|
November 22, 2007
Aeons ago when John Howard said kids should be able to leave school at year ten I figured we were in for another one of his devious, booger-headed plans to keep us all as stupid and pliable as possible. Why else would he suggest such a thing when we all know year 12 is an intrinsic good? But for reasons John wouldn't have a clue about I've come to agree with him.
Over the past few days I've learned that about a third of the kids who, on paper, are doing years 10, 11 and 12 aren't really doing it. Public or private. I know this because my 14 year old son is one of them. The eff word has had a bit of a workout around here lately, mostly in the 'you're effing joking' context. But no, they're not joking.
These kids have left school in real life, even though they're still technically at school. And since there's no such thing as starting in the mail room and working your way up any more, there's nothing else for them except passing time until they're old enough to have outgrown masses of useless regulation.
This is a longish story.
I knew my son hadn't been overjoyed about school since he realised early in the year that if he wanted to stay popular he was going to have to pick on kids he liked. Or at least stand by and watch other kids do it. He did the honourable thing and stuck by the chubby redhead who can't ride a skateboard, which was exceptionally brave, but ultimately pointless. No single kid is ever going to change playground culture.
This year I've had more meetings at the school than in the other nine years combined. He's still some kind of weird savant with maths, but everything else has gone to custard. At least he was still at school, right? Well, no, actually.
When your kid has been absent for 10 consecutive days you get a phone call which, oddly enough, isn't about where your kid has been, but whether the school has made some kind of administrative error. I stupidly went along with the error inference and forgot about it. No child of mine would contemplate wagging school for two solid weeks. We take education seriously in this house.
That phone call taught me nothing, but the next one taught me I'd been wrong the first time around. However the first one taught him that you have to turn up at least one day a fortnight to avoid trouble. He got away with it until, along with 10 other kids in his class, more than a third, he missed an exam and the teacher rang to explain he was going to fail.
That's part of the trouble though. The senior years are about education if you want to go to uni, which he doesn't. And what's the point of writing a four page detailed report on mythical creatures you've encountered on an imaginary island if you can fail and go up a grade anyway? School was like a holding pen and he resented being treated like a sheep. Especially when the flock mentality revolves around cruelty to your fellow sheep.
Critical thinking is a necessary skill if kids are to grow up being anything more than droids, but the downside is that they can always cast their critical eye over the system they're in, and it's not too difficult to see its inconsistencies and work your way around them. And it takes less imagination than mythical creatures.
Long story short, the mum network reports this is not unusual. What is unusual is for parents to refuse to go along with it. We're supposed to keep pretending, keep the right boxes ticked and the youth unemployment stats down. Go through the formalities.
There are not a lot of options for the rebellious parent. After two days of phone calls the 'earn or learn' mantra was demonstrably hollow. The 'learn' actually means attend school one day a fortnight and stay on the rolls. The 'earn' is also illusory. When it comes to employing kids in a job with a future, for every rule there is a contradictory regulation.
We appear to be stuffed. As Alice Cooper would say, school's out. I'm not prepared to pretend he's at school if he's probably not. And I can sympathise with him about the culture. Nor am I prepared to have him sitting around the house, unlike a lot of other parents in this situation who are black and blue from hitting dead ends. He can't start learning a trade unless it's linked to a school based traineeship, which requires us to pretend he's at school four days out of five. He can work full time as long as it's a dead end job of some kind.
For the time being we've settled for the work experience loophole. He's working with his dad, so we know where he is and he's doing something useful. Even though he's actually learning a trade, the experience won't count technically because it won't contribute to a qualification, which has to be earned through the appropriate channels. I secretly hope he hates it so much he'd rather write four page detailed reports on mythical creatures he's encountered on an imaginary island. Either that or being excellent at playing Final Fantasy turns out to be a career option.
Meanwhile, school retention rates continue to impress. We can reassure ourselves that an education revolution will make us the smartest country on earth. I wonder though, whether we'll ever be smart enough to outsmart the kids we've taught to recognise a con when they see one.
It reminds me of the kid who got around the government's family safe internet package in under 10 minutes, or whatever it was. We're being all earnest about preparing the next generation for the future, but we seem to have built a system designed first and last to preserve the myths grown ups are so fond of.
|
Lyn, great post. It touches on a lot of things I think are wrong with the education system, which for many reasons continues to fail to apply what many educators and educational theorists know about the curriculum, school culture and our society as a whole. I was quite successful at my distinctly working class school (and thus went toe University) but there were times where I was incredibly bored. Other kids would have been even more bored and less interested in being there and there was little that they were being taught or that they could learn due to the restrictions of the curriculum and the system as a whole.
I really disagree with the focus on getting everyone to do Year 12 unless the system is drastically changed to reflect the many different aptitudes, learning styles and personalities that can be found in the school population. When people talk about how easy teachers have it, I think of how easy can it be to have to 'manage' large numbers of students who have no interest in being in the school system, while at the same time facing pressure from various sources to try and keep them in it and learning in the accepted way.