During the Second World War, the government of the USSR mass-produced a poster that reads Religion is poison. Protect your children. In fact, as you can probably guess, it says that in Russian. But that’s the idea. What the poster is driving at is that modern citizens must give up religion for education. And they’re right. But here in North America, we missed that lesson. Or perhaps we learned a different one in Sunday School.

We have a school system that was originally church-run. Here in Canada, it was church-run a whole lot more recently than in other places. And it only completely eliminated the church in the late 1990s in Newfoundland. Apart from my sadness that it took so long, the issue that we are addressing is that it hasn’t really happened.

My personal views on religion are extreme at best. But I shan’t bore you with an ecclesiastical rant. There are teachers discussing morality and faith. Creationism is seen by many to be a valid perspective for classroom use. Our school system is called non-denominational, which implies that it accepts all Christian sects but nobody else. These are symptoms of a larger problem.

Teachers are using the school system as a pulpit from which to preach religious indoctrination. Church groups have power over schools and the government departments that control their curriculum. We celebrate religious holidays in schools. We allow a system to exist that implies strongly that Christianity has a monopoly on what is right and goes so far as to actually state that we are all people of faith, when we simply are not. While teaching the right answer is a spurious approach to education, teaching the wrong answer is definitely a bad idea.

I am not saying that people who believe in a supreme being make bad teachers. I know many, including my parents, who are excellent teachers and also religious. I am not arguing for an elimination of religion from the minds and hearts of teachers or even from those of the students.

It simply must not be part of the educational experience. We are no longer in the dark ages. The church is not the holder of knowledge. We have creativity, we have science, and we have thought. Teach those.

By this point, you have likely already seen Ken Robinson’s ubiquitous Schools Kill Creativity Ted Talk. He’s right. But he’s only gone halfway down the road. Schools do kill creativity but that’s not ok. We need to do something about that. The problem comes in two forms – we test knowledge as if it were important, rather than understanding, and we award less importance to creativity than to correctness.

You’re going to tell me that these things are not bad. Knowledge is good and it’s important to have the right answer.

In a way, I suppose you could make an argument for these statements. But I won’t believe you and neither should you.

Knowledge is worthless and the right answer is irrelevant.

In centuries past, knowledge was the all-important concept and the right answer was prised above all else. But we live in the era of universal information sharing and, although schools often like to ban information-carrying devices from the classroom and pretend that nothing has changed since the age of Plato, we have left the cave.

There are other reasons for the death of in-school (and after-school) creativity in our students. These include the lack of funding for the arts, the blatant disregard for creativity in science curriculum, and a lack of respect for novel approaches in a framework of learning that is not a framework of discovery. But those are secondary to the two main reasons.

Understanding is the new knowledge. You think that it’s important to know the capital of Lithuania and the date of the Treaty of Versailles. But that’s because you know the answers and our personal knowledge is valuable to us. What about the value of a stamp bearing the head of King George V or the name of the hospital where your best friend was born? Is that knowledge more or less valuable because you don’t possess it? I can look up almost any piece of information in less than a minute. And so can you. And so can your first-grade child. Instant recall is almost useless in a world where action takes time; a minute is short enough that it makes no difference in all but the most severe of cases. So why do we ask our students to memorize dates, to define words, and to label maps? We did it. And we’re smart. So it had to be good for us.

That argument doesn’t fly for me. And it shouldn’t for you, either.

What should we be teaching? In a word, understanding. In another few, we should be teaching students to come up with creative solutions to problems, new ways to understand the world and not simply the accepted approach. If I want the historical argument, I can go to Wikipedia. If I want something new, I can ask a child. And I should. And so should you.

But, you say, the right answer is still the right answer.

In this world, the right answer is only one of many right answers, in almost all cases. The Second World War was caused by Hitler. It was caused by Chamberlain. It was caused by Poland’s lacklustre defences. It was caused by France’s delusions of military superiority. It began because of a piece of paper. It was started because England thought it would be easier than assassinating Hitler.

These answers are all right and none of them is the whole story. The right answer is available any time, any day, free of charge on the Internet. What I want from my students is creative thought. Deeper meanings. As I said, knowledge has become worthless as it is now available anywhere; the right answer is freely available and understanding is now key.

…we are asking the wrong question. We know why students hate school – it’s boring, it’s useless, it’s bureaucratic, and it’s as well organized as a drunken mob fighting over the last hotdog at a ballgame. And that’s only the beginning. But what is the right question, you ask?

Why is it ok to hate school?

I went on to list the twenty principal problems (nice pun, eh?) with contemporary education – curriculum, creativity, religion, evaluation, tradition, teacher training, age, timing, technology, marks, textbooks, classrooms, subjects, punishment, innocence, bureaucracy, government, unions, administration, and substituting. My plan was to talk about these in groups of five. And I still shall do so. But I’m going to split them up into individual posts every few days, rather than burden you with all five at a time.

Curriculum.

I know what you’re thinking. Standardization is good. Learning is good. Books are good. Bulk purchasing is good. So what’s wrong with curriculum? Curriculum is the closest thing in contemporary government to mob rule. I shall take for granted that most of you don’t know how curriculum is developed and explain it in brief.

A group of government functionaries (see government in part 4), educational theorists (see teacher training in part 2), and teachers who want to spend time in a boardroom rather than a classroom (see substituting in part 4), get together and spend vast amounts of time discussing what we can’t teach our students.

I know, the theory is that they get together and talk about what we should teach. And they do that. Right at the beginning. They ask the question, what do students need to know? and receive answers that have not already been filtered out by the sheer lack of representation of good information in the room. That takes a few hours. The remainder of the time is spent discussing what parts of that we can’t teach, we don’t have time to teach, we don’t know how to teach, or faith (see religion in this part) won’t let us teach.

So far, we have determined that curriculum development is a waste of time. But most things in society and all things in government can easily be classified as that. So what’s the problem? As I said, so far. At this point, there isn’t one.

Then they make it mandatory. Problem.

We, as teachers, are told by our passion for teaching that our job is to help the students in the best way possible to learn, to grow, and to think. We are told by our curriculum that this is not only impossible but prohibited. And, since we are employed by the very organization who creates this curriculum, we (yes, I included) teach what we are instructed to teach and let students down, not one at a time but by the hundreds.

What could be so wrong with the curriculum, you ask? Three things – mediocrity, modifications, and segregation. We’re going to talk about these three things in depth in other sections but there’s no reason not to begin now.

Mediocrity is the most massive problem with schools. We expect less from students now than ever before. And they continue to disappoint us. Every time we lower the bar, the students find a new way to walk straight into it and hit their heads. We need to stop lowering the bar. We need to get out of this painfully archaic way of thinking that we tailor our teaching to what the student is capable of (theoretically speaking, this is a concept from the early part of the last century called the Zone of Proximal Development) and raise our expectations. Not a little. Or gradually. Expect nothing short of what we think of as genius and students will not only perform but ask for more.

You’re skeptical, I know. You don’t think you could have performed at exceptional levels when you were in school. There are several reasons that you think that. One is that what you consider normal is no longer what is expected of students. What you were required to do in third grade is likely what is now expected in the sixth and so forth. Don’t believe me? In some regions, ninth-grade textbooks are now being used in twelfth grade. The same answers now receive higher marks on the SATs. Standardized tests have been renormed across North America because average results were so poor that it didn’t justify education funding.

Another reason is that you were raised in an era where the expectation was low and you didn’t have to work to achieve it. Who knows what you could have done if you had applied yourself at age 8? Don’t sell yourself so short to think that you achieved your potential at every step of the way. I assure you that you didn’t even come close.

Where is my proof? The Internet. Who is better at using a computer – you or your six-year-old? She’s managed to achieve more in the last year understanding technology than you have in the last ten. Don’t tell me that children are stupid. I tell you that they are underachieving because they are expected to be mediocre. And, as they would achieve what we ask of them if it were difficult, they achieve exactly what we expect of them now. Sad, isn’t it?

Modifications are another staggering area of curriculum development. By this, I don’t mean exceptionality, which is a whole other topic about which we shall have much to say in the future. I mean, how difficult is it to change the curriculum? In theory, theory is exactly what drives curriculum development. In practice, curriculum is exactly the same as it has been for decades. Sure, we put different names on it. And we talk about groupwork more now than ever before. But teachers figured out groupwork a long time ago. And the use of technology in the classroom. And student leadership. And teaching to individuals rather than to norms. And how long has it taken for any of these things to be adopted in the government documentation? Simply, they still haven’t made it in there in anything but name. And they won’t because change is an admission of guilt that it wasn’t already working. And we can’t have that.

Teachers are asked to teach to the students but strapped into a straightjacket of rigid curriculum outcomes and methods. So what comes first? The student or our jobs? I’ll leave that to you to figure out and I assure you it’s not the first.

Segregation used to mean different races having different water fountains. And I suppose, in a way, that’s what I mean, too. The maths don’t mix with the musics. The Englishes don’t even contemplate talking to the sciences. Curriculum talks about subjects as if they existed in small black boxes, rather than as an ocean with seas of understanding flowing freely into each other. And that’s wrong.

We’re going to talk about this in much more depth in part 3 but I’ll give a brief of it here. There is no boundary between history and English, between math and music, between physics and geography. We made it up to make things easier. And because teachers don’t want to teach everything. Which they should be doing. Some primary educators have got the right idea, creating projects that span the gaps between traditional subject areas, using math to build models in art class, writing English assignments on topics from biology. The educated person is not an expert in one thing and mindlessly unaware of all others. We mark separately, we teach separately, and we treat subjects as if they had nothing in common but the building in which we sit. Wrong is only the beginning.

So what’s the solution to this one? Throw out the curriculum?

That’s too simple. That being said, however, it’s a start.

But we are asking the wrong question. We know why students hate school – it’s boring, it’s useless, it’s bureaucratic, and it’s as well organized as a drunken mob fighting over the last hotdog at a ballgame. And that’s only the beginning. But what is the right question, you ask?

Why is it ok to hate school?

I know what you’re going to say. It’s not ok. You reprimand little Ferdinand every time he says school sucks and Anastasia is summarily grounded when instead of writing her homework she simply writes vulgarities on the paper to be submitted. But ask yourself if this is pro forma or for real? You hated school so it must be natural that your kids do. So you feel a little pang of guilt every time you say that school is good for you. You know that vegetables make you healthy so ensuring that the overcooked green peas make it into Frederica’s mouth rather than her pockets is your duty as a parent. But school was a waste of time and you can’t bring yourself to think otherwise, regardless of the hours of effort that you must put into the task.

If you think it’s ok to hate school, then, there must be others who think like you. The people who had similar experiences to you, I would expect. Like your friends. And classmates. And their friends and classmates. Oh my. That covers just about everyone, doesn’t it?

So we all think it’s ok to hate school and then we wonder why students go on the pip and feel justified in so doing. If we’re going to spend innumerable hours seeking educational solutions, perhaps we should begin our search from a place of truth rather than fiction. Just a thought.

I assure you, this has not been a pointless rant; neither was the point to spread depression and lethargy. We shall discuss twenty serious issues with education and potential solutions to them. Before we begin, I should point out that I have not said issues with public education. If you noticed the omission, I applaud your sense of the status quo. This is not a discussion of issues with the oft-maligned state education system. Private educators are just as guilty, often more so. I simply ask that you keep this in mind as you read further.

We’re going to tackle five of these at a time.

Part 1 – What’s in a school?

• curriculum – When you see a train coming, it might be best to step off the track.
• creativity – When we tell students to be themselves, perhaps we should actually mean it.
• religion – The infidel is smarter than you are.
• evaluation – We’re testing the wrong thing.
• tradition – Yesterday’s methods didn’t even work yesterday.

Part 2 – How do we do it?

• teacher training – Who needs a class on chalkboard writing, anyway?
• age – Five-year-olds aren’t stupid. At least, not all of them.
• timing – It’s not just half of us who hate periods.
• technology – Just because it’s new doesn’t mean it’s good. Or bad, come to think of it.
• marks – What’s the difference between an 80% and an 81%?

Part 3 – Think inside the box?

• textbooks – If you write well, it’s a best-selling novel. If you don’t, it’s a textbook.
• classrooms – Chalkboards and tables and desks. Oh my.
• subjects – Why is writing a story and writing about the Great War different?
• punishment – What did you learn in detention today?
• innocence – Your students probably have more sex than you do.

Part 4 – Where is the box, anyway?

• bureaucracy – Red tape is an ineffective teaching tool.
• government – What do politicians know about teaching, anyway?
• unions – There exists a fuzzy world where mediocrity is rewarded if you keep at it long enough.
• administration – When was the last time you were sent to the principal’s office because you were good?
• substituting – Random never solved anything.

I shan’t bore you with the details at the moment, since I believe that you have enough to keep your thoughts busy for a short while. More soon.

but i’m going to deal with that at another point.

there’s something else that i’ve been thinking about. newness. i am told every day (yes, really, in this industry it actually comes up on a daily basis) that so many things have changed. i’m tired of hearing about it. because it’s a myth. in the next little bit, we’re going to talk at length about the myths of web 2.0, internet openness, the death of privacy, and some other related issues. but let’s start with progress.

everyone knows that humankind is a progressive species. by definition, we evolve, as we are alive. but does that mean that we improve?

applied to a more everyday scenario, think of what has changed about life in the past ten years and what do you come up with?

let’s see if i have the whole list – computers, mobile phones, the internet, cars, television, music sharing, long-distance calling. we can add to that a list of things that haven’t so much changed as become more prevalent in our non-technical lives – yoga, organic foods, environmentalism.

we’ll start with the second list.

yoga’s been around since the beginning of time. alright, not the beginning of time. but about 3300bc is slightly before my memory ends so we can think of it that way. i know what you’re thinking. you don’t think that yoga is new, just the rise of its popularity. and i’ll give you that. to a point. but these at-one-with-the-earth rituals have been floating around a lot in the past half-century and, if we are to believe that history is cyclic, which it is, i give you one decade in particular to contemplate – the nineteen-sixties. that’s a time when everyone and her dog was a child of flower, consumed more marijuana than the modern artistic community as a whole, and danced to music that resembled an acid trip more than the blue man group does today. so tell me again about this rise of yoga, if you please.

organic foods. now there’s a concept. if you told a farmer from the first half of the twentieth century that we’d have a rise of organic produce, things grown properly, healthy diets, they’d give you one answer. all of them would. i guarantee it. “what do you mean? there’s going to be a time when this declines in between?” we simply fell off the wagon. welcome home.

environmentalism is beyond farcical. at least, the way that it is exercised in our modern world certainly is. you tell me. how much do you care about recycling? how much do you take transit because our cities are badly designed and how much do you take it because it’s good for the environment? or because you can’t afford a car? if we want to improve the environment, there are many things that we can do that will have enormous effect. let’s look at a list of some of them. if we all consumed no meat, there would be a massive shift in production of greenhouse gasses, transportation costs, and foreign trade. food quality would improve, waste would be de-facto eliminated, plant life would increase, carbon production would go through the floor, and people would be healthier, not to mention live in a healthier world. if all transportation were to be fueled by electricity and that electricity were to be produced by means other than fossil fuel consumption, we wouldn’t have to stop moving, only change the way in which that movement was powered. and improvement would be immediate. if we were to eliminate alcohol consumption and other non-essential activities (read, drug consumption, eating in restaurants, purchasing of music and videos rather than duplicating them), and give that money to clean-energy research, that would mean an increase of trillions (yes, i’m serious and conservative in my estimate at the same time) of dollars worldwide and an imminent delivery from that industry.

are you prepared to do any of those things? i will if you will. step up.

i’ll tackle the other list next time. ta.

it is over.

i am finished.

no, i’m not going to die. or hurt anyone. i’m simply going to have to spend the rest of my life wishing that people were more intelligent. that people didn’t want to hurt me so much.

let’s look at it for a moment.

when i was four years old, i made the most important decision in my life.

“i want to be a teacher”, spoke my innocent, treble vocal chords.

and i was right.

i wavered from that exactly never. i have been a teacher all my life, inside. helping others, groups, friends, even enemies. until i had a classroom of my own. and when that was taken away, my students protested, complained, and some even cried. like me.

and i swore it would never happen again. i’d teach where teachers were needed.

where i always wanted to be, anyway.

teachers are often soft, weak people. not all of them, but most.

they teach because they have no other options and they are lost.

i don’t.

i’m passionate about teaching in a way that the word doesn’t convey. i love teaching in the way that others love living. in the way that others love physical attraction. but they don’t understand.

i’m not one to lose this fight. this is only a setback.

but it’s a setback from which my emotions will never recover.

mark my words, this day is the day when potential happiness became potential lack of sadness. the bar just got lowered.

and they tell me that i’m the worst candidate they’ve got.

you’ve been looking for a good example of collective blindness?

mission accomplished.

the most important decision of my life has been made. and it’s been made without me being in the room.

know what the worst part of it is?

i still don’t know what it is. the answer. i know the question.

“will i be a teacher in september and for the rest of my life?”

the answer is sealed.

i believe that decisions of this magnitude should be made with the doors open. but i am outvoted on that and it is behind closed doors that people speak.

but i spoke before the panel.

a group of people who believe that they are acting in the best interests of the school and, even more painfully, me.

i believe it may have been the most eloquent speech that i have ever given. and i managed not to cry until right at the end. not even the end of the speech but the end of the question period.

and i know that i did well because they asked the right questions.

now if they could just give the right answers.

i have no faith in these people.

but i have hope.

and i spoke well and i’m extremely convincing.

but can i shake off years of indoctrination and self-training in an hour?

i can only hope.

but i don’t think it actually exists. not in the way that people speak of it.

there’s no such thing as generic patience. it’s a myth.

what do people actually mean by patience?

being patient with children. ok, i’ve got that. you have difficulty learning? difficulty figuring out how to learn? takes three days for you to figure out how to stay on your bicycle? twenty minutes to come up with a first sentence for your essay? not a problem. i call this “teaching patience”. and people are always surprised to witness that i have it. because they believe that patience is a uniform concept, that you are patient with people or not.

it’s contextual, dear reader. as a teacher, particularly in the case of adult-to-child or adult-to-adolescent, i don’t get tired of helping, give up, or contemplate the passage of time being wasted. it’s an investment in the future. and all time invested is good time.

then there’s “commuting patience”. that’s when you’re in a car or on a bus or on an airplane. and you’re waiting for time to pass until you reach your destination. when you’re making solid progress, that’s good. when you’re not, then it’s taxing on the patience. and i have none of that. i don’t mind taking circuitous  routes, as long as i’m moving. airplanes delayed because of turbulence are not a problem for me. it’s when idiocy rears its ugly head and traffic slows or airplanes sit on the tarmac because someone forgot that the computer can take off in fog without an issue and wants to explain to me that people are important in transportation. that’s a subject for another day.

but they think that, because i have so much patience with children that i should be alright with drivers mindlessly wasting my time.

i don’t care if i’m not in a hurry. that’s no excuse for mindlessness. getting from point a to point b is not an exercise in calm deliberation. it’s a study in efficiency. and the average driver, especially in this country, has approximately as much understanding of efficient driving as nuclear physics. perhaps less.

then there’s “roadblock patience”. that’s when one person stands in your way. it doesn’t matter why they think they’re doing it. it doesn’t help. we typically call those people enemies. adversaries. those to be defeated in time. and that’s not a matter of patience, at all. but what i’m talking about is those conceited fools who tell you that they are standing in your way because it’s for your own good. they care about you and want to help. so they stop you from achieving your dreams. i have no patience for this type of absurd mental gymnastics. and if other people would agree with me on this, it would become socially unacceptable and that would be the end of it. but somehow busybodies are everywhere and corrupt the common good. oops.

then we get to “groupthink patience”. that’s when a group of people does the same thing. institutional bureaucracy, for example. we believe that you can only take five courses this semester because that’s the rule. you must drive at 50mph on this road because we say so. social assistance comes out of your paycheque because we believe that it is for your own good.

go away. i don’t need one person standing in my way, never mind large groups of mindless fools making decisions that affect my life.

and it has nothing to do with patience.

give me a classroom and i’ll show you limitless time spent with students. give me a roadblock and i’ll show you that i will win or lose. but never wait.

until tomorrow. which is the real reason for this.

waiting until tomorrow, when a large group makes a decision that will change my life forever. anybody out there believe in intercessory prayer?

well, we’ll get to that in a minute.

let’s talk about class, in fact.

for years, i have said that i want to teach. more than twenty of them, in fact. and i am well on my way to becoming a teacher. the only thing that can stand in my way is a small group of powerful-yet-inept people. i don’t believe in group paranoia. they’re not all out to get me. the world couldn’t care less, in general, whether i wake up tomorrow. but there is a small group of conspirators in the faculty of education intent on tearing my life apart by the threads. a subject for another day, though. and there is still hope.

but teaching is my lifeblood, to say the least. other people love chocolate. or swimming. or sex.

they should try teaching. puts chocolate in a whole new light.

the other thing that i keep saying to people is that the age group makes no difference. middle school, high school, university, grad school. all the same to me. subject is irrelevant, too. i’m good at speaking on english. but there are plenty of other things that i can teach. and i don’t have a particular bias toward one of them. this confuses people.

they believe that you get to be a teacher by having a particular subject close to your heart and communicating that subject to other people. i beg to differ. teaching isn’t so much an action as a state of mind.

it’s about being a teacher rather than being a learner. that’s not to say that learning doesn’t continue from birth until death. but teaching is a break with learning being the principle function of life. we humans are learning beings. but there is a point at which some of us say that what we want to do is help other people to learn, rather than continue with the en-masse collection and processing of information, ourselves.

and then we become teachers.

at least, the good ones do. the others become babysitters, whose knowledge is dangerous and whose intentions are self-concentrated. don’t get me wrong. i teach because i love it. but i teach to help the students. those teaching-is-learning people teach because it’s the easiest way to keep learning. and that’s beyond sad.

but why am i telling you all of this today?

today was one of the best classes that i’ve ever had.

that’s not to say that i didn’t cry during the class. and it wasn’t exactly a case of tears-of-joy.

but that’s a whole other matter.

i got to lead a class discussion on the impact of violent video games and media on students. and it may be the last time i get to do anything of the sort in the near future. that’s what was so sad about it. but it did prove one very important point for me.

i don’t care about the subject, the age, or the location. give me a group of people who can learn and i’ll give you a class to remember.

any questions?

so what was so wrong with these particular examinations?

cartoons.

now, as many of you know, i have nothing against the great art of the graphic novel. i must not be seen to be criticizing a type of literature for which i have incredible respect. authors like hergé, spiegelman, goscinny, and satrapi have written some of the most brilliant works of literature that i have ever encountered.

i don’t like political cartoons. especially social-oriented ones. i don’t think they’re funny. but if you do, that’s fine. i don’t think they should be banned; i just don’t like them. i don’t read the sports section, either. or the local news, for that matter.

but there’s a vast gulf of theoretical liquid that spans the distance between what is kosher for a public newspaper and what makes a valid examination question for university students. i was going to say, especially university students who have finished at least one degree already. but that’s not the case. i strongly believe that this is true for undergraduates and high school students, too. valid examinations are valid examinations.

let me postulate a theoretical examination. i shall imply but not confirm that this was the examination that i just wrote, since that would be improper. at least, it would improper until i receive a grade.

you are given a short piece of paper that says that you must evaluate one of the images in the enclosed package with relation to the course material. and you must relate it to at least two topics in the course. and you must use references to research materials, scholarly articles, and so forth, to do this. and the enclosed package is a series of political cartoons.

there are many problems with this. i don’t know about you, dear reader, but i don’t understand political cartoons, for the most part. this is not a lack of understanding of the material in the course, which is not in any way cartoon-related. it is simply that i don’t read them and, therefore, do not have a grasp on how they work. being asked to figure out a whole new sign-signified structure before writing a final examination is not only unfair, it is invalid.

that’s not the whole of it, though.

political cartoons have a motive. they talk about something. they address a particular issue in a strong, usually satirical way.

the point of this is that it doesn’t address two issues. ever. i mean, almost ever. but really, for all intents and purposes, the whole point of the political cartoon is undermined by dealing with more than one issue. so if it does that, it’s already a failure. and that’s even before it makes its way onto an examination.

there’s more, though.

being asked to deal with research and articles is also invalid.

the point of a university course is information processing. in a course, like the one that i wrote an exam in today, where the focus is on taking theoretical material and applying it in context, the examination should reflect this. a context should be given and an explanation required as to how to apply the theoretical information, in practice.

the only valid examination is one that requires the task that the course was meant to teach, to be enacted, or at least contemplated on paper.

so these cartoons. they’re incomprehensible. they’re irrelevant. the style is painful to contemplate. and the exam is unrelated to the course’s purpose.

welcome to my world, dear reader. enjoy the view.