Do we set up our children for failure?

Posted by: mimanifesto on: April 26, 2011

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This is an extended version of the reply posted on Margaret Vass’s excellent blog, in response to a post she made on her work with Blogs and Wikis with her primary class children. What strikes me about this is that the enthusiasm for learning shines through in the children’s work ethic. Many of them update their sites at home, for example and most are probably not aware of the ACfE outcomes and experiences they are covering across the curriculum by their on-line work directly, but also by the indirect heutagogical processes they undergo in thinking about just what they are going to achieve by their efforts. Embryonic ePortfolios are starting to take form, extended writing abounds, and even a budding author explaining his love of books. Margaret hopes that this work will be carried on when the children move across to secondary school.

The transition is what interests me. These are examples of some great work by a class and teacher who work together for most of the school week. On going on to secondary school however, this sense of continuity of teaching and learning is lost, replaced by a fragmented experience of distinct subjects where very often, joined up learning is a foreign language ! My feelings about this have always been extreme frustration. I saw this myself with my P7 kids coming into their S1 year. All the great joined-up learning habits; the cross curricular focus on skills across the curriculum just dissipates and the children quickly abandon skills and learning methodology developed during their formative years in education. The psychology shifts to one of almost Watsonian behaviourism as the ‘Tabula Rasa’ mindset of many secondary subject teachers comes into play and the children react by making choices about what they do and don’t like, and therefore, learning becomes, in many cases for some subjects, a self-fulfilling prophesy of success, failure, or mediocrity. They travel, heads down, from room to room. Queue up at the door. Some smile as they feel good about this subject. Others carry a more worried look as they condition themselves to failure. Others just slump into a sort of torpor, merely doing just enough to get them through the next fifty minutes or so. The joined-up approach of the primary curriculum is gone, replaced by seemingly worthy ‘subject specialist’ lessons and teachers, many of whom, it is sad to say, regard the keen and eager new S1′s as eventual exam canon-fodder.

Oh for a ‘middle school’ approach in S1 and S2 with fewer teachers and learning themes rather than subject distinctions. Will it ever happen? will the supremacy of the secondary teacher who defines him/her self as a ‘Subject Specialist’ (Biologist, geographer, mathematician etc) be replaced by those who recognise that teaching is a vocation one should be proud and privileged to define oneself as ? Will ACfE deliver this sea-change? my old school is now making children choose their examinable subjects two thirds of the way through S1 !!

If I had my way, they wouldn’t even get ‘distinct’ subjects until S3…

Sorry Margaret, rant over. Oh for your approach, and that of the many like you, in secondary schools. And there’s no offence meant to the twiteratti who, I suspect, share many if not all of my concerns.

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