Should we do away with formal schooling?

Do our schools confuse teaching with learning? Do they overlook real achievements in favour of a process? Abha Adams puts forward some thoughts from the other side.

Is school dumbing your child down? Do you worry that your children are wasting their time in pointless and meaningless exercises that stifle their creativity and restrict their mental capacities? Are you worried that your children are being spoon-fed someone’s ideas instead of developing their own? If so, you are not alone.

Recently there has been much concern about the ‘dumbing down’ of society in general. Much of the criticism is aimed at the print and visual media, but increasingly voices are being raised about schools and their role in the dumbing down of children. What’s alarming to the lay person and to parents of school-going children in particular, is that this concern is being expressed by some among the educators themselves.

 

The case against school
Over the years, many have argued that state schooling is detrimental to children and highly undesirable. These ‘anti-school’ advocates are not against education, they are against the idea of school (as an institution) itself, because they believe school is giving education and learning a bad reputation.

The critics further go on to say that schooling confuses teaching with learning, grades with education, diplomas with competence, attendance with attainment, and that schools do not reward real achievement, only processes. Many believe that compulsory schooling perverts the child’s natural inclination to grow and learn and replaces it with the demand for instruction and seeks to quantify the unquantifiable —human growth. Meanwhile, industrialists grumble that those coming out of our schools are ill-equipped for the modern work place.

Most of us have been taught to think of ‘success’ as synonymous with, or at least dependent on, ‘schooling,’ but historically that isn’t true in either an intellectual or a financial sense. Another myth is that schooling somehow produces better human beings than those who are unschooled, but the truth is that schooling in its literal sense is often an impediment to creativity and leadership, and many of our best men and women were not formally schooled. Instead, they gained wisdom by meditation and reflection — Gandhi became a great leader despite being a failure in the schooling system! So too, at the other end of the spectrum did Winston Churchill. Edison spent 12 weeks in school and there is no record of Shakespeare attending school at all.

Do we really need it?
As India begins again to try and introduce compulsory schooling, the question needs to be asked. Do we really need school? I don’t mean education, just forced schooling: six classes a day, five days a week, nine months a year, for twelve years? Is this routine really necessary? Most of us don’t think it is and rebel against it. Over 60 per cent of our children do not spend their childhood in school.

It is not that we do not believe in education — almost all of us have gone to schools ourselves and put our children into schools as well.

But isn’t it true that once we have learned to read and write, we could find much better, more profitable, more useful things to do than sit all day with 40 others being told, and made to repeat things that have no relevance to our lives?

The alternate route
School trains children to be conforming consumers. You can teach your children to be leaders and adventurers. School trains children to obey reflexively. You can teach your own to think critically and independently, and you can save your children from boredom by helping them develop an inner life.

Those who are successfully schooled are conditioned to dread being alone, and they seek constant companionship through the TV, the computer, the cell phone. You can teach your children how to meditate in solitude so that they can learn to enjoy their own company, and conduct inner dialogues. You can urge them to take on the serious material that schoolteachers always avoid. Introduce them to the grown-up material, in history, literature, philosophy, music, art, economics, theology, that will challenge and confront them and make them analyse their society and their place within it.

My home, my school
In the West, the number of parents who are pulling their children out of school is increasing because the parents believe that their children can learn better and faster without the many distractions and negative influences that are part of the package of the school environment.

Studies show that the number of home schoolers in the US has grown from approximately 15,000 back in 1970 to over 1.5 million as of 2007 and there is anecdotal evidence that middle class Indian parents turning to home schooling is also increasing.

In this age of instant information, geographical mobility, open social interaction, private education institutions, support groups, private sports academies, study groups, tutoring, and social media, there becomes less and less reason for full-time schooling. Many think the demise of compulsory schooling could be a step forward.