Quite. But if there is one thing I have learned in life, it is that you do not solve a problem by taking in all the various things that are wrong with it and obsessing about how impossible they all are to solve at once. One problem I had to deal with recently was to have to clean a whole house that has been allowed to go to rot. The amount of different jobs that needed doing was scary, and each depended on the others. But if you start by being scared of the whole, and just looking around you helplessly, you will never get anything done. You have to start from one point - say, the kitchen. And what is more, you will find that as you are cleaning, for a while the mess will grow worse, not better. As you go behind the furniture to get rid of the caked filth and spray for mice and cockroaches, the dirt will go back on the areas you have already worked in. But in the long run, you are cleaning the whole area.
The same goes for the catastrophic situation I described. Where can government start from? Not from the media; there is such a thing as freedom of speech, and government is not dictate to the press. Not from the interiors of people's houses - the thing in the world most resistant to government interference. Government has an influence on schools, and it is in schools that it must act. Give teachers real authority; crack down on violent parents; allow punishments that children feel; face down threats from lawyers and the media. My complaint against the Blair government is that it has spent a monstrous amount of energy on fiddling around with externals without once addressing the serious problem of a rising class of the untaught and unteachable, and when the situation has become dramatic, its reaction has not been to work constructively to deal with, but to blackmail the universities into pretending that there was no problem. One indicative sign is that the already overburdened, overtaxed and over-mortgaged English middle class is spending ever more money on private education: in one decade, the proportion of privately educated children has risen from six to nine per cent - one Hell of a vote of no-confidence in state schooling from the people best able to judge.
I agree that the government should focus on this issues and radically change its policies in education and schools (I'm talking about Spain now, but I don't think the situation is all that different), and above all, stop catering to the media and "general opinion". Schools should stop being afraid of parents and lawyers and be given the proper tools to implement good learning atmosphere for kids.
I don't think I'm the type of person that just whines about everything that's wrong in the world without taking any action, but I must confess that I am pessimistic about this. My mother is a schoolteacher in a rather good school (german state school in Madrid) and she always repeats that the problem is not the kids, or even the school system, with those she could work. The problem are the parents, who undermine every effort she makes. Parents send their kids to all kinds of after-school activities or to stay with their grandparents or sit them in front of a video console, and think it is perfectly ok if they don't their homework. They have no rules, no discipline at home, and when the kids become too difficult, they tell the teachers they expect the school to "educate" them. They have no books at all at home, never go to museums, concert or even have a conversation as a family at home. There's not much a teacher can do in view of those odds, everything she tries to do in school is immediately undone when the kids come home, so after a while she just gives up and tries to at least get them to learn to write, to read, and to count (she teaches primary school).
The problem with the house-analogy is that, even if it's a big task that might seem impossible at first, cleaning it up still depends only on you. You can choose how and when to do it, take your own time, and you can be sure that any layer of paint you apply, any nook you clean, will stay that way. There is no way to control what society and families are doing to the kids when they are not in school, and I seriously doubt the ability of school, even in ideal conditions, to educate children so well that they'll be able to withstand the barrage of negative influence that awaits them in the world outside.
We have been there before. Or rather, our fathers have. When, one after the other, Prussia, France, Britain, Italy and the USA imposed universal elementary education on their population, they started from human material at least as unpromising as today's. One Frenchman from the period described his own country as "a nation of barbarians civilized by conscription" - and conscription, which was the end of the educational cycle for most male citizens, was no bed of roses. The State, having a clear idea in mind of the citizen it wanted and needed to produce, used all its powers to produce it. The problem today begins with the State having no confidence in its own values, not enough to face down refractary and anti-social citizens. Of course, this does not apply only to schools.
Above all, you have to remember what I was writing. My point was not that the work to be done is difficult or impossible; the point is that the Tory Blur has wasted an incredible amount of effort - mostly other people's effort - essentially in an escapistic direction, positively refusing to notice, let alone deal with, the one gigantically serious issue that underlay all others. When I think of all the extra work that has been placed on the shoulders of teachers, let alone the way they have been made to feel at fault, my blood boils. And when I think that the final result of this process, which I had seen at work years ago (and I have the essays to prove it), is children of fifteen stabbing each other to death because the only social reality they know is their street gang, and that these things were not happening even five years ago, that they are the end result of ten years of wasted effort, I could strangle the man.
The same goes for the catastrophic situation I described. Where can government start from? Not from the media; there is such a thing as freedom of speech, and government is not dictate to the press. Not from the interiors of people's houses - the thing in the world most resistant to government interference. Government has an influence on schools, and it is in schools that it must act. Give teachers real authority; crack down on violent parents; allow punishments that children feel; face down threats from lawyers and the media. My complaint against the Blair government is that it has spent a monstrous amount of energy on fiddling around with externals without once addressing the serious problem of a rising class of the untaught and unteachable, and when the situation has become dramatic, its reaction has not been to work constructively to deal with, but to blackmail the universities into pretending that there was no problem. One indicative sign is that the already overburdened, overtaxed and over-mortgaged English middle class is spending ever more money on private education: in one decade, the proportion of privately educated children has risen from six to nine per cent - one Hell of a vote of no-confidence in state schooling from the people best able to judge.
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I don't think I'm the type of person that just whines about everything that's wrong in the world without taking any action, but I must confess that I am pessimistic about this. My mother is a schoolteacher in a rather good school (german state school in Madrid) and she always repeats that the problem is not the kids, or even the school system, with those she could work. The problem are the parents, who undermine every effort she makes. Parents send their kids to all kinds of after-school activities or to stay with their grandparents or sit them in front of a video console, and think it is perfectly ok if they don't their homework. They have no rules, no discipline at home, and when the kids become too difficult, they tell the teachers they expect the school to "educate" them. They have no books at all at home, never go to museums, concert or even have a conversation as a family at home. There's not much a teacher can do in view of those odds, everything she tries to do in school is immediately undone when the kids come home, so after a while she just gives up and tries to at least get them to learn to write, to read, and to count (she teaches primary school).
The problem with the house-analogy is that, even if it's a big task that might seem impossible at first, cleaning it up still depends only on you. You can choose how and when to do it, take your own time, and you can be sure that any layer of paint you apply, any nook you clean, will stay that way. There is no way to control what society and families are doing to the kids when they are not in school, and I seriously doubt the ability of school, even in ideal conditions, to educate children so well that they'll be able to withstand the barrage of negative influence that awaits them in the world outside.
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