Thoughts on Education Systems in General Terms

C.V. Monague

In the interests of full disclosure: I am an Australian teacher who has worked for the South Australian Education Department for many years. I am still a Registered Teacher although I now work with a private Educational Tuition business.

Most education systems around the world appear to be based on an antiquated premise from the nineteenth century, that was specifically designed to feed the ever-expanding need for a semi-literate workforce to keep the evolving ‘wheels of industry’ turning, but most importantly keep the rich people happy and growing even more rich and investing in a wider range of industries. So, schools were established to allow the poor people to learn how to read and write, but hopefully not to think too much about their situation in life. Sir Ken Robinson expressed the situation perfectly when he described the model for the five-year-olds as ‘a nineteenth century factory model’ where children are put on a production line in ‘batches’ by age; all five year olds start at the same time each year and then progress down the said production line until they are spewed out at the end with a school certificate which will give them the privilege of working their whole life to build someone else’s dream and make that other person very wealthy.

So let us examine the concept that we all generally accept to be ‘the education system’ and begin by looking at its basic structure. The first thing you will notice is that for any subject to have any apparent value, it must at least appear to be complicated and/or boring. Personally, I feel that this is possibly due to the general population holding onto the firm belief that if someone pops out of the other end of the education assembly line, they must have understood all of the things that most people can’t and must therefore be an educated person. I was always taught, as a child, that if you work hard at school and get a ‘good’ education you will have a good and happy life. The second thing you may notice is that people firmly believe that education happens only in schools. The problem with that is that I and many of my colleagues do not believe that proposition; we believe that education begins at your birth and (maybe) ends when you die. So, from that viewpoint, if we are truthful about what we do for the twelve years of schooling is, at best, mechanically training young people to conform to some antiquated ideas of what will make them useful to society and at worst picking the few who will not think individually while discarding the rest.

So, how do the parents contribute to the culturation and wider education of their child? They tell stories and read books. Sound too simple? Well, the process is, in fact, very simple because I believe that the basis of passing on all knowledge is in how you can best pass the histories of you and your ancestry onto your child, while providing them with a cultural framework in which they can absorb and evaluate who they are, and how they fit into the particular societal grouping in which they find themselves. At this point have a look at ‘fig 1’ and you will observe that it has been numbered in what I consider to be the ‘order of importance’:

Figure 1

We begin with the parents of a child telling the child the stories of their family in the past. What they were like, how they interacted with each other, adventures passed down from generation to generation, making the child understand their position within the great framework of life. Giving the child reference points and markers to help them navigate their world. Someone once said that you can’t live in the past, but you must have some concept of where you have come from to ascertain where you are at, and attempt to map out a worthwhile future.

The wider family backs this up with many more stories about how they all fit in, and aunties and uncles were there to follow up and reinforce the ties that bind us all as family. All the time we are learning the histories and aspirations of our collective dreams and goals. Many of the stories read to children were designed to illustrate to the child the moral values that we should all live by. For example, ‘The Boy Who Cried Wolf’ and ‘The Ugly Duckling’ which were designed to demonstrate the better side of human nature. In this modern world, the family as well as communities have begun to fracture, and whole swathes of today’s youth have simply not had a grounding in morality, which is why we have so much youth violence.

Schooling traditionally does involve a certain amount of storytelling as well, however schooling (as the word implies) is in reality only concerned with the practice and application of specific skill sets. For example, reading and writing are not ‘natural’ to the human being and must therefore be taught; that will only happen if some fundamental psychological aspects occur, such as the recipient can understand a need and therefore want to learn, or if the teacher can engender enough interest through telling stories and ‘painting’ word pictures for the recipient to perceive it as a good idea.

In conclusion, all schools in Australia need to have a really good look at what they do and how they justify what they do when looking at the world’s best educational practices. A really good shake-up of how we approach what is obviously not working today. Fundamentals through play and up to about age 10 should be institutionalised, recognising that the young people of today over about 10 years of age, are not children in the sense that they were a hundred years ago. Their education should be aimed at their ambitions, dreams, and passions; eliminating the age of entitlement, encouraging an awareness of responsibility, while promoting cooperation and community awareness in order to grow a nation with psychological stability. It probably won’t happen in my lifetime, but I hope it will for future generations to flourish.