. To our eternal shame, we allow demonising national blanket testing to exist.