Subscribe Feed (RSS)Schools cause young people to fail in society?
October 26th, 2008 by mas | Comments | Filed in Education & Skills
I was reading this interesting article earlier in which Tim Brighouse suggests the need to change the education system to move away from a success/failure system.
I agree there’s a need to adapt how young people are educated and certainly there needs to be a better system for measuring abilities than simply assessing how well people fit along the scales of academia. A ridiculous thing I heard from a Head Teacher recently was that potential applicants for a job at his school, including among others a former Lawyer, were not even considered for interview because they had poor GCSE’s! Ridiculous to me, but then I did also think after that I could see the (silly) logic that teachers would be expected to help children attain good GCSE’s.
Its several years since I applied for a job but when I did I never indicated what GCSE’s I have. If you’re interested I have 3. I didn’t omit this information out of shame, I just assume that my higher qualifications and experience now stand for more than that particular time of ‘failure’ in my life. In fact I didn’t ‘fail’ as such, I wasn’t permitted to take more exams as I’d been asked to leave school prior to the exams (because of my failure to behave!). Yet it seems that had I been a teacher applying to that particular school, regardless of the successes I have had since that time, I would have been rejected on the basis of failure earlier in life.
There are many stories of people who’ve gone on to do extremely well in life despite academic failure. For me there were many reasons for my failure at school - some of my own cause, some to do with circumstances, and a lot to do with the fact that it was a crap school, with mostly crap teachers using a curriculum in which I could find nothing of interest or relevance to me (I did mention this once or twice which maybe contributed to my early departure!).
In the article Brighouse highlights something very interesting which is the “.. correlation of school failure with subsequent predisposition to crime, homelessness and ill health..” Now there are obviously lots of possible reasons that such a correlation exists, is it though the cause of education that young people could end up on such a downward path? Do you think its likely to be the case that if ‘failure’ were no longer an option within the education system, the numbers of young people becoming involved in crime would go down, less would be homeless and all would be healthier?
I’m not so sure, but what I like about the approach Brighouse suggests is the potential it has to completely change the way we view society. I don’t mean in an airy fairy ‘we’re all winners’ way, but in a way that we seek to find and acknowledge where peoples talents really lie and not simply write them off as failures because they don’t fit well into an academic system that measures people in very limited ways against very limited standards.
Another interesting statistic in the article is that “Children are in school for only 15% of their waking time between birth and 16; that balance (85%) is spent in the home or community”. Wouldn’t it be interesting then for young people to get more recognition for what they achieve during that 85% than just how they measure up in the 15%?
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Tags: Education & Skills, policy
