Transmitting knowledge and culture from one generation to the next is a constant and universal activity. Schools do not stand as islands in the sea of everyday life. The undertaking is simplified when there is homgeneity in the matter to be transmitted and agreement on the means which, at the moment, there is not. It is known now that learning is more effectively undertaken between the ages of 4 and 11 (more or less). After that we still learn but the way in which we learn is set not so much in stone as in the organisation of our brains. There are no arbitrary cut-off points for learning but earlier is different and often easier than later, at least for groundwork skills in central subjects.
Schools are essentially for formal learning; they are not substitutes for the social absorption of life skills and pragmatic understanding which are acquired, necessarily, in everyday life. Certainly schools build upon these things by instruction, that is why homgeneity in earlier acqisitions is so helpful - but not essential.
Formal learning and the instruction that enables it is not an egalitarian undertaking or experience (as a music teacher of impeccable socially egalitarian principles advised an overly creative pupil). ‘Do as you are told’ from master to pupil is not a request but a requirement for learning at all. The evidence for this is reinforced when considering the subjects that are taught in schools. Mathematics, music, foreign languages, grammar, art, all of the sciences are best taught early and by imposition of fundamental principles to be absorbed before any experimentation in application takes place. This is true as well of any decent teaching in literature , history, or any other interpretive study. There, too, the rules of rhetoric need tobe known before they are flouted. An education requires submission and acceptance of discipline, in itself a very good reason why such a practice should be confined within schools.
A school exists within a building, but it is not necessary for all activity within that building to be a school . Many of the undertakings currently regarded as ‘school’ should be offered, but not compulsory, and outside of the work that a school undertakes. There is ample evidence of the way this works. In Italy, for instance, the school building opens at 8 am and lessons start at 8.10. They continue until 12.30 for under elevens and until 1.40 for older pupils. There is one 20 minute break mid-morning. After school, where lunch can be taken, there is supervised homework by tutors, and activities from sport to the furthering of interests and hobbies, that can be enjoyed there; or pupils can leave for home and use their afternoons as they choose (school homework remains an obligation not lightly ignored.) Working parents know where they stand, and children from all backgrounds can access all kinds of activities. Schools are essentially of their community, for the journey to school should be autonomous from a reasonable age, building, inter alia, all kinds of other links.
A school physically set within a surround of social and community services can impose its need for discipline and respect for teachers, while the hardness of learning is ameliorated by meeting locally determined needs - be they instruction in the language of instruction itself, childcare for older children, group activities, advanced teaching in some disciplines, and even a place of tranquility and safety for those from troubled homes.
The very nature of acquiring an education requires a central core of disciplined acceptance of teaching, and it is this that is sinking beneath the confusion of objectives that our schools are bearing.
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So are you saying we need coherent subject matter and discpline in schools HG ?
Was your own gigantic pulsing brain blown up to its current terrifying size in an educational hot house for the unnaturally gifted. I imagine it must have been.
I have done quite a bit on education. I like the lottery selection idea which sadly the Labour Party are more likely to adopt than the Conservatives
'Course we do and school should be acknowledged as different from other activities for children. School is hard and bossy, but it does reward effort, even just feeling terrrific when a task is done or a problem actually comes out with recognisably the right answer.
Are you saying I'm big-headed N? Education by nuns usually gets rid of anything but a sense of grovelling humility.
Different from other activities for children, perhaps, but not an unique model. The thing is, whenever you want mass results (public health, education, military victories, cars for all) you had best establish sound production-lines. Mass production of a good product is a great human achievement.
Admittedly, you will turn out Fords rather than Ferraris. Fords aren't so bad these days
(However (Mr Mania) you needn't go round proscribing Ferraris!)
ND, anyone bigger than an infant and smaller than an adult likes to be with others like themselves; But school, as a place of instruction, can't serve for that. If all the schooling is concentrated in a single 5 hour a day session, with behaviour during that time and towards school teachers, whose sole professional task is to teach, agreed, and the other stuff is supplied in a different context and by differently trained staff -it's essential, just different, then there is some experience and evidence that both kinds of learning benefit.
Equate schools with production lines? No, their antithesis actually; conveying complex information to diversely equipped audiences needs small-scale, locally tailored, highly-skilled input. I'll give you public health, and cars, on production lines, I don't know what goes into military victories or how they are are achieved.
I intend to do the community-base for schools next and brave N.
Can't agree. "small-scale, locally tailored, highly-skilled input" is certainly the tutorial ideal, without doubt the means of getting the best result for a given individual. Would we could provide it for all.
The better the teacher, the smaller the class, the better the discipline / materials etc, the nearer a school can approximate this ideal. It's out of the question for mass education, just as 24-hour personal nursing is for mass public health provision. ILPs are a delusion: they can't be executed in the context of mass provision.
But very high basic standards can be achieved en masse. Did you see (Daily Mail yesterday) the difference between the geometry test set to Chinese university applicants vs the one used to assess maths apptitude for some UK universities? What a farce: what have we become.
N D,
With a tax take no higher than that in the UK, continental EU countries have class sizes of around 20 pupils. I only have experience of the quality of teaching in Italian and English schools, and though the English teachers are just as well qualified they don't get much of a chance to teach in some places. The behaviour in some English classrooms is unthinkable in most continental European class rooms. I believe this is to do with using school for too many purposes here, as I wrote.
It is possible to have mass, compulsory education with small class sizes and good equipment at a high level of teaching in community schools; children across Europe receive just that.
A lot of what is taught shouldn't be offered in compulsory education as it's a waste of the children's school time and our tax money. Going to look at the maths aptitude tests now, nervously.
You are not big headed HG you are perfect .…….what you are or are not I confess to be somewhat fascinated by in that I can make very few guesses. There is some vital clue missing but one doesn’t like to pry.
You say that without raising taxes we can have more resources in education .As you cannot know what resources are directed into what areas in this country let alone others I shall retain scepticism on that..
You are missing the main pint which is that it is parents that make schools. With the development of the housing market and in inner cities the explosive immigration state schools have become class and race/religion ghettoes .Sometimwes this makes for an excellent school and flats are duly bought in the catchments area by Labour Councillors across London. Usually it is a disaster. It is from these schools that the functionally illiterate are pouring and resources and class sizes has little to do with it . Look at educational attainment and its linkage with class is exceedingly strong. Schools cannot solve these problems but they can be given a better environment by having a better starting place hence the vaule of the Lottery idea and the prospect of homogeneity . This would take large catchment areas and be the revese of s community school which is what we have now and the model that is so startlingly failing. Schools are not about resources they have so much money they hardly know what to do with it now. All you need is a room some discipline and some books . The other side of the coin is that you have to combat the culture of nihilistic despair in the teaching profession. It can be almost Soviet “ We pretend you work and you pretend to pay us “ . This would be done by accountability and rewards and punishments applying to winners and losers . Get the Parent Teacher buit on some sort of reasonable level and you have solved a lot
Mr mania, isn't it that parents make schools only when those who should be the school-makers (i.e. determined & truly professional educationalists, with the necessary support to establish and maintain discipline) have abrogated their responsibilities? - the failure of 'duc' in education.
HG you must be right when you say that schools should never have the additional policy-burdens placed upon them. And, as you say, countries with more confidence in what they are doing and an expectation of order in the classroom are achieving much more than we in the UK. (Saw some really impressive Italian school outings in Florence last week - so orderly and happy!)
Like electro-kev has posted elsewhere, the only 'teaching' I have done (essentially lecturing, but including classes of teenage squaddies) has been either in an environment of thirst for knowledge, and/or a set-up where the person at the front of the class is given the benefit of the doubt & good order comes automatically. It's amazing what can be achieved in such conditions.
I do still insist on the 'mass production' view of this, however, when mass results are needed. It should not be viewed as a dehumanising model: imparting education by whatever genuinely successful means is one of the most humanising endeavours possible.
(OK, my real name is Gradgrind...)
I know Nick`s real name . Its Samantha
Oh well, ND, 'There is geometry in the humming of the strings. There is music in the spacings of the spheres..' so perhaps it is one of those questions with lots of scope for expanding your answer and extra marks if you do; we wouldn't like English education to suffer the bane of superficial factual knowledge.
Also ND (university entry questions apart) if mass production does not imply huge classes and no books (exercise for rough work and separate ones for 'bella', and text books that are revised each year to cover curriculum advances) then you are right. Delivery of en masse education lives.
N, 'All you need is a room some discipline and some books..' Yes, but that is for a school; a lot of children, as opposed to a lot of pupils, need other socialisations (really some of these words are hackle-raising but often have a pre-politicised usefulness) before they can accept what many see as the humiliation of accepting the essential discipline of a school. And they lose so much from this.
ND was taken by the orderliness(? are you sure?) and by the happiness of the Italian school class. They are a team, and their trainer is the Signora Maestra. Glory for one of them, in anything to do with school or fame, and they glow, "You are all of us", they cry with rounds of applause. The Signora Maestra rules, and they are proud of her. But then she (or more rarely he) never appear out of role. Why do we put our professional teachers to such trial? It destroys their status and their identity. Other professionals can do mending, the Teacher is theirs, not one of the limiters of experiment and revolt but a leader in learning hard and useful things. And the parents are agreed on this to. After all, it is their own experience.
Well just to show I know all about "there is music in the spacings of the spheres", one of me poems is currently echoing around (but I have had the decency to drag it off to Guido's sector of the 'sphere)
- Samantha Gradgrind age 19
N, 'All you need is a room some discipline and some books..' Yes, but that is for a school; a lot of children, as opposed to a lot of pupils, need other socialisations (really some of these words are hackle-raising but often have a pre-politicised usefulness) .
I would be fascinated to learn how you feel throwing money at schools would help this process of " Socialisation" or why you imagine that teachers , conspicuously and often hilariously inexperienced socially ,are qualified to assist.
No this is plain wrong . Schools cannot solve every problem and the idea that they can has lead to the absurd over funding and the entrenchment of satisficing in the educational world .
Teachers must have authority not money or shiny new Labs or trips to the continent or PA schemes to defraud and so on . They must vbe accountable and fireable.
None of this has anything to do with more income.
'before they can accept what many see as the humiliation of accepting the essential discipline of a school'
I believe no such thing and as we have no discpline in our schoools might we perhaps try it first ?Just as an experiment
N, we are in agreement I think. Teachers teach, and teach school subjects, in school. Nothing else; administration, social work, child care, hobbies, homework clubs, etc., are all done perhaps in the same buildings but by other staff, outside the hours of school, with different skills and training. Teachers retain their role and their status. I was saying they are required to play too many parts and this results in them losing their standing as teachers.
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