What's School?
Spoiler: You aren't the pipe.
Once a student (Year 10, reasonable when he chooses to be) asked me:
"Isn't university hard?"
Yes, I answered it can be quite hard. What in specific terms do you think might be hard about it?
"Isn't it hard having lectures, because someone just talks at you?"
Yes, I said, that is quite tricky but you don't really do the learning there. The learning, I said, is done over coffee with friends, or it is done in a library, or in your bedroom with a book and a cup of tea. The lectures just sort of point you at some starting points.
"You mean they don't teach you!?" he replied, clearly stunned.
No, I said, that is the teaching, the part where they point you at the repositories of knowledge and say, "Engage with that, see you in a week." That, I said, is what teaching is.
And at this point he really hit me for six.
"You mean they don't go round and help you!?"
At that I didn't have anything to say. Nothing at all really. I realised that I had honestly had the assumption in my head that my students knew what the point of academic learning was. They don't know what we are doing all this for, The Kids. Because to him learning is sitting still and waiting for somebody to come and help you and then as others have observed presumably to say "I don't get it".
Patrick doesn't get it either.
Like an idiot I had thought they meant "I do not understand the work".
But no, they had meant "What on earth is going on?" They had meant "What's school?"
This was my hypothesis anyway, and I tucked it in my belt and carried on with my job. Then, a week or so later, another student was in detention and I was trying to make him see that running away when I asked him to stop and speak to me might aggravate me and in the long run him as well. At this point he asked,
"And why am I even here?"
I asked him if he meant in the cosmic sense, which was not a joke that he was in the mood to get.
"Because," he went on, with slim regard for my attempts at humour", "my mum only went to school for four years and she's fine. So what am I doing here?"
And if I was a better teacher then I would have found a way to say this to him:
Aha! Another piece of the puzzle. Another student asking "What's School?" Or rather, what's secondary school?
Now, secondary school in its present incarnation is very much a preparation for public life, including as a basic assumption the ability to be pointed at a responsibility and going away and owning it so hard that everyone weeps with gratitude. Tertiary education prepares you for that by stripping away a lot of the more visible frameworks and leaving you in the hands of those who have Mastered their knowledge.
What I mean is, nobody is going to come around and help you, and the longer we keep doing that for students, the ruder the awakening on the other end of the long tunnel.
One of these things is getting more common around the world quicker than the other. Guess which.
Students who avow that they want to go to university (because it will make them rich) don't know what university is.
I believe that this is a problem. I believe, also, that it is not just a problem for academics, or even educators. I believe that we are all for it if people lose the ability to find things out which they want or need to know (usually the same thing, where knowledge is concerned).
Do I have a solution? No that is not my job. But it does strike me that we might be doing the wrong thing putting children through Key Stage Three when their parents left school after four years. It does occur to me that this big push might be a push in the wrong place, and entirely too hard. Won't somebody think of the Adults?
Now, New Labour made Education (of the young, obv) their big push. They made it their big push three times. They made it their big push three times. They made it their big push three times. Read my lips. That works quite well, doesn't it, because who can look at a snarling feral hoodie or an angelic but impoverished urchin and not resolve that something very definitely must be done? That is, provided they don't have to pay for it.
If the parents aren't able to explain the long term objectives of a course of learning to a child, then it might conceivably be the case that that child will have expectations of their future and their present so wide of the mark that only disillusionment can result.
All of this is parenthetical however. My purpose here is to address the 'question' (they think it is),
"I don't get it"
(emphasis theirs) translated by me as,
"What's school"
And I think that we should start answering that question.
School is the pipe and you are the water. Whatever age you are, you arrive at school and, insofar as it is a school at all, elements within it do not change. Those are called The Facts. If you dispute The Facts then you are not a member of The School. That may well be a good thing, from your point of view, and the best of luck with that. Certainly The Facts have changed before. As Keynes is supposed to have said,
"When the facts change, I change my opinion; what do you do, sir?"
But The Facts give solidity to the idea of school.
When water meets a pipe, the pipe does not change shape to fit the water. The water changes shape to fit the pipe. And that is school. It really really is. On the other end of the pipe, the water can evaporate, or make a puddle, or wash up, or it might even want to stop being a metaphor for somebody's weak version of power and become a real human being.
But water in a pipe is pipe shaped.
And students in a school are school shaped.
And a student who is trying to fit the wrong pipe, or who doesn't believe the pipe exists, needs to have it explained to them before anything else happens.
