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| layout | title | date |
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| post | Thoughts on the education system — To hell with the classroom | 2017-12-14 |
Photo by Roman Mager on UnsplashI’ve spent the majority of my life in formal education, as is typical for someone who’s 19. But maybe it shouldn’t be that way.
I’ve been home-schooled, private-schooled, public-schooled. Taught by people from all walks of life, in all sorts of things. But the most important lessons I learned at school can’t be found in some government curriculum, or a meticulously prepared lesson plan. I learnt them from the people I found there.
The academic education system faces a multitude of major flaws that I feel are doing me and my generation a huge disservice.
Taught to memorise facts and pass tests, rather than to truly learn
I remember analysing mark schemes in every subject from English to Biology. To pass a standardised test as a nonstandard individual (i.e. everyone) it isn’t always enough to know the right answer. You have to tick the boxes. To think in just the right way.
Creative thinking, and being critical, is passively discouraged. The best teachers will overcome this and allow you to learn whilst still being able to get that grade. Because those aren’t one and the same, though they very much should be.
A good memory is rewarded much more than it has any right to be. Rote memorisation of anything from key facts to entire essay answers allows anyone with the memory capacity to simply regurgitate what they remember — but often do not know or understand — and get great marks. I have a terrible memory, particularly with dates. So to pass history exams I’ve had to rely on my genuine interest in the subject and the natural flair I’ve been told I inject into my writing. Others just learnt the facts and dates by heart and did as well, if not better, than me.
I’ll be more enthusiastic about encouraging thinking outside the box when there’s evidence of any thinking going on inside it. — TERRY PRATCHETTI’m not sure how this can be solved, but I’m also not convinced that people truly want it to be. Society requires critical thinkers to advance, and yet…these critical thinkers, the Jeff Bezoses and Elon Musks, stand on the shoulders of a multitude of those that are ‘just getting by’. Following societal rules and norms because they’ve been taught from an early age that this is just fine.
Criminal underpayment and overwork of great teachers
In an odd parallel to the industry I now work in (food service) the perfect storm of low pay, long hours and high workload is killer.
Teachers are responsible for shaping the future of the up-and-coming generation. And yet, society doesn’t seem to value this job as highly as it absolutely should. Instead it overloads teachers with paperwork and pays them terribly for the privilege.
To survive and thrive in teaching demands passion. You have to love your job, because you’d have to be mad to do it. And love is intrinsically shot through with madness.
You could almost twist that to be a good thing, saying that such conditions and demand for love ensures only the best remain in teaching. Unfortunately it doesn't work that way in reality. There’s plenty of anecdotal evidence to refute that. A teacher’s handling of a personal issue I had at my previous school encouraged me towards barely-avoided alcoholism. That teacher was the school’s pastoral head no less.
90% of learning in 10% of time
My handwriting is terrible. Honestly medical doctor level awful, bad enough that I was granted the use of a laptop in classes and exams. From that moment, my productivity rocketed.
I wrote all sorts of things, probably some of the earlier pieces I’ve published on this very site. I programmed a lot, honed my self-taught skills. I read continuously. More often than I should, I just screwed around or chatted to friends on the Internet.
I have no problem admitting that because I still engaged with the lessons as much if not more so than the others around me. Teachers rarely noticed I was distracted. That might come across as egotistical, and I suppose it is to a degree.
But it doesn’t take much to realise school is packed with unnecessary downtime. Free periods, registrations, form time and all the other nonsense that eats into time that should be spent learning.
What I learnt spread over a week of school could be condensed into a couple of hours of actual learning. I’m a quick learner, but that’s not the point. The fact is the knowledge is drip fed, when it could be placed in front of you at once for you to digest in your own time.
As someone that works in short intense bursts of concentration — frenzied scribblings as it were — this suits me particularly badly. Hence the large proportion of time I spent doing my own thing. But I think the recent rise in the idea of MOOCs and online learning/self-teaching in general reinforces my point. People learn differently, and at different rates. This is compounded by the fact only really good teachers know how to compensate for this and accommodate the learning strategies of all those they are teaching.
The classroom problem
As I wrote right at the start, I learnt more from the people I was surrounded by than the actual contents of the lessons. I’ve also learnt more by ferociously reading articles on Medium than I usually ever did at school, but that’s a topic for another time.
A lot of subjects are inherently unsuited to being taught in a classroom manner. Some are obvious, like practical subjects. These don’t get enough focus in the school system in general, but that’s also a tangential topic.
Creative subjects, too, I don’t think suit it very well. They’re also difficult to evaluate using standardised tests. Science is easier, because right and wrong is valid in science. Facts are facts, no matter how they’re dressed. Right or wrong doesn’t apply to creative subjects.
As an example, I hated English as a school subject. And yet here I am writing one or more Medium pieces a day, tweeting incessantly, and with a novel in the works. Because I don’t hate english, I hate English. Capital E english, the ‘subject’. English has rules, and those stifle creativity. Often I take more joy than I probably should in breaking those rules carefree.
In particular, I was taught that ‘one should never start a sentence with a conjunction’. But, who gives a damn? Language is a function of communicating between people. Provided that you can still communicate effectively, does it really matter how exactly it’s structured? I suppose you can call me a Grammar Antifascist!
The way to learn to write is simply to do so. To find your own voice, you have to use it. And use it repeatedly.
The Final Word
Just as technology is disrupting many established industries from automotive to energy, I think that education is due a disruption.
Mainly:
- Train and pay teachers properly, goddamnit. Their job is perhaps the most important of any of us. They shape the future more than we are comfortable realising.
- Provide an increased emphasis on nonacademia. Practical skills are increasingly valuable, despite the Digital Age. There’s quite a primal joy to it too.
- Stop wasting students’ time! Strip out the fluff from the schoolday. Challenge those that need to be challenged, support those that need to be supported.
- Rethink the way that education is done at a core level. It’s already happening with the shift towards programs like Open University. 21st-Century learning shouldn’t look the same as 18th-Century learning. Teaching people to rote-learn and pass tests breeds a frustration with what they have been misinformed is learning. Telling people that learning just means staring at a textbook is an injustice.
Learning is a constant process. People need to be taught how to learn, how to teach themselves, and even better, how to teach others from their experiences.
“If you want the kids’ test scores up, bring back band and bring back shop and get kids actually learning stuff instead of teaching them how to take a test,” — Adam SavageOnce someone discovers the true joy of learning something new, there will be no stopping them. A robust education system that is simultaneously flexible enough to accommodate the style differences of different students would be a monumental step towards a better World.
Utopian and dreamy, definitely. But certainly achievable. If we’d just find the drive.