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

Centrist Dad's lament - provoked by looming no deal

 "If a man is not a socialist by the time he is 20, he has no heart. If he is not a conservative by the time he is 40, he has no brain"   

For much of my adult life I have misattributed the above quote to Churchill. A superficial web search throws enough doubt for me to be unsure of its true origin and slightly embarassed to have been wrong for so long; Churchill having famously left the Tories at age of 56 to join the Liberals for a two-decade stint.

I suspect the reason I have not questioned its origin is because it appears to be so self-evident. As we get older, we have more to protect. The most obvious corrolary is, "Turkeys don't vote for Christmas". And yet maybe I should start examining the things I believe to be obvious in more detail as 2020 seems to have more than a little topsy-turveyness about it.

I have felt disenfranchised for the best part of a decade, if not longer. My political choices have generally been choices between the least dreadful. I cannot remember voting for someone I genuinely trusted to do right by society. In my youth I despised Margaret Thatcher at least partly because I was young and to do so was fashionable. Looking back now, although I still disagree with most of her policies and grieve at the damage done to communities and society, I can at least respect a values-led politician.

John Major is a man to whom history has been surprisingly kind, although his fondness for cricket and Europe are probably behind my affection. And what wouldn't one give to have politicians of the stature of Clarke and Hesseltine more involved in government now?

It is odd that I feel most let down by Blair. Not because of the Iraq war. I have to admit that I did not oppose it at the time, so I will not fly that flag of convenience now. But because of the lost opportunity. New Labour could have done so much more and in the end was brought low by its squallid compromises. Brown I suspect, like Major, will weather increasingly better with the passing of time as the importance of his role in avoiding genuine global financial collapse in 2009 becomes more apparent. But timing was against him as was his slightly awkward style and he paid for his predecessor's crimes

I flirted briefly with the idea of Clegg, despite having probably been a possible Lib-Dem for many years before his accession. But I cannot really forgive the degree to which he enabled a government so much worse than the one that he claimed to have mitigated. He was so comprehensively outmanouvred that his party was consigned to irrelevance.

Whilst Boris probably only make's the 8th level of Dante's Inferno [i] but with claims to the 2nd, 3rd and 4th (go on look them up it's fun), David Cameron I condemn to the 9th. He must go down, amongst some stiff competition, as the worst leader this country has had in centuries.

I already have some sympathy for Teresa May but the sooner we are done with Boris and all who sail in him the better. Society is coming apart at the seams because of the box that David Cameron arrogantly flung open and I'm not sure that there's much hope left at the bottom. 

The damage we have done to our country over the last decade borders on vandalism.

Would that the Greens had a little more pragmatism... [ii]

Footnote

[i] I do not believe in hell so this a merely a thought experiment in ranking catastrophic leaders

[ii] My political compass appears to have moved a click or so to the left since I last checked but I'm still quite libertarian (in American terms)