IanB has a couple of great articles about education. First up, what starts out as a complaint about bias in the BBCs GCSE revision guide on religious education, ends up pointing out the shoddy, patronising writing therein:
Many people think that the Christian Church is sexist. It does not treat men and women equally.Many people? How many? Who? Are they right? Well, the second sentence sorts it out for us. Yes, yes they are right. But the “many people†is jammed in there as a disclaimer. When you’re perpetrating writing so bad that it wouldn’t be tolerated on wikipedia, you’re in trouble as a writer. This is crap.
And what really bugs me to be honest (other than that the BBC are spending the TV poll tax on this shit) is the childish level of the writing in general. These articles are for GCSE students. They’re written for fifteen and sixteen year olds; young adults. Yes, I know that the GCSE replaced the GCE and CSE so that one exam could be taken by everyone from a young Einstein to the borderline retarded, but look at it. Look at it. Short sentences, no big words. Young people of this age are on the cusp of embarking on adult life. They should have a normal adult command of the english language.
Indeed. Expectations of the capabilities of sixteen-year-olds seem to be pretty low in general; it can’t be doing them any good. I hope IanB gets around to blogging his thoughts about the infantilisation of teenagers — it should be good.
But the tour de force is his article about the problem with schools, which I find very little to disagree with. He argues that schools are inefficient at teaching; that they take a students who want to learn and beat it out of them; and that the regimented and authoritarian nature of schools churns out people who submit to authority.
It’s my anecdotal experience that many people of a libertarian, or at least non-conformist, attitude, are people who never quite fell for the myth of schooling. People who were sceptical at the time, and who were self-educators who read books other than the ones set for them by their tutors. The schooling system is designed- intended- to stamp out dissent and inviduality, but however hard they try to do that some proportion of the victims will smell the rat, and not be completely beaten.
I always felt a bit like I did well in spite of school. I certainly read stuff I was interested in that wasn’t anything to do with school work. I felt like lessons I was interested in went to slowly, and that lessons I wasn’t interested in were a waste of time. I think student directed learning would have worked well on me. You could argue that I wouldn’t have had as well rounded an education, but honestly, the stuff I wasn’t interested in was, in restrospect, rubbish. I loved learning about techtonic plates and geology in geography class; hated the rubbish about the ozone layer.
We must set our sights on a future society that will consider schooling in the horrified way that people today consider child labour, a society in which people describe their forebears being forced into schools in the same tones as we describe infants despatched up chimneys or down coalmines.
It’s radical. It goes further than Brian Micklethwait has argued, I think. And I can’t find fault with it, except possibly that it neglects to address the other true purpose of schools: to keep kids out of the way.
Rob, thanks for the nod!
I’ll hopefully address the schools-as-childminding-facilities issue in the sequel about infantilisation.