Schools are Unnatural
By John Stiles, Ruam Rudee International School in Thailand.
Mark Twain was to have said, "Don't let school get in the way of your education." Ever since hearing that quote, the idea of how our learners are universally "schooled" impacts everything I do in the classroom. And, because I am in a classroom, I realize that despite my best efforts, I can never fully give my students an opportunity to get an education.
Once education was formalized, that is, taken from the experiential realm to the institutionalized arena, society took away real learning. When it was perceived that it was more important to have adults work in factories to expand the economy than in their own shops or the fields, it was necessary to find a place where children could be looked after during work time. In the place of educating youngsters by giving them direct experience in natural settings, such as how to know when each plant flowered, or which insects were pollinators of the fruits to be eaten by actually observing such things, we gathered the children together into buildings, sorted them by age, and began having them read about which insects pollinated flowers. Any flower. It didn't even have to be one that grew anywhere near the school, as long as the children memorized the facts. Facts were good, even if one never used them.
It simply wasn't possible to find enough teachers to give children one on one instruction, or even small group instruction as had been done through the millennia, nor was it possible to fund such an education. It was decided that it was more economically feasible to have quite a lot of children in one room with an instructor. And so it has been, decade after dull decade, society's answer to a growing economy, driven by profit. Today we continue this unnatural way of educating, of "schooling" children, and wonder why it isn't working so well.
This is the "factory model" of education built on the top-down hierarchy organizational system, in which the idea of grades based on Carnegie units were developed to prepare students to be successful members of our workforce. Indeed, one can often see such messages built into school vision statements yet today. Gary Martin and Angus MacNeil (cnx.org) go even further, and note that if the factory model becomes encumbered by what they call rejects, "the system often switches from the factory model to the prison model and instead of preparing students for the economy we guard them from any influence on the society."
Martin and MacNeil also note that centuries prior to the industrial revolution that gave rise to our current school model, the Greeks had an alternative based on community in which shared beliefs and values created relationships based on belonging, identifying with place, providing members with security, sense and meaning. This model can often be seen in some of the world's best private schools, and many public institutions that have committed to the idea of a learning community, much as the Greeks did.
Unfortunately, our global society is far too much caught in the trap of perpetually dulling the minds of our learners, and we have no collective memory of why we are doing it. It's just the way it has always been done. A consequence of this has been the "commercializing" of children. With career success comes the obligation to buy more things, driven by the advertising world, and children learn that lesson very well. It is an extension not of their education, but of their schooling.
Some may argue that the modern school model is a compromise between meaningful education and running students through a factory-style institution. I would reply by saying that we haven't gotten far enough to consider it a compromise. The model is not all that different than it was 120 years ago. If professionals from 1890 stepped from a time machine and walked into 2009, only the teachers would recognize and feel at home in their 21st century environment.
When will we decide that enough is enough and turn our attention to truly educating our children? For me it starts with the little things that I can do to provide opportunities for children to really be educated, and it is not an easy thing to accomplish, particularly in international schools where so many of the students are children of those in the commercial world. I'm afraid that if given he choice, most parents would choose schooling over education.
