Read on Twitter
I think the different sides of this conversation are a good example of the division on Edutwitter between those who see school primarily as an exam factory& those who see it as a more holistic environment... https://twitter.com/grahamchatterl2/status/1286574325877940226
I think it’s time to be very honest about this. There are two questions it seems to me: the one of curriculum where we ask the question of whether we want every subject to be taught as series of facts to which children have to memorise ‘the answers’...
I would argue that in the arts& humanities this is problematic. The other question is, do we want an attitude that children should be conditioned to unquestioningly obey adults by being harshly punished until they do. This is maybe the more complex question..
In the 1950s, this was the way schools worked. They were in general orderly places. But if children were being abused in any way, they just had to deal with it, no one would listen to them. If that abuser was a teacher, they generally got away with it...
The other point is that while in the 1950s schools were pretty grey places, outside school hours children engaged with each other in independent play in streets, wooded areas etc around where they lived. This doesn’t happen anymore.
Many children just go from one adult organised activity to another, or spend hours online, often associating with each other in an environment where a lot of human signalling in communication is missing https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2018/05/i-played-fortnite-and-figured-out-the-universe/559940/
So the evidence suggests that modern children’s lives are actually far more constricted by the exam factory school than 1950s children, an issue that is seldom recognised. I think because ‘school’ has filled the frame...
I think instead we need to discuss ‘childhood’ and what part ‘school’ plays in this, remembering that except for the highly privileged, 300 years ago, the answer to this would be ‘none’. This won’t work today because all children do need schooling...
...to exist in a post industrial, technological society. The question is, what part schools schooling play, what do we want them to learn for a future in which they will need a highly fluid, problem solving approach (& play at all ages helps with this)...
...because it is an arena in which they have to think ‘in the moment’, to stay in the game, to make original responses to other people in a fast-changing situation, to learn to decipher primate signalling like facial expression and ‘body language’...
Having thought about this, we then go back to considering services for children and families for the 21st century, with school- and teachers-as an important piece of a much larger jigsaw.
