Precious little containers of human capital

Although it is not clear that many really care if kids learn anything, or are even doing OK.

Content warning: child abuse, suicide, self-harm, schooling.

Visiting my Nan and Pop when my son was a baby, my grandfather, who was born in 1918, expressed one of the key child rearing values of his generation: children need discipline. I was only 25, which may explain the cheekiness with which I looked him in the eye and asked ‘what for?’ Having spent pregnancy reading Maria Montessori, I was persuaded that what children need is freedom. Discipline was sure to be forced on them later.

Or sooner, as the case may be.

Discipline sounds so moral, doesn’t it? At least it did to my Pop. Be good, write neatly, turn up on time. All that.

Or, as my Bolshie child said when he was around 12: teachers will say explicitly that they don’t care if you’re learning, just so long as you sit still and be quiet.

Those of us who have gone to school also get this from the teacher’s perspective (kids can be shits) but it is also a reminder that school is not only about learning. Nor is it only about discipline. It is also about power, and who has it.

At sauna (some weeks this is the only place I have conversations with people I’m not married to, so it comes up a lot) a number of people have mentioned instigating procedures against teachers who abused them at school. Like writing one’s initials on someone’s liver during surgery, everyone knows abuse in educational settings is bad.

The problem, at least everyone at sauna agrees (N=maybe around 10), is that the whole system rests on a system of power relations that makes abuse its logical, (if awful, and avoidable) extension.

Which means that of course it is not all teachers who are abusive, but all teachers (whether they want to or not, for the system is coercive) use their power to impose discipline on the very people whose little selves (for I still believe the Montessori argument) need freedom, space and self-determination to become.

The Kids are Not OK

School has always been something analogous to prisons for children, but things were getting worse even before Covid. And now there is a serious problem.

Worldwide, 13% of the illnesses experienced by those aged between 10 and 19 are mental illnesses, which affect one in seven young people. This means that Depression and Anxiety are leading diseases in children and suicide is the fourth cause of death for 10-19 year olds. The World Health Organisation states the obvious by saying that:

‘failing to address adolescent mental health conditions extend to adulthood, impairing both physical and mental health and limiting opportunities to lead fulfilling lives as adults.’

https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/adolescent-mental-health

Some more local surveys suggest that the mental health crisis is particularly acute among young women.

School refusal too, is on the rise. Last year, the Australian government had an Inquiry into the National Trend of School Refusal or ‘School Can’t’, which they stressed was not the same as truancy.

There are children poisoning themselves with paracetamol. The therapeutic goods folk are unsure whether this is part of the general rise in self harm or if kids think this is a relatively harmless way to get out of school (note - it is not harmless).

The drug regulators have decided that smaller packets of paracetamol are the first answer. They did suggest that someone should look at the underlying causes, but in out deeply specialised society, those responsible for drugs cannot also be responsible for wider societal things, like school.

In what sort of society do we limit the drug rather than fix schooling?

Education Matters

Schools might be prisons for children, but education still matters. Education can be an answer to inequality (though frankly more often it is a key cause). It enables participation in society and democracy. And it can be a vehicle for becoming.

Though often it isn’t. UNESCO is sounding a bit desperate when they talk about creating ‘happy’ schools, probably because there is not much evidence that happiness, on the whole, is what is produced there.

I have long thought that more education is better than less, though I am starting to wonder just how much we should be allowing workplaces to force us all into paying with our time and money for our own training – well before we even arrive in a job.

Like I wonder if maybe we shouldn’t have to hand over cash and spend soulless hours* to learn to make coffees, pour beer and stack books on a library shelf in a tertiary institution rather than while we work.

*Not all courses are soulless, but a lot are.

And it isn’t just school, or courses where you pay to learn some basic work skills that you’ll need in a minimum wage job. Young people are shunning university too, where you’re in classes so large you not only have opportunity to hide up the back and not engage, you are also likely not to make any friends.

Schooling is so awful now that not even teachers want to be there. The process I keep describing as moral deskilling has been applied to teaching to such a degree that they have little say over what or how they teach and the loss of autonomy correlates very strongly with a decline in job satisfaction. A loss of autonomy doesn’t overcome the problem of power and authority that comes with teaching – sadly that is going strong – it just means you have little or no room to use your own judgment as you work.

I hate dissing either research or education, but we should note that too much education research sucks. We always knew we shouldn’t align research to vested interests and what passes for ‘evidence’ or the ‘science’ of teaching in any setting is too often just another way of giving management the tools for disciplining teachers. I’m not going to name or shame any particular researchers, but if anyone reading this used research to ‘prove’ that class size doesn’t matter just in time for management to increase tutorials to levels that mean university is no fun anymore, and a much harder place to learn anything, please get in the bin*.

That ‘discipline’ that my Pop thought children need has been applied to teachers to such an extent that many now just don’t want to do it. And who could blame them? Being unable to make the decisions with which you do your job makes a stressful job unbearable.

*Whole units of educational research and professional development have been established to help management produce ‘tolerable sub-optimisation’: tolerable to managers, that is, not to anyone else. Least of all students who, facing a job market that doesn’t currently hold their tertiary education to ransom, choose anything but more school.

Endless accumulation of human capital

Even the economists are worried. The World Economic Forum says:

We live in a world where teenagers grapple with a sense of crisis before adulthood; a time when young people, historically beacons of optimism, report lower happiness than their elders.

To be fair, there is plenty for them to worry about.