School Days are NOT the Best Days of your Life

“School days are the best days of your life.”

I’d be inclined to disagree with this piece of often recited wisdom. School for me (or at least secondary school) was rampant hormones and feelings about the fairer sex that can most accurately be described as mortal terror. All of this sprinkled with relentless lessons about things I didn’t care about, taught largely by people who didn’t seem to care about me.

Comparing this to my post-school experience which has largely comprised of getting drunk, studying the things I find most interesting, and the ability to travel anywhere on the planet as long I save up the money is a bit like comparing McDonald’s to a fillet steak topped with lobster. McDonalds provides an important service but you sure as hell wouldn’t want to eat there every day.

 

One thing that I can be grateful about is that I went to school when I did. Everyone is familiar with the stories from parents and grandparents about rote learning and board rubbers launched at heads like chalky anti-aircraft missiles. Thank god we’ve moved on from that medieval nightmare right? Wrong, because minus the corporal punishment bit, the education system seems to be regressing to the point that my children will be educated the way my parents were with me representing a weird, hippy generation in the middle.

The thing that irritates me the most is the series of suggestions, recommendations, and potential legislation that would lead to extended time in school by diminishing holidays, lengthening school days, and making the starting age ever earlier. The starting age move in particular seems counter intuitive. Germany, France, and Switzerland who all have a comparable economic status to the UK but noticeably consistently sit above us in education league tables start school at six which you may notice is a full two freaking years after most children here start primary school. Numerous studies have shown that overly structured education for very young children isn’t at all helpful and has at times even proved to be harmful to creativity and self-esteem.

 

Young children have an unparalleled hunger for knowledge that should be encouraged in any avenue it explores whether it be art, physics, or whether Superman or the Hulk would win in a fight (It’s Superman). I try to seriously answer any questions posed by my youngest brothers but sometimes, despite more in depth research than I ever bother with for actual university assignments, I have to return a verdict of “science doesn’t actually seem to know yet”. That’s how brilliant young kids are at asking questions. Don’t you think by telling them from the age of two that they have to only learn what some old, dull Etonians want them to learn might be limiting them a bit? I highly doubt Sir Michael Wilshaw (head of Ofsted who suggested this reform) has ever even considered what would happen if you tried to fly a helicopter upside down, much less whether pirates, ninjas, or cowboys ever met and if so what the resulting carnage looked like. I started structured numeracy from two years later than is currently proposed and I’d pit my trigonometry against Michael Gove any day of the week (that’s a standing challenge to all cabinet ministers, I will take on all comers).

 

The usual reason for increasing time in school is to lessen disparities between rich and poor and I totally understand the logic. When a child from an affluent family spends his summer experiencing the wildlife of the Seychelles or the culture and history of the Acropolis, whilst a child living on a council estate spends it home alone whilst their parents work, it’s easy to see why a gap in knowledge might occur. However, I genuinely believe that diverting funds into providing state run organisations outside of school to provide something to do like trips to broaden experience and just a place to hang out and make friends would be a hell of a lot more useful then forcing children to spend every waking hour from the day they’re born in a school system that they couldn’t give less of a shit about. You want us to stop smoking, drinking and knocking each other up? Then give people some other activity so we don’t feel like we need to do those things just to feel ok.

And as if the scheduling wasn’t bad enough, I haven’t even started on the curriculum. The current government are overseeing a massive back slide of the content being taught to children in school. Words like “traditional subject” and “in depth study” get thrown around a lot but it’s kind of all just a nice way of saying can’t everyone just teach the way they do at Eton and Harrow? Which I guess worked great for a lot of people so hey, why don’t we all just be politicians and Latin professors and we’ll drink champagne and discuss the Aeneid until the power shuts off and we all die. You’ll hear press releases stating that what the UK really needs is a boost in production to save our economy and then almost in the same breathe, we’ll be told that education needs to be more focused on British history and exams and coursework are now all one try only much like O levels which were done away with because they DIDN’T WORK.

 

Do I think everyone should learn about the battle of Trafalgar and the theory of relativity? Yes of course, but if instead of making those things accessible and interesting so children can apply their own brilliance to them, you ram it down their throats with endless dates and learning by repetition you’ll alienate an entire generation and instead of the future captains of industry, you’ll get a million disenfranchised twenty somethings who still live at home because they couldn’t get to university or get a decent job because they couldn’t remember the names of all the amino acids on one specific Monday morning when in real life all you’d do is Google it anyway.

So I suppose this is a plea, from someone who by the skin of his teeth avoided all the waves of reforms currently ploughing through schools, but has to watch as they affect his younger brothers and their friends. For the love of god stop fucking about with our education. If you take all the power over what we learn and give it to people who have never been teachers and don’t even seem to have ever been children, you end up with a system that works great for people who it doesn’t even affect whilst the people it does lose interest a little more day by day. I’d never say that my school days were the best of my life, but they’re definitely some of the most important. If you ruin school, you ruin everything.