Education, Education, Education

I’ve blogged before about schools and how we teach young people, and recently I came across this fantastic blog post by Alberto Cottica.

I love this bit:

As for socializing children, school does an excellent job: it teaches them not to raise their voice, to arrive on time and so on. However, in this area too school encodes a model of a nineteenth century hierarchical society: its values are obedience, predictability, conformity.

Co-incidentally I discovered this RSA Animated video separately and I’m such a fan that I’m embedding it here as well. Aside from being a great talk that is beautifully articulated verbally, the animation just makes it even better.  As someone who thinks best in pictures this really helped me get more out of the talk.  If only school had used tricks like that too…

 

Let’s get rid of schools

I was totally excited to read this post on ‘Hacking Education’, which I found referenced on Johnnie Moore’s blog while I was catching up with my out-of-control Google Reader subscriptions.

People who know me have heard me rant about education for a while.  In summary, I hated school and it wasn’t the right place for me to learn.  I did OK at it, but it wasn’t because of school, it was in spite of it.  I mean does this look like an inspiring place to learn?

The world of social care is going through some pretty fundamental shifts – one of the coolest things is the idea of personal budgets which allow people to have a bit more control over what care they get.  In my view it doesn’t go far enough, but that’s for another day.

What does this have to do with schools?  Well, nothing at the moment.  But imagine if, instead of being shoved in a school, you had a personal education budget that would give you more control over how you learned.  Instead of sitting in maths lessons (my personal nadir) I would have used a bit of cash to go travelling.

That might sound like a bit of a doss but think about the far more useful skills I could have gained at a younger age:  Languages and communication skills, resourcefulness, confidence, general knowledge, budgeting – the list goes on.

Backpacking round Europe wouldn’t be for everyone, but the sheer wealth of ways there are to learn should be opened up to young people.  Of course, some people love school; it provides structure, routine, discipline, social interaction and much more, so maybe the title of this post is a little bit sensationalist   Perhaps it would be better to say that everyone should be entitled to the freedom to learn in the way that best suits them.

Sure, the implementation would need a bit of thinking about, but in principle that would be how I would hack education.

Actual Real People

Last week I had a super cool couple of days working with a bunch of nurses, service users and mangers from a Department of Health project called the Family Nurse Partnership.

In summary the programme supports young mums-to-be through pregnancy and childbirth, right through until their kids are toddlers.  The idea comes from the USA, where they’ve had some good results (though I gather that anything would be an improvement over there) and initially I was sceptical – was this just another way for the government to seep into people’s lives and spy on them? It turns out that this occurred to some of the young women we spoke to as well.

The reality, though, seems to be quite different. After their initial misgivings, the programme participants were giving some amazing feedback – ‘my nurse is like a member of my family’- was one of the comments we heard. Instead of feeling spied-on, most of them felt supported and like they had someone who was on their side – their nurses were there just when they needed them.

I can’t express how impressed I was with the young women we met. They were all 18-19 years old, each with a child from 9 – 18 months old and far from being the social stereotype of Vicky Pollard, they were bright, articulate and ambitious. Talk after our workshop was of returning to college, getting a job and a place to live.

Blimey, all that AND a small child needing constant care and attention. Sometimes I can’t even look after myself, never mind another tiny human being.

Attitudes to the web were fascinating as well. The programme leaders and managers we spoke to were all about the information and knowledge-sharing – they needed access to the latest research to inform policy decisions. The nurses were much more into sharing experience and talking to peers. The mums were the most web-savvy bunch – they mostly sorted their social lives through Facebook which they used on their phones while on the go. Across the board SMS was the preferred way to communicate, and the most frequent web use was for shopping.

Quite a challenge for those of us who spend our time trying to solve social problems by using the web. It’s easy to fall into the trap of thinking everyone knows/cares about the latest energy efficiency social network or the newest donate-a-hug to Africa site. It’s only when you meet up with people outside your immediate circle that you realise most of this stuff is completely off the radar. That doesn’t mean it’s not important (though maybe it’s a sort of litmus test) but I think it means we need to widen out to make sure that what we’re doing will be useful and relevant. Hmmm. This is something I need to keep thinking about…