This book is about education in the twenty-first century, how it has developed, and what it means for teachers, parents, schoolchildren, and educational policy makers in post-modern western societies through an educational philosophy lens. It is intended as a manual for twenty-first-century educators, and by the term teacher, I am being inclusive of all adults who are involved in bringing up children in our societies. In this regard I am firmly influenced by the notion that as a parent , you are your childâs first teacher (Baldwin 1989), and by the well-worn but resonant saying: It takes a village to raise a child.
Like Mark Twain I also make a clear distinction between schooling and education. It will be important as you read this book to arrive at a shared understanding of these termsâas well as terms like training , teaching, learning, curriculum , assessment , and so onâto unpack their meaning, their etymology, their use, and abuse in different contexts such as everyday parlance, academic language, policy jargon, and bureaucracy-speak. The intention of the book is to stand back and take a big picture view of education and its attendant terminology, assumptions, myths, and influences. It is offered as a long meditation on a discipline that has been an occupation and interest for my entire life and careerâas a student, teacher, parent , teacher educator, and educational researcher. The more I have pursued this interest, the more I realise that education is everywhere, affecting and influencing us in many forms, from the overt experience of formal institutions like schools, to the subtle effects of lived experience of the world and the influences of people and things that we interact with on a daily basis.
In a crowded and busy modern world, we often do not have the time to stand back and contemplate big questions of meaning as we become bogged down in the minutiae of detail and the demands of daily life. My experience of working in university teacher education in Australia for over 25 years has also reinforced the view that, as emerging professionals, beginning teachers have less opportunity to discuss and consider fundamental questions such as What is education for? and What is my role and purpose as a teacher? Teacher education courses have become crowded with regulatory requirements and mandatory subjects in behaviour management, assessment policy, and curriculum content, leaving little room for reflection and discourse.
In 1978 I completed a one-year Graduate Diploma in Education at the University of Adelaide to qualify as a secondary English and humanities teacher. In addition to the subject area courses, there were four core courses in this program that covered the history, sociology, psychology, and philosophy of education. Since then, theory has gradually given way to practice. At the University of South Australia where I became a lecturer in education, subjects related to the philosophy of education gradually disappeared from the Bachelor of Education (BEd) around 2010. Despite the BEd being a four-year programâthe minimum required length for a teaching qualification in Australiaâsuch subjects became the casualty of a policy shift towards pragmatism and regulation, which saw them sidelined and eventually crowded out. It is intended therefore that this book will be seen as a resource for those beginning teachersâas well as anyone else with an interest in education past, present, and futureâto engage with and reflect on those philosophies (and philosophers) which have underpinned and influenced the very educational institutions, teaching methodologies , curriculum frameworks, and learning environments that we have inherited today.
1.1 âI Hated SchoolâŚâ
In a first world country like Australia, almost everyone has been to school at least up to a certain year level, so everyone has an opinion of school based on their own experiences. For many people these experiences have been challenging and uninspiring at best or extremely negative and distressing at worst. Australians also have a culture of criticism concerning the profession of teaching, compared to countries like Finland where teaching is seen as a noble profession and teachers are highly regarded as âcandles of the peopleâ lighting the way to knowledge (see Chap. 10). In Australia even the politicians get in on the act of disparaging teachers, with erstwhile Federal Minister of Education Christopher Pyne engaging in teacher bashing in the media and even in parliament (Pyne 2014).
Pyne was using âteacher qualityâ as a measure of school performance, looking for reasons why Australian schoolchildren were not performing so well in international academic assessment programs such as the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA). And yes, while research has shown that the role of the teacher in a traditional classroom is important for successful outcomes, this is often based on the relationships established with students as much as on a teacherâs content knowledge, and is clearly only one part of a much bigger picture in which other significant factors come into play, such as adequate funding and resourcing of public schools (Stehlik 2011). The fact that the proportion of Australian schoolchildren now attending a non-government school is over one-third and growing demonstrates that parents are voting with their feet and choosing private independent schoolingâif they can afford it (see Chap. 5). Pyne himself attended a Catholic school and so his view of education would have been influencedâand skewedâby that experience.
As part of my academic research work, I had the experience of leading a research project working with young people who were disengaged from school and undertaking alternative learning programs outside the mainstream curriculum (a growing trendâsee Chap. 11). I was working with a colleague who was an experienced research assistant, highly educated with a PhD, and to all intents and purposes an intelligent and well-adjusted woman. Yet when she accompanied me to a primary school in the southern suburbs of Adelaide to interview the principal, I noticed she was becoming increasingly agitated. Waiting outside the principalâs office, she looked terrified and I asked her what the matter was. She said she had not been in a primary school since she was a student herself, over 30 years ago, and this was bringing back bad memories of her experiences as a young girl. She had suffered under a male teacher who had been abusive, violent, and manipulative and who regularly sent her to the headmaster for punishment for minor infringements of his sadistic discipline (Note: in those days the principal was invariably male). I reassured her that things were different now, teachers were not like that (I hoped!), corporal punishment was banned years ago, and the principal we were about to interview turned out to be a charming professional woman who put us both at ease.
But I was disturbed by this event, as it recalled bad memories of my own schooling during the 1960s and early 1970s: suffering bullying from cruel, sadistic, or cold teachersâas well as bullying from other kidsâand being punished by severe headmasters who seemed to relish in giving âcutsâ to the hands or back of the legs with a cane. Why did these people get into teaching if they disliked children so much that they could physically and mentally abuse them? And yet I also had some warm, wonderful, and inspiring teachers who were positive role models and managed to get me interested and inspired in subjects that I lovedâEnglish, geography, and history. On balance, and despite some of these Dickensian characters, I did reasonably well at school and even came âtop of the classâ in the upper primary years. And this seems to have been the experience of many of usâdespite a random series of mixed experiences and unpredictable situations that as children we have little or no control over, most people have âsurvived schoolâ and managed to come out reasonably unscathed, even having learned something.
However, there are also many victims of the schooling system: young people who leave school early, are disengaged or discouraged, act out and get into trouble, experience bullying and social exclusion, have low literacy and numeracy and reduced career opportunities, and no interest in further education. I often think that we do our children a dis-service by sending them to an institution for the best years of their lives, sitting in classrooms of rows of desks, in a large group of kids of the same age, who are all expected to achieve in all subjects at the same pace and level. Compare this, say, with growing up in a tribal or village society where children of various age groups can interact and learn by looking out for, and being looked after by, each other. As a parent I know that children need boundaries but they also need the freedom to be a child and be able to experience what Rudolf Steiner called the âKingdom of Childhoodâ (see Chaps. 6 and 7).
But I am concerned at the cumulative effect of these negative experiences of school, especially as it is apparent that many parents who have a low regard for the education system are projecting this onto their childrenâwhether intentionally or subliminallyâand it becomes an intergenerational issue, leading to the type of âteacher bashingâ mentioned already. Like my colleague, it seems that many adults are under the mistaken apprehension that not much has changed since their own school days, and the teachers and classrooms that they experienced are the same ones they are sending their children to today. I therefore advocate for a more positive discourse around education in our society today, and in the hope that being more informed will lead to being more enlightened, I offer this book.
Finally, it is not surprising that the effect of spending so many of our formative years at school results in aspects of school life entering our dream life. I still clearly remember a dream that I had as boy of about ten or 11 years old, in which I was at school but only dressed in a pyjama top⌠I was in the asphalt quadrangle surrounded by other boys and girls, doing some sort of PE while desperately trying to cross my legs and cover up my l...