#BTColumn – Where has the privilege of being in school gone?

Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed by this author are their own and do not represent the official position of the Barbados TODAY. 

by Julia Hanschell

Classrooms of 1900 were far more varied than they are now.

Envision the ‘old school house’ where students across a range of ages, learning levels and needs all sat together, with slates and chalk. In this book-rare, pre-internet world, students listened, took turns, followed instructions, practised self-control, accepted consequences, understood expectations of behaviour and engaged in learning.

A century ago, teaching was about imparting facts that students would need for life, discussing what these meant and how knowledge could be linked and applied. This is still the case.

What I think has truly disappeared is the ‘awe’ of new knowledge.

A century ago, the emphasis was not on creating an atmosphere for learning to occur, ensuring a receptive attitude in students.

Teachers were not ‘entertainers’, focusing on classes being ‘fun’ and therefore worthy of their students’ attention.

School was an opportunity denied to the majority and valued by the few who received it.  Any teacher in 2021 will tell you that their greatest challenge is managing classroom behaviours.

Teachers today must compete with external, non-academic and socially interactive pursuits. Failure to teach in a ‘fun way’ results in negative behaviours which must be carefully handled so that learning happens for everyone.

The Teaching profession, once highly esteemed, was the domain of brilliant minds who chose this vocation in order to leave a legacy of significance.

Teaching in 2021 attracts only the idealists or the heroic. Teaching children has never been more challenging. Teaching has become a hard grind.

What has changed? Where has the privilege of being in school gone? Where has the opportunity and the personal investment and commitment to learn gone?

Has the social expectation of education being provided, free or otherwise, or parenting practices changed to such an extent that no one flinches when a student says, ‘I don’t like school’?

Let’s be brutally honest here. Education is taken wildly for granted by the majority; the student’s job is no longer to learn.

The parents’ job is no longer to supervise their children.

The pendulum has swung to such an extent that it is knocking potentially great teachers off of the tree of knowledge into any other job but teaching.

I do agree that teachers need to know their students’ abilities so well that no child gets left behind. But, let’s be real, too much responsibility is being placed solely on teachers’ shoulders.

Teachers are neither entrepreneurs nor highly paid CEOs. Yet, in no other profession are personal hours consumed with responsibility, expectations, planning and guilt than those of a teacher’s.

The school day does not end for a teacher after six hours of teaching; it goes way into each night and into the holidays. It utilises every spare hour of the day and every recess.

Who, in their right mind, would want this job for forty years?

As if the classroom were not challenging enough, we now have virtual learning and all the cracks have widened. Students, teachers and parents, by all accounts, hate it.

The loss of social interaction in class or at recess and playing sports together is devastating; we know that these elements are of inestimable value.

The only solution is that students, and by extension, parents, now need to return to basics and get involved in independent learning and the supervision of it.

In 1970 when I was at school, these happened. My job was to chase knowledge and my parents’ job was to ensure I did my job. When I asked ‘What does this word mean?’ or ‘Why does something happen?”, I was told, ‘Look it up!’

Discovery had to be pursued with diligence and organisation. I had to call a neighbour to ask permission to use her Encyclopaedia Britannica and arrange a time to do so.

I had to teach myself how to use an Index, to find what I needed, evaluate what was unnecessary and take a pencil and paper to make notes. My generation had to work for knowledge.

There are children who are starving for education in some parts of the world who are still doing so; they would happily embrace online learning if it were at all possible.

The world has gone soft and become complacent in its enjoyment of luxuries and lost all semblance of responsibility-driven hard work, pure and simple.

The moaning ensues, along with the finger pointing and the blame. Teachers are an easy target and the guilt being placed on them is neither rational nor realistic.

We’re living in a new reality and we need to re-calibrate. I suspect that online learning will become the basis of education.

We are on a different pathway now, like it or not. However, revisiting the old ways of student-driven, rather that student-centred learning, might not be a bad idea.

Students are fortunate to have easier tools at their disposal. It’s their world and they need to embrace it.

We are all stuck between a rock and a hard place as we re-condition ourselves.

What we are not all doing, is accepting that personal discipline, by all involved, is the only thing that will get us through.

Julia Hanschell can be contacted on smartstudying @gmail.com.