What is education for? Why do we do schools?
I ask these simple questions at the start of this book because I think it is time that we take a long and serious look at the purpose of our education systems, country by country, region by region, town by town and challenge those who run them to step beyond their vested interests and consider for a moment if the education we provide for our citizens really is suitable for the world in which we live. My view is that we are seriously out of alignment.
For more than two decades, many people, in many countries have grappled with the challenge of the effective improvement of schools and school systems. These efforts have witnessed vast sums of public money being spent. They have witnessed numerous specialized agencies and advisory groups being established. They have seen testing regeimes come and go, inspections and criteria for performance and accountability being introduced, modified and redesigned.
The two primary drivers of the reforms, school effectiveness and school improvement have in themselves moved from the obscure preoccupation of a group of academics, to the mainstream. In so doing their original objectives, driven by interests of equity, freedom and social justice have become diluted and distorted. The relentless modifications and tinkering with the monolithic structures of schooling have not transformed schools, instead, they have generated a distorted, engorged, reified version of Fordism. Schools function under a managerial system which plays to the mediocre and the monotonous as if it were the bastion of quality. It denies rather than embraces freedom, voice and choice. It colludes with a self-satisfied illusion of innovation and it stifles creative thinkers and struggles to know what to do and how to think about with a vast array of non-conformist learners. Despite unprecedented levels of continuous professional development of pedagogic reform, teachers, as if footsoldiers to someone else’s battle, continue to transmit a body of knowledge to students who are frequently the passive recipients of a mundane curriculum for a set number of hours each day, each week, each year on the back of a worldview that is outdated, and too scared to attend to its real, deep seated prejudice.
Our desperate efforts to improve upon these dire experiences, when of course, students begin to rebel and systematically fail to respond to the altogether putrid churning desperation of what we laughably call education is to set up ‘challenges.’ Our schools functionally provide a form of knowledge through a fragmented and specialized set of subjects which promote a world view that asserts if we maintain a certain amount of personal and organizational order, control and planning we will be successful in life and institution. Yet the rate of unemployment of young people is increasing and the number of graduates on minimum wage is at an all time high. Schooling is failing. All of this stuff happens, on a daily basis, to thousands of people, within cavernous buildings, disconnected from most other aspects of daily life. It is run and regulated by adults, it is defined by adults and managed – not led - on behalf of others who they do not know, and who they often fear, whose only philosophy is to have no philosophy of education at all for fear of commitment and connection to something. And finally, when these students get to leave they learn that much of what they have learnt isn’t worth knowing as the world outside is differently configured, differently operating and differently focused and preoccupied, and much of what they could have learnt could have happened without all the pressures and anxieties that overstressed teachers pile upon their students just so that they can maintain their school’s place in an arbitrary league table created at a whim to placate our educated public who have grown up inside this mess.
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