What is a school?

 As you already know, dear reader, I am a classical liberal educator. Unfortunately, we live currently in a period of deliberate endarkenment. But there is always hope...

I sincerely hope that America gets rid of Donald Trump next Tuesday. But there is nothing I can do to make that happen. Closer to home and in a field where I might have a tiny bit of influence, I sincerely hope that the Covid pandemic impact on the operation of schools will lead to a re-examination of the process of education that is to the benefit of the learners themselves. 

Wilhelm von Humboldt said, "We cannot teach language, we merely create the environment in which it is learnt". And with the rolling ongoing closing of schools I hope that we can deconstruct what we understand by a "learning environment".

As I have written before, most people have strong opinions about education because most people at least attended a school and thus believe they have received or suffered an education. But the extent to which most people, including many politicians, actually think about or understand the process of learning is tiny. We tend to conceptualise the process of educating through its machinery, namely schools.

Education is done to children - in classes - by teachers - in schools - run by headteachers - held to account to a greater or lesser extent by local or national governments. Even the late Ken Robinson in his famous TED talk used the metaphor of a factory to explain what he saw as wrong with education, when he asked if "schools were killing creativity".

But as Le Corbusier famously described houses as being, "things for living in" then schools should be "things for learning in" and here we can see that the process of education, or 'schooling', is not defined by the physical school or classroom itself.

Indeed children can and do learn at home, in the park, online, in the playground... anywhere in fact. Equally as schools are forced to send more and more children home to learn "remotely", they must realise that they have lost control of the learning environment, if indeed they ever had it. 

Much of the flurry of Covid remote learning has been the creation of pre-recorded lessons in video format that children can watch at home. But however much care is given to the platform through which teachers communicate, test and feedback to children, I don't think anyone has got the technology to tell whether any particular child actually watches the videos with the sound turned on and pays attention.

I suggest a school should be determined by its output. A school is the thing which creates, in the mind of a child, sufficient trust that appropriate risks can be taken from which learning may occur. Schools should create learners. If they do not, then they are not schools, they are merely childcare facilities.[1] 

This in turn poses questions about how you measure whether learning human beings have been created by our schooling process but that is for another post.

Footnote

[1] The Covid pandemic has revealed that our current government cares more about schools as childcare for workers than it does as instruments of social progress