It's been a while since I last posted
on here, or indeed since I have written anything. I guess I haven't
felt very inspired lately. But I have a few more topics in mind so
I'll try to get a few more blog posts out over the next few months.
This one is a little different, but is something I feel quite
strongly about; my problems with education. First of all, a
disclaimer - I don't hate schools. My later school years were some of
the best in my life, I had the time of my life at university and I
now work in a college and still plan to go back to uni and do a
Masters at some point. I do think, however, that schools are not
always equipping their students with the right skills to enter the
working world. I am aware that every school is different, and that my
own education experiences will differ greatly from other peoples, but
I think what I am going to talk about is a fairly common problem.
This post will cover the idea that you need to get good grades in
school to get a good job, the problems I have with this motivator,
and what impact it can have on students.
I remember this one time when one of my
teachers was having a go at the class, and something she said stuck
in my mind. She mentioned something about our future and how we
needed to work hard or we would end up working in Tesco. She then
said "Any idiot can stack shelves for the rest of their lives."
Thinking back, the threat of retail work is extremely insulting. I
think the message we were supposed to get from the rant was that we
need to work hard to live up to our potential. I agree that we should
always try to better ourselves, but classing all supermarket
employees as losers who threw their lives away is not the way to go
about it. This isn't the only thing wrong with this scenario. Even
discounting the offensive nature of the Tescos threat, let's look at
reality. You tell your students that they need to work hard in school
or they will end up working in a supermarket; you fail to mention
that potential employers don't look for good grades, they look for
transferable skills. If a child has spent their entire life working
hard in school to get good grades, and has never done anything beyond
that, they are pretty much unemployable. In this case, they will have
a hard time getting any job.
I have been extremely lucky to have
parents who understand all this, and encouraged me from a young age
to take part in a number of activities outside school, and that doing
my best was enough. But let's look at how things could have gone if
this hadn't been the case. When I had my interview for Sixth Form I
was told that I needed to have extra curricular activities and be a
well-rounded person to go anywhere in life. Why had it taken the
education system twelve years to tell me that? This is the sort of
information that I should have been given much earlier. Now let's
look at what happened when I finished University: I spent seven
months working in Waitrose – a supermarket. But I had no problem
with it. I had no more student loan, and I knew what the job market
was like. So I asked my boss if there were any extra shifts going and
was lucky enough to be taken on full-time. This meant that I was able
to move straight into the working world, and for the first time in my
life live entirely off my own earnings. And I loved it. I enjoy my
current job a whole lot more, but I still think that without the
skills I acquired in Waitrose, I wouldn't be where I am now. But if I
had believed that retail work was the profession of failures, doing
this straight out of university might feel like hitting an all-time
low. At school, you are pretty much taught that you go through
school, you go through uni and then you get a job. I feel that the
education system leaves out the finer details, which I think results
in a lot of straight A students winding up unemployed.
I think the league tables are a big
part of the problem. The higher the grades at a school, the higher
that school will be on the league tables, and the school will have a
better reputation as a result. This means that some schools will make
a big deal out of grade averages not for the good of the students,
but to improve the reputation of the school. But what impact does
this have on the students? There are people out there who have gone
as far as to take their own lives over exams, believing that failing
an exam or being a bad student means that much. There are people who
tear themselves apart trying to get grades that they can't possibly
achieve. We have some teachers who worry more about what Ofsted
inspectors think than about how good they actually are at teaching.
I think school is an important part of
life, and that we learn a lot of valuable skills from our time there.
I think these need to be emphasised more. If a cheeky student asks
their teacher 'when will I ever use this in real life', the teacher
needs to be able to answer. Getting an A in maths won't necessarily
get you a good job, but it shows that you are good at approaching
problems in a logical manner. Being good at English allows you to
analyse problems and see beneath the surface meaning. Understanding
geography, history and religion broadens our minds to how our world
works, our past, and how different we all are as people. Science is a
given; scientific discovery has done wonders for the world, and will
continue to do so. All these are valuable things to know - getting
good grades is irrelevant in my eyes. I think a good teacher makes
their students passionate about the subject, and makes them want to
learn more and do well. There is so much in this world that we should
try to learn more about, but we need to be doing it for the right
reasons. Education is about enriching lives and equipping us with
important skills, not about memorising facts that can be coughed up
later in a test. There are some wonderful teachers out there who have
inspired their students, and the education system needs more of these
people. To make school really worthwhile, they need to stop worrying
about looking good and start focussing on being good.
I think I've experienced a mixed bag in
terms of my education - some years have been really good, while
others I would rather forget. So what is the solution? Should
children be taught that it doesn't matter how well you do in school -
the job market sucks right now so you'll be lucky to get anything? I
don't think so. I do think that the focus needs to be more on
children's futures and less on the school's reputation, and that
schools need to provide more education that will prepare their
students for the working world. So what are your thoughts? Do you
agree or disagree with the points I've made? How did this issue
affect your education experience? Feel free to leave a comment, or
better yet, write a response.
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