Problems with the current education system

Class sizes

Research has proven that large class sizes are detrimental to the learning of children especially those that are very young.  Can you honestly expect one teacher to adequately pay attention to 25 – 30 pupils? Can you expect the teacher to give intellectual and emotional support to those children? If you work out the Maths that’s 2 minutes/child in 1 hour and that doesn’t include actual teaching.

 

Totalitarian Environment

Children are forced to learn what adults think they should learn. If someone forces something down your throat do you say “thank you very much, I will now learn with enthusiasm”. No, you will more than likely resent that person for forcing you to do something that you do not want to do.

 

Rules in most schools are set by the teachers and as a result children take not responsibility for them. Why not involve the children in the rule making process? Surely if you are involved in something then you are more likely to follow it.

 

Punished by Rewards

In our society we constant reward and punish people. However, in almost all cases we only concentrate on the behaviour. We do not consider the inherent reasons why someone does what they do. In other words we do not get to the root of a problem.

 

I once visited a school where one of their strong principles was a commitment to telling the truth. Very good you might say but in the next page was a paragraph that anyone found not complying with the rules would be punished for their behaviour.  How can you honestly expect the child to tell the truth when you punish them for doing so? If we know the truth about something then we can progress otherwise we live in ignorance and continue our misery.

Frequently we decide to reward a child for being good or getting great marks but do we ever consider the underlying implications of what this does? For instance, it has being shown that the more someone is rewarded for a particular behaviour the less likely they will continue that behaviour naturally. Obviously, if you ask a child to sit down and reward them with a sweet then they will comply but this will work only over the short term. Over the long term you would have just taken away their natural motivation.

 

Structured Learning

In a traditional school the teacher stands at the head of a class and dictates her knowledge to the class.  The children are expected to listen and regurgitate information. Everyone, adults and children alike learn most effectively by doing the learning themselves.

In current systems you have a timetable for all subjects, when the hour is up you are expect to stop what you are doing and proceed to the next class regardless of whether you are actually enjoying what you are doing. True learning has no structure; it is haphazard so why enforce timetables on children?

 

The problem is of course that without curiosity, the dissection is, at best, busywork. If the student's own motivation is disregarded, even the most careful preparation will backfire because he will be relegated to an entirely passive role. In the worst case, this passive, compulsory experience squeezes the life out of his interest in biology altogether.