Alanna Mitchell asks the big question in this article.
So is school
- for the transmission of culture and potted knowledge, akin to filling a CD-ROM?
- for fostering skills that will serve society down the road, or make dutiful employees?
- a strategy to make sure a nation’s gross domestic product keeps rising?
- a sorting mechanism aimed at working out where in the class system a student ought to land?
- a way to encourage upward mobility?
She asks if school should it build character or endow morals? Is it a way for the new generation to question the values of the old? Or is it for making sure they don’t?
As Mitchell rightfully points out, you could write a library full of books on this stuff. However, 2 issues stand out to me as big red flashing signals alerting us that a schools’ reform is necessary:
1 Neuroscientific findings shows that the brain learns – or forms strong neural connections – when a child is in a calm, emotionally regulated state.
2 Neuroscience also shows that the brain is a platform on which intelligence can be built, rather than the determinant of a fixed intelligence.
I feel many schools fail on the first point, most particularly when children are taken from the much smaller, intimate primary school setting to an overcrowded secondary school.
As for the second point, it seems to me that education hasn’t changed much from my days at primary school, where the emphasis was on figuring out who was ‘brainy’ and who was ‘thick’ and streaming us accordingly. While being streamed into the ‘brainy’ group worked for me and kept me from being bored at school, I’m not so sure it was so great for the children in the ‘remedial’ stream. Maybe the problem was that the kids in remedial seemed to believe that’s where they’d be for life – not just for short-term special support in a specific area.
Mitchell quotes Guy Claxton, a psychologist at the University of Winchester in England, who argues that the brain as an organ is expandable, something to improve rather than prove, In theory, schooling should help that expansion happen. I don’t think the system encourages this.
Read the article here.
