The Flaws of the Education System
The thing with the education system is that your fate is pretty much decided by the age of 6. Even before that, academic achievement is limited by predetermined factors like your class, gender and ethnicity. Take class, for example. Arguably, your standard comprehensive state schools uphold very middle class values through the standards by which the school is run and the staff that are hired to teach. This is a given as the teachers, particularly at secondary school level, are required to have a specialism in their subject and have achieved some degree of further education, an opportunity which on average mainly middle class families push their children to go through. Marketisation in education has led to league tables and choice in schooling which, in consequence, increases the standards of schools and again reinforces very MC/UC values.
So how does that limit anyone? Well, working class families enforce different norms in socialisation to middle and upper class families. Behaviour and language differ quite extortionately and in comparison, some working class children would even be considered culturally deprived and have not acquired cultural capital with ease. When they reach school age and progress through the system they will likely struggle to conform to the rules and normality of the school having been brought up on different values. Not only will they have to learn to adapt when in school, giving their middle class peers a head start, they could also face material deprivation which has the potential to limit their success due to lacking commonplace materials of that period of time. In short, middle class students have a greater likelihood of falling behind in school as they have to learn a new set of values which may contradict the ones upon which they were raised. This also increases their chances of turning to deviant sub-cultures and rejecting the education system as whole, having been branded a failure after struggling to conform to the school's rules.
Another fact of our system is the hidden curriculum. From a very Marxist perspective, this would entail the bourgeoisie inflicting a series of lessons (that are not formally taught) upon the proletariat. Examples of such lessons are punctuality, conforming to rules, accepting hierarchy, dress code and routine. This hidden curriculum represents society's values and prepares students for their role in society later in life. Here, in the hidden curriculum, is also where gender role allocation is sparked. Teachers often act differently towards genders and treat them accordingly, expecting different behaviour and success from each. This means that they learn different things from school and take different academic routes as a result. Where girls are already "supposed" to be gentle and timid as enforced by primary socialisation (a good example is young girls' birthday cards), the hidden curriculum reiterates this. The correct behaviour for females is strengthened here and gendered regimes push this further: girls play netball and boys play rugby, seating plans of girl, boy, girl, boy and uniform consistently reinforces gender roles. How can issuing gender roles be detrimental? In many occupations it is evident how under-represented both genders are. In Forbes top ten richest people list, only two of the ten are women. This is not because men are better and therefore get more money, but because women are not provided with the same opportunities as men: this is a concept which begins as early on as school! Gender roles limit us as human beings and are oppressive towards all genders. Ethnic minorities also have a disadvantage. In Britain, we have a very ethno-centric curriculum and any children who have moved from their home country at some point in their life, who live under a different culture's values will be already behind before they begin school.
That is just the tip of the iceberg in terms of painfully obvious flaws in our schools. You don't have to look hard to know that a heavy majority of a secondary school pupils hate every second of being there - from experience I know that a shockingly large proportion of secondary school students are driven to tears by the very prospect of going to school. Stress at school was found to be the main cause of depression among young people in 2013 - why? Is that really what was intended when the structure of our system was created? Education and learning are both very beautiful things, understanding a text and solving a problem created out of numbers is both satisfying and a remarkable concept. Something needs to change. We should not be continuing to create a space which teenagers passionately hate and resent for their whole lives - school should be at the very least an escape from home, where so many young people have disgusting circumstances and pressure already. They should enjoy going to school! As much as I could sit here and continue to rip into our current system, the problem is that there is no easy solution. Even if a good one existed, enforcing it would be a huge issue in that it would need to be trailed and tested, but how can you do this ethically? It is not fair to disrupt a child's education, however much they may dislike it, to experiment with a new structure. And that is assuming there is a good solution; while the stress of exams is genuinely detrimental to the mental health and stability of GCSE and A level students, how else can you test them? With the national curriculum, there is so much being missed out that we will never learn, that has already been decided for us before we are even born! But everyone should have the same fundamental knowledge provided to them, otherwise some may have an advantage over others. Assessing the education system in Britian is difficult. We have a workforce and evidently we have produced astounding scholars, but is that any consolation when we are taught so little beyond academia, and when such a huge level of anxiety is invoked by school environments?
Success is defined by "the accomplishment of an aim or purpose." Recently, at my own secondary school we were given our termly report and upon numerous occasions throughout the day I heard people proclaim that they "wished they were clever!" or that they were "dumb." All this report consisted of was a piece of paper with letters from A onwards placed next to a subject heading. Based solely on this, a large number of teenagers subjected themselves to cruel self-deprecation and made comparisons between their peers which only furthered their shame. We have been taught to believe that you are only clever if you manage to succeed in school, and although it is all very well to explain that being "smart" is not confined to the classroom, how can anyone be expected to believe this of themselves when so much of our futures depend on how we excel between classroom walls? It is not much a matter of being gifted, and instead of possessing the ability to memorise and recite facts, to comprehend the education system and manipulate it to fill the criteria of each exam board.
Whilst I have presented only a fraction of the flaws that preside in the education system, I bring no solution. Realistically, is there an answer? There are so many other factors which play a part in students' education, beyond their own capacity to learn. The only way to progress is to acknowledge these factors and make a change, because it is sickeningly wrong to know how many teenagers despise attending school when learning is such an incredible thing. Oscar Wilde made the very significant point that "nothing worth knowing can be taught."
I want to know what you think: Are/were you happy at school? Do you agree or disagree with anything I have said? And what do you think is good about our system? As, although this has been soaked in pessimism and negativity, it is not all bad. Leave a comment with your own thoughts on this.