Saturday, August 09, 2008

Guest Blog: Schools Should be About More Than Learning

By Andrew Ford

The DSFC’s latest statistic strikes me as inane. 84% of parents and 75% of children don’t think bullying is a problem.

Well, of course they don’t.

Bullying is something to which minorities are subjected. Vast numbers of students pass through the education system without ever experiencing it.

Moreover, children who witness bullying as third parties have very little concept of what it actually is. While bullying can have practical and physical implications in the short-term, the long term problems that arise from it are very much emotional and internalised. Very few eleven-year-olds are empathetic enough to understand the hardships suffered by students who feel socially excluded.

Having fallen prey to bullies at various stages throughout my education, I can testify to that last point. While I’m sure it made an amusing spectacle to onlookers, hearing a peer scream, “You f**king fag!” in my ear before publicly drenching me in shaving foam was one of the low points in my short life.

I could relate numerous similar scenes – but my point is this: For 75% of students, it’s “not a problem”; for the victims, it makes life seem unbearable.

The way the government parades these superficial statistics is symptomatic of a flawed approach to education. It is an approach that fails to recognise the individuality of both schools and the young people learning in them. More importantly, however, it cynically assumes that the purpose of our schools is purely economic, and thus fails to address issues like bullying.

There are two key attitudes built into our curricula. Firstly, that childhood is preparation to enable us to fulfil our purpose as adults. Secondly, that this purpose is to be productive for the British economy. In my A level textbook, the stated function of state-funded education is ‘to shift the long run aggregate supply curve outward’. (In other words, to increase the productive capacity of the population.)

But I think we should think about this for a moment. Excluding holidays, for up to fourteen years young people spend almost every weekday in school. Consider, then, that the average life expectancy in the UK is 78.7 years. This means the normal British student who completes A-levels will be enrolled in a school or college for about 17% of their life. That is not an insignificant proportion.

It is surely wrong to view schooling merely as a gateway to working life. Instead it should be a more generically beneficial endeavour. Should it be preparation for adulthood? Certainly – both economically and personally. But it should also be a positive experience in the present.

My father is the head teacher at comprehensive school. Every year on GCSE and A-level results day, he comes home proud of his student’s achievements. He then spends a good ten minutes looking sullenly at newspapers which belittle those achievements with articles about ‘easy’ exam papers and ‘worthless’ qualifications. Results day is his cup final – everything builds towards it. But, on a normal school day, he often returns home bemoaning the bureaucratic aspects of his job: filling in forms, hiring staff and so on. Little of his time is spent supporting the well-being of his students, and even less worrying about their raw happiness. Perhaps it is time that he was praised or criticised under more meaningful criteria than A grades and B grades.

Children and teenagers should feel enriched by a day at school. Social interaction and friendship-building shouldn’t be seen as the unfortunate by-product of factory-style learning, but as a life-experience for young people. Similarly, sport in schools shouldn’t be a solution to obesity’s drain on the health service, but a way for kids to pursue their passions. Lessons should not just be test-passing courses, but (when possible) intellectually exciting mental challenges.

But it is also true that problems like bullying can no longer be ignored. Statistics released in 2007 show that one in five teenage girls self-harm. I know about ten students who have at some point suffered from debilitating depression. Unhappiness in teenagers may not be a headline grabber for the Daily Mail, but it is certainly rampant.

Why is there not a counsellor working at every secondary school in the country? (Some friends and I estimated that the cost of doing this would be less than £150 million; the DSCF will spend £74 billion in 2010/11.) The answer is simple and desperately sad: the happiness of fifteen year olds is transient. Depression among the young impacts very little on the long run aggregate supply curve.

18 comments:

Anonymous said...

That all sounds a bit confused. Every school should have a bullying policy. It would not true to say that the problem is just ignored.

It might be correct to say that private schools focus more directly upon bullying. Local authorities are, perhaps, more concerned that state schools protect themselves and the LA. It's up to each school to ensure that they have a good policy and implement it. This guest blog reads like it should have been written about 20 years ago.

Anonymous said...

Surely the concept of a guest blog is completely incongruous. If you haven't got time to blog then don't, neither the world nor your blog will end - although you might slip down the rankings a bit. The guest can have their own blog, afterall it is free ...

Andrew Cooper said...

Excellent post, Andrew. The only way around this abuse and/or wrong headed use of statistics is, in my view, to open up government much more than is currently the case.

The current administration certainly seem to see the education system as a machine for providing employees. New Labour - particularly under Blair - has been so keen not to be seen as socialist that it rolls over on its back as soon as 'business' speaks.

I don't support any political party these days. I've voted labour and libem in the past. But I now feel very strongly that the current system - a system which allows, for example, someone with none of the qualities of a leader into its top job is seriously broken.

www.mindworksblog.com

Unsworth said...

"Children and teenagers should feel enriched by a day at school"

Why? And thence, How?

In particular what does 'enriched' actually mean? This is another example of the jargon which is overloading the education system currently. That in itself is symptomatic of all pervasive wooly-mindedness of those responsible for administration of education and educational policies.

Anonymous said...

"Why is there not a counsellor working at every secondary school in the country? "

Because we are trying to raise confident, self-reliant young adults, not weak, snivelling little crybabies who run to have a hug and their tears dried as soon as they meet any kind of resistance, perhaps..?

Sorry if that was too harsh for you.

Anonymous said...

This little more than a personal whinge, padded out with psycho-babble. The concept of "enriching" the lives of school children makes me reach for the sick-bag - teach the little buggers to read, write, add up and behave. That really would benefit them and society.

Anonymous said...

Schools are ALL about learning. As an aside you could argue that they are about training people to think as well.

Schools can do more, of course (maybe should) and good luck to those that can. But at a time when our schools are not even achieving learning status its drivel to say they are about more.

Anonymous said...

Well they certainly won't be 'enriched' by going on to higher education - in fact they will be £20,000 'enpoored'.

Anonymous said...

Children and teenagers should feel enriched by a day at school [...] Lessons should not just be test-passing courses, but (when possible) intellectually exciting mental challenges.

100% agree

Anonymous said...

The author bemoans sloppy stastics, then calculates school time as "excluding holidays". Pah. How many weeks holiday do kids get? 2 weeks Christmas, 2 weeks Easter, 6 weeks summer and usually another 3 weeks for half terms. So... 13 weeks, or a quarter of a year. Not to mention the lack of any comparison between the child's working week of less than 30 hours and a typical 40 hour adult working week before family duties.

Hint.. don't criticise something and then do the exact same thing yourself. There's a name for people who do that.

As for the rest of it... couldn't

Anonymous said...

'Schools should be about more than learning'

I agree with the above, but in my experience as a university academic for over 4 decades, and a school governor for a decade, the majority comprehensive schools, primary and secondary have failed to deliver the minimum standard of learning. Many reasons for this, low expectations (from teachers), discipline, curriculum design, parental input, governmental interference etc.. there are`already plethora of counsellors in each school drawn from the teaching staff. Unless parents/carers/guardians realise that they have a shared responsibility with teachers, I do not see any improvement in the horizon. In my humble opinion, when Education became talking point from so called experts from institutes of education (from late 1960s/early 1970s,)the school inevitably became an environment for experimentation and government interference.

I still feel that we should continue to emphasise learning at the core of whatever other 'enrichment experience' we should be providing.

About pupils performance in GCSE and A levels. The discussion can be complex. I would only suggest that there should be a single exam board(currently three boards in England) so that each pupil is taught from the same syllabus in each subject, does same coursework and appears for the same examination paper in that subject. As some one who votes conservative,
I do not believe in monopolies. But here, the monopoly of a single examination board is justified. Suffice to say that despite the common belief, difference in syllabii, coursework and examination( examination instruments) mean that we are looking at difference performance partly as pupil's effort and partly as a function of syllabii and examination instruments.

Anonymous said...

Iain, These guest posts aren't great are they. They are too long and too dull. I come to Iain Dale's diary for comment by Iain Dale. If I wanted to read these other chaps I'd go to their lame blogs. I don't. I know I can just scroll past their useless writing, but do I have to. Please stop posting these.

Pogo said...

Forget "enrichment"... Teaching the little sods to read, write and count would make a good start.

Anonymous said...

Thank you, Andrew. As a teacher I'm horrified by the idea that we should ONLY teach children to read, write, count and behave. Of course we should do all those things but we should enable children to think and question and feel the sense of wonder that can come from education rather than indoctrination. I still treasure the memory of a boy I taught who, at eight, could barely read but at eleven asked me, "Was Telemachus the son of Ulysses?" His joy in reading a children's version of the Iliad and Odyssey was my reward and what kept me in teaching. The Literacy Strategy with its emphasis on the mechanics of reading and writing drove me out of full time teaching.

Old Holborn said...

"Bullying is something to which minorities are subjected"

Not in the case of what 646 psychotic bullys are doing to the 60 million people of the UK.

Eat up your greens, empty your pockets, stop smoking, eat less, drive slower, go inside, stop thinking like that, do this, don't do that, stop saying that ad infinitum.

Bastards

Anonymous said...

This post exposes the wisdom of not allowing children to vote.

Anonymous said...

Another fascinating and well-argued blog post from a teenager. As someone who has also suffered bullying myself I completely agree.

Elby the Beserk said...

Agree with your thoughts on the "purpose" of schooling. Which is we sent our four children to a Steiner school, where the vision of the child and how they move to adulthood accords with mine, and not with that of the government. School, for them, is simply a means of producing economic units. And even that doesn't seem to work any more.

I just thank whomsoever we are right out of the education "system" as it FUBAR.