I remember looking out at a class of about 25 children in the third school, at which I taught. It was 1990, and this was a really nice school in South Wales, near Cardiff. The children were, for the most part, compliant and middle class; well-behaved. This class of Year 7 students (11-12 years old) were eager to learn. One little boy, in particular, sat at one of the front benches in my laboratory, would, every time I told the class what experiment we were going to do, would exclaim “Yes!!” quietly, but excitedly. Five years later, he was in my A-level Chemistry class. He was still intelligent and skilled in the subject, but that spark of life had gone. That little group of about a dozen Advanced-level students was well-behaved, but, for the most part, cynical. They all came out with good grades in the external A-level exams, but what had they learned of life in the intervening years? Was I, along with other teachers, responsible for the loss of their enthusiasm? Or was that just due to the teenage mentality? Or is the teenage mentality itself partly caused by government schools?
My teaching career lasted from 1983 through 2000. It was actually personal circumstances that caused me to leave what I had assumed, as a young graduate, would be my career forever. But in the years since, I have re-evaluated my time as a comprehensive school science teacher – indeed, as a teacher in general. By the way, comprehensive schools are the English and Welsh equivalent of public high schools here in the US, where I now live.
A Good Teacher
I didn’t hate my time in teaching. As I said, it was actually personal circumstances, not the job itself, that caused me to abandon that career. I was actually pretty good at it. My classroom teaching was reputed to be excellent, but my relationship with school hierarchies was never brilliant. I got promotions, but each promotion took me more and more away from the class teaching, for which I was supposedly being rewarded. Finally, I became a senior manager, and could not actually manage the personalities of those other teachers in my department. This stress, coupled with personal stress at home, forced me to decide to leave teaching.
“Dumbing Us Down”
My reflections on my teaching career were crystallized, when I came across a book called “Dumbing Us Down” by John Taylor Gatto, who was himself an award-winning teacher of English in public schools. The book, subtitled “the hidden curriculum of compulsory schooling”, opines that compulsory schooling successfully educates children with seven lessons. He states these as:
Confusion. All lessons are out of context
Class Position. What is important is the child’s position in the class, in which she should remain.
Indifference. No subject matter is so important that it shouldn’t be dropped when the class bell sounds.
Emotional Dependency. Children work for stickers, red ink check marks, and the good favor of their teachers.
Intellectual Dependency. “Successful children do the thinking I assign them, with a minimum of resistance.”
Provisional Self-Esteem. Monthly, termly, or annual reports “elicit approval” or explain to the parents “how dissatisfied with their child they should be”.
One Can’t Hide. Children in schools are being constantly watched, constantly discussed, constantly evaluated.
You might consider these seven lesson headings to be unduly cynical. But, for me, they ring true. I think it is time that I used Gatto’s headings to re-evaluate just what I achieved in my time as a schoolteacher.
Reference:
Gatto, J.T. (2017), Dumbing Us Down - 25th Anniversary Edition, (Gabriola Island, BC, Canada: New Society Publishers)