A big question for a small blog I know but one that I am increasingly convinced needs clarifying before we stumble further down a very bumpy road.
Before we ascertain what the point of education is, let’s clarify what it isn’t. The process by which we simply accrue grades for a start. That, to use the distinction of John Paul Gatto, is about schooling. The trouble is all the league tables – from the ‘macro’ ones put out by the well-meaning but perfidious OECD to the ‘micro’ ones churned out by a school proudly showing off its students with 14 A and A* grades, not to mention the ones that pit school against school, parent against parent, postcode against postcode – they all feed off exam results of one kind or another. It is the lazy layman’s approach to assessing the quality of a country’s schools and is underwritten by the unwritten, often unchallenged, assumption that 'education equals grades'. By counting one you measure the other.
But grades do not maketh the man, woman or education system.
What's more, not happy with just counting grades, the people who run the system like to show off how good they are at making that system 'better', so the focus shifts to incorporate not only how many grades but how higher more of those grades are now than they used to be. 'Above average' is the target for all children and schools once we go through this looking glass. Anything else is simply coasting.
But I would by far prefer my children to have a life, be happy and get C grades than be stressed, ill and get A grades. (While the student suicide rates in those high performing Chinese, Hong Kong and Finnish education systems deserves a whole new blog of their own.)
The ‘education equals grades’ approach to schooling is also invidious in that it can rob children of their childhoods. Childhood isn’t simply a training programme to be endured in order to prepare young people to take their pre-determined place as working adults. An education system that steals time from children’s childhoods in order to devote it to the acquiring of A grades instead of C grades is an odious system indeed, especially when the biggest winners of such a system are the politicians and the school leaders who can boast of their achievements when the next set of PISA results or school league tables are produced.
Even if we were to agree on a purpose for education being something that allows children to be children and supports them as they develop skills and competencies as well as acquire and exploit knowledge, it's still not enough. The words of the famous poem written by a survivor of the Holocaust and quoted by the psychologist Haim Ginott tell us why:
Gas chambers built by learned engineers.
Children poisoned by educated physicians.
Infants killed by trained nurses.
Women and babies shot and burned by high school and college graduates.
An education system that doesn’t allow children to explore and adopt morals, ethics and values is not worthy of the name. By which I don’t mean the imposition of someone else’s moral code and set of values. That’s what newspapers are for. I mean, at a very simple level, the opportunity for children to develop the cognitive faculties necessary to not do to others what they would not want doing to themselves.
An education system that allows children to exploit that once in a lifetime opportunity that is their childhood, that encourages learning in and of itself, not as a means to a grade, that is designed with children in mind, not the careers of politicians and empire builders, and that produces the sorts of adults whose values and empathies can bring to an end the sorts of practices that have created the mess the world is in currently – that helps your students ‘become human’, to quote from the poem I mention above - now that would be an education with a purpose and a system worth fighting for.
