Learning about education

Jul 16 2008 By John Avison

WE do so like to compartmentalise things.

We’ve built a neat little box around education, for instance, and stuck a label on it that says ‘school.’

This way, we can blame the schools if our children run to seed. This way, parents and relatives, people in the children’s peer group, the media and advertising, the churches, if fact everybody else in the world, can’t be blamed if ‘education’ lets their children down.

Clearly there’s a lot wrong with the education system, and I tend to believe that it’s to do with two things.

One is the endless testing and measuring, with statistics and lists. Teachers and the educational hierarchy right up into Government are obsessed with setting cardboard hurdles, and with all that effort going in one direction, there’s little time to nurture all those lovely unformed, inquisitive, inventive, totally curious little brains.

The other is that we don’t seem to be able to look for winners any more, on the grounds, presumably, that if you have winners you must also have losers: and who wants to face having to tell little Johnny, or worse, his parents, that he’s a loser?

In fact, life itself is an education, and anybody, of any age, can take education on board – or reject it. The trick, it seems to me, is to find a door into a child’s mind and rip it off its hinges.

A child’s appetite for knowledge is insatiable. We had evidence of this when friends brought their two-year-old to visit last weekend.

Our house is not a minimalist house. There are hundreds of knick-knacks from all over the world cluttering every shelf, and they are a nightmare to dust. But every item has a story to tell, and young Dougie was right into it. He wanted to be told.

Dinky cars, little wobbly wooden beetles in boxes, fridge magnets, the vacuum cleaner, Indian dinner bells, cloth puppets: nothing escaped his attention.

The race was on to see who got tired first, us or Dougie. We took it in turns, with his parents, to keep him going. After three hours he hadn’t stopped. His eyes were shining, and he had a good few more words in his vocabulary and images in his head.

Now that’s education. For all of us.