Landeskunde GB Role of schools for children /

DOWN with school

am not against all schools. I am very

much in favour of schools which consist of
groups of porpoises or similar aquatic
5animals that swim together. I only wish Id
been to one. No, Im thinking more of school
in the sense defined by the Collins English
dictionary as an institution or building at
which children and young people usually
10under 19 receive education.
Those dictionary definitions tell the story.
What a school of porpoises does is to play.
School is for work. It is an institution. Why
put children in an institution? The real reason
15is that it gets the brats out from under the
parents feet. The purported reason is that this
is the best way to get useful information into
the skulls of the little darlings.
In their first years children learn
20extraordinarily complicated things like walking
and talking. At nursery and primary school
they mostly show wonderful creativity. And
then something goes wrong.
Picasso put his finger on it. When opening
25an exhibition of childrens art he said: When I
was 12 I could draw like Raphael. It took me
another 40 years to learn to draw like these
children.
Personally I quite enjoyed my schooldays
30but I feel sorry for anyone who says they were
the happiest days of their life. Im sure that
many would agree that their education began
(or was resumed) the day they left school.
Where the school system goes wrong is in
35thinking that education and passing exams are
the same thing. They are not. Anything learned
in order to pass an exam is immediately
forgotten because it is acquired through
compulsion rather than motivation. Certainly I
40remember the works of Rider Haggard more
vividly than those of Virgil.
The amount of time I spent studying the
Seven Years War was almost as long as the
war itself. I could tell you which century it
45was fought in, but if you asked me the dates or
why the war was waged, I would be lost. Yet I
got a history A-level with the Seven Years
War as a special subject. Why werent we

taught something useful, like mending fuses,

50how plumbing functions, and all the rest of the
complex business of how a house works. Or
simple book-keeping. Or first aid.
Languages are useful, too. I was taught
French for about ten years at school, and since
55then have spent what must add up to about
five years in France. I can read French fairly
easily but I still feel inhibited about speaking it
because always at my back I hear some
schoolteacher giving me marks and pulling me
60up for incorrect use of the conditional or the
subjunctive. I was never taught Italian at
school, but I did work in Italy and picked up
the language as I went along. I now speak it
badly, but my Italian accent is better than my
65French one. School made French an effort.
Italian is pleasure.
And fun and pleasure are what schools
ought to be about, and is what they originally
were. Ive just looked up school in the big
70Oxford Dictionary and it turns out that the
word comes from the Greek skhole and
means leisure spent in the pursuit of
knowledge. Schools in recent centuries have
been nothing like that. Of course there are
75teachers who make subjects exciting but they
are exceptional. Far more of them turn
exciting subjects into mere exam-fodder.
Of course there are some things that school
can teach, like conformity and uniformity and
80discipline and blind obedience and bullying and
how to say Sir to some pompous, narrowminded, sanctimonious, emotional cripple.
One good thing about school is that it gives
something to react against, and makes the rest
85of your life a holiday.
Children are more intelligent than adults,
and wiser. Instead of instilling into them the
accepted knowledge and wisdom of the past,
what we ought to be doing is learning from
90them. That would be my idea of a good
school. One run by children. Or porpoises.
[Richard Boston in THE GUARDIAN
WEEKLY, April 22, 1990; abridged; 643
words.]
hm-abo Mai 1990