Killing curiosity

The one service the school education system should be providing is to teach every child to love learning for its own sake. In meeting this one overriding moral responsibility, it fails disgracefully.

Why did Indigenous people of a century ago have intellectual powers in some respects which are beyond our own? It was because their minds were not shaped by formal western schooling to support entrenched and distorted institutional values.

The education of the Indigenous child was driven by the desire to learn what was seen by the child as being desirable to learn. The adults were the facilitators of the learning process.

Killing curiosity

Like all pre-school children, I was in a world of imagination and discovery. Then, from the first day at school, my sole objective was to please my teacher who represented authority. In high school, it was to pass exams. I became a victim of “the system”.

After learning to read and write and do basic arithmetic through the usual rigor, my schooling should then have been essentially a series of free-flowing discussions with fellow students facilitated by the teacher. From this platform my education would have been driven by my own curiosity.

There may be a killing of natural curiosity in primary school, but it is from the first week in high school that the real mind-deadening begins. The greatest injustice is done to those who leave at age 16. They come away with essential reading writing and arithmetic skills and little more of any use. That is a tragic outcome for the expenditure of 10 years of one’s life when one’s brain was at its most receptive.

If a child is to be kept in class by order of the state until age 16, then that child deserves to be taught how to think properly during those vital years instead of having to face tests of one’s ability to retrieve information that the child sees at the time as being totally irrelevant to his or her life.

For 30 years Edward de Bono has been pushing for school to be a place where children gain an understanding of the nature of perception if they are not to have lives seriously set back by wrong decisions in the management of money; in the choice of career; or in the choice of a partner.

The system in the hands of rigid thinkers

Currently there is pressure coming from some people - with minds confined to a small box - to make a foreign language mandatory in high schools. After the three Rs are taught, nothing should be mandatory.

The study of French and Shakespeare gives some people a lot a pleasure - but so does the study of engines for others. We have lobbyists on the boards of education attempting to force their own special interests onto children held captive by a compulsory school system.

The backbone of our distorted system is the process of exams. High school students are forced to learn what can be easily tested - with the one objective of moving 18-year-old people onto university. The keepers of the system seems satisfied that those who leave at 16 - as being labeled “limited” - have at least been kept off the streets.

A measure of the state education departments’ gross failure of our young people is the high proportion of school students in this technological age who leave school hating science.

How can a teenager become interested in science?

I went to a Catholic school where biology was not available as the words “sex” and “evolution” would have been unavoidable. I did poorly in science. Several years after leaving school I picked up a well-illustrated book on biology. I have had a keen interest in all areas of science since.

A child’s interest in science can be most easily developed beginning with:

• a study of human behaviour (the nature of which has the potential to fascinate most of us) and from there onto;
• the human body and its care (which again has the potential to fascinate most of us) and from there onto;
• a history of technology (which has brought us from living in caves and throwing stones at animals to the capacity of destroying all life on Earth).

Some will go no further than this, but will, none the less, remain through their adult lives supportive of scientific research. Others will want a bigger picture and will move onto:

• biology, and from there the student’s desire to gain a bigger picture would lead him or her naturally onto;
• chemistry and from there the student’s desire to gain a bigger picture would lead him or her naturally onto;
• physics and from there the student’s desire to gain a bigger picture would lead him or her naturally onto;
• more complicated mathematics.

This is the Indigenous way. It allows the student to move forward on his or her own initiative. Some will move forward faster than others. That does not matter as all will have a genuine understanding of what has interested them.

Survival of the fittest

The top 1 per cent of students don’t find school mind-deadening at all as relatively little time is spent on absorbing the material which leaves time for freer thinking. But, then there are the many not so bright who put in long hours and adapt successfully enough to go onto university. But can they think for themselves? As these people provide the required numbers for the economy, it could be asked: “where is the problem?”

The problem is in the waste. Our system of learning is an obstacle course which you survive if you do not notice how wronged you have been by having your young developing mind commandeered by an establishment which claims to know what is good for the nation.

When I was in a position to hire science graduates, I was astonished at their inability to use their education upon which to build a science-based life philosophy. To them a degree was solely a ticket to a job. After 12 years of having their neural networks hard-wired into an intellectual straight jacket, many will remain that way for life.

We all have talents. Those who excel at school without having to work at it have a talent which school brings to the surface. The “ordinary” need a different environment to bring their talents to the surface. This will never happen because the system of hoops to jump through by captured young people will continue to be protected by those who have a vested interest in it continuing.

Self-serving state-run education is not the only culprit. Our young are expected to run on rails by their parents and by a culture which does not respect the young person who wishes to step off the rails so as to sort him or herself out. (See Clive Hamilton’s article.)

In the meanwhile, stress in teachers trying to control their rebellious charges who are intending to leave at 16 is becoming unbearable. Many of the students staying on to 18 are exchanging healthy living for high marks.

In the grades-focused state-run education system, it is forgotten that the supposed objective of education is to open the door to a more fulfilling life.