questions, rhetoric polemics and observations

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Not a great picture, I know, I know, but this virtual school Victoria, the school for nearly 4000 students….now take a look at the (blurry) picture, go on take a close look and tell me what you notice? this is a school for 4000 students and there are no students in the photo.

The school uses blended learning, a mix of virtual and face-to-face teaching and learning. Students can visit the school during normal school hours to meet with teachers, attend seminars and study in the library or purpose-built study areas. And Mr McIver arranged a fantastic programme for the day where I did meet teachers, students, administrators so as they say down here in Australia, “its all good”.

I arrived early at the school and signed in to reception, the receptionist asked how the first test was going in the Ashes series…..that was below the belt! England had crumbled in the second innings and gave the match to Australia. As it turned out Mr McIver would not be ready for 20 minutes and the receptionist suggested I go to the canteen for a coffee. I did so and when I placed my order an attractive woman with an “Australian face,” (by which I mean sunshine eyes and sunshine smile it seems to be a characteristic of the Aussies), I got to musing were the solemn countences so ubiquitous in Britain, the consequence of grey, solemn weather. Who knows but I digress. Where was I??? Oh yes……. An attractive woman with an Australian face said “Oh what a lovely accent! where are you from?” after introducing myself, she instructed the girl serving the drinks return my payment for the coffee….”its on the house” she explained.

The above examples may not be important per se, but they do indicate the warmth of the welcome i received in VSV….and they indicate just how well prepared the school was for my visit, I think every request, every query I had was addressed and included in the programme.In this respect, very similar to Te Kura. However this was a different beast to te Kura.

I am going to ask YOU two questions, if you feel the need, answer in the feedback section, actually I would appreciate that.

1. What is Education?
2. Why do we educate our young people?

I have alluded to these questions already, they appear simple and straight forward, but they are questions that have been bothering me for quite some time.

I am not going to say my answer is correct…I really don’t know, nor am I going to drag you down to agree with my conclusion by asking a series of leading questions. But ponder for a moment those two questions.

If you transported the builders who built the pyramids or the stargazers of babylon to the control centre for the Hubble Space telescope or to the construction site for latest prestige project, they would be entering a fantasy world which is completely beyond their understanding…..If on the other hand you transported Socrates to the typical classroom in 21st Century England, he would recognise the structure of the class. It would be different of course, there would be girls, larger classes, more rigid timetable, more structure to the lessons, more teachers but in essence 3000 years have passed but the song remains the same.

So back to the first of my original two questions. The dictionary gives two definitions of education;

1. the process of receiving or giving systematic instruction, especially at a school or university.

2. an enlightening experience

I have already stated in an earlier entry that over the past 55 years, my personal experience of schools has felt like a systematic attempt to stifle and suppress my own passion and curiosity for learning and strait-jacket my education into a neatly packaged curriculum “one size fits all” bundle, with little or no effort to provide me with an enlightening experience.

I got the impression that VSV did attempt to redress the balance and really try to create an experience which for the students in which education was an enlightening opportunity.

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For what its worth, I believe we educate children to prepare them for adulthood, I believe the role of the school is vaguely analagous to the neccessity for a very deep and wide gene pool. If students are only educated by parents, the education is potentially narrow and limited. The wider the pool of educators the broader the horizons children are given.

The model I was shown at VSV can be summarised in the following diagram

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I mentioned earlier that Socrates might recognise the 21st century classroom, but I also believe that education even in the golden age of Greece was something dictated by the ruling elite.  Its main purpose was to ensure citizens were trained in the arts, and to prepare them for both peace and war. It was aimed at the cultivation of the students’ physical, mental, and moral qualities.   From Athens we get the motto: A sound mind in a sound body. All schools were very small private schools, and education was very valued.

Boys
Until age six, boys were taught at home by their mother or a male slave. Age six to 14 was primary school. The teacher in school was always a male. Once the youths were 16, their ‘basic education’ was complete. The boys who didn’t have to work could now study the sciences and philosophy. From the ages of 18 to 20, able bodied young men had to take military trainging for the army or the navy. Athenians wanted their sons to have a well rounded education so that they would know a variety of things and appreciate lots of things.  

Girls
Girls were taught at home by their mothers or a private tutor. The objective was to prepare girls for being a stay-at-home mum, to look after and educate their children just as they had been educated. 

However only the citizens of Athens were educated, the metics, the middle classes and the slaves were not educated. They may have received training in a trade or in service, but they were not allowed to develop their think of philosophy or politics, it was an education system designed to keep the elite at the top of the hierarchy and to keep the lower classes at a lower tier.

The story of a hierarchy continues today. Except it is 150 years out of date, The private schools and the likes of Eton and Harrow still offer an education for the ruling class to acquire the skills to rule. This is not envy politics, one simply has to look at the current and the previous governments to see that one school has provided the UK with 19 prime ministers since 1800, which corresponds to 47.5% of British prime ministers educated at the same school. Then when you then consider that 71% of the current tory cabinet attended a private school is an improvement on the 91% under Thatcher you can only draw one of two conclusions, either the education system is skewed to exclude the masses from entering positions of power or the ruling classes are somehow more intelligent than the rest of us. I know which viewpoint I take.

Sorry…I have wandered off the point again, I am accepting education is to provide us with the skills we need for adulthood, but I believe that the current system is 150 years out of date and has has been borne out of a desire to ensure that the demarcation of who ” cooks and serves dinner, who eats dinner and who washes the dirty dishes afterwards” remains intact. The grammar schools were there to teach children to be the functionaries of the empire and the other schools were to teach children to be obedient, know their places ad be ready and willing to shed blood for the empire, which in effect is a euphemism for “give blood and die” to ensure that the seats at the high table continued to belong to the same arseholes which had always sat there.

I said the system is out of date, because now there is no need for the functionary, I honestly passionately believe that our current education system, its emphasis on testing, testing testing and after that test some more, its emphasis on exam performance, school league tables, accountability, the mind numbing narrowness of the curriculum, the marginalisation of modern languages, the politically weaponised history curriculum and an English curriculum which really benefits the middle class “consumer,” I really believe it robs children of the skills they need for the 21st century, it stifles creativity, imagination, independence. We pay lip service to encouraging resilience, entrepreneurship, collaboration and culture awareness, while delivering a curriculum that relies on slavish rote learning.

How many English schools put all forms of life on ice in year 11 and 13? no trips out because it clashes with GCSE or A Level, suspend sports teams, introduce compulsory after school lessons, compulsory saturday clubs, compulsory holiday time cramming….OK they are not compulsory but neither teacher nor student is really allowed to miss them.

And for what? to learn facts that are of no value, that the students have no ownership of. How many times have you heard or have you asked the question when will I ever need this? The “this” in question could be any one of 1000 topics.

Furthermore, who are we really directing our teaching towards? certainly not the kid with pyscho-social anxieties, certainly not the creative spark in our classes who has ADHD who can create and innovate and daydream and make magic happen but who cant sit still, who cant focus on minutae once she is bored, who is so disorganised that homework is never done, classwork is erratic and their mind jumps from topic to topic like a smoke molecule when observing brownian motion. It is not targeted towards the kid who is a lower or higher attainer and god help you if you are different.

I asked a student back in England what she thought the purpose of education is, she said ” to get my GCSEs”. She was right, the exam is the end product, we don’t educate. we fill heads with useless facts that they will retain for the exam period and then forget about forever, but hey…..the school can proudly display a banner on its front door saying 90% of our students achieved 5 GCSEs including Maths and English. Meanwhile Eton and Harrow and St Pauls will be teaching their children how to rule the country.

So what has this got to do with Victoria Virtual School? Actually I truly believe the flexibility, the delivery and the ethos of this school does encourage

• planning skills,
• time management,
• team communication and coordination and self discipline

VSV encourages non formal learning as well as formal learning. Over and over again the needs of the child were the focus of the school;s delivery

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OK I have written more than I planned to do here, but I want to conclude tht the model I saw here in Melbourne showed me a lot, it gave me food for thought and I now have real ideas about the way forward.