|
Voices of
Students: The Struggle of Different Learners
Education - A Link To The Past
from
The School Daily, October 3, 2002
For more articles on disabilities and special ed visit
www.bridges4kids.org.
The Year 12 student who wrote the following essay earlier this
year has a clear idea of where he wants to head career-wise.
Sadly as the year progressed he found himself unable to
function in the school system and left prematurely.
"It is a well known and accepted fact that a majority of
students do not enjoy school, and would choose not to go if
the decision was up to them.
But everyone knows that they are there to learn and achieve
qualifications that will earn them a place in the workforce,
and an income.
We rely on the school system to educate children to this
level, and without questioning the system, we trust it to do
just that.
School is not a good environment to learn in and does not
cater for all learning styles, it only caters for those that
are good at memorisation and those with linguistic and
logical-mathematical or analytical intelligence.
These are the people that have no trouble learning and these
are the people that do well in class. Others struggle and are
forced to try and learn the same way. It’s like telling
everyone that they must wear a size ten shoe regardless of the
fact it does not fit most.
These people that do fit the shoe, can walk right through the
education system, passing people that were meant for a size
six.
Schools have been working the same way for over 35 years, and
for this reason, nobody stops to think that they may be
teaching badly.
The system of assessment is designed by educators who
themselves have been successful in the system and have these
same intelligence's - linguistic and analytical.
It is these people that organise the education system to
emphasise teaching, the attainment of skills representing
their own culture rather than those useful in later life.
These assessments are designed to filter out the higher end
students who will lead administration and companies,
researchers and teaching staff.
The reality is that they are not good predictors of future
success.
Alistair Mant describes in his book Intelligent Leadership the
characteristics of ten highly successful business leaders in
Australia. None of them were successful at school.
Each of them displays “broad band” intelligence in the way
they work.
“This goes beyond the sort of linguistic and logical-mathimatical
intelligence recognised by schools to include other strands
such as spatial, musical, physical, interpersonal, and
intrapersonal intelligence.
Subject choices are a major part of a students life, and once
chosen, are organised into an inflexible timetable for the
year long period.
Five to six subjects must be chosen in order to fill the
timetable, regardless of the fact that the student may not
require or be interested in the subject They simply must
choose it to fill in a space on the timetable.
If this subject was for a one hour period five days a week and
this student was at school for 35 weeks in a year then 175
hours of school are put into a subject that is useless to the
student.
This is just for one subject, the hours tally up for more
subjects and build a number of hours that could be better
spent with a subject of more relevance to the students future
career choice, if one has been made.
These problems have been around since technology and job
opportunities have changed. It has shown through since
research has been done on how exactly to optimise a child's
learning.
Few schools have made changes, but not nearly enough.
The major problem is tradition and the slow movement of
changing it, and as technology advances and the world sees new
jobs, schools will remain the same, they will be frozen in the
motion of time and all things that happen there will become
irrelevant and useless for educating a workforce of the
future.
|
