All and All, You're Just Another Brick in the Wall

As a child of the 80s, my music tastes are pretty old school, as my students would say. Of course, in being old school means I listen to the Floyd. So here I was marking mock exam papers and on my playlist comes 'The Wall', a Pink Floyd classic.

Whose chorus is:

We don't need no education

We dont need no thought control

No dark sarcasm in the classroom

Teachers leave them kids alone

Hey! Teachers! Leave them kids alone!

All in all it's just another brick in the wall.

All in all you're just another brick in the wall.

We don't need no education

We dont need no thought control

No dark sarcasm in the classroom

Teachers leave them kids alone

Hey! Teachers! Leave them kids alone!

All in all it's just another brick in the wall.

All in all you're just another brick in the wall.

In an attempt to procrastinate from further marking, this got me thinking. Is school a factory. controlling the thoughts of our learners? Are we just merely creating more bricks for the wall?

You would think this if you happened to read "Why the New Zealand high school model does students no favors" by Joanna Mathers of the New Zealand Herald who asked, Isn't it time for some tough questions about the high school model? Stating:

"I hated high school. Everything about it stunk of conformity. The factory producing little capitalists that would slot into their predefined places in society upon graduation. Those who didn't toe the line were spat out and left to fend for themselves........The indoctrination of thousands of young minds in the "right" and "wrong" ways of thinking and being. But somehow high school just keeps ticking along. No questions asked"

Is this true? Is school a factory for conformity? Are we just indoctrinating young minds? or as Pink Floyd put, instigating thought control?

Ms. Mathers goes on further to state that:

The model of education that we accept as given originated in Prussia in the 18th century. Under the auspices of King Frederick II (Frederick the Great) the education system put in place compulsory schooling for girls and boys between the ages of 5 to 13. Education was free, literacy increased markedly, and the system was funded by tax. It was so successful that it formed the foundation of an education system that has achieved ongoing and worldwide acceptance.

While this model brought education to those who otherwise would never learn to read or write, there is an argument that posits the Prussian model as a form of mass social control. That these compulsory schools trained children to be submissive and subservient, forged into cogs to power the machinations of industrialisation.

Writer and futurist Alvin Toffler provided this analysis of the Prussian system in his seminal work Future Shock (1970): "Mass education was the ingenious machine constructed by industrialism to produce the kind of adults it needed. The problem was inordinately complex. How to pre-adapt children for a new world – a world of repetitive indoor toil, smoke, noise, machines, crowded living conditions, collective discipline, a world in which time was to be regulated not by the cycle of sun and moon, but by the factory whistle and the clock. 

"The solution was an educational system that, in its very structure, simulated this new world."

She then goes on to interview Peter O'Connor, a professor of critical studies at the education department of the University of Auckland. He sees high school as a failed experiment and has little hope for the model ever changing in this country.

"Schools were invented at the same time as factories to stamp out standardised models that would serve the industrial machine. They are designed to sort out the good product from the bad. There are public factories and private factories – they create different products, but they are still factories." 

So is this true? Is this where modern education sits? Stuck in the 18th Century? or is it dare I say an overly simplistic take on a complex system? Take the assertion that the education system we have now originated in Prussia and that is based around industrialization. Frederick the Great lived until 1786, yet the industrial revolution on which his education system is supposedly designed for did not begin until the 1830s. When analyzing the role of education in the Industrial Revolution, the direction of causation is so easy to discern. Factory production may have increased the demand for low-skilled and child labor and thus kept children out of school. Conversely, increasing living standards might have made education more affordable, so that more children would have been sent to school. Both examples imply that the causation might also run from industrialization to education.

How does such a narrative fit with schools where individual students can take ownership of their own learning? How does a school like Clevedon School which gives students the agency to make their own decisions about what they learn, when, how and with whom fit within this idea? 

Instead of being just bricks in a wall, these learners are able to articulate where they are at on their learning journey. Able to say "Here’s where I’m at. I’m in a group with this person, and we’re working on our learning goal together. Then this is how we’re going to seek further learning" An alternative to the industrial school is a highly individualized approach to learning giving learners a new degree of freedom and flexibility. 

This change is further illustrated by the rise of “student-led conferences” compared to traditional parent-teacher interviews in many schools with the ability of young people to design and organize their own learning, where students sit down with their teacher and parent and take them through their learning journey and describe it using the learning outcomes.

Schools are also now blurring the lines that conventionally distinguish students and teachers. Employing some students who are really good at maths in classes to tutor other kids that are needing some support as well as students working in areas including IT and audiovisual operations, reception and events in their schools.

Schools like Hobsonville Point Secondary School and Albany Senior High School where there are no uniforms, students call teachers by their first names and have very little in the way of a compulsory curriculum are challenging the notion of schools being a factory. With no compulsory exams at Level 1, continuous assessment allows learners to substantially direct their learning, from posing their own research questions to responding to novels with their own creative work. 

I am also, however, conscious that what works for senior secondary students in the nation’s most educated and affluent suburbs may not work as well elsewhere. It is one thing to transplant the Hobsonville Point model to Albany, an affluent part of North Auckland barely a fifteen-minute drive from the Harbour Bridge. But will a model that relies so heavily on intrinsic motivation and self-direction work for all ages in all contexts?

If the Hobsonville Point model isn’t suited to kids who do not have the parental support networks of higher decile schools its application could be very limited indeed. However, with the changing face of education, maybe the only reason where we sometimes end up with situations like that where kids are not self-motivated and they’ve got significant behavioral issues is that we’ve picked them up from a primary school, in many cases, that hasn’t met these needs. 

Decile 2 Haeta Community Campus built after the devastating Canterbury earthquakes of 2011 duly set about driving the adoption of Hobsonville Point model of individualized learning adding a vertical learning component. The results have been mixed. Students have access to free internet access, however, the school, three years after opening is still considered a work in progress. 

Looking at Haeta, it is clear that the model used is not one of the factory farmed learners. According to principal Andy Kai Fong, the most important aspect of the school is the individual human skills the learners bring. He advocates the need to champion and celebrate the ability to collaborate, create, think critically and problem-solve.

The school is also passionate about connecting learning concepts and ideas, not just teaching individual subjects. His argument is that the real world functions as a whole and therefore preparation for that should be grounded in real-world interconnected situations.

That leads to the third driver in the school, the delivering of content for curiosity, not for just recall. The place of content is to provide a springboard for bigger, deeper questions and inquiries on the part of young people. 

The final component which is becoming more common in education is about making it personal to create a much more meaningful education for the students that looks at success more holistically. Haeta also has multi-age classes that have engendered a positive cultural shift. In essence, young people get used to the difference being the norm. 

Schools like Haeta Community Campus show that the changing educational philosophy of radically individualized learning is spreading which can be linked to the local community and can be embedded in New Zealand culture. As educators, we continually look overseas to places like Finland and Canada for solutions, and yet the answers may be in our own backyard and people are too blind to actually go and have a look at it.

None of this, it seems to me, fits in the critics’ picture of what happens in our schools. The flexibility of the New Zealand curriculum allows local contexts to be incorporated into the learning. However, I do believe we do need to impose ideas on our learners, but the imposition must be based on a judgment that the ideas need to appeal enough to inspire students to engage with them. And this time, at least, my judgments have proved correct: numerous reluctant scientists investigate and explore acid-base titrations in my lessons. Even if the outcome was achieved via a teacher-controlled process, this also seems to me like the essence of education, in which we are introduced to things we would not find, or could not do, by ourselves.

I share my own experience because I suggest, it is entirely unexceptional. "Student voice" has recently become the zeitgeist in education It is now standard for learners to choose from a selection of courses; for topics within subjects to be chosen by learners; for teacher judgment to be heavily guided by whether learners will be engaged by the teaching; for learners to have opportunities for self-directed inquiry; and for teachers to use formative assessment to gauge the state of a learner’s understanding prior to a unit of learning, thereby enabling them to differentiate learning experiences for the different learners that make up a class.

Even in the most conventional classroom, discussion, group activities and developing, articulating and defending one’s own opinion are entirely standard. Critical and creative thinking are at the core of the New Zealand Curriculum, just as they are at the core of what happens in New Zealand classrooms. The strong tendency towards student-centered learning within the educational orthodoxy extends to significant modifications of the conventional “grammar of schooling”: flipped classrooms, team-teaching, multidisciplinary approaches like inquiry and project-based learning, and open-plan learning spaces are widespread. 

There is clearly a need for ongoing innovation in New Zealand education. Our decline in the OECD’s PISA tests — relative to past performance as well as other countries — is profoundly disconcerting. It should cause serious reflection, as it has. And there is evidently much to learn from schools like Hobsonville Point and Haeta Community Campus. But just as schools can become anachronistic, so can the critique of them, and it would be a mistake to take a caricature of the present as our point of departure. It’s not just that solutions for problems that no longer exist are unlikely to help; the danger is that individualized learning will be taken too far. A lack of balance could result in students who might be able to think for themselves but won’t be familiar with the traditions in which their thinking takes place; free to pursue their own curiosity but ignorant of things they should know; empowered to challenge authority but as polarised as the rest of the culture; confident in who they are but denied opportunities to transcend themselves.

In practical terms, it is essential that students feel learning is relevant to them, but the more students are pursuing their own topics at their own pace, the more thinly a teacher’s efforts will be spread across the class. Given a constant level of investment and teacher workload, there is an inevitable trade-off between giving students the freedom to pursue individual topics and supporting them in a methodical, systematic way.