Education and control

I have joined the Kaneva community and therefore was trawling through my links for videos that I have enjoyed the other day. There was an element of synchronicity to what happened. I posted some months ago a link to Jefferson Han’s amazing multi-touch screen, and in looking for the link, found his talk to the 2006 TED conference about the screen, which includes his explanation of what is going on, on the screen.

I had read a couple of Boingboing posts recently about TED, and know the 2007 conference was taking place or had just taken place, and so searched youtube to see if there were any other interesting videos. Thus I found Sir Ken Robinson’s talk on education.

It’s a great speech, and you should watch it.

You know, at least you ought to know, for I have often told you so, that I am a home educator. NOT a home schooler, because I have for many years now believed schooling to be wrong and damaging. I take as my model for education William Penn, founder of Pennsylvania and a man way ahead of his time. You can read what he said about education here.

When the time came for my elder son to go to school, I was anxious about handing him into the control of strangers, but school seemed normal and uncontroversial to me. Maybe that’s where it starts: John Taylor Gatto (another of my education heroes) points out that most people would be rather reluctant to hand over their TV or car to a total stranger, and yet will hand over their best-beloved children without turning a hair.

As my children became unhappier, I read more and more voraciously: John Taylor Gatto, Roland Meighan, Alan Thomas, John Holt.  What I learned as a result was that I had really never thought about the concepts behind schooling or the consequences of some of the things that we do to children at school.

There has been a lot of publicity recently about new ways to combat dyslexia and dyspraxia, which focus on making children spin and jump and swing and balance. In short – making children do as exercises all those things that they would have been doing if we hadn’t made them start school at four years old and started to exhort them to sit still and pay attention.

I am ready to tell anyone who will listen why I took my children out of school: it was for reasons that were individual to them, and mainly, because they were becoming increasingly unhappy. But in the years since that I have learned more and more about schooling and education and the ways in which it has been subverted to become more about control, and less about allowing people to grow into their potential, I have begun to understand how schooling can damage the people we are, undermining our vocations, and separating us from the things we love to do.

Consider for a moment, that every person I know with a boy under ten has been told that their child does not concentrate, is always fidgetting and doesn’t seem to be able to complete the amount of work required. When I hear this, I think of the routine of school: get your Maths books out, do some maths, put them away, get out your history books, do some history, get your english books out. Is this truly conducive to concentration? To learning? Suppose that child A loves maths, child B love history and child C wants to kick a ball around the playground. Those activities are all valid and worthwhile, and so school becomes – particularly to male children – a strange place where there are arcane rules about when and how it is appropriate to do a particular thing. Often the rules favour girls, and girs’ play, over boys and boys’ play.
They teach concentration by never allowing children to fully immerse in an activity before they are on to the next one.  People – teachers and parents particularly – talk as though there would be chaos if children were allowed to do whatever they wanted, but there are schools in the world who allow just that: Sudbury Valley schools... I commend their website here if you are interested.

I see more and more people in education migrating to Second Life. I don’t see many people offering innovative experiences and freedom to their students. Mostly I see requests for proposals that involve a strong element of snooping and control over the people participating in activities. A lot of grey lecture rooms. I think it is so sad.

This world, this virtual world which is being created is not subject to internal controls at present, no government nothing except prevention of abuse by one person of another’s rights to enjoy the world. It is an open book, a blank page, a tool that could offer schools and colleges a chance to experiment with education, to break out of the mould of education that has developed into a way of controlling not just children’s behaviour but also their thought and interests.

As Sir Ken says in his talk, we need to reevaluate the messages that we send to children about what we value. Certainly one of the negative consequences of schooling for my children was the horror of being wrong. We practiced long and hard with the advertising technique for brainstorming – saying at least one outrageous, completely nonsensical thing to get our creative thinking going, and to overcome the hurdle of having been the one to say something “wrong”.

I’m waiting for people to realise that the Second Life grid is already an engine for self-directed learning which requires no classrooms, no courses of study, no timetable to help children, teens, adults to grow at their own pace. I’d love to see some collaborative projects which allowed people to discover their potential, and I’d like it NOW please, before anyone builds another facsimile of their lecture hall.