The road to transformation in education — is it a cul de sac?

We must take the following points to heart if we are to truly transform education for our young people, and not just change it.

Ritual

Schools must offer students a sense of ritual and organisation. These are vital if students are to feel safe and understand their environment. Students may wish to kick against the system, but that is part of the growing up process. Without something to kick against, students become more alienated and display this need to be ‘anarchic’ in other ways, possibly criminal.

We grow up knowing a system has been a certain way for a long time. To be part of that tradition is to undergo a social ritual. There will always be changes within a school but too much change represents a significant break with tradition. Students are then faced with a wholly different set of rituals, which often have no meaning.

This is a problem with personalised alternatives, which can create feelings of isolation and alienation from the system. There is the danger of a growing demand for personal attention and an inability to take personal responsibility.

Development

A focus on learning (be that subjects / skills or whatever) is not the sole purpose of schools. We have a responsibility to act as loco in parentis. School is family, good and bad. One of the major problems in education over the last 10 years or so in the UK is that schools are increasingly abdicating this responsibility in order to score higher on league tables.

Students have a relationship with their school. It is a home away from home, even if it is a bad home. Its function in helping young people take on a role outside of the family, by creating a new ‘family’, is a vital one. Students get to know friends, enemies and teachers, as a microcosm of the larger society. A move from single to multiple institutions may alienate our young people even more.

There are dangers in mixing age groups with no consideration for adolescence and the processes and rituals of growing up. Using age group cohorts as a universal organising device has lasted for a reason - it works. Students know where they are and who they are with. There is a sense of belonging and participation; age cohort groups provide a real sense of social order in an otherwise chaotic world. Most adults looking back on their school days will talk about the ‘people in my year’ because they can, and want to.

Who are we educating our young people for? If the answer is examinations, league tables, society, industry or the country, then we have no right to be educating them at all. We should be educating them to be the people they want to be, so that they can create the world they want to live in. The rising levels of crime and alienation in schools is clear evidence that we have failed, so far, to meet this most basic of requirements, by focusing on the wrong direction.

For the pastoral aspect to become an explicit support for learning is a clear example of how the whole system is being misdirected. The pastoral system should focus on supporting the child. One of the most destructive aspects of the developing curriculum in schools is the focus on learning and away from development. We do not teach subjects we teach children. The pastoral system is there to support and care for the individual within the group / social structure of the school.

Sadly, school is just a child-minding service in the eyes of many, including government, and we should be very careful to avoid decisions taken for the wrong reasons. I can see no educationally sound reasons to change the school year except to have longer winter holidays to cut down on illness, heating bills and days cancelled due to bad weather.

We cannot operate a world where everyone is a jack of all trades and master of none. We need specialists whose knowledge in a single area is profound. This can only be achieved through focus in one discipline. To shift the whole curriculum is a recipe for disaster. What we need is a recognition of the importance of trans-disciplinary work and plenty of opportunities for this to happen, without throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Mr Anthony Gears is Director of Performing Arts at Egglescliffe School, in Stockton on Tees, England, United Kingdom.

 

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