Education and schooling are not the same thing Part 2
Education and schooling are not the same thing Part 2
The freedom to dream of something better
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In part 1 of this 2-part series, I outlined our personal journey to home education and some of the realisations that I came to in order to make that decision. You can find a link to part 1 at the end of this article if you have not seen it already. But that process of eye-opening about education did not stop with our decision to home educate.
All the reading, and our personal experiences with education professionals, started flipping a whole stack of switches, turning on yet more light bulbs in my mind. The light they shed laid bare an ugliness to the school system that I had never fully appreciated before. It was hidden under that bright facade of faceless children, all smart in their uniforms passing our house going to and from school, eagerly chatting with parents or peers, milling in noisy exited chaos in the school yards at lunch time. It was an ugliness that I had blocked out of my own childhood. That my son had been desperately trying to show me for some time. With meme collections of sarcasm and despair about school. Questions about why schools teach this useless thing instead of that useful thing. Frequent complaints of too much, too hard, too boring. And eventually with his total inability to attend.
It has been said on many an occasion that sometimes we need to step back from a problem in order to see a solution. I suggest that sometimes we need to step back from a problem to even see that it is a problem. Most of us have gone through the school system, some with less pain than others. We have sat on hard chairs at desks and copied words and pictures from the board - in my case a blackboard filled with coloured chalk. We have sat reading textbooks, that we may or may not have found interesting, next to other children with an entirely different set of interests and strengths, reading the exact same textbook. Probably the exact same pages. We have wrestled with grammar and algebra and chemical formulae. We have memorised times-tables and dates and places. And we have regurgitated all the information that we crammed into our heads onto exam papers, in exchange for apparently priceless certificates. These certificates, we were told, were the keys to our future. We have gone through school, and in doing so we have been conditioned to view sitting silently on a chair listening to an adult as the only valid form of learning for our children. We have been persuaded that the sheer amount of information that our children can absorb and then regurgitate in exams is what will decide the course of their entire life. But how much of the information that we learnt have we actually used since? How much can we even remember now? Did those exams that we passed or failed really dictate our entire future? Did those that failed the exams turn out to be the total failures in life that we were always taught they would be?
We are constantly told that school is essential to prepare children for ‘real life’. Perhaps that was once true, when folk from poor families had no other access to information than word of mouth from their peers. When they were expected to be God-fearing obedient workers in the industrial ventures of the rich. But is is really true today? Or is school actually taking more and more of the little time children have as children away from real life?
Modern employers value critical thinking, the ability to learn new things quickly and independently, and the ability to create new ideas. They are increasingly recognising the benefits of healthy work-life balance and good mental health, problem solving, collaborative teamwork, and employees challenging the ways things have always been done. Schools, on the other hand, still teach facts by rote learning that the children must accept as the only correct ones. They still teach children not to question the information presented, or the adults presenting it. Not to talk about anything deemed ‘off-topic' in class. To do what they are told and only what they are told. To do it when they are told. Schools still focus on attendance at all costs, competition with peers and total unquestioning obedience to authority. How does any of this help prepare children for real life in modern society?
Even in my own youth, now four decades ago, the culture shock that I felt when I moved from school education to university in the 1980's was huge. We were suddenly expected to take charge of our own education. To be self motivated. To think critically about information presented as fact. To question assumptions. To come up with new ideas. To manage our own time. After 13 years of having the exact opposite drilled into me, I was totally un-prepared. Forty years later I am still struggling to see how school really prepared me for anything I have since faced, either in the workplace or in life. My Mum encouraged my reading skills and taught me how to do mental maths in a way that made sense to me. Everything else I have needed since school I have had to learn as I went. My real learning didn't stop after I left school, it started then. So why do we persist in believing the education system when it says that school is essential to prepare children for real life? Could it be because we were conditioned as children to accept any information presented by it as the only correct fact?
While the attitudes of the education system appear firmly rooted in the past, it has grown massively in scale and scope since the concept of schooling was invented. Intead of village schools set up for a few children by local benefactors, we now have a massive education system dealing with millions of children. In the process of that change, everything has become about standardisation.
The education system has developed a standardised national curriculum of information for children to learn. For any specific topic this information is only part of a much more detailed story, and in todays fast-developing world, at least some of that information may be out of date before it even hits a brain cell. While information in the curriculum is limited in depth it is ever expanding in breadth. Yet even then, it is only a pin head on the tip of the iceberg of things that could be learned about. What makes the information in the national curriculum more important than all the other information out there? Who decides what to put in it and why? This we are never told. The general approach seems to be to force-feed children ‘all the information they might one day need depending on their career choice but will probably never use’. This is done, we are told, to give all children the same chances in life. But it is overwhelming and exhausting for the very children it is meant to be helping, requiring ever increasing amounts of homework just to cram it all in. The children are not remotely interested in vast swathes of it. It is not teaching any of the skills that employers actually want. And, in my opinion, it is ultimately doomed to failure in terms of effectively preparing children for a fast-developing modern world. The content of the national curriculum will always be behind the times because it is too huge and unweildy to update quickly. And in the digital age, remembering facts that we don't need and aren't interested in is an incredibly overrated skill.
The picture gets even worse when we also look at the standardised methods of delivering the national curriculum, and at the methods of measuring and comparing performance. None of it takes any account of the differences in interests between individual children, which will significantly affect their motivation to learn certain subjects and their capacity to retain information. None of it takes any account of the differences in learning styles and preferred learning media between individual children, which will significantly affect how well they process the information in the first place and therefore how well they understand it. Even when children are recognised as needing a different kind of support in school, as with those children with additional needs, they are still expected to fit in clearly defined boxes. To somehow thrive under a different set of generic approaches.
It seems that by trying to cater for the possible routes in life of millions of children, the education system has lost sight of how to truly educate one single child. Instead of reaching for an outcome where each child reaches their individual potential, the system pursues population-wide targets of academic output in the form of attendance and exam grades. And despite claims to the contrary, exams are not measuring individual aptitude. Scoring is rigged to ensure that a standardised proportion of children obtain each of the available grades each year, from the top grades to fails. There was much uproar during the pandemic about how to further fiddle the grade boundaries so that children who may have got poorer results than expected due to time in lockdown were not disadvantaged relative to those in other years. The most that school exam grades can tell us is where a child's results fell within that particular cohort of children. And each year, after 11 or more years of telling them that their entire life depends on passing these exams, the rigged scoring ensures that the same standardised proportion of children will fail. This, we are told, is because if every child passed, the exams would be seen as too easy. But where is the fairness in a system that would pass a child with a certain result one year, and then fail them the next, just to keep to a standardised quota of grades?
Add into this mix the sensory, physical, cognitive and social challenges faced by many children with additional needs that are simply not being met, and it is easy to see how the very environment of school becomes so toxic to some children. If we really wanted to know why children’s mental health is declining, I personally think that looking at the education system would be a good place to start. But as we are mostly conditioned not to question it, it seems far easier to blame social media and video games than to face up to this ever-growing behemoth that is ruling more and more of our children’s lives, and indeed more and more of the lives of their families.
Because the influence of the education system is not just on children in the classroom any more. It reaches its tentacles much further. It controls when families can go on holiday or spend time with distant relatives. What clothes and shoes parents must spend limited funds on for their children and where they must buy them from. It often controls children’s extra-curricular activities. It eats away at the already limited time children have outside school to spend with family or on hobbies or with friends, with yet more schoolwork at home. It ties tired parents into spending their free time after work persuading tired children to undertake that schoolwork. And for many families with children with additional needs, it even attempts to control the very relationships between parents and children - how they parent their children at home. So why do we permit all this control over our lives, well beyond the school gates? Could it be because we were conditioned by school to be unquestioningly obedient?
In March of this year we had a wave of pupil protests in the UK. Children objecting to ever more control of their existence - mostly around uniforms and toilet access. Suspending girls from education over the length of their skirts, and banning pupils from leaving classrooms to go to the toilet, were the focus of many children's quite understandable ire. We would never stand for adults being banned from going to the toilet - even prisoners have a toilet in their cell. It was disappointing, but perhaps not unsurprising, that the education professionals utterly dismissed the valid objections of these children, putting the protests down to social media and yobbish behaviour. Even more interesting to me, though, was that these professionals appeared more concerned that the objections being raised by the children were too often supported by the children’s parents. This strongly suggests to me that these professionals think that neither children, nor their parents, should be allowed to question the authority of schools - despite the parents being grown adults who have long left school, and who pay for the education system with the income tax taken out of their wages. The press, of course, focused on the use of social media to co-ordinate the protests, the headlines reflecting the view of education ‘experts' that it was use of social media that stirred up the protests, not the increasingly unbearable situation in many schools. What really boggles my mind about all this, though, is that schools teach children about the UN Convention on Child Rights and then have the audacity to get upset when the children stand up for those rights. Why does no-one question this? Could it be because we were conditioned in school not to question authority?
In the same month, teacher’s unions were up in arms in the press about Ofsted inspections of schools. They were calling for the whole school inspection system to be scrapped after a single headteacher committed suicide in January, allegedly because, after the first inspection in years, her school was downgraded. We will never really know what was going on for that poor woman to take her own life, nor should we. But against that one headteacher, stack thousands of children with additional needs who can go their entire school lives without those needs being properly met, who suffer huge impacts on their mental and physical health on a daily basis, sometimes leading to suicide ideation if not worse. There seems to be no will from the education system to even acknowledge that this is happening, let alone fix it. There is currently much wailing and gnashing of teeth about ‘ghost children’ that didn't go back to school after the pandemic and what awful things might happen to them if we don't ‘get them back’. But absolutely no appreciation of why that has happened, or how the education system has crushed those children so badly that they simply cannot face it any more. School was the awful thing that happened to them. Yet, despite the constant testing and comparison of pupils and schools, there is still no clear measure of progress, or even accountability, for the education system itself. The education system, it appears, is beyond reproach, beyond question. Could it be that it is the very conditioning that we all absorbed in school that has allowed this to happen, un-noticed, beneath our very noses, in an otherwise democratic society?
Mine is not the only voice shouting out that there is something dreadfully wrong with the education system. A system that we are too often forced, by law and circumstance, to entrust our children to, whether we agree with how it is run or not. A system in which our children often spend more time awake than they do at home. But what is the alternative for the child of working parents who need to put food on the table, keep a roof over their families heads, and the heating on in the winter? We were lucky enough to be able to home educate because I can do my day job from home, mostly. Many families don't have that luxury. They need somewhere to put their children where they will be safe, and learning, while they attend their jobs. We are assured that place is school. And, unlike most other alternatives, it is generally free at the point of use.
I understand that not all children find school such an inhospitable place as my son did, and that perhaps my view of the bigger picture is tainted by our own personal experiences. School has a hugely important role in society and, where done right, it can be a positive and formative period in a child’s life. But I am no longer convinced that school, in it's current form, is either as safe, or as much a beacon of learning, as the education system makes out. And the situation that our children are trapped in somehow seems to be getting worse rather than better. So how do we make it better?
In my opinion, we urgently need to recognise that, no matter how many millions of children the education system is dealing with, there is no one size fits all for true education. Perhaps we need to go back to first principles. Ultimately parents, not schools, are legally responsible for their children's education. Under Section 30 of the Education (Scotland) Act 1980, for example, parents have a duty to provide efficient education suitable to the age, ability and aptitude of their child, either by sending them to school or by other means. As home educating parents, we look at the ability and aptitude of our children both individually and holistically. What is our child interested in? What are their individual strengths that they can build on? What basic needs do they require to be met in order to learn effectively? I suggest that we need to tame the behemoth that we have created and look at how to turn the education system round to focus on educating the individual rather than the millions. If schools took the individual and holistic approach of home educating parents, there would be no unmet needs. And children would be taught according to their strengths, not shamed for their weaknesses.
There is no legal definition of efficient and suitable education for home education. However, case-law suggests that it prepares children for life in a modern civilised society and enables them to achieve their full potential. For reasons previously outlined, in my opinion, if schools were held to the same standard it is unlikely that they would currently pass muster. Again, perhaps we need to go back to first principles. The most basic thing an adult needs in order to do well in life is to obtain enough money to pay for everything that they need. When schooling was invented that meant either working for or marrying into a rich family. That hasn't been the case for a long time, and the digital age in particular has opened up a huge variety of possibilities for self employment alongside the more traditional route of ‘getting a job’. The job market itself has changed beyond all recognition thanks to the fast moving development of technology and more enlightened attitudes in modern workplaces. If we could slim down the sheer volume of facts that children are expected to absorb, generally to those that they are actually interested in and have an aptitude for, we could use the rest of children's time at school to properly discuss concepts more important to living and working in todays society. We could really talk to them about mental health, first aid, their personal rights, other people's rights, animal welfare, race, religion, gender, disability, how to negotiate, how to debate rather than argue, how democracy works, financial management, time management, how to find a job, how to set up a business, how tax works, how to look for information and how to critically analyse it, relationships. Not just spout information at them that they need to regurgitate verbatim, but actually have conversations where we listen to their questions and their developing views and offer different perspectives for them to consider for themselves. This is the stuff that our children have to figure out for themselves when it slams them in the face once they leave school. This is the stuff that would prepare them for real life. This is the stuff that parents would do themselves if they actually had enough time with their children to even think about it in between work and school and homework.
In my dream school, there would be no uniform, no rules beyond common decency. Home work would not be a thing. Family holidays would be taken when it suits the families and any work missed caught up on online if of interest or otherwise simply skipped. There would be no assessment or exams, no competion, no rewards and punishments to manipulate children. There would be free access to any and all age appropriate information, a variety of media to pick from and adults to ask question of, to bounce ideas off, to guide debate. Children could get up and move about if they needed, or leave the room and join in remotely from a quiet space elsewhere. They could join in from home if they wished. They could work alone or collaborate with other children as they chose. They could come in late or leave early if it suited. Attendance registers would be used to check who was present, but there would be no measuring, no unhealthy and unfair target of 100 percent. And they could go to the toilet whenever they damn well needed to.
I am no education professional, I don't know if or how any of this would work in practice. But I am an ex-pupil. And the parent of a child that the education system in its current form has failed. Badly. My eyes are wide open now and the lights are all on. I know that what we have is not working for many children. And I am certain that if we could give children a truly individual education with a clear and specific value to them, within a school environment that truly catered for everyone, every single child would reach their full potential. There would be no need to force any child into school, and no need to force them to stay. They would be pulled back by their curiosity
I can dream of something better.
Further reading
A suitable education for every child
Inverse Relationship Between GPA and Innovative Orientation.
Can You Measure an Education? Can You Define Life’s Meaning?
Pupil protests across England and Wales spread by social media, experts say
Pressure mounts on Ofsted amid outcry after death of headteacher
