The illusion 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.