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Curious
Teenagers, Busy Parents and Market Forces: Appeared in
Lion Magazine, Wesley College, Sept 2006, |
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JA: My career started as a Geography teacher in a traditional English Grammar school in Manchester whose motto was the same as yours, “Dare to be wise”. That’s a fascinating motto, because it’s wisdom and not knowledge, which leads to the understanding that if you’re getting at wisdom you are probably going to upset a few people and so if you really want to be wise, you’re going to have to be prepared to tough because you’re going to have to dare to say the things that you want to say. And my career moved very rapidly, I was promoted almost too quickly, so I became Principal of a very large old English Grammar school as it changed into an all-ability school, which is very much like Wesley. My school was a good deal older than this, it was founded in 1558, and as opposed to Helen sitting in her very modern study, I say in the original temporary classroom put up in 1558 with big oak beams around, which gave me, as a very young head teacher, a certain sense of history. Like when things got particularly rough, I could look up at these oak beams and think, “Well things must have been worse in the days of the Spanish Armada.” So there is a sense in me from the very beginning that education is about wisdom, about being brave enough to say the things that you want to, but also the understanding that knowledge goes back a long time – it’s not just modern ideas. But the more I got into that the more concerned I was that conventional schooling was too much about instruction in the classroom, it was about teaching and not about learning. Now those are easy words to mess around with but there are actually very profoundly different… Then a dozen years ago I accepted and invitation to go to Washington and set up the 21st Century Learning Initiative, and the idea behind that is to say, “alright, a large number of people talk about learning and over the last 30 years a lot of new disciplines have emerged out of brain studies about learning but they all use different language. So what would happen if you tried to draw all of this knowledge to the surface and say: “the summation of all of these studies is this…”? That’s where the daring comes in because there’s no methodology to combine the biological and social sciences. But unless you do, we are trapped in a 19th century mindset of “sit still and do as you’re told” and somehow from these academic structures you’ll just develop moral judgement. Which fundamentally is not true. So for a dozen years I’ve been struggling with that. I have to say it makes me increasingly optimistic that more and more people are realising that the conventional model of schooling - defined in terms of age related material, defined in terms of separate disciplines that don’t talk to each other - is almost as dead as the dodo. But it is so well established, it’s very difficult for it to give birth to something else. Lion: So, practically, how does this new way of educating manifest itself? Let’s say for argument sake, in a school like Wesley at 2pm on a Friday? JA:… if you take Wesley at 2pm on a Friday, teachers are exhausted, many of the children are frustrated as hell from rushing around from classroom to classroom… It’s all such a disconnected fit. The research that is coming through, and has been for the last 15 – 20 years, shows us that the brain of the youngest child is a work in progress. But by the age of five it’s not just genetic intelligence they have, they are a product of their environment. We know that the environment of the child before they come to school is vastly important. So interpreting that into the school system, you start where the child is… Now let me jump you way away from Wesley to Oxford University 60 years ago, when the Vice Chancellor of the University said that there is something going on in children between the ages of about 13 and 16 which means they are too old to sit still, but not yet wise enough to deal with the sort of curriculum which we are handing them. He advocated that from 14 - 17, children should spend three days a week earning their own living and two days a week at school studying only three subjects; literature, history and philosophy. Then by the age of 17 they would understand more of what life was all about and they would have been encouraged to think about the big issues, which are relevant to everybody. You don’t have to be an academic to be interested in philosophy. So if you come back to Wesley on a Friday afternoon, if you wanted to bring that about, it would shake Melbourne rigid because the adult community would have to confront children on a one-to-one basis and not just leave it for the teachers to do. Lion: I imagine parents would probably have a few issues with it as well. JA: I am sure they would IQ: Especially in an age where parents are willing to surrender responsibility to schools. In a sense one could say that the school has been complicit in that process. Schools, like this one, are influenced by market forces and so have virtually taken a position of, “We can do everything you want, bring your children to us”. Schools have become another gadget to buy that occupies the children. Part of this sensibility is that the parents’ job is working for the money to pay the people to provide an all-encompassing education. In reality, it should be a partnership where everybody is actively contributing to the education of the child. As we would say in Africa, the child is the child of two parents but it is the whole community’s responsibility to bring up that child. I think that has been lost somewhere along the way. JA: And where that kind of upbringing takes those children, I’m not sure… I think the question that is totally unanswered in modern society is why bother to have children? We are interested in the future, but we are interested in the short term, we live in a society that is so full of short-term novelty we just go for immediate fulfilment like nobody’s business. Yet at the end of a lifetime, people reflect not so much on how many goodies they’ve had, but what am I leaving? What am I passing on? The very deepest biological trait of having children is to pass something on… the emotional need to feel satisfied that we have done something for society. So I would suggest that what we are dealing with is actually a very deep spiritual issue. Do we still actually believe that life is more than just our involvement in it? I think that is the question – it’s in the minds of almost everybody but we don’t really want to articulate it. We are so busy rushing around doing things. If only we had the courage to talk to children about the fact that there’s no future to society if we are all just interested in the short term, if we are all just consumers in a consumerist society. IQ: There was a time when schools felt proud in saying we are producing children to change the world and somehow that’s just moved away from us quietly. When did the agenda change? JA: It wasn’t very long ago – I started teaching in 1965. In teacher training it was absolutely specific - you are educating people to make a better world than the one we have today. The concept that you were being prepared to fit in was ludicrous, we’d have been laughed out of the business... In 1984 there was a book produced in England that was very influential called The Future of Work. And in it the argument was that information technology is liberating us from work… I think the changing point was literally in the months that followed when IT became linked to communication…That’s when we get “just in time” marketing and “just in time” this that and the other, which links back with the question of why have children. When the dominant thesis in the society is just “go for it now” - when there is not a significant number of people who believe life is not about self-satisfaction, then greed is seen as good and the world is driven by “how do I get more”. But other voices in society are already picking up… IQ: It’s amazing how education got sucked into those community values. But I’ve had kids come through my door who are concerned that we are not engaging enough with the community around us and that the only time we ask them to do something is when we ask them to give money. The happy thing for me is that young adults are realising it – when are we going to respond with what they actually need? They are coming to us with an idealism that we can both harness and challenge for the good of all… JA: I’ll tell you where we need to start and I think every single one of us can do this – especially parents… When children are very young, you have to do everything for them. You teach them things, like how to do their shoelaces, so that eventually you don’t have to do it for them. Then comes a crucial point when adolescents start rebelling and saying, “Don’t even tell me when I need to do something, let alone how!” That’s when you get confrontation, when parents say, “You’re not old enough to make that decision.” And I think that this is the educational model that we have in schools too. Up to about the age of 12, children respond very warmly to an instructor but from that moment onwards, they want you to get more out of the way… Nietzsche once said that it’s a bad teacher that people remain dependent on. IQ: Older students need more of the teacher, but as a critical friend – not to instruct. We are almost in a situation where teachers have to go back to school to learn how to make themselves redundant – neither of which is a pleasant prospect. JA: I just think it’s horrible seeing 18 year olds sitting quietly, doing as they’re told – to me it’s a contradiction… Benjamin Franklin was running his own printing press at 19. Nelson, at 12 and a half, had already sailed the Caribbean and to the Arctic. Schooling has slowed down the growing up process, but physical maturity is coming earlier. We are comfortable keeping people subservient to ourselves when in fact the natural growth process is saying I need to be independent. It’s a contradiction that we really need to resolve.
____________________________________ 21st Century Learning Initiative http://www.21learn.org |
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