Many years ago in Mexico City, a friend and I came across a stall selling magnetic health bracelets. My friend (a scientist) asked the stall holder how they worked. He explained that the iron in your blood flowing through the polarised magnetic field would induce positive energy. My friend (who was looking for an argument) asked what would happen if he put one on the wrong way round. Wouldn't that risk producing negative energy?
It's the same with education. There are things we put huge national effort behind, emphasising how dramatic and cumulative the effects are, but as soon as anyone asks about the negative impacts, these are pooh poohed and dismissed.
The obvious one is Grades. We think that emphasising the importance of grades will make a difference to pupils' attitudes. Targets, assessment against targets, assemblies, intervention, reporting, insisting pupils know their target and how it compares to where they currently stand. Comparing, competing, ranking. If we think it has such a strong effect, why would we be unable to countenance the idea that a culture of constantly emphasising a high stakes achievement defecit would have some possible negative effect on pupils' view of themselves and their purpose in school?
Then there's learning. Learning as memorisation and being tested. Right/wrong answers that you ought to know because you have been explicitly told. Is learning really just memorisation? Or is learning the by-product of being interested or challenged? Is learning the outcome of doing something worthwhile on its own terms? It might be in other areas of your life. But not in school.
Worse, the right/wrong answers might be verbatim scripted answers. Teachers use "cold calling" to see if pupils can recall the definitions and quotes they have been drilled in.
If these notions of learning are so powerful, might not they also have powerful negative impacts on pupils' understanding of their own agency?
If we think the voices of authority and all that is best and in "standard English" will play a substantial role in correcting pupils' own ideas, pupils' own expression of ideas and pupils' deviant voices, how can we minimise any concern about its effect on their own sense of value, of creativity, of self?
Think of the example of the "hook" which has fallen into disrepute. Pupils shouldn't be doing a lesson with a memorable imaginative element, because they will be so distracted by it, they won't grasp the point of the lesson, remembering only the fun and excitement. If fun and excitement have such a powerful effect on children, what might be the effect of removing them from their lives? How can it be of vital importance in its impact in one direction, but negligible in the other?
Now imagine a child in a school where all of these things are part of a concerted approach, where conformity and consistency are key to maximising the impact. The effects are cumulative and compounded. They may even use the word "relentless". What consideration is given to the possible negative effects of something considered so impactful?
What we are witnessing is a relentless focus on the outcomes the school needs in order to meet targets. With no regard to the experience of being a young person. The here and now is something to be sacrificed in a disciplined way, to an outcome you will be forever judged on. We devalue the idea of the learning being interesting. Being engaged just means paying attention. Enquiry and discovery have somehow become dirty words. Creativity, expression, having a voice, being a person. The joy of reading is replaced by learning knowledge about a text to be tested on. Thinking about the universe and asking questions is replaced by being tested on applying formulae. And in languages we are made to question whether asking pupils to communicate is in fact inappropriate.
You may say not all schools are like this. Or that no school is really like this. But in every school, the dial has shifted in this direction. And the effects are supposedly powerful when it comes to outcomes. And supposedly negligible when it comes to lived experience. Just as with the Mexican magnetic bracelet, I am not buying it.
I think of how, last I checked, the UK has about 20% of its pupils persistently absent.
ReplyDeleteAnd how my son, a most likely neurodivergent kid, who had to start school at 4.and who used to love having us read to him so much that my husband and I would go hoarse and nod off on the pages in the evening, now "hates" reading.
He's supposedly doing well: last year, in his mixed class Y3/4, when he was a Y3, he was in the top 6 for maths overall, and top of his year.
But he had also already started to tell us that he hates maths as well. And since starting school he started opposing any puting fiercely, complaining that we're wasting the free time that he has. He is terrified of the behavioural policy because missed homework or mandated reading (whichc we have to log in a journal for him) will mean docked play time. More of his time taken.
His school isn't at all one of the worse ones, in our area they are one of the more accommodating. The teachers are well meaning, but this system is what they are into.
And so on paper this is a kid that is doing well, but life at home has been really hard and we work really hard to accommodate where the school doesn't and it feels like we're to bed of simply being with our child.
He'd do so much better somewhere where learning is for inquisitive kids as well and isn't all about ticking boxes and stuffing data in heads.
So sorry to hear how this is happening. Even in good schools that try to focus on the pupils and their experience of learning, we are still in the same system as the schools that put their performance targets ahead of the kids' lived experience and actual learning. We are made to compete with these schools. I hope most schools know that this is counter productive and do their best in spite of the rewards and incentives to be pushed into it by their own outcome measures. But we are all in the same system being slowly boiled like frogs who never realise until it's too late.
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