Salad days

School: The Wonder Years or Hell on Earth?

David Garland 09 February 2010

It must be tough being a school student today. On the one hand, you have the Minister for Education and Deputy PM Julia Gillard espousing “…new ways of teaching and learning that promote creativity, flexibility, self-reliance and the other abilities students will need for the 21st century.” On the other, you’re banned from school when you do exercise a little creativity, as in the case of a Year 10 student at a high school in NSW recently, who was told she wasn’t welcome after she dyed her hair. Fortunately the student also seems to have taken Gillard’s message of self-reliance to heart, declaring in response: “At this stage of my life, I do not need such nonsense that is so distressing and disruptive.” While this might seem a fairly trivial example of the petty tyranny of a school authority over a student, it’s something that goes on day after day, week after week in schools with grinding regularity. Think about the school day with its highly structured and regimented environment. The bell that tells you when to start learning, when to stop, when to eat, when to play, when to stop enjoying yourself, when to be at school and when to leave. The rules on what to wear and what not to wear. Having to stand when the teacher enters the room, chorusing in unison a greeting, sitting when they give permission, communicating by request and only opening your textbooks when told. Then there is the “learning” itself. Not only the irrelevancy of much of the content and the boredom that it provokes but the methods of assessment such as tests and exams which are akin to being forced to jump through a series of hoops designed to ensure you “know your stuff” so as to be able “to make it in the real world”. This despite it being exceedingly rare to find a workplace where you are forced to sit silently for hours on end, where you are unable to ask co-workers of supervisors for advice or instructions and are unlikely to be asked to regurgitate verbatim large quantities of text. Even when the lunch bell signals “free-time”, there are sporting matches and music lessons and debating clubs – all of which may be enjoyable and impart valuable skills but which are also part of the increasing encroachment of regimentation into any unstructured time and space you might enjoy. Given this, it’s not hard to see that much of the schooling process is designed to enforce discipline and inculcate habits of obedience to authority. Indeed this was the express motive of many ruling class advocates of a national education system, whose efforts coincided with the consolidation of the nation state and beginning of the industrial revolution in the late 1700s. One such advocate declared that she would teach children to read but not write: “They learn, on weekdays, such coarse works as may fit them for servants. I allow of no writing for the poor. My object is…to train up the lower classes in habits of industry and piety… Beautiful is the order of society when each, according to his place, pays willing honour to his superiors.” Many of these early advocates of a coherent and systematic educational system were motivated by the need to ensure that the emerging working class had the skills to operate the machinery of the new factories and also accepted the orders of foremen, bosses, police and government without question. Of course, this is not generally the way that school is experienced by students today. Passionate teachers strive to make learning interesting and meaningful, innovative programs challenge old methods of education, and learning new skills in music, sport, drama and so forth can capture at least some students’ imaginations. Moreover, for many students, the experience of school is overwhelmingly coloured by their social experiences and friendships. Many students will look back with fond memories of their school days, while just as many others struggle to meet the demands of a competitive system, and often spend years recovering from the effects of bullying or social exclusion. But while this might be the way that school is experienced by students, it doesn’t mean that there is not a different motivation behind the kind of education system we have. While access to a decent and comprehensive education has been a key goal of many working class movements and is often a battleground between the haves and have nots, the fundamentals of the school experience are still centred around ensuring a mass of obedient, disciplined workers, ready for the call centres, factories and office blocks of modern capitalism.