SOME THOUGHTS AND A RESPONSE - RICK STREET (C97/19)
You argue that education is responsible for the ills of modern society and blame teachers for this with your concluding statement that, "All a teacher can really teach you … is how to be a teacher!".
Perhaps this is so, but only if you accept a narrow and limiting definition of education. By this I mean accepting education as being solely concerned with teaching while ignoring the complementary aspect of learning. I’ll explain my point -
The Collins Compact Dictionary gives the following as a definition of "to educate":
It is the fifth part that supports my claim that you cannot talk about teaching (or training) without looking to its impact in terms of improving/developing the individual i.e. learning. When you do this something happens to your thoughts about what schools, education and teachers are there for - we realise that they are there to provide the opportunity (no, one of many opportunities) for an individual to learn. But the individual is not a Dickensian pupil, a passive and empty receptacle, to be filled up with knowledge. The individual has to take responsibility for his/her own learning. Okay, so I hear you cry that a child in primary school does not have the autonomy to take responsibility for learning, perhaps that is where the child’s parents come in!
I take Rick’s point that in our society we relinquish (or off-load) the responsibility for the education of our children, we turn out backs to the needs of our children (and now we want to do so at an earlier age) and expect the state, the school and the teacher to create well-rounded and employable young people. This isn’t going to happen. We have to accept that the individual and everyone who has a vested interest in that individual - yes, the state, the school, the teachers, but also the parents and the employers - must contribute to his/her development by providing the opportunity and the willingness to learn.
So, how does an individual learn to become "equipped for adult life"?
It is not enough to say that people with proven job skills should teach job skills to children. (Sorry, Rick). I think it is fair to say that no one learns anything until they do it. So how can this happen in the school environment?
From a child’s first day in school (and before this in the home) the individual learns about work, and in this way develops job skills.
So what are job skills? If you take a job advertisement at random, the key attributes the employer seems to want are:
There is the opportunity to learn all of this at school (any school) and teachers, themselves, have learnt these skills while pursuing their academic careers - I’ll concede that some have learnt better than others!
So why do some young people leave school without these skills?
Okay, so I hear you mention children with "special needs". I would argue, from experience and observation, that in mainstream education such kids often demonstrate these job skills quite readily if not consistently.
So, we’ll move on to describe a typical teenager - if such a creature actually exists! He or she has a family of some kind; has been at school since four years old; has gone through the trauma of puberty and adolescence; has had the first, and a few more, romantic encounters of varying intimacy; has made friends and lost friends; has completed homework and some times, or a lot of times, has not; has chosen subjects and dropped others; has taken up team sports and/or has adopted a solitary approach to work; and left school with or without the equipment to survive adult life in the workplace.
If the individual has the job skills then he/she has been learning throughout life (not just at school) that these skills are worth having. These people have learned that, for example, the ability to get on with others has helped them to make friends, find partners, get round teachers and generally get on in life.
The individual who has failed to acquire these skills has had the same opportunities (in so much as two individuals can have similar experiences while sharing time and space - okay, so I know someone is going to shoot me down for that!) but has learned something entirely different. What could this be? Perhaps, the lessons at school have conflicted with the lessons learnt elsewhere, either from the family, the social environment, or from peers. Perhaps, the individual refuses to accept the dictates of a society that promotes the work ethic and prefers a different way of life. I don’t know. But, I don’t think that it is fair to blame the teachers or to expect job skill "experts" to have a miracle cure.
Thanks for reading.
PS : I was a teacher/lecturer in adult and further education (working with the long-term unemployed and in an adult male prison, as well as in school and college) until last Christmas, so maybe I’m biased !
Final Word: Shoot me down if this isn’t philosophy, but don’t you dare say it isn’t a well-structured argument.
Debbie