WHAT IS SCHOOL FOR? WHY DOESN’T THE EDUCATION SYSTEM REFLECT THE MODERN WORLD? By Graham Brown-Martin My 10 year-old daughter asked my 80 year-old mother what school had been like when she was little. My mother said, “Probably the same”, and while I don’t think she meant it in the way that it came out, I do think she was absolutely right. It had already struck me by that point that the education system hadn’t changed very much in a long time. We don’t really ask ourselves about the purpose of school or why we send our kids there, it’s just something we do. But every country should be asking themselves what schools are for. In order to have an idea about what our countries are going to be like in the future, we need to know what the purpose of our schools is. At the moment it appears to be content transmission and testing, and that isn’t going to produce the kind of innovators we need. The old answer was that you go to school, you work hard, you get good grades, you go to university, you get a good degree, and you get a job for life. Education as a passport to job security, a job for life and so forth may once have been true, especially in western countries, but not anymore. So the question then becomes ‘what is school for now?’ What do we need? There’s a constant tension within the education system, as there has been for hundreds of years. In 1902, John Dewey wrote a book called The Child and The Curriculum that had the same tension, the same argument about whether education is about subject and content knowledge or about self-realisation of the child, learning for the fun of
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WHAT IS SCHOOL FOR?
learning as opposed to learning because you had to get through some tests. This constant tension is increasing now that we’re beginning to use technology in a way that reinforces that format, the idea that education is about mastery of content, of subject knowledge, and then regurgitating it in an exam. Ideally, we need both content and subject knowledge as well as competencies. The winner of the Nobel Prize isn’t the person who has read the most books, it’s about their competencies. When I hire a software engineer, I’m more interested in their ability to code than whether they’ve got a PhD from a big university. Rather than having an education system which has been industrialized around content and testing, why not have one that’s based around solving problems, working together, and collaborating? We talk about the future and the skills we’ll need, such as creativity and collaboration and critical thinking, but nothing in our school or examination systems work toward that goal, so we have to decide which one we value. When I was writing my book, Learning {Re} imagined, I researched and travelled extensively; from rural India and refugee camps in conflict zones to active crisis zones like the mountains in China after an earthquake, and also into schools in the U.S. and U.K. What I found in every school I visited was that the environment was important, and the engagement between teacher and student was important.
