Education- What is school, really?

Again, a lot of ideas are converging from all over the place so please bear with me while I try my best to sort this out.

Education has been a great interest of mine for some time now. Having experienced both “force-fed” and “free range” styles, I personally find the latter much more rewarding. It is also my wish to be in a school environment again, holding a teaching role as opposed to being a student to try to understand what it really is like to share ideas and values that I believe in. So far I see this as an experiment for my own learning and therefore I am not expecting too much success. I can’t say that I am seeing too much result yet, but there are kids who come to me after the class singing the song I taught, or using the vocabs to test me back!

So what is success? That’s rather subjective. Success to who? The teacher? The parents? The student? Everyone will give you a different answer. However, what is the ultimate success of education?

Then comes another idea that I am very much against. “Institutionalization”. It’s pretty obvious, from my previous posts, that I really hate the idea of institution. Think politics. Think religion. Think corporate. Think media. Think education! Based on today’s education system, institution starts when a child steps into a school.

So what’s so bad about school? Isn’t this the place where we learn different values and how to co-exist with other individuals of the society? Isn’t this where we learn from history and prepare ourselves to build a progressive future? Isn’t this where our bright future starts?

Well, let me site a recent incident, a rather small one, one that sounds more like a rant, but a rather horrible one.

On one Monday morning, after the flag raising ceremony (when every student needs to be present at the assembly), a class teacher came into the staff room and said that the cake she bought for the class is missing from the bag that it was sitting in. She found it on the soccer field, intact.

Before she could finish telling her story, a loud voice yelled,”It must be the dogs!” Referring to the dozen of stray dogs rescued by another teacher who keeps the dogs behind the school compound. The dogs sometimes escape the enclosure and roam about the school, but always been harmless.

Then before you know it, other people chimed in,”Yeah it had to be the dogs!”

The teacher quickly said it doesn’t look like a dog’s doing because the cake was intact, sitting on the field and the bag was also untouched. She requested to review the surveillance camera video.

Later, the truth was out. It was one of her students who got too anxious and took the cake out. Little kids are always unpredictable.

Then, a loud voice said,”Yeah it’s the kids, had to be the kids.”

Needless to say, the rest followed suit.

What is this? Cultural Revolution? Witch hunt? Or some private court deciding whether to stone a woman to death?

What’s horrible is that this took place in the teacher’s staff room, the very front line of education.

So what has institutionalization brought to education? We have schools, uniforms, rules, exams and a set of absolute values to grade your ability. Your ability as what? Student? Or as a human being?

We have many students with lousy parents. Parents who don’t enforce their kids habits, tell them to do their homework or even tell them to take daily showers. Education doesn’t start or end in school. Without a strong family influence, it is very hard for a child to really learn a value.

Teachers. Good teachers? Bad teachers? What are teachers?

If a school is an institution, then the teachers are the enforcers of the institution, the ones who sustain the relevancy of the institution, the ones who keeps making it seem meaningful. However, school merely teaches the theory, but no one learns, and truly learns from theory. You don’t learn how a fell feels like from a Physics or Medicine class. You learn from actual practice. So if we all learn from actual practice, what’s the point of school?

And therefore, what’s the point of teachers? First of all, why is “teacher” an occupation? I don’t have a teaching certificate, can I not teach? So what does this certificate really do? To protect the teachers and therefore to protect the institution, for the mere sake of sustaining the institution?

I am teaching everyday, just the same as how I am learning everyday despite the fact that I am neither a teacher of student by title. Learning and teaching comes from experience. Experience with the world and each other. We experience all the time, even when we are asleep, even when we are in coma. Why do we have to go to school to have the “right” experience? So that we can learn to believe in and up hold the system? What system? The future?

So it comes back in one full circle. It’s all about the future!

Then comes the ironic part. The idea of institution facilitates accelerated progression towards a specific goal because everyone’s thoughts are united. However, isn’t this anti-progressive in nature? How is a society progressive when there is a definite ideology? Furthermore, it’s proven that no ideology is truly attainable. We can only pretend to live in it, and even this is hard enough.

What happens when a person have been a teacher for his entire career?

What happens to a person who spends his whole life on theory?

What happens to a person who spends his whole life just telling an ideology?

What happens to a person who spends his whole life sustaining an institution?

What happens to a person when the institution ceases to exist?

What happens to the human inside the person?

This extends far beyond education, but education is such a fundamental element that makes our society and future, it is probably the most important part of our challenge as human race. Is is also ironic that before the existence of school, we lived as free individuals. True freedom of the mind. To go back is like going back to a savage world of uncontrolled behaviors. So yes, perhaps we need something to keep things in check, but like everything else, we need to constantly remind ourselves if we still have that human inside us.