Barbelith Underground > Switchboard

I feel a bit conflicted about entering this discussion, because I'm clearly the sort of person school is essentially aimed at.
I'm intrigued at this, haus. Can you go into detail on what you mean by this?

I'd like to defend the statement about "school-based education" being jumping through some hoops to learn some useless GCSE's which you'll never use again, so the school hits it's targets. Everything I've experienced about education indicates that kids pass these things based on class, accent, wealth, etc, and not on intelligence.

Also, the problem with forcing people to rub shoulders is precisely that; they are being forced. It isn't helpful for either set of kids, especially when the authority figures favour one set over the other, and it is blatently based upon class. I've heard the same argument about this mixing come from many of the Jesmond/Heaton kids (just to explain; physically, Heaton is a kind of buffer zone seperating Byker from Jesmond. You can observe the neighbourhoods getting gradually more and more poor as you walk from, say, Jesmond Metro station to Byker metro via Heaton). They talk about how 'lucky' and priveliged they are to have been to a multicultural school with children of all classes. It's all about them and their experiences, and what they've learnt about the working classes. Never have they stopped to think how the working class/underclass kids feel about it, instead drawing arrogant and prejudiced conclusions about these people. A certain set of language skills were taught to one segment of the student body, while the other was kept as dumb as possible (i mean, there were people sitting GCSE's in my school where it was impossible to get over a C! What is that telling the kid?). And those language skills were put to very clever use by the upper class kids to justify their privelege, rather than question it. Many still don;t see that it is necessary to question it, and that their own liberation is bound up with the liberation of these people.

On the failure of schools to deal with people with physical or learning disabilities - well, that is a real problem. One question is where you set the bar for "learning difficulties". Ronan!Nick seems to be setting it pretty high, and saying that schools only cater to an academically able (and apolitical?) elite. In which case, is there an alternative? Possibly a more streamed system in which people have more options for self-development in different ways? Or is that just divisive?

I think Becky makes the point in the marmots that all children have special needs, and that special needs are the rule, not the exception. The way schools teach is fascist in it's proper sense, the root of it being the 'fascia', a bundle of uniform twigs which strengthen one another; however, this strength comes at the price of diversity, and there are a lot of individualistic and creative twigs\humans who could have served their communities in valuable ways, but school has convinced them that life is all about a lifeless job. I don't think Nick is setting the bar high at all; a lot of people have been saying that there's a lack of money in schools, and this is why they're so bad, but i think this is entirely false. It requires only a little thought to create a truly educational environment which gives people self worth and allows them to explore the universe in their own way. GCSE's and A-levels are very narrow ways of learning about the world.

I don't think anything could be more divisive than it is now. Allowing people the freedom to chat about what they want, write about what they want, play what they want, that would be true culture and true education. Humans are naturally motivated to learn, they don't need to be forced; forcing them dampens that natural enthusiasm for exploration, and inevitably winds them up either staring at a monitor for Thomas Cooks, or indeed being on the other side of the desk buying a packaged holiday. (Heaton Manor has a special 'British Airways Lounge' specifically for training up GNVQ kids to work for travel agents - this is not education, this is recruitment and training). Illmatic has already mentioned AS Neill, and i recommend you read his very straightforward outlines on how to bring up happy children.

In answer to Lurid; we were all very unusual students, and thats an important point which the schools want us to forget. If we do manage to hold onto individuality, they try to make us experience our uniqueness as loneliness or friendlessness.

Thus, the fact that Illmatic has learnt more by himself than from his schooling is not necessarily a product of a poor education. In fact, its what I'd expect from someone who had an excellent education.

I think people learn a lot from the mental and physical abuse they recieve at school, but that doesn't justify it. We should be using experiences of abuse to help others out of that cycle; it's kind of like the argument from violent parents 'well it never did me any harm'. Well, yes, it did, otherwise they wouldn;t be hitting their children. Likewise, you can't really call experiences of mental/physical violence learning unless people have learnt the important lesson; it just is not acceptable.

Also, the line: one wants to guarantee certain standards. The standards should involve the well being of the child, not whether he can perform incredibly stupid mental tasks on cue. I expected certain standards from the adults around me, they had no right to raise me up to any standard, especially when that standard involved total subjection to adult will.

Also, Maths is an incredible subject and was one of the escapes from school for me, and i was incredibly lucky to have had it passed on. My earliest experiences of it were atrocious, however; in primary school i remember being reduced to tears because every adult in my life seemed to be saying i would die poor and lonely if i didn't learn the times tables up to 12 off by heart. All i wanted to do was read judge dredd, and perhaps explore the patterns of the numbers myself in my own time. I already knew before i even reached school that there was a rich area of exploration open to me in numbers. Learning them in that way was like putting them in a deathcamp, something humans seem to do with a lot of entities they encounter. I got into high school and excelled at maths; every other kid i ever met through maths never knew their times tables; i think the kids who did had been defeated, they'd accepted that maths wasn't fun, that it was meaningless, that there were no interesting patterns to discover. Mental arithmetic is an incredible mental block.

As for my complaint; the iraq tv debate the school hosted seems to have been allowed because it was a very 'safe' debate, no matter what the head teacher says (Link to his reply to my letter). They weren;t willing to engage in debate on East Timor, nor on Iraq back when discussion and consciousness raising might have made a difference. When the debate was aired, it was already clear to everyone with any experience of these things that the war was over before it had started. The media was still maintaining the pretence that there was a debate going on, and the HMS thing helped maintain that illusion, and also presented the illusion that that school respects freedom of speech. Perhaps it does, but it would have required a huge revolution in how that school is run; and infringements of freedom of speech aren't just about policing overtly political discourse, its about allowing children just to have the freedom to express themselves without fear of verbal abuse from adults.

I've covered a lot of stuff here, and haven;t addressed everything in this thread. I'm still reading through. Don't feel you have to respond to everything I've said all at once.

School