17 June 2007
school report
23/06/07 18:42 | Permalink
Yesterday my daughter bought home her
end of year report. It was, as always, a traumatic experience.
There is something about being judged and measured that undermines
a human being at quite a fundamental level. They have two sets of
marks, one a letter grade for 'behavour and attitude in class' and
the second a number that is the National Curriculum level in each
subject area. Last time her Tutor had gone round the class and
asked how many people got 9 'A's and then 8 'A's and then 7 'A's
and so on. This was a pretty crushing experience because it forced
the children to publicly declare how they had been judged and
Mirinda had come home in tears because of it (I don't suppose any
of them thought they could refuse to answer). She is in a new Tutor
group this term and the new Tutor at least did not repeat this
exercise. This time again however she arrived home and hid in her
room in tears. After I had spent quite a while just hugging her and
reassuring her we spent quite some time reading through and
discussing the report, looking at the grades and the teachers
comments and deciding whether they represented how she felt she had
done in each class. She had shared her grades with a few people,
but then her friend told some others about her grades which had
particularly upset her. And this was not even the grade that says
how 'clever' you are, just how you behaved in class. The
accompanying letter gives a list of what level the 'average'
student would be expected to be at in each subject. Mirinda is
quite bright, above the average grade in most of the subjects, and
it was still an undermining process. She had initially just flicked
through the report to look at each number and she focussed of
course on the grades that were lower and judged herself by those
ones. Just how undermining this experience must be for a child
whose grades are all lower than they 'should be' I cannot begin to
imagine. Schools are unable to see that what they do is invest the
idea of 'academic success' with such weight and then label a child
as a failure by this process of comparison. Not only that but
children come to label themselves as failures. The way a school
report attacks self esteem is quite brutal, it classifies and
measures a child and reduces them to a series of numbers. They
justify this process on the idea that a child can watch their own
progress as their grades improve, and the teacher can offer
encouraging suggestions to try and get them to move from a 4.5 to a
4.8. But is it just an exercise in comparing human beings, against
eachother and against some completely arbitrary system that bears
no relation to the real nature of learning. School places itself in
a position of authority over its pupils, and creates a situation of
conditional self-esteem, where children become dependent on the
school telling them that their achievements are worthwhile and to
be valued. There is no space on the report for the child to say how
they think they have done, or to comment on how their teachers have
behaved towards them. Despite all that schools say there is no
sense of it being a collaborative process, both the teaching and
the judging is a passive process that is done to
children.
Kohl and Holt
18/06/07 16:01 | Permalink
I have been reading Herbert Kohl in between Ursula le Guin and have been struck by a contrast
between him and Holt. Kohl, like John Holt, was a teacher
who started to look more critically at the system he worked within.
Although he recognises, like Holt, that teaching and the school
system in general can potentially do more harm than good to
children, he does not reject the system out of hand, preferring to
think that having an impact at a personal, individual level is
still a positive thing. The collection of essays I am reading is
more about telling stories of individuals and how they have reacted
to learning and the things they have done to retain their
intellectual integrity in the face of a bad system. His, I think,
first book, '36 children' is similar in some ways to Holt's 'How
children fail', in that it is a record of his time with a
particular class and the children's learning and how he worked to
make the curriculum more relevant to their lives. In much of his
writing he makes quite fundamental criticisms of schools, but he
never quite takes the jump into saying that we should reject them
altogether. Holt takes what he observed in his own classroom, that
no matter what he did he was damaging his pupils' ability to learn,
and concludes that it cannot be the only way to educate, and goes
in search of alternatives. Kohl does not. He focusses instead on
the ways to work within the system and work the system to the
advantage of his pupils. I can sympathise with his conclusions in
many ways, what is important to him is helping the individuals he
comes into contact with rather than trying to tackle the whole
system. Anyway, when I have finished the book I'll write something
longer, I love especially his concept of 'not-learning', the active
and positive process of refusing to learn something that someone
tries to teach you.