Well, it’s 4am, I should be abed, but it’s too hot, and Cassie the company cat has just performed her nightly ritual of devouring a freshly caught rat in front of me. Yay, summer.
So, I just left a comment over at the Libertarian Alliance blog that was sort of about schools. I’m a little known for commenting a lot, all over the well travelled blogs, and frankly it’s easier than blogging, because the conversation has already started and you’re replying rather than kicking things off, you know. Blogging, you have to start the conversation. So here’s a stab at starting one.
Schools. What do I think about schools? I think they’re crap. And by that, I don’t mean “the schools are crap” as in, the schools are currently crap and need fixing somehow. I think schools, as an institution, as an idea, as a system are crap. And every day I think a little more strongly that they’re crap.
I’ve been sceptical of schooling for a long time. I can remember musing, years and years ago, that they were a lousy thing to do to children. They’re a kind of police state; a little society in which children are trapped. As such, they teach children appalling assumptions about what society is; regimentation, arbitrary rules, undemocratic, collectivist, and the “government” and “police” of the school (the teaching staff) have absolute power, and a child soon learns it is better to, for instance, suffer bullying than shop the bullies to the teachers. As in any totalitarian society, the populace learn not to involve themselves with power, and to keep their problems to themselves. Better to suffer the predations of your fellows, than of the state.
I didn’t have a particularly bad time at school. I wasn’t bullied (one or two occasional incidents, but nothing more); I was in that extended middle class in the pupil social hierarchy who are neither at the top nor the bottom. I don’t have any horror stories to tell, and I’m not motivated by that. And I was reasonably bright and academic (though also somewhat “lazy” perhaps) so I did quite well. I also had the odd experience of having been at private prep schools until I was 11 (my parents scrimped and saved) and then went comprehensive, so I saw both sides in that regard, and had the experience of being the poor kid among rich kids, then being considered “posh” at Gasworks Street Comprehensive. But throughout, I had this constant nagging feeling that the whole thing was a terrible waste of time. I’d sometimes look out of the window on a nice sunny day like this, and be “learning” something I’ve long forgotten about the banana crop of Alaska or how to multiply matrices (I still have no clue at all what circumstance would require me to multiply matrices, all I can say is I’ve never in my life found a reason to do it) and think, “what on Earth am I doing in this place? Why the heck am I here?” Schooling is so ingrained in our culture that it seems unthinkable not to do it. It is part of life. But I felt that both we the pupils and they the teachers were, much of the time, acting out a kind of empty, hollow ritual, with no purpose other than itself.
As an adult, it later struck me how inefficient it had been. All those years. All that time, and how little I’d learned at the end. Does it really take twelve years to get from what a number is to how to solve a quadratic equation? Pythagoras’ theorem is simple; it’s just three terms. Did it really take all those lessons? At O Level, the teacher considered me a whizz at the subject, all that happened was that I was interested in chemistry, so I read the whole textbook rather than waiting to be told what was in it. Then at A level, frequently I would arrive for a lesson to find blackboards full of writing to be copied down. I’d sit there doing this dull copyist job, wondering why in God’s name I was sitting in a lab copying words off a blackboard, and why an excellent teacher like Mr Spence was wasting his life writing it up there. Would giving us photocopies have really been more expensive than the cost of the teacher and school facilitlies for two hours? Why the hell were we there? This was nothing but makework to fill the school day.
So well, I think schooling is an empty ritual, and also a damaging one. Learning is not difficult. After more than a century of mass factory schooling, it has failed so badly that everyone is now convinced that learning the basic tasks of reading and arithmetic are enormously difficult tasks that require top experts and ever more radical teaching methods. This is bollocks. Children in schools don’t learn easily because schools are simply an appalling environment in which to learn. The regimentation and bizarre “an hour of this, bell rings, an hour of that, bell rings, an hour of the other” turn learning into an onerous burden against which the young mind rebels. The joy of discovery is lost, the sense of purpose drained out of the task- the purpose is simply to do what is commanded of you. It’s a wonder any child learns a damned thing in the awful places.
Now people will say, “millions of children learn stuff in schools every year”. Well, it’s certainly true that some learning goes on. But we’re discussing efficiency here. If we compared electric motors, and one was 10% efficient, and one was 95% efficient, we wouldn’t defend the 10% one by saying “it turns, doesn’t it?” We’d say, this thing is crap. If we look at the vast resources pumped into schooling, and the return we get for it in terms of intellectual development, we must conclude, for schools, that this thing is crap.
But then, schools were never intended to effect intellectual development. The intention of mass schooling was always social engineering. The purpose was, and remains, to use schools to mould children into “good citizens”. What counts as a good citizen has varied over time; at one time it was to inculcate religious values, then later to make good little workers for industry, and patriots who’d march unquestioning into the machine guns of the Somme, now the good little citizen comes out with a head full of greenism and post-marxist social values. The idea of making people who can think for themselves- and of course you can’t create a free thinker, only destroy one- has always been low on the list of priorities. The existence of good teachers who have helped their students intellectually (and there are many teachers like that, let us be fair here) is more a bug than a feature, which particularly our current masters are doing everything they can to stamp out… though the process of weeding out the non-gramscians has been underway for a long time.
It’s my anecdotal experience that many people of a libertarian, or at least non-conformist, attitude, are people who never quite fell for the myth of schooling. People who were sceptical at the time, and who were self-educators who read books other than the ones set for them by their tutors. The schooling system is designed- intended- to stamp out dissent and inviduality, but however hard they try to do that some proportion of the victims will smell the rat, and not be completely beaten. The bad news is the system works, in that after a decade and a half or two decades of schooling, a sufficient majority of the students will have been indoctrinated such that they will keep the whole system- schooling and statism- running over the next generation. The most pernicious element of schooling- and a very deliberate one- is that a child who has been institutionalised will see the world in institutional terms as an adult, and be a natural statist. Hvaing been ruled by teachers, they will seek rule by government. Some will have learned the lesson of currying favour with power, and the nasty sneaks at school will become the nasty sneaks as adults, those “anonymous complainants” who ring the council because their neighbour dropped a cigarette end. They will see the institution they grew up in mirrored in the society around them. The schools foster the state; and that is why statists are so obsessed with schooling.
While schooling exists- of whatever kind- free thinking will remain a minority sport for a few non-conformists. The libertarian idea- the general one that the individual is the unit, not “society”- will never triumph if it has to attempt to change the minds of a majority of adults for whom institutionalisation has been hammered into them from the age of four. If we are to restore (or create, depending on your historical perspective) liberty, then the schools have to go. It’s not a matter of somehow “recapturing” the schools, because we never had them. It’s not a matter of privatising schools, or paying for them with vouchers. The whole idea of factory schooling- children compelled into a uniformitarian compulsory institutional environment- has to go.
There is already progress on this. Homeschooling and unschooling are significant movements now, particularly in the USA, and they terrify the statists, which is why the likes of Balls and all his progressive friends are so desperate to find an excuse to make them illegal. As such, the schooling issue is a key one for liberty. We who desire liberty must do what we can not only to protect the right of non-schooling, but to encourage and increase it until the trickle becomes a flood. And we must spread the idea that non-schooling is right on its own merits- not just taking your kids out of school because the local comprehensive is crap, thus supporting the idea that the schools can be fixed, but rather that schooling is an inherently broken idea that damages children. We must set our sights on a future society that will consider schooling in the horrified way that people today consider child labour, a society in which people describe their forebears being forced into schools in the same tones as we describe infants despatched up chimneys or down coalmines.
Progressivism marches forward because it shamelessly uses children as a crowbar, demanding that every child must have the “right” to suffer the waste and damage of compulsory schooling. Well, the children must be our crowbar, and we should not be ashamed of this, because whereas our enemy use the children, we seek to help them. Where the enemy seek to close their minds, we seek to open them. They seek to stunt intellectual development, we seek to allow it.
Libertarianism, in its most general sense as just seeking to stay reasonably free, has failed over the past century. Schooling is a primary reason why. It’s time to recognise the destruction- not the reform- of schooling as a primary objective.
Er, that’s it. I was going to weave in my other big point about how infantilisation of young people leads to many of the social problems we now experience, but I seem to have whizzed past that bus stop. I’ll do that in another post, if anyone’s interested, because it’s 5am and I think I’d better go to bed.
Ian
“Education is a drawing out, not a putting in” .. Good teachers and good schools understand this and do produce free thinking adults who can stand on their own two feet - I was luck to go to such a school. What you describe is the result of decades of authoritarian socialist policy that has resulted in the regimented mess we have today - sad ain’t it
I don’t agree. A school is, by its nature, an authoritarian socialist institution. Some do less harm than others. Some do some good as well- but then so does the NHS, but that doesn’t alter that the fundamental idea of the NHS is flawed. There are undoubtedly some good people- good teachers- operating in the schools system, but the flawed institutional nature of it is inescapable.
Cassie the company cat
Have you counted her?
Cats,
For Gawd’s sake change your name back. And then we shall never speak of this incident again.
I kinda like Ruprecht. Pity I didn’t think of it earlier.
I have no idea what is going on any more. I’ve decided to just go with the flow, whatever that may be.
Ian, as you should know at your age, sanity is not a requirement.
Some of the things I learned at school that have stood me in good stead in my life: Skiving, bludging, feigning, dodging, forging, (Kevin wos reely sick yesterday, singed Kevins mum), and above all how to cope in a vicious hierarchical society, (and that was just my fellow pupils).
I’m sure I could have learned these things without going to school and certainly thirty hours a week is a bit much, but they are necessary lessons.
Ruprecht is fine, it’s the Hfurhruhurr which is a bit of a mouthful. Or it sounds like you’ve had a bit of a mouthfull… of something nasty… like Mandy’s c… Oh wait, this isn’t Guido’s comment section, is it?
Class! Class! this is disgraceful!
I pop out to see the Headmaster, for just five minutes, and when I get back, all hell has broken loose.
Well I’m afraid you will all have to stay after school and write out 100 times…
I will at least attempt to keep a thread on topic.
Malreward Crossbuttock
Form Teacher.
Great post, crucial discussion at a time when compulsory schooling is becomming less necessary for most people and yet the Gov seek to increase it and worse to increase the force with which it is applied.
I’ve been mulling on the notion of compulsory education/forced schooling, stimulated by this.
http://www.renegadeparent.net/post/Contact-the-Forced-School-Unit!.aspx#comment
Starting to think that they can keep their comuplsory education, it is indeed wrong of any parent not to provide an environment in which a child can learn well. But we must begin to regognise the dangers of imposed education and in particular forced schooling.
Great to see the discussion happening outside the Home Ed world. People are compelled to learn by their very birth and their genes, there is no need for the government to aply compulsion, all it will do is twist the powerful natural drive we have to learn.
“Er, that’s it. I was going to weave in my other big point about how infantilisation of young people leads to many of the social problems we now experience, but I seem to have whizzed past that bus stop. I’ll do that in another post, if anyone’s interested, because it’s 5am and I think I’d better go to bed.”
would be good to hear this
[...] writing this I read the following blog Down With Skool and I think Counting Cats has hit the nail on the head. Balls and his ilk want to make Autonomous [...]
fascinating post. My other half is fond of saying that this education system is the only way of educating that we know doesn’t work, speaking in terms of educational achievement, but yes, it is remarkably successful at stamping out free thought.
Except of course there are many of us who went through it and have decided against it for our children, and we seem to be growing in number. Has it finally reached its natural end? Are these the vicious death throes of an exhausted monster?
I’d say we can but hope, but actually I think we have to help it on its way by prodding, poking and fighting back
Great post.
Brilliant post, I do so agree. Let it become part of the zeitgeist.
loved it, a real *yep, aha, yep, mmm, aha* kind of read. I had private and state education but the other way round to you, and I was very badly bullied at the comp prior to going to boarding school, but other than that, could have been my thoughts up here. Looking forward to the next post, thanks
Thanks for the kind comments. I’m especially glad to see some from non-schoolers. I think this really is a very important issue. Switching the “discourse” in society from discussions about how to better run the schools to questioning the whole concept of schooling itself is, I think, vital.
“Switching the “discourse” in society from discussions about how to better run the schools to questioning the whole concept of schooling itself is, I think, vital”
Indeed, I think we “non-schoolers” as you call us (and hey we havn’t got a better name, pne day we won’t need one) have been quietly getting on with letting our children learn, leaping for joy as they do, but rarely in public. Learning is possible and amazing without the constraints of school.
Personally I’ve prefered to argue that education without school is possible and wonderful without attacking the schooling system. But as the Gov have decided not to let us get on with simply living and learning it is no longer time to simply get on with living and learning we need to make clear the dangers of forced schooling.
This is a very good post.
“Good teachers and good schools understand this and do produce free thinking adults who can stand on their own two feet”
Actually, ‘free thinking adults who can stand on their own two feet’ are a natural result of growing up. School don’t ‘produce’ anything, ever. The most they can do is support a potential which is inherent in the pupil.
Because schools frequently destroy people’s potential, instead, the occasions when they don’t are hailed as a success for the school - sometimes even by the person involved. But you know, Andy and anyone else who has been thinking like this, the success was entirely yours.
it was the idea of natural learning as described in John Holt that brought me to home education, but John Taylor Gatto really brought it home.
There are quite a lot of us about you know
Brilliant! With you all the way. Want to convert the whole world. Down with badmenn everywhere. (have demolished glasses of wine and am aware I feel a little out of control) Miaow!
Elizabeth, for me the lesson is that any group who are just getting on with living will in the end be spotted by the Government’s Eye Of Sauron and become its target. They can’t leave anyone alone. It’s just not in their nature. So I think home/unschoolers (I just coined the term nonschoolers as a catch-all for both) were bound to be spotted and attacked sooner or later.
But I do think that being anti-school is a virtue in its own right. The history of mass factory schooling is one of coercion and compulsion, and of a deliberate political agenda as I tried to say in my article. It’s a battleground between authoritarians and “the people”, if you like.
I think working for the end of schooling is a noble goal on its own merits. That is- not to try to “ban” schools, but simply to show as many people as possible that they are a Bad Thing, and to encourage alternative, and in my view better, methods of child development. Ultimately, if we are right, and schooling is genuinely harmful, then millions of children are being damaged by it every day. To save them from that is surely a worthy ambition.
I shared you feelings of “what am I doing here” all through my school career. It was memories of the crushing boredom and wasted time not to mention the injustice of the whole thing that made me decide not to send my daughter to school.
At first the latest attack on HE didn’t seem to have any logic to it, but viewed as part of the battle between state control and individual freedom it does make perfect sense. We’ve seen through the myth and horror of horrors we’re raising a generation of free thinkers who will incidentally be better educated than the products of the school system. They will go off into the adult world and prove by example that school just isn’t necessary, encouraging others to home educate their children. No wonder they want to stamp us out now before the school-free movement grows too big to stop.
I’ve always said home education is a positive choice and I’m not against school per se, but lately I’ve begun to wonder if ‘not being against school’ isn’t self-destructive. Still, I don’t like being against something, I find it much more constructive and productive to be in favour of something. So from now on I’ll just be in favour of the abolition of school. And in favour of finding - more! - good alternatives. We must realize, however, that in the absence of schools as they are now - and if we don’t want them being reintroduced within days of disappearing - parents will be required to make a conscious choice about the way they want the education of their children to take place. That in itself will require a major revolution, I think.
Not quite relevant to the discussion, but one of my fondest memories of school was O Level art. I elected to do it, and on the first day of the course we all discovered we were on the O Level Graphic Design course. So a bunch of us including myself complained that we weren’t doing Art. And the Head Of Art told us we hadn’t the ability to do it. One girl was grudgingly allowed, eventually, but I was told in no uncertain terms that I had no talent for art whatsoever.
I wasn’t interested in the course, I didn’t (as a genuine timing mistake) turn up for the O Level exam. I didn’t care anyway.
I now make my living as an artist.
you could go into any school be it private or state and ask any kid where they would rather be and i would bet my life it would be anywhere other than school, and that would be thier choice not thier parents. In my experience if a child had a choice of gettin up early in the morning or staying in bed and only doing anything educational when they felt like it then most would definitley choose the latter. You could argue that either way of educating home or school smacks of more of what the parents THINK is best for the children. Some people will swear by school education and some will swear by home education and in life you will always get kids hungry for learning and need a more structured day a school can provide and you will always get kids who will only be willing to learn at thier own pace and maybe those kids would benefit by been home educated. As for bullying teachers, they need confronted, unfurtunatley in this world our offspring will come into contact with bullies in all walks of life probabley even more so in thier working lives, it,s a horrible fact of life . Home education verses school education, there is no right or wrong way, as parents we can only hope and pray that the way we have chosen to educate our children is the right way for them and not educated in a way that has been more to do with induldging our own ideals about the way WE think our children should recieve an education.
What a fantastic post, sums up my thoughts on school, I too felt it was completely pointless spending entire lessons copying from the blackboard a whole load of nonsense that the teacher in turn had copied from a book.
Practically everything I know now I learned DESPITE school rather than because of it, much of it since leaving school and entering the adult world where I could choose what I wanted to learn.
Keep it up, looking forward to reading more.
As a libertarian and teacher, I totally agree. My parents were teachers as well, yet freedom of the mind was what they taught their students and me. As a history teacher it is easier for me to teach students to have a more open mind, to not trust, but verify. The Socratic Method is the only way for school to not be tyrannical. Ask a question, have the students find the answers for themselves, then question their findings. The “basics” have grown beyond the basics. Reason is no longer taught, therefore one cannot realize his own state of mind/freedom. Keep the masses dependent and defeated, and a Statist government you will have.
BTW Statist is not even in my browser’s dictionary. Wonder why?
@ Maggie
“Home education verses school education, there is no right or wrong way, as parents we can only hope and pray that the way we have chosen to educate our children is the right way for them and not educated in a way that has been more to do with induldging our own ideals about the way WE think our children should recieve an education.”
It should not be about hoping and praying that the coin has fallen on the right side. It’s about looking at the options and picking the best one for you child, it’s about looking at that child and listening to them. We have piles of information on how people learn, parents and teachers should know about this, today’s teachers tend to know little about history and philosophy of education, they tend to have read narrowly on the subject.
We should watch how the child learns and provide an educational environment on the basis of the child’s needs and what we know about learning. Every person should know about learning, it is not a field for experts. Many of the “experts” know less than they would if they themselves were good learners.
It needn’t be about indulging a parents ideals, it ought to be based on an understanding of development, how it happens best, and a deep knowledge of the child himself along with a response to the child’s own needs and desires.
“But I do think that being anti-school is a virtue in its own right. The history of mass factory schooling is one of coercion and compulsion, and of a deliberate political agenda as I tried to say in my article. It’s a battleground between authoritarians and “the people”, if you like.”
Agreed, John Holt in which of his books I can’t quite remember which, maybe Instead of Education, said that we cannot (or could not then) change the system (he had tried), but we could make it easier for those who wished to live outside it and that is how free learing would grow.
Maybe now, that we have reached a point in this country where we are a large enough group for the Gov to wish to constrain us and where the failings of the expanding eductional system are so obvious, maybe now we will be able to change it for others and share the freedom and excellence that can be achieved if people are allowed to learn naturally.
We could do with a less dramatic UK version of this film on compulsory education:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uexMYBkfCic&feature=related.
The question is how to get the general public to see that there are better ways than school. I know my neighbours find many of their children’s teachers tiresome, as they dictate what kids should have in lunchboxes, judge flat black fabric shoes unsuitable on safety grounds because they are “not leather” and scold teenage girls for putting concealer on their spots!!
Great little book on the topic that I’m still getting my head round
Unlearning: How Not to be Governed by Nader Chokr
Though to be honest you make the point more succinctly.
Bloody hell Ian, was your Art teacher blind?
I have seen your cartoons. I got O Level Art without going to a lesson for 2 years, and your stuff pisses all over anything I can do!
Maybe it’s a cartoon thing.
I have an old school friend who is an animator(did Billy the Fish for Channel 4) and he was always copping it from the teacher for doing cartoons all the time.
But my main point.
My great great grandfather owned a private school in Caerphilly, in the 1860s. It was no Eton or anything, just the three Rs, so no indoctrination to speak of.
He was a great believer in something Mark Twain said.
Teach them to read and write, then show them where the library is.
There were plenty of them about in the S Wales Valleys too. Miners Institutes had better libraries than the Public ones.
Then in 1870 they Nationalised gramp and made him first head of the brand new Twyn School.
I read somewhere, perhaps someone can verify it, that adult literacy in 1870 was around 94% despite what Socialist propaganda might say.
What do you recon it is now? 60%?
Yes 140 years of factory education has been a wonderful improvement hasnt it!
Ian,
I too was taught matrix multiplication at school - lots on matrices - at GCSE level. It does have it’s uses and you’ll find out doing a maths/physics/engineering(?) degree. God alone knows why they taught it to every top-set 13/14/15 year old. What percentage of those kids d’ya reckon will ever multiply a matrix in their life?
And if you asked teacher the “why?” of it then they couldn’t really answer. Not blaming the teachers. I mean Dougie Howser himself would have struggled with where I mainly used the techniques of matrix manipulation - things like reasonably advanced Quantum Mechanics onward… I mean you start of on QM using the Schodinger Equation. Heisenberg’s matrix mechanics comes later.
Great post.
From the viewpoint of convincing “them out there” that school-free education is at least worthwhile, I don’t think it’s helpful to attack school as an organ of state control and mindlessness (even though it is one).
Most parents don’t become attached to the idea of sending their kids to school as a great way of turning little Johnnie and Mary into mindless automatons. From my experience they do it because of some combination of:
(a) they’ve been brainwashed (by their own schooling and the fact that everyone else does it) and they can’t see that they’re just doing what they’ve been brainwashed into doing
(b) they genuinely want their children to have a “good education”, probably because they see school, quallies and all that (still, and largely mistakenly), as a way of setting them on their way to economic prosperity and don’t know of any alternatives that they have good enough reasons to trust
(c) they see sending the children to school as a socially acceptable way of getting outsourced child care (usually free) while they’re off out doing the click-whirr “must earn more money to provide a good (material) lifestyle for the family” thing
(d) they subscribe to a version (sometimes religious, sometimes secular) of the original sin doctrine whereby children need to be “disciplined ” (i.e. coerced) into “learning” (i.e. being conditioned) to do anything that adults consider to be worthwhile and will sit in front of the telly and eat marshmallows 24/7 forever unless compelled to do otherwise. This includes, as a sub-variety “I have to send them away from me otherwise they’ll turn out as useless clingy victims”.
Personally I do not subscribe to any of these four beliefs, but I think that they are basically the things we need to (creatively) neutralise (i.e. refute or side-step) when putting across the virtues of school-free education to the unbeliever.
Of the four, I believe that (a) is the hardest to combat. It would require something akin to personal psychotherapy (bringing into consciousness what has been deleted from consciousness). However I don’t think it’s necessary to remove it - just to work around it.
(b) and (d) can readily be dealt with by providing plenty of examples. That’s really all that’s needed. “light, light and more light”, as M. Hugo said. But I mean lots and lots of examples. So many examples that the “well that’s OK for them, but back at reality…” filters get overwhelmed.
(c) seems to need some socio-economic restructuring. Outsourcing child care to school definitely “works” for parents who want to play the rat-on-a-treadmill game, and for those who genuinely can’t avoid the rat-on-a-treadmill game (who have my genuine sympathy). On the other hand perhaps this issue can just be treated like (b) and (d). Seeing enough school-free families having a blast, even though it may be of the happy-though-poor variety might just do the trick.
I think I need to get out more. . .
I responded a bit on my own blog. But more importantly, I wanted to mention the bit of a Paul Graham article where he points out the other real purpose of school (and which you haven’t addressed): it keeps kids out of the way. It’s linked to by Brian Micklethwait along with some other related discussion.
Thank you for writing this, I totally agree and please do the next one you promised. You might also consider the effect on adult society of the institutionalisation of children. I personally believe that we have become less tolerant of children because they are kept in schools instead of mingling among us.
James of Ashford’s strategy looks good, and his (c) takes into account the other real purpose of school.
Louisa, there are lots of bits to fit into the infantilisation article, and at the moment it’s a bit like an item of Ikea furniture. I have all these parts in front of me, I know they fit together somehow, but how?
Yep, I’m in agreement about schools being crap, regardless of their current state. I wrote a letter to Jenny Russell at the Guardian on the subject and am expecting to speak to her this week on the subject. She is writing an article on the subject, and hopefully about the current situation with home education. She is worth contacting.
My letter is on my blog, and the post is here:
http://happyathome.homeschooljournal.net/2009/07/02/238/
@ James of Ashford
Thanks for bulletpointing the stuff that’s been mushing about in my brain.
I’m starting to think though that shying away from clear citritcism of the school system is a bit gutless. They can put shiny happy home educators down to other factors, the two need to be seen side by side and contrasted. In part so people can begin to see better ways of doing education that are neither “home education” or school.
@ Elizabeth:
Sorry - I think what I wote may have been unclear. I am not against attacking school - I’m just wary of the tactical usefulness of attacking school on the grounds that it is an organ of statist conditioning and mindlessness. I think that approach is rather like running straight up the beach towards the enemy’s best machine-gunners. And I’m a coward.
Let’s attack school for some other things which are harder to blank out:
It is ineffective in achieving its own ostensible objectives, and is also less effective in those terms than available alternatives (so it’s not even the best of a bad bunch). The more proceduralised it gets, the less effective it becomes. That is a clue - how about trying to de-proceduralising it? - but they don’t get it because they don’t accept the possibility of a process that is emergent, undefinable and optimal (i.e. one which it’s unwise to monkey with).
It is inefficient - there are other ways of having children learn what they need to learn (or even what we want them to learn, if you want to keep that bit in the spec) that are radically quicker and less effort (and more fun)
It is anachronistic - the problem mass schooling was supposed to fix no longer exists. Mass schooling may once have been necessary, because the vast majority of children would not have been exposed to enough literacy and numeracy had they not gone to school. But now that literacy and numeracy are everywhere to be seen, it is reasonable to expect children to pick up what they need in the same way that they learn to walk, understand spoken language and talk - by a combination of an instinctive feeling that learning to do what everyone else can do matters, together with exposure to large-enough numbers of real-world examples from which to make inferences. It is no longer necessary to put our children into the hands of subject-matter experts to have them learn this stuff.
It goes nowhere - the old contract that getting better grades set you up for a better career has been torn up - not by the children but by the would-be employers. Employers know that most of what is taught in the curriculum is irrelevant to the world of work. I have absolutely no idea what my son (now aged 4) will “need to know” in order to earn a decent living when he is 25. No idea at all. And nor does anyone else. Employers generally do not yet seem to understand that school cannot “teach” the very things they most want - teamwork, leadership, creativity, integrity (I could go on, but you know the list as well as I do). This is not because the system needs further tweaking, it’s because schools are there to teach, and those are things which cannot be taught. Furthermore, employers no longer provide careers, they just provide a job. A succession of jobs, if that’s what you’re after and you’re lucky. It is up to the individual to craft a career out of whatever sequence of opportunities may arise. Hardly an incentive to work your butt off at school, is it?
School is a damn poor way of socialising children and young people. It sets up reward and punishment schedules (to use B.F. Skinner’s terminology) which predictably promote cynical and in extreme cases violent behaviour. It seems to be doing this more and more effectively over time, presumably because the system is getting more and more Skinnerian as it struggles to get a grip on its problems. Children do not become appropriately socialised through contact with their peers. They do it by modelling the behaviour of adults with whom they have a strong relationship of trust. The overwhelmingly most effective role models for a child are its parents. All it needs is plenty of time and attention. Those parents who might nonetheless wish to pursue the quest for “peer-group socialisation” are onto a loser. The more geographically fragmented society gets the harder it becomes to find a school where most of the children have parents who are “like” oneself. Since most parents really want their children to grow up “like” themselves (but a bit better!), finding a school that provides the “right” kind of peer group is tough and getting tougher. The only vaguely plausible ways out of that one are public school, which is clearly a self-limiting system (if everyone could go, no-one would want to), regardless of its other shortcomings, and faith schools based on high concentrations of people of the same faith in certain localities (i.e. ghettoes).
Having covered the “socialisation” ground in that way, I now begin to suspect that my earlier post needs another item covering the great socialisation myth. I had believed that this would be covered by item (d), but now I see that it doesn’t really get to the heart of it. So let there be a new item
(e) they (incorrectly) believe that children are appropriately socialised primarily through contact with their peers, mediated and moderated where necessary by “responsible” adults (not necessarily the parents), and that school is the most effective and practicable way of accomplishing the necessary socialisation.
I still think I need to get out more . . .
[...] Schooling Here’s a link that might be of interest to some of you. [...]
Coupla resources of possible interest:
Gatto’s classic doorstopper Underground History of American Education is available for free online. His latest, Weapons of Mass Instruction, is even more hardhitting, full of examples of people who did extraordinary things without the benefit of schooling, until you get Gatto’s point that they did BECAUSE they weren’t schooled (and what they did is probably illegal now).
Also, Robinson’s Curriculum: a complete homeschooling system on CDs. Lots of food for thought in various articles about it on the homepage. The Robinsons are a devoutly Christian family, but but even if you’re not, there’s some solid stuff here: Arthur Robinson is a CalTech graduate and former science professor, and has strongly libertarian views.
[...] a week ago, I banged out a posting in the middle of the night about my doubts regarding mass schooling, which went down quite well, and I sort of implied I’d do a follow up about our attitude to [...]
It was Adam Smith was it not all those years ago who opined that schooling had to be very good indeed to deprive a child of so much liberty.
That skools are crap is an idea which needs arguing.
A libertarian front line will open up if the Badman proposal are implemented.
Consider the state kidnapping case written about by Christopher Booker
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/columnists/christopherbooker/5743419/Is-the-state-guilty-of-child-kidnap.html
“The only reason offered in these documents for the abduction of the children is Mr Jones’s “delusional belief system” that special care should be taken of his children because of their elevated family connections.”
The views espoused above about Skool could easily be considered “delusional” by LEA’s and Social workers, especially if espoused by free range and combative Home Educators.
R