On schools and education…
I read today a short quote from Oscar Wilde:
, “A school should be the most beautiful place in every town and village – so beautiful that the punishments for undutiful children should be that they should be debarred from going to school the following day.”
I checked to see that he’d said it and found the quote listed in “The Schooldays of Oscar Wilde”
by David Robertson, Portora Archivist. It seems Oscar Wilde’s school didn’t live up to his belief that schools should be beautiful.
I went to school in the usual picture book schoolhouse — looking a bit like you’d expect a church to look actually. It was a small school with grades kindergarten through sixth grade. Then it was on to junior high (the first year in that school) and then high school (the last class to graduate from that building).
I was an okay student. Looking back I believe I could have been a much better student but I was more interested in learning in general than in learning just what was taught. If I found something interesting in an assignment, I was likely to go to the library or to our set of encyclopedias and look up more information and read on that topic until my interest got caught by something else. So, homework got a lick and a promise, but luckily in such small school I was still a A-B student.
Then came college. That’s when lots of things changed. You see I thought that college was the time to explore, learn, expand my horizons, and check out new areas of study. It took nearly flunking out to make me realize that that’s not what colleges are for. College is to polish the edges of what you already know and add depth to the knowledge that you already have. Taking a subject you know nothing about and studying like crazy and ending up knowing a lot but not as much as the students who came into it already knowing the basics and building on that knowledge usually left you at the C or D level, and that’s not how you graduate. So, eventually, I learned that college was not for learning and settled down to polish my edges and got a degree. I even did most of the studying for a MS before I decided I just couldn’t take the politics and rules for rules sake that made little to no sense to me.
However, looking at school now and talking to teens and younger children — schools are prisons now. There’s guards and police officers. In some schools students go through metal scanners similar to the ones in airports. Their belongings can be searched at any time. Some schools have won cases in court and banned students or punished them for things they did outside of school hours and off school grounds. With budget cuts and a worsening economy text books are getting older and older and more out of date. The buildings are decaying. Many classes are held in trailers set up next to the schools.
I honestly can’t think of an environment that is less likely to encourage learning. Then you add in the unfunded No Child Left Behind which translates into you will learn to pass the tests because we can’t do anything else with our budget. The bullying that children suffer from, that teachers can and will do nothing about — because Zero Tolerance means the victim is victimized twice, once by the bully and again by getting the same punishment as the bully if it’s reported. Zero Tolerance means that the letter not the spirit of all the rules is followed and that lowers students respect for and belief in fairness, justice, and authority.
Schools now-a-days seem more about not offending anyone anywhere rather than teaching facts, skills, logic, science, and how-to find out about a topic. To me it is a wonder that anyone learns anything in schools now-a-days and from some of the studies that show up showing that most American’s think the Sun goes around the Earth, that can’t name the states of the US (or even half of them), and can’t find countries on a labeled map. [Hyperion: Or my own pet peeve: That still think global warming and/or evolution are hoaxes.]
Our schools need help and we need to encourage learning. Schools are not supposed to be just places where sports occur at regular intervals with pep rallies. Schools are supposed to be where learning occurs. Where students open their minds to learn about new ideas, new thoughts, and new ways of putting those ideas and thoughts together to form hypotheses, and to gain skills to help them find jobs and work that will be satisfying to them.
Schools should be beautiful places of learning, knowledge, and exciting ideas. Punishment should be denying us the ability to attend schools. Of course, right now your economic ability to pay impacts your ability to attend school more than any other factor. Education should rest on ability to learn not ability to pay.
Just some thoughts…