Another year, another series of tinkerings with the
education system. Academies; free
schools; abolish AS levels … abolish GCSEs … on and on it goes, and the teachers,
slogging away in the trenches, resign themselves to yet another round of
upheaval. Indeed, for most of their professional
lifetimes upheaval rather than stability has been the norm. But does all this constant change really change anything?
There are overdue rumblings of doubt whether compulsory
full-time academic education up to the age of 16 was such a good idea in the
first place. The Sunday Telegraph published
figures to show that young men’s last year of schooling, whichever year that
was, was the year in which they committed most offences, throughout the
twentieth century. Francis Gilbert’s
book I’m a Teacher, Get Me Out Of Here blew the lid off ‘bog standard
comprehensives’, revealing them to be universities of anti-social behaviour
rather than nurseries of talent. The
system, as it stands, is not just failing to prepare adolescents for
citizenship, it is actively encouraging them towards a life of crime. Yet why should anyone be surprised?
Compulsory education was introduced with the best of motives
– to protect children from exploitation and to equip them with skills they
needed to succeed in an increasingly complex society. In a hi-tech world it is no longer economic
to employ children as agricultural labourers or sweatshop operatives; instead
of an inefficiently exploited and expendable resource, a child is now a valued
luxury, and in most respects this is a great blessing. But it has a downside. In removing children from the workforce,
society declares them useless mouths. In
protecting them, we stuff them into a box in which nothing they do can make any
conceivable difference to anybody – except themselves, in the remote future. We’re more comfortable with that. Trust spotty, giddy teenagers to do anything
that matters? No thanks. Duke of Edinburgh’s Award, community service,
as long as it’s safety-checked and sanitized, but nothing that has the rank
smell of real money or real danger.
Well-brought-up children are the imperial concubines of our
society – showered with gifts, taught to show off utterly useless skills,
simply because we can afford it.
Children from dysfunctional or non-existent families, badly behaved
children, are society’s prisoners, banged up in schools for want of anything
better to do with them, with teachers as their equally trapped warders. Why do we expect them to like it? School can work for docile, highly
intelligent children who are good at deferring gratification. But these are a minority, and in most
ordinary schools the discontented majority will not let even them get on with
it.
The perceived uselessness of children and adolescents is at
the root of most of the problems in schools and many of those of society at
large. All down the ages humans have
dreamed and schemed to be freed from the necessity of getting their daily
bread. But human character is formed
under that necessity just as the human skeleton is formed by the force of
gravity, and few people function well when it is removed. Right from the first time a baby is plonked
in front of a television screen to be entertained, through the classroom years
in which passivity is rewarded and independence treated as a threat, children
today are trained to the behaviour patterns of a parasitic aristocracy. Depressive, self-destructive behaviour –
excess consumption of food and alcohol, gambling, aimless violence and
promiscuous sex; the languid enjoyment of possessions gained without effort;
inactivity whenever possible – these used to be the preserve of the idle rich,
but compulsory education followed by the welfare state have made them the
condition of choice of an entire society, known by the collective, approving
label of ‘cool’.
This enforced parasitism is the chief cause, for instance,
of bullying in schools. Most human
tolerance and co-operation is founded on the practical realization that
different people make useful contributions, in their various ways, to the
group’s survival. Unlike a baboon troop,
a human society contains all kinds of niches in which people with different
abilities can survive with some self-respect.
The aggressive fighter will support the weedy intellectual because the
geek’s skills complement his own; even the poor, inoffensive idiot will be
valued as a worker. In school, none of
this happens because survival and economic benefit are not at issue. No one needs anyone else in a classroom. The battle for status becomes as stark and
pure as in any baboon troop. The most
aggressive and intimidating members enforce a rigid conformity; anyone who
shows difference or vulnerability is persecuted without escape. And yet some of the most horrible bullies I
knew at school became helpful and affable individuals, once they got to do a job
that needed doing. Nothing combats bullying like responsibility;
but without responsibility all the valiant efforts being made to combat it will
do little good. Bullying is
structural. So are many of the other
behaviour patterns we deplore in teenagers.
A fourteen-year-old girl’s deliberate decision to become pregnant, for
instance: what is it but a desperate assertion that she matters, that
she wants to have the ultimate responsibility for something in her life, rather
than simply taking what is dished out to her?
But we prefer not to notice this; having herded our children
into a dysfunctional sub-society, we attempt to rationalize and gloss over
their appalling behaviour as normal and inevitable. Solemn academic studies ‘find’ that young
people are ‘socialized by’ and ‘draw their values from’ their peer group, not
their parents, absolving parents in retrospect from their abandoned duty to
instil a sense of social obligation in opposition to the fainéant mentality
of school. In a recent Sunday
Telegraph article on the suicide of a bullied schoolgirl, Jenny McCartney
wished the victim could have kept her hopes up until she left school: ‘there is
no workplace so vile that you will be jostled and taunted on your way to your
desk’. Why do we accept that schools are
viler than workplaces? Why do we assume
that to be a teenager is to be a depressed misfit or a jeering bully, when we
know perfectly well that teenagers are as various as adults, and capable,
moreover, of amazing idealism, courage and generosity – if ever they get the
chance to show it?
I suppose we put up with it partly because we know deep down
that it is still an improvement on what went before. Visitors to Africa and China often comment
wistfully on how much the children there value education, on their eagerness to
learn compared to the sullen apathy of Britain’s well-cared-for youth. Of course they value education: it is the
best passport out of a life of squalor and miserable, back-breaking labour in
societies with little compassion to spare for the poor. We have Dickens and Kingsley to remind us
how comparatively recently we were there ourselves. We have books like Barry Hines’s Kes and
Lorna Sage’s Bad Blood to remind us how far from ideal British schools
were even in the nostalgically recalled 1950s.
But the fact that we don’t want to go back shouldn’t mean that we go
ever further forward down a blind alley.
Young people have to be re-integrated into the world around
them. They need to feel their efforts
count, and they need to be mentored and taken seriously by adults who haven’t
the vested interest of parents or the crowd-control problems of teachers. Isn’t apartheid by age group one of the
strangest things about our society?
Whence this unnatural situation in which many, perhaps a majority of
adults can go for days at a time without speaking to a child, foisting the duty
of bringing on the next generation onto teachers? Where did we, as adults, get the expectation
of working in a ready-socialized, child-free environment? No wonder most children, addressed by an
adult, return a blank stare and seem to have no idea how to respond. No wonder they get their own back on us on
the streets, parks and buses.
Sometimes I imagine a town in which every restaurant would
have a few aproned eleven-year-old waiters wishing the diners bon appetit;
where accountants and estate agents would have a complement of teenage trainees
applying their school maths to real life; where, once you started secondary
school, you could choose to spend real time at a variety of these jobs – and
get real money for them –as part of your ‘education’. And where schools, in turn, were places you
could go to at any age, to catch up on the academic subjects you saw no point
in when you were a young man in a hurry.
It would not be easy to safeguard children in such a scheme from danger
and exploitation, and also to ensure that the work they were given was real and
not just cosmetic. But it would be worth
the effort, if it introduced them to the need for striving before they got
hooked on the habit of skiving.
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