Are schools becoming obsolete?

[CarmenSanDiego]

It's a provocative question, but I'm really beginning to wonder what purpose traditional schools are there to serve.

The adult world is a complex place and there are many paths one can take. You could be a manicurist or a gardener, a lawyer or a doctor, a housewife or an entrepreneur. Or several of these things.

There is an assumption that schools should 'prepare' children. But for what, and how?

Now, I realise that parents may have to work and money and resources are limited, but I'm pondering on the whole concept and whether education needs revolutionising.

I withdrew my children from school a few months ago. I didn't really want to do it but now am actually amazed how easy it has been. We're following an online curriculum and I love how the lessons are very specific and to the point, with particular learning goals for each one. We get through maths and English quickly each morning and then have the rest of the day to pootle around with science, history, music or whatever we fancy.

School seems more of a continuum of practicing and rehashing work. It seems a slow way of learning when today's kids are very fast - able to zoom through internet sites and learn about a range of topics very quickly, zooming in and out on what interests them.

I'm also amazed at just how much time is wasted in school - all the nonsense that is inherent in the school culture - uniforms, PTA squabbles, disputes over healthy lunchboxes, bullying, peer pressure, proms etc. and having just read about the teacher who was taunted and cracked under the stress, there is an element of dehumanisation about schools - teachers aren't seen as people by pupils. PSHE doesn't even touch what you can learn by talking about the news and engaging with the real world and with people of different ages rather than just the dynamics of your own age group.

It interests me that children are often seen as unengaged at school. I remember being so bored and zoning out in lessons, yet as an adult able to choose my own method of learning, I haven't stopped studying. My children seem to be the same - they learn without even thinking about it or planning it, they just follow their interests. They're most engaged when it's a project they like whether it be dinosaurs, computer programming or a dance show.

I think the ideal is a system where children can somehow pick and choose their learning. I love the US system of summer day camps where children can do pretty much anything they like for a week at a time - golf, horseriding, chemistry or dinosaurs.

How do we decide what is important? Why does understanding the formulas for gravity take precedence over being able to compose a song or design a web application or bake and decorate a fantastic cake? Why should children learn French or German? Why can't they do Japanese?

I really think we need to move towards some kind of system where children can follow their interests and start rethinking school - rather than it being such an incestuous artificial environment, it should be more flowing and community based. I think this would lead to a happier, more productive society in the long run. Am I mad?

Very interesting thought and agree with a lot of what you said. I have been thnking similar things about University education recently.

Surely, most university teaching could be done online with students going to short residential courses for things like laboratory practicals.

I think that the education system needs a complete overhaul and we need to stop getting all children to jump through the same hoops. We also need to stop continually testing to see how they are doing.
However schools are about so much more than the work done-they are a community and teach life skill lessons on how to get on with others. I wouldn't have missed it for the world-I have lovely happy childhood memories. My DSs have friends that they have known from the infant classes and they have grown up together.

As a long term OUer (still doing OU after a year in the US), I would agree with that.

I also started life as a computer programmer and was advised out of school not to go to university as computer science would be obsolete by the time I graduated. There's a lot of truth there and having done a few OU computer courses, I found even the newest ones outdated. Adult life seems to be about getting specific skills as and when you need them. I'm not sure why childhood should be any different.

I realise there are a lot of impracticalities to what I say. My ideals would work best in a city where there are a lot of skilled people able to teach diverse subjects, languages, sports etc. It wouldn't be easy to do this sort of thing in a rural community where parents need to work.

But I do think the philosophy has some merit. School strikes me as such a timesink when there are so many exciting things to do and learn.

I agree to certain extent. I would love to home educate but just don't have the patience.
The issue to me is how do you educate 'the masses'. Finding a system that can educate every child on a pretty much individual level would be difficult to structure and costs would be huge. I do personally see a lot of value in the social side of school (although I appreciate not everyone has a happy experience- myself included).

I agree, scrappy. I'm trying to somehow shift this out of the realm of HE because that puts the responsibility on the parent. Instead, I'm thinking on the idea of child-led education.

The social point is a very good one, but I don't think a pick-and-choose education would exclude that. There would still be group classes and there's no reason they couldn't have social time with others from those classes. I'm not sure socialisation has to happen within the confines of school politics, hierarchy etc. to be valid. In fact, I think many children find that restrictive and even oppressive.

I don't know what the practicality would be. Perhaps you have a 'community education centre' and sign up for the classes you're going to do each term then go your separate ways to them. At the education centre, children could stop and socialise, sign up for charity, community or volunteering events, do sports. There would also be basic skills classes - reading, writing, learning skills, using money, time etc. especially for the younger ones.

I also see a lot of scope for online learning.

I'm just dreaming/brainstorming really

You can find exciting state schools, if you shop around. I know ones that have days where the age groups are muddled up, they have allotments, have chefs coming in, theatre groups etc.

i guess that's fine is there is one parent around to supervise them for the 9 or so years they need supervising

The majority of parents want 'wrap around' child care.

but in practice most people can't 'shop around' for a state school, piscesmoon - around here, you get allocated the one closest to you (if you're lucky) - the whole concept of parental choice is meaningless as there aren't enough school places in the first place

going back to the OP - nice idea, but completely impractical for the vast majority - the costs would be huge and what would you do with the substantial minority of kids who come from families who place no value on any form of education - how would you stop the gulf between their achivements and expectations and those of most middle class kids getting even bigger than it is now

But curriculums (curriculi?) can be delivered in a school setting in an inspiring and dynamic way - I'm thinking of initiatives like Enquiry Based Learning, where children are encouraged to think and learn independently, and go off on tangents rather than just sit and be talked at. I only have experience of seeing that used at KS1 though (so up to 7) - don't know how it would work further up the years.

I agree with a lot of the OP, though - although you're missing the value of social interaction, mixing with people from different parts of society and learning about the compromises you need to make to co-exist. I can't see how you can replicate that with home-schooling.

CarmenSanDiego - You might find the Personalised Education Now website interesting if you've not already seen it.

Hassled, I don't think you are mixing with people from different parts of society in school. To me, it's actually the opposite. Even in a diverse school, children are in same-age groups and are operating under the mindset and culture of the school they are all part of. There is a tendency to see school socialisation as a right of passage. But I'm not convinced. To many children it is hell on earth and just a rehearsal of adult pecking orders and popularity contests. It can be quite inhibitive imo.

I think mixed-age language groups, dance groups, science clubs and so on could be at least as socially valuable.

However, I'm trying not to get bogged down in whether or not HE kids are socialised or not - this isn't really about HE and that's a big topic. I don't think HE for everyone is feasible anyway, because as southeastastra says, not all children will have a parent around to supervise them in the daytime.

Regarding shopping around for an exciting school... that's fine but sort of misses the point. The UK has the national curriculum, doesn't it? So schools all have to teach more or less the same thing but may vary in how they do it. I just don't get it. Other than the ability to read, write and have basic life skills like telling the time, everything else seems somewhat optional.

My dh left school able to recite obscure formulas, but can't bake a loaf of bread. I left school knowing how to do quadratic equations and speak a few sentences of German, but couldn't speak to the thousands of Spanish speakers who now surround me or play the guitar. Things I'd dearly love to learn (and hopefully will one day!) Who decides what is so necessary?

The 'masses' and 'gulf between the classes' question is really interesting. I guess in a perfect world, all the options would be somehow subsidised so you could put together the education you needed (spending your education tokens however you wanted). That might actually be quite equalising - nothing to stop an upper class kid from doing a series of beauty classes or a working class kid going to quantum mechanics camp.

But I'm being idealistic. I know.

I'm interested in the opposition though - of the argument for traditional one-size-all education as it stands. I don't seem to meet that many people who support it, yet it's how it is.

Juuule, will check it out. Thanks for the link

I suppose it depends on the school, but I know that my DS2 has had a hell of a culture shock this year moving to a very large High School, and I think it's been very good for him.

We are white, middle-class stereotypes; he went to a Junior School that was pretty much made up of the same people. He's now at a school which is ethnically diverse, diverse in terms of income/class/call it what you will - a massively different range and the only thing his peers have in common is that they're all 11 or 12. It's been very very good for him and will prepare him for living in society at large in a way that I just couldn't replicate.

You're right that the key is how the National Curriculum is delivered, but there is scope for considerable variation in that. For example, some schools in the UK follow the International Primary Curriculum, which ticks all the NC boxes but allows much more cross-curricular learning. So the freedom is there - the difficulty is that many schools still follow a fairly archaic, proscribed method of teaching.

ugh, rite of passage even. Too late for typing in this part of the world.

I am very grateful that I was made to learn far maths and English and French than I wanted to at school. Left to my own devices I would have spent all my time reading about medieval history, but never picked up the basic skills that mean that I can now have a career actually doing medieval history. Many of those things would have been far more difficult to pick up later in life, when you haven't got the time, or the money to fill in all the holes.

My niece was allowed to bunk off school and spend all her time on the things she happened to be interested in at the time. Of course that would have been great if her interests had been science or literature or anything else that you can make a career out of. Unfortunately, they turned out to be clothes and make-up and partying. Not studying to be a beauty technician but just spending hours in front of the mirror. Her mum believed in letting her do what she wanted. The problem is, that it has proved an incredibly expensive experiment, since my niece now has to pay to catch up on all the education she missed while her friends were buckling down to doing things that they did not immediately enjoy, but which turned out to be things required by employers.

I am not suggesting that everything is right about the school system as it now stands. But if you are going to opt out, you need to be the kind of person who can take responsibility. My niece wasn't.

More generally, I think anyone who expects school to provide the whole education is unrealistic, but that concluding from this that school is useless is a non sequitur. You need to learn some things from life around you; that is not to say you can't learn others from school. When things work well, school and real life complement each other; you can use what you learned at school to get more out of real life and vice versa.

School gave me the foundations of French grammar, which meant I could learn to speak it far quicker and far more accurately once I was able to go abroad and practise on the natives. My time in France would have been far less productive if I had not been made to recite those irregular verbs several years earlier, because I would not have had the level of understanding that meant I could engage people in conversation and learning from talking to them.

But these days, of course, schools can do far more about getting you in touch with real life, via the internet, video-linking, easy access to ordering foreign books and magazines etc.

All the same, just because your child is at school (if they are), it doesn't mean you (or the child!) can abdicate all responsibility. If my child left school unable to make a loaf of bread or cook a meal, I would think it was at least partly his fault for never finding out how you do it, and my fault for never suggesting to him that that this might be a good thing to do. You don't have to be a helpless idiot just because you go to school.

And the school day is a very short time of all the time available for a child to learn in.

(besides, both my dcs are learning basic baking and cooking at school; I think it might even be part of the national curriculum).

School was great for suggesting that some things I hadn't thought of might be useful in later life (and they have been). Real life was great for teaching me more things. Win-win.

I agree with a lot of what you say. In many ways, school is a frustrating and time wasting exercise for many children. But your kids sounds extremely fortunate in that you are clearly intelligent and able to provide good experiences. In a Y4 class I taught, there were some children who really needed to be reading at home every night and being read to. I know it would have transformed their reading. But their parents were not willing or able to do this. Also schools on the whole (compared to when I was at school in the 80s) are now pretty well resourced and there are all sorts of things you can do there, which you cannot do at home. Additionally, much as you naturally want to protect them from children you don't want them mixing with (and if we're honest, that's something everyone will identify with), they will in their lives have to mix with and work with all kinds of people in a productive way. A classroom, though it can be a little traumatic at times, is ideal for learning this skill. I had a child in a y6 class (starting to sound like Cameron here, an anecdote for every occasion) whose family were Jehovah's Witnesses. This can be socially isolating in itself, but the child in question also had a difficult attitude to the others and found friendships hard. As well as this, his parents pulled him out of RE because he couldn't reconcile what he was being taught with the background he had. Halfway through the year his parents withdrew him from school altogether to teach him at home with his brother. I mentioned he was intelligent and very into science. At home, you cannot recreate lab conditions and I can't see how he was going to learn to socialise either, which will isolate him further.

No conclusions really - it's a very difficult question.

Just wondering if the Tory proposal to allow parents to set up schools might 'free up' the system so that by accident or evolution the school system would be redesigned by parents.

For example, if a group of parents clubbed together, hired a building to house computers a library and other teaching resources for continuous learning but then did say socialisation sessions of a sport camp for a week, a week long theatre workshop not just acting but painting scenery, learning about how real actors work, the way theatre works as a business. School certainly does not have to be sat in a classroom.

School could then be flexible too so it could run along the lines of modules so that we would not be locked into traditional term times.

My DSs go to school but in the holiday we send them to camps and let them choose what sports and activities they want to do each week. School should be more like that.

Sounds great, Been.

But what happens after a few years when those parents' children move on to the next school or leave school? Then those parents are going to want to pour their energy and enthusiasm into that stage of their children's life, not run a school for somebody else's children.

What if you can't find another set of parents able or willing to run a school? The LEA does have the responsibility to educate all children but it cannot rely on there always being parents with the time or ability to run a school.

Aries, I think I'm pondering some way of making the HE experience more accessible - taking it out of the home, I guess.

One thing which I've seen cropping up in California are charter schools which operate on a semi-formal basis. They have scheduled classes and children can drop in just to attend the lessons their parents choose - this works well for lab-based classes or classes with expensive equipment like music.

There's actually one of these in the city shopping mall, so your kids can take a maths class while you shop or go to the cinema.

I envisage a sort of education centre with nice facilities but with a mix of centralised and decentralised lessons.

I guess this thought comes from signing my children up today for various YMCA summer camps. Basically, the YMCA have organised camps at various places - theme parks like Legoland and Seaworld, the ice rink, tennis clubs, various museums and galleries... (trying to ignore the 'America's Next Top Model' and 'Project Runway' options for 6 year olds.. ugh!!!). You then drop your children off at the YMCA and they bus them out to their activity then bus them back for some group activities at the YMCA itself.

I do wonder about the 'character building' aspect of having to socialise with people you don't want to. This seems such a lottery really of who is in your class and how you cope with people. I know I've never had to deal with people as an adult the way I had to at school and I wouldn't want to. I think I found it all quite harmful and made me more defensive and inhibited. But I can understand how different children react differently. To me it's like anything else 'character building' - you may learn some new skills from it. You may feel utterly defeated and lose confidence in yourself.

I'm not really convinced children need to be 'socialised' either - some are naturally social, some are happy on their own. Just like adults, really. I think it's fine to let them take the lead.

Cory: I think you hit the nail on the head there that different children are motivated differently.

I love the whole unschooling philosophy and I'd love to be able to say children will always teach themselves, but I can't stick to it - my 6yo would stay on the Pixie Hollow website for several hours everyday. So I set some boundaries. But I still try to keep things child-led and give her a list of websites that are educational and appropriate that she can access in the daytime. (And of course plenty of other non-computer activities).

I guess my idea is all about giving children acceptable activities and then letting them choose. As long as they all get the same basic literacy skills and perhaps classes in learning skills, everything else should be far less formal. Impossible dream but there are some really interesting debates in here

cory - yes that would be a problem. Kepeing teh continuity after the initial set of parents had left. I suppose I was thinking about it as a sort of cooperative. There is a private school near us that runs on those lines. It is for school for children with mild learning difficulties or for whatever reason had found mainstream school too difficult to cope with. Parents have quite a high involvement in return for very low fees. The charter school idea is also an attractive one that Carmen describes.

Looking back in history, to Victorian times a lot of village schools were set up more or less without any state involvement because teh village thought it was a good idea. A lot of private schools were set up that way too with just a couple of school teachers (usually a married couple) who gradually bult the school from scratch. A lot of them still exist. I dont see why that could not happen again with the appropriate child protections etc.

Have you read much by John Holt, Carmen? He wanted to reform the school system and wrote loads about how it could be done, but eventually realised that child-led learning would always be impossible in an institution-based education and began to speak strongly in favour of home education being the best for children.

However, that's all well and good, but, as many people have said already, you need parents who enjoy being engaged with their children and who are passionate about learning themselves (that does not mean 'intelligent' or 'well-educated' btw). You need parents who can work out a creative way of having one staying at home full time, or making sure that the children at least have care full time. You need parents who really want to do it. If you don't have those things, then those children will not get a good education and would be better off in school.

We can't expect children to learn well in an environment where their parents are out of work full time because they can't be bothered, lie around the house smoking, are totally disinterested in everything their child does.

Home education is hard work, however you approach it. We are totally autonomous and I have four children. Three of them are at the stage of learning things that they don't just learn totally automatically ie. I need to play a lot with my 3yo and read to her etc. to make sure she has plenty of opportunity to learn to read eventually, and to learn to count. If I ignored her, she wouldn't learn those things. My nearly 7yo is a fluent reader now and fantastic at maths, but she needs me to be dynamic at finding activities to do and places to take her to stimulate her interests and imagination. Making sure that none of the four get 'lost' is, I am finding, hard brain work! Of course, the 3yo learns alongside the 5yo when we're visiting a museum or something, but if I soley focussed on the 5yo and forgot to talk to the 3yo and answer her questions and find activities appropriate to her age and abilities, she'd get educationally neglected.

What I'm saying is that I just can't imagine how such a system would work with larger numbers of children. I guess if it were your job to ensure there were lots of different activities on hand it would work.

What about Summerhill? that's how they do it?

Actually,a fter all that rambling, I can see how it would be possible to do something along those lines. What if children went to school 9-3 but in each classroom was a different activity led by a passionate and excited teacher who is free to teach as he or she feels is best, and the children could just choose where they went each lesson? Why would that be expensive? They could put their names down for rooms in advance so that there was never more than 20 (or whatever) children in each lesson.

tbh though the system outlined by mrswobble is attractive, I think in a school setting a lot of girls would be disadvantaged because they would influence each other only to put their names down for light, fluffy girlie activities iyswim. Peer pressure can be very important at that age.

I felt it was one of the advantages of my own schooling that both boys and girls were made to do both woodwork and sewing, both science and arts. If you are not made to try something, you might never know if it's good or not.

One of the great advantages of school for my dcs is that they get the chance to try new things which I find it difficult to get passionate about. But if they could choose, then they probably would stick far more narrowly to things they had already learnt to enjoy at home. Dd is actually developing an interest in maths thanks to her teachers. I am bemused, but I can't help seeing that this is a good thing; she is not me, and she is learning that. I can't see that she would ever have chosen it for herself.

Ok, what if they had a colour-coded (or symbols or something) system where you had to fill your timetable with at least one activity from each colour each week and the rest was free choice.

That way you could make sure each child got to do something wrt literacy, numeracy, domestic skills (for want of a better term!), science, history, geography, whatever but they could choose what the activity was. That way they wouldn't get stuck in a class where they were bored and ended up losing all interest in learning that subject at the cost of something more interesting (to that child) in that subject further on down the line.

If they chose something above their abilities, then they could be advised which activities woudl be more suited to them next time. If they really enjoyed one session, they'd be able to do it again and again until they got really good at it.

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