21st Century

Domes of blown plaster, hollow-sounding at the flick of a fingernail. Wood so rotten you can scoop it out in handfuls and crumble it to dust with your fingertips. Mould around windows, windows painted shut, windows boarded up. Chipped paintwork, lazy paintwork, dangerous paintwork or just no paintwork at all, and corners where the stuff won’t adhere properly as it blisters and peels away from walls that won’t dry out. And it’s always cold if you are more than a foot away from the ancient cast iron rads. What heat there is escapes up the stairs and out through the roof or via the thin panes of bubbling, brittle glass. And that’s just the stuff you can see. Legally, there should be plans to clearly mark the places where you mustn’t drill or saw! We live in a house like this and that’s because it is 167 years old! Built to old principles and practices that in so many ways have aced time’s harsh exam. And anyway, it was our choice and our solemn undertaking (hugely underestimated) to reverse all this decay when we bought the place and that journey is well underway. But there is no justification whatsoever for sending our children to be educated in such conditions in the 21st Century.

Children as children

Schools work when we see children for what they are. See their million tiny, fleeting inflections; see the trillion stimuli triggering the molecular tremblings which manifest in every way we can possibly think of. It’s quite something when we give ourselves permission to share the power. True, we have to watch the child really carefully through the full oscillation because the variation in magnitude about its central point creates an uneven pulse, a distorted wavelength. This takes time, but it’s worth it because what we’ll see when we do look is pure, unbridled feeling and being. Essence. Everything essential to learning what really matters in the long run. For us as well as them. Of course, it often looks like so many things we’ve learned to not like or want or need; things that we believe have their own special times in the day just not now, but we need to avoid this and seek instead the oscillation. Schools start to work when we meet our own pledge to see children as children.

Children as something other than children

School don’t work when we stop seeing children. They are there in front of us in our classrooms so in some sort of literal and entirely superficial sense we see them. We will walk past each other in the corridors and we will gather together in all sorts of places throughout the day, but we have stopped seeing them and if we are honest, probably stopped looking for them. Here we need them for one thing and one thing only. And to this end we have replaced acceptance and a quest for understanding with expectation, assumption and the quicksand of misunderstanding. We fall back on old attitudes and beliefs that these powerful learning machines are actually the opposite of brave and confident and competent. Children so at risk they need to be constantly surveilled and accounted for and counted up and spoken to. Never left alone for fear of all sorts. And worse of all, our language embraces the sour tropes of the risk-averse, the punitive, the transactional, the coercive. We cast our eyes about the room and we can’t see beyond dots on a flightpath or surname/first names on a coloured spreadsheet. We rag rate them and talk about them in sad and deterministic ways. We see them on a journey, for sure, but it’s not one of those great expeditions that reveals new truths ourselves, each other and the world around us, but as something narrower in all dimensions. High stakes and joy-free as entirely quotidian. The spark has gone, the embers tamped out. Perhaps it is not not seeing them, but that we’ve actually started to see them differently; children as something other than children.

Seen to be believed

No school would ever call itself coercive. But are they actually not? Big c or small. And no school should aim to educate the nation’s youth in crumbling buildings, but do they actually not?

I meet parents who home school their children and they are often quick to tell me that they are not teachers. My immediate response has become that they are, in fact, the original teacher, the prima pedagogista. I am always struck about how deeply they think about the education of their children, and how insanely courageous they are. But that all being said, I now find myself thinking about this conundrum a great deal. I mean, if I’m a teacher and they are not, then what is the difference? I mean, the actual difference? It can’t be knowledge because knowledge is easily and quickly obtained (and anyway, I’ve met loads of teachers who know very little about quite a lot!). My conclusion is that the difference is to do with the skills and experience of getting groups of 25 or more kids to do something that they may well not want to do and to do it at the same time as each other. This is the difference, and this has to be coercive if only by degree. Schools in the current mainstream paradigm must be places of order, drill and formula in a Victorian imaginary. If not, they won’t deliver their narrow and ancient aims. And for too many children they are also places of fear and upset and trauma. Places they simply don’t want to be. To mandate their attendance under these circumstances demands coercion, if only by degrees. For others they are just a waste of their precious time where apathy is the armour that enables them to be navigated or tolerated. Moments of joy are often unexpected. Even where they are enjoyed, inch for inch and pound for pound, they represent very poor value for all the money and effort poured into them. Despite their pursuit of efficiencies and impact in operation and outcome they are ultimately ineffective. Honestly, who would buy into a business model that bakes in a 40% failure rate year on year? No one in their sane mind, that’s who! No, coercive schools don’t work, so instead, schools must become places of exponential and unconditional learning and growth. Of warmth and love and happiness. Of excitement and adventure and transformation and partnership. Schools should be built for dreaming where learning is irresistible and inevitable. A place to be seen, and seen to be believed.