Knowing that it will be all I will be doing for the next two weeks, the idea of sitting down and writing an essay repulses me. Previously a relaxing pastime of mine, school’s overindulgence in the otherwise enjoyable has turned writing into a post-traumatic trip, where I am reminded of those two and a half hour sessions I spend, staring at a piece of paper, writing about some historical event/political concept/work of literature I am now too jaded to give a damn about. The insincerity of my literary voice, masked by the dry and uninvolved academic voice that all academic essays have to imitate in order to tick the “communication” box of the rubric, never quite manages to “communicate” what I really think. So now, free of the shackling chains of any rubric or examiner, it’s time that my voice is heard.
Clearly by the attitudes conveyed in the previous paragraph, I hold a cynical view of the “modern” education system. Having spent a good portion of my childhood in it, all of it in fact, I see education as a valuable and necessary tool in creating productive citizens, but one with an equal opportunity to harm. Working alongside our biological transition to maturity, education works to mould children’s minds while the clay is still soft, creating permanent and long-lasting changes to children’s personalities. When the conditions are right, these changes can be instrumental in preparing a student for “the real world”. But the conditions are rarely right, and more often than not kids come out of school frustrated and lost, either spending the next few years of their lives studying/practicing a profession they never knew they wouldn’t like or simply being too convinced of their own inadequacies to ever try something ambitious. Of course, I have not experienced any of that yet, so these are really my own baseless observations. What I can talk about, however, is the system itself, and why as amazing and essential as it is, it has a long way to go before we can really call it modern.
School hasn’t changed for the a past 100 years. This isn’t a subjective remark or a generalisation. This is an objective fact. The concept of schooling, in the most fundamental ways, has not changed. While boards have gone digital, and we now may read textbooks on iPads and laptops rather than in print (I am a bit of a luddite so I haven’t taken advantage of these technological shifts anyway) the way school works and has worked, has largely remained the same. Centred around the model where a teacher stands in front of a class, explains things for about an hour and then sets a task to test students on their capacity to absorb said things, this description of the school environment would be as relevant to a man in his 90s as it would to today’s youth. And yet we are all content maintaining this status quo.
Of course, sometimes systems are better left unchanged. What’s new isn’t necessarily what’s best, and humans often hold the unfounded bias that old traditions are bound to become obsolete with time (this is recognised as the appeal to novelty fallacy). My criticism of the education system thus isn’t based on this notion. In fact, I believe that one of the strengths of the modern education system is that its widespread and almost universal adoption (built up over the past 100 years) has given many underprivileged people the opportunity to succeed in life, when in previous times they would be condemned to a life of mediocrity. But great ideas are the ones most deserving of improvement, and in a time where humanity is advancing faster than we can anticipate, our current education system seems comically outdated (It’s from a generation where donkeys and horses were still the main form of transport and lobotomies were an accepted medical cure for depression). So, put simply, what’s wrong with this system?
As a student, if I could identify one glaring issue with the modern education system, it would be its unhealthy obsession with standardised testing. Whether in Britain, the United States or Australia, all of the education systems/curriculums I have been in, place an enormous emphasis on standardised testing. The issue is, standardised tests, while a good idea on paper, work terrible in practice. Originally intended to be a tool for teachers in evaluating a student’s understanding of the curriculum, tests have devolved into highly-competitive intellectual-combat arenas, where students are forced to outperform their peers in order to score within the desirable top 15% grading. The result is an education environment that is unconcerned with whether a student has truly learned a concept or not. Instead, all that matters is the ‘objective’ mark that each student gets at the end of an exam: forcing teachers to teach curricula didactically and with the sole objective of preparing students for the exam NOT for its actual application in real life. This is problematic because the capacity of standardised tests to actually measure the knowledge of a students is restricted heavily.
Often there are important non-cognitive factors that influence a student’s performance in a test. Stress and lack of sleep are two notable examples of this. And even when these factors have little impact, tests are fundamentally limited in the types of skills they can realistically measure. Really only able to test your writing skills in an essay, or your knowledge/mathematical skills in short answer or multiple-choice questions, oral, social, emotional and creative skills go unmeasured in a typical exam. Even when these sorts of things are measured, because of the subjective nature of them, they are confined by highly specific rubrics, again forcing teachers to teach the material preparing the students for examination not for real life. The recurring theme here is that this system cares not about whether a student learns or not, it cares about their performance in a test. Intuitively, we would say that in order for a student to do well in a test, they would have to have learned, right? However, as studies imply, most students forget what they’ve learned within days of completing their tests, thereby rendering the whole preparation process for it, largely pointless. And anecdotally, we know this is true anyway.
So if students are truly ‘learning’ little, and tests struggle to measure anything meaningful, why do teachers bother preparing students for them in the first place? The cynic in me says that most other kids wouldn’t bother learning the curriculum if they weren’t threatened by a test. Having something that forces you to sit down and actually internalise the material, is important, especially for kids less motivated and appreciative of the benefits of education. But that doesn’t excuse the reign of fear and terror that the education system rules under, by making standardised tests the be all and end all of life. Threatening kids by essentially saying “You better do good in this test or else you won’t have a future” is perhaps one of the most sick and sardonic norms society is content with maintaining. And for kids that don’t have a desire to learn anyway, and thus perform badly in tests, all that does is create a negative feedback loop, giving students little reason to try in the future. For students who do perform well, many develop a sort of imposter syndrome, where they are too afraid to fail as doing so would undermine their raised standards, and thus lead to insecurity and self-doubt surrounding around their actual abilities. Thus, and this leads me to my final point, students have little reason to experiment.
My inspiration in making this essay came from Sir Ken Robinson’s famous Ted talk, titled “Do schools kill creativity”. Now 11 years old, I recall watching this video when I was much younger, unable to fully relate to the points Robinson was making. A few years have passed since then, and while I question some of the idealism Robinson has, he got a lot of things damn right. Firstly, school does not kill creativity, but it does limit it, confine it, and reduce its potency. In subjects such as Art, Drama and to a lesser extent English, creativity is intertwined with the curriculum. This lasts right up until high school, when it is quickly sterilised in place of more objective metrics/subjects that force uniformity for the sake of objectivity (as academia gets more ‘serious’). Since, by high school, your grades will largely dictate what university you will go to, schools suddenly become keen on splitting the lawyers and doctors from the trade workers, and with the last and arguably most significant years of school being dedicated to the cold hard sciences and humanities, creativity gets supressed.
The sad reality is that when grades dictate your future you cannot afford to experiment or make mistakes. Failure becomes more like a punishment than an opportunity to improve, and the unrealistic standard of perfection is placed on teenagers right as they transition into adulthood, killing any last inkling of creativity and willingness to experiment that they may have: now their future is one of obedience and conformity. The trade-off, as we are supposed to believe, is that this transaction occurs in return for economic stability and prosperity. Those who study hard, focus on the work and get the grades will surely succeed. And indeed, this is the case… but only for a select few. Between Grade 1 and 12, because of all the reasons listed above, in a class of 20, perhaps only 3 become the model student, prepared for “the real world”. Forming the top 15% percentile of the bell curve that gets to enjoy the trade-off of creativity for economic prosperity (likely being accepted into prestigious universities and thus guaranteed employment, sometimes regardless of perceived competency), the education system works only for a few. It goes at a pace only benefiting a few, and is tailored towards skills only a portion of the population are naturally proficient at. Anything else is neglected, and with the standardisation of tests comes the expected standardisation of people.
While I know I live in relative freedom, unscathed by true oppression, the feeling of having some examiner scrutinise my performance in a test and list me a letter grade that will dictate the success of the rest of my life, feels dystopian. It feels like the flawed justice system of Camus’ The Outsider, where everyone is so inwardly obsessed with defining and measuring key words like ‘learning’, ‘developing’ and ‘growing’ that educators lose sight of what any of that truly means. Ultimately, just like Meursault, I feel helpless against the asphyxiatingly bureaucratic system I am placed in, with my only option being to tolerate it or give up. As a student who just wants to learn and to be challenged in a meaningful way, I instead find myself doing repetitive and menial tasks that are only assigned to us because they work as good assessments, not as developing experiences. I feel that for many students, our potential is wasted, not because I believe the curriculum is useless (yes, I may never use the quadratic formula again, but developing the logical skills associated with mathematics is important) but because our assessments are almost always useless. Made so we can be compared to our peers, not so that our own individual talents can be revealed, standardised testing kills individuality and creativity by making both of those things practically unfeasible. The best strategy is to be ‘generic and safe’, and as this essay comes to an end, my literary voice will return to its generic and safe home.
It’s unfortunate that this is the reality we live in, and while I have ideas on how this system could be improved, I hold no authority in that debate. But I do wonder, these days, how many kids we are letting down by leaving this system unreformed. How many kids are we convincing that they are incompetent and unworthy of success? How many more are we allowing to have their full capacity neglected? Critics of Sir Ken Robinson usually dismiss him as being idealistic and utopian, but in an age of mounting cynicism, I think higher expectations are healthy. I hope one day students will look back at this system, and with the same confused repulsion we associate with lobotomies and riding donkeys around, they will wonder how we could be so content living such primitive lives. But until then, I have an essay to write on how Mao’s 1966 Cultural Revolution impacted the price of ancient clay tablets in British archaeological museums.
Balance is a critical component of forming informed opinions. As such, if you are interested in this topic, I recommend reading the links bellow, as they challenge both mine, and Sir Robinson’s view of the modern education system:
https://pragmaticreform.wordpress.com/2013/10/12/what-sir-ken-got-wrong/
http://hackeducation.com/2015/04/25/factory-model
Pheisty Philosophers 