Week 6: Should we rethink the way we run our schools?

Today I’m going to talk about schools. It’s an curious topic for a presentation, because everyone is pretty intimately familiar with it - we all spent a good portion of our childhood sitting in a classroom. As a consequence we usually think about the way our education system is organized as something evident and immutable - almost like a law of nature. Sure, we can argue about the specifics, but in broad terms the way our schools function seems to us as the only sensible way to tackle the problem of educating our offspring. And indeed - our schools haven’t really changed since the XIX century.

I’d like to use this presentation as a chance to ask the questions we don’t usually ask: why are schools organized the way they are? Is it really the only sensible way?

Start by watching this entertaining presentation by Sir Ken Robinson:



The Robinson’s messages seems pretty clear - our schools are not in step with modern times (by the way, if you liked this talk, he did a second one on that topic). Even more basic thing to ask might be “why people thought this was a good way to teach kids in the first place?”. We can find a possible answer in “The Third Wave” - a book by Alvin Toffler published in 1980. In his chapter about the “Second Wave” industrial revolution society of the XIX century, Toffler makes some interesting remarks about the origins of the modern school:

As work shifted out of the fields and the home, moreover, children had to be prepared for factory life. The early mine, mill, and factory owners of industrializing England discovered, as Andrew Ure wrote in 1835, that it was "nearly impossible to convert persons past the age of puberty, whether drawn from rural or from handicraft occupations, into useful factory hands." If young people could be prefitted to the industrial system, it would vastly ease the problems of industrial discipline later on. The result was another central structure of all Second Wave societies: mass education. Built on the factory model, mass education taught basic reading, writing, and arithmetic, a bit of history and other subjects. This was the "overt curriculum." But beneath it lay an invisible or "covert curriculum" that was far more basic. It consisted—and still does in most industrial nations—of three courses: one in punctuality, one in obedience, and one in rote, repetitive work. Factory labor demanded workers who showed up on time, especially assembly-line hands. It demanded workers who would take orders from a management hierarchy without questioning. And it demanded men and women prepared to slave away at machines or in offices, performing brutally repetitious operations. 

According to Toffler,  our school has been organised to resemble a XIX-century factory floor - with focus on obedience, punctuality and one’s ability to sit still for hours, doing repetitive work. The scary thing is modern schools still use the same XIX-century blueprint.

So... maybe not teaching creativity it is not a failure of our education system after all? Maybe it was designed this way deliberately?

The problem is, even if we agree that’s the case, it doesn’t help us find a better way to educate our children. What might help, however, are examples of schools that are successful without following the classic XIX-century model of “obedience, punctuality and repetitive work”. One of them is Summerhill. This free (“free” as in “freedom”, not just “free of charge”!) school was founded in 1921 by Alexander Neill. Today, more than 90 years later, it’s still going strong. What’s remarkable about the school, it is completely antithetical to the classic educational system. It is more concerned about making its pupils into happy well adjusted human beings who follow their passions than about forcing them into a pre-defined model of success.

Creative Commons licensed photo by Blue Square Thing

There are no mandatory classes in Summerhill. I know the idea might be hard to comprehend for people educated in a traditional school, so I’ll repeat: no mandatory classes. You could literally spend all 12 year of your education without attending a single class. This is hard for us to accept, because we were taught by our schools that children have to be forced to learn. The example of Summerhill clearly shows this notion is false. Children want to learn. The development of new skills and new knowledge is in fact one of basic human needs. In the 90 year history of Summerhill there was never a student who wasn’t interested in learning something.

There is however an interesting phenomenon connected with the kids transferred to Summerhill from different schools. After learning they are not forced to attend lessons, many of them declare they will never go to another class. Ever. While Sumerhill kids associate learning with fun, those children were already “corrupted” by adults forcing education on them. It often takes many months before those kids discover they actually want to learn and start to attend classes again. This time for a much better reason.

You can learn much more about the Summerhill school from Neil’s book entitled “Summerhill School: A New View of Childhood” (it was published in Poland under the title “Nowa Summerhill” by Wydawnictwo Zysk i S-ka). I found the book utterly fascinating. Below you will find found a short report on Summerhill from Euronews TV:

Sumerhill is obviously not the only free school out there. There are plenty more. “This American Life”, the radio show I raved about in my previous presentation, made a story on The Brooklyn Free School. I think it is worth listening to.

Source: "Stuff No-one Told Me"

So. What do you think? Should we rethink the way we teach children or is the current system just fine?