A very interesting post
Greetings,
This comes through my bloglines.
Essentially it is a history teacher in the U.K. who has become fed up with the educational constraints that he feels himself under. His complaints mirror my fears about the future of education in the United States. I find it fascinating, and surprisingly comforting, that this future is not only in the U.S., but the present in the U.K.
Doug, there is something that my TE instructor (I am a senior in the TE program at the moment) has shown me throughout the past school year. If you can justify your actions with the ‘constraints’ that the administration places on you, you can accomplish the goals that you want to achieve. Although I don’t know how the educational system is set up in the U.K., in the U.S., educators are given standards and benchmarks regarding what should happen in the classroom. As an educator, as long as I can justify, say, discussing the genocide taking place in Darfur and encouraging students to do something (and even going as far as letting them choose what), I cannot understand why I would get in trouble with the state or the administration.
My inability to speak from an educated position from the U.K.’s perspective does prohibit me from giving you advice (so does my inexperience, idealistic worldview, I am sure), but I think that teachers cannot become automatons of the state, and if it were to be, the society opens itself to demagogues, extremists, and undemocratic futures. And THAT scares me.
February 28th, 2007 at 3:57 pm
Hi Chris,
Thanks for the comments. You’re correct in that, to an extent, I can work within the existing framework, but there’s some things that just can’t fit in at all. For example, I can’t control what is blocked by the school network. So out goes a lot of social networking sites, YouTube, etc.
I’m also constrained by my timetable, as I see the majority of my classes for only one 50 minute period per week. This doesn’t really allow the kind of learning relationships I’m after. It means I have to resort pretty much to stereotypical teaching. With my GCSE cohort, whom I see three times per week it’s a different story, but then I’m constrained by the final exam that is just – no modules, a small amount of coursework, and an undifferentiated examination paper.
Some have commented that schools prepare young people for the workplace. And that’s right, to some extent. But schools should not only reflect but help shape society: it’s all very well having a shared common experience of schooling as a society, but that shouldn’t stand in the way of authentic learning.
Things need to change, and quickly. Otherwise I can see some kind of homeschooling/alternative education revolution on the cards in the next 20 years…