Education , gig economies and cotton mills in Bedfordshire

Did you know that the current education system was established over 260 years ago in order to feed the rise of the need for workers to drive the Industrial Revolution? It was aimed at producing compliant, reasonably educated people to work on the floor of factories and in administrative roles to drive the growth of said industry. These workers were required to be indoctrinated in the historical and hegemonic mores of the ruling classes to enforce their feudal worldview and keep them quietly acquiescent. Sanitised historical facts were touted to engender patriotism and a subservient agreement to the traditional roles, a subtle pride encouraged in the ideology of class and your valuable place in the New World. Soldiers for the New Frontier. It’s still happening in modern industry where long hours are expected in reward for being part of the shining system of Capitalism driven by your very own Company, a vital leader in the Business World and making lots of MONEY.

This gave rise to the lower class “Ruling Bosses” who whipped their little empires within the factory/ company into line with an iron fist. This false alliance with the powers that be might be fruitful by the granting of small accolades such as ‘employee of the month’ due to an increase in production. Profit was seen and is still seen, as the Holy Grail, even if at the price of cutting costs by increasing hours and accountability to the common workers.

And of course with the great technological progress machine in full throttle, just as Sarah Connor predicted, the machines eventually took over and the working class lost jobs by the droves. And thereby the dream of class mobility ended. No one much was going up except the profits of the owners of industry.

But the education system has not changed.

Despite there being few, if any manufacturing jobs anywhere but in third world countries, as those same magnates derived even greater profits by moving offshore to a cheaper labour force and the added bonus of massive tax avoidance.

Despite technological advances driving a workplace morphing into a behemoth in the service industries.

Despite being modelled on a system of long ago permanent jobs in the same firm for life. An employment situation that rarely exists in the new gig economy.

Despite the fact that the workplace is saturated with degreed youngsters with no place to go.

The refugee population used to be the one where you’d find a heart surgeon driving a cab because it’s the only job he could get because his qualifications were not recognised in his adoptive country. Now it’s the case of a degree is worthless if everyone’s got one, making the employment marketplace so highly competitive, it serves no one but employers. University graduates are left with aspirations to manage a McDonald’s.

A couple of colleagues and I were discussing what to do with the kids that don’t want to be here. Year after year we encounter those kids that have no interest at all in academic studies. And year after year we drag out the old tainted argument of what could you possibly do without an education?

Those kids who know what they want to do or at least have been lucky enough to discover something they enjoy know what path they wish to follow. They can make plans, explore options around which subjects to take to underpin their future direction. Within the demographic of my school at least, the kids are not without hope of getting a job.

But many have no idea what they want to do and have no interest in exploring the subjects they are required to take. Their literacy and often numeracy are low and they can barely write an essay; the format for much assessment. This is not the teacher’s fault; there is often a deeply ingrained and wilful refusal to learn. Many of these kids give up and will not engage. They don’t see the point. They are so far behind their peers that they settle into the role of class clown and agent provocateur during classes. They chronically engage in school avoidance, obviously condoned by parents who sign off on absences. Many fall into mental health issues with anxiety and depression prevalent in their mid teens.

We see this. We work with it. And it’s getting worse.

We’re all trapped in an outdated system and it’s crushing us; teachers who have to consistently deal with behaviour issues of bored and frustrated kids and those bored and frustrated kids themselves.

In the Netherlands, after 8 years of primary education, students are offered 3 choices for secondary education; vocational (4 years), general (5 years) and university preparatory (6 years). How eminently sensible of the Dutch. Trying to cram a car mechanic, park ranger, construction worker, landscaper, hairdresser, sports coach or beautician into an academic stream is preposterous. Everybody gets the shits.

In Finland “Ninety-three percent of Finns graduate from academic or vocational high schools.” Finland leads the world in educational achievements for students; valuing more than those positions that are favoured by the business world. It makes for a happier, healthier country.

In Australia, one in four high school students drop out of school.  

The system is broken. It is run by non-educators, bean counters, who know nothing about the fine art of education and view it as a number crunching exercise where piling on more requirements by way of curriculum and teacher improvement is the answer to a complex problem. Teaching is the most micro-managed profession in the world. By non-educators.

“Finland’s schools are publicly funded. The people in the government agencies running them, from national officials to local authorities, are educators, not business people, military leaders or career politicians. Every school has the same national goals and draws from the same pool of university-trained educators. The result is that a Finnish child has a good shot at getting the same quality education no matter whether he or she lives in a rural village or a university town. The differences between weakest and strongest students are the smallest in the world, according to the most recent survey by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).”

As Chris Hedges (Human Reform Politics) says, “We’ve bought the idea that education is about training and ‘success’, defined monetarily, rather than learning to think critically and challenge. We should not forget that the true purpose of education is to make minds, not careers.”

This is what it’s about. Teaching kids to be thinking citizens in a world that values them, not their use in the business world. We need all sorts of workers in this world and undervaluing those jobs and people who keep the world running, quietly, yet efficiently, does all of our society great harm.

Why oh why, can’t we adopt the same system here?! Kids act out because they’re unhappy. They’re unhappy because they are not being directed to where they need to be. It is not a matter of intelligence- they are many of them, just ask Gardner. And if you are a Naturalist or a Kinesthetic, the hallowed halls of Academia are not for you, yet the world needs you; builder, actor, farmer, conservationist…

Why are we so hell bent on maintaining an outmoded, outdated system of education that does little to arm kids for life in the real world instead of a cotton mill in Bedfordshire in 1832?