Rethinking School Chapter 1: The way we do school

 The way we do school

By "school," I don't simply mean the buildings where children go to sit in a physical classroom and learn. I mean our entire K-12-plus system, the one that we tend to think of as normal: Classify yourself by the month and year in which you were born; group yourself with those born within twelve months of you; study seven or eight unrelated subjects in blocks, four or five times per week; do this for twelve or so years, but not usually during the summer; at least once a year (usually much more often), fill out lots of bubble sheets with a #2 pencil; after twelve years of this, go away and live in a group home with others born within four years of you, while attending lectures and choosing a major that doesn't necessarily line up with any particular adult pattern of life.

The physical institutions of local elementary, middle, and high schools add an additional layer of artificiality: Leave home and travel to a place, where you sit in a room with that group of others who were born within twelve months of you; do this from September to June, unless it snows; study your subjects in fifty-minute blocks, four or five times per week; listen to someone at the front of the room, and then go home and complete a series of randomly assigned tasks.

This has nothing to do with the way that actual human beings acquire knowledge. Realize that the way we do school is entirely unnatural.

"Only a few children in school," wrote John Holt, "ever become good at learning in the way we try to make them learn. Most of them get humiliated, frightened, and discouraged." 

If your child falls anywhere on this mismatch spectrum, there's a very good chance that the problem is school, not your child.

Our current school system, as Sir Ken Robinson explains in his wildly popular TED talk "Do Schools Kill Creativity?," was designed to produce good workers for a capitalistic society. Deep in "the gene pool of public education," is the unquestioned premise that "there are only two types of people -- academic and nonacademic; smart people and non-smart people. And the consequence of that is that many brilliant people think they're not, because they've been judged against this particular view of the mind ... this model has causes chaos in many people's lives. It's been great for some; there have been people who have benefitted wonderfully from it. But most people have not. Instead, they suffer."

Conversations about school reform have to keep happening. But as of right now, only a few innovative schools seem able to movr ahead with them. If your child, right now, weeping in frustration over homework, or staring blankly into space, switched off, I can guarantee you that school reform isn't going to happen soon enough to make a difference to you and your child. Instead, you're going to have to take control of the K-12 years yourself, and use your own ingenuity to bend the system to fit your child.

Saduran dari: Bauer, Susan Wise. 2018. Rethinking School: How to Take Charge of Your Child's Education (Chapter 1).