(This essay is a slightly altered version of a previous post in Dutch)
Education is a
wonderful thing. Almost all of our children worldwide[1]
receive the opportunity to go to school and to develop themselves and learn
skills that will enrich their lives and provide for their future. As wonderful
as this may seem, on the other hand, our day to day reality is often much less
flowery. Many kids do not like to go to school at all. It is a considerable
source of stress for many of them. This is a pity. Mankind has achieved such a
level of development that children get to have 6, 12 or even more years of
their life completely devoted to their own personal growth, but somehow this
does not seem to make them any happier. We have this grand opportunity, but
ever so often it seems to turn into a drag. Whatever happened? Are our kids
merely ungrateful, or is there something else going on here? And how can we
make our education more fulfilling for our children?
My story
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| Do the traditional stick and carrot really work? |
This essay is the result of my own experience
as a teacher. For little over a year, I taught in a secondary school in
Brussels, a school with many inner city kids from immigrant and/or working
class backgrounds. Many of my students had difficult family situations. Many of
them were deemed ‘bad students’, ‘disobedient’, ‘not motivated’ or even ‘stupid’.
Classes were chaotic, and it was quite difficult to grab their attention to say
the least. Most teachers seemed to respond to this with anger and punishment, often
with little success. Many of the students, on their part, replied to this
repression with just the same amount of anger. Needless to say, things could
get quite tense, and at times the whole school building just seemed to be teeming
with anger and suppressed emotions.
This is the school I came into. It was my first
experience as a teacher and I had just spent a year as an intern in Plum
Village. The contrast could not have been any greater. But I told myself, if
anyone was to go and make something good come out of these kids, it had to be
me, because I was armed by Thay’s teachings and my practice and I would not let
myself get sucked into these negative emotions. So I did what Thay taught me
when things got out of hand: I breathed, I smiled, I tried to see the situation
from their point of view. Though this got me some respect from my students, and
stopped them from being angry at me, I still did not manage to teach my classes
in an orderly way. Many of them still disturbed class and just could not sit
still and cooperate for one hour. I felt that many of them just did not want to
be there, and I felt I could not, and did not want to, force them into doing
things they just did not want to do. Thay’s teaching had made me very wary of
anger. So I felt anger and punishment were just poor attempts to try and mend a
situation that was unwholesome at its core.
The whole situation seemed way beyond me to
transform, however diligently I had practiced with Thay, and I felt a change was needed on a more systemic level. So I
started reflecting on our traditional educational system and how it could and
should be changed for students to want to be there and cooperate and to make
normal, healthy relationships possible between teachers and students, instead
of the repressive atmosphere that existed. I felt, instead of discipline, and
people telling them what to do, what the students need most was someone they
could trust and relate to, and someone that trusted them and gave them space to
find their own way. This eventually led me to quitting my job as a teacher,
because I felt I was part of an unwholesome system that I did not believe in.
Here is how I came to my conclusion.
Education: the
fundamentals
What constitutes a good education? What are the
basic conditions that should be met for any sort of training to be fulfilling?
And, most importantly, what do children and teenagers need in order to grow and
realize their full potential? These are questions anyone engaged in the
training of our young – or in any sort of training for that matter – ought to
ask himself, but often get buried underneath the day to day drag of school
books, tests and curricula.
My experience is that children mostly need
love, trust and acceptance. I think any teacher ought to fundamentally believe
in the potential of his pupils. He has to accept every kid as it is and believe
in its innate qualities and possibilities to develop itself. Only then will it
have the ability to grow and flourish. Therefore children need the freedom to
explore. They need to be able to discover what they are passionate about and
what they are good at. For that they need the trust and acceptance of their
teacher, and some guidance and encouragement along the way. In the spiritual
world, we find this way of teaching quite obvious. For some reason, in standard
education, different rules seem to apply.
What we get wrong
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| Why do we try to force everyone into the same system? |
Our traditional schooling methods do exactly
the opposite. Of course, there can be inspirational teachers who offer us guidance
and the freedom to explore, however, it is not the foundation of our system,
rather on the contrary. Apart from some alternative schooling methods, all our
traditional schools, for as long as we have known them in the West[2],
have imposed a curriculum on their students. The elite considered such and such
subjects to be important and then ordered kids to sit down, listen and digest.
Our education is not based on the needs of the developing child, but rather on
the perceived needs of ‘society’, whatever that may be. Even though the
traditional lecture is no longer the only method used, and in most systems
students have some choices in their curricula, still, our system remains
basically a top down system. And that is a pity.
Not only children are not free to follow their
own interests, on a deeper level, this top down method holds a negative premise:
the idea that children do not know what
is good for themselves and we should tell them instead. This basic idea,
which many educators seem to have as their creed, has far reaching consequences.
I think it is quite problematic. It starts not from a basic belief in children, but from a basic disbelief. Kids are ignorant and stupid,
that is why we should tell them what to do. Everyone who has ever seen kids at
play, knows that this is not true. Even the youngest kids have the wildest
imagination and they can continue doing something for hours when they are
really fascinated by it. Modern educational theories also emphasize that
learning is a process of the student actively creating meaning out of his
experiences, rather than just passively copying things that are imposed on him.[3]
Thinking that children do not know what is good
for themselves allows us to force our
children into doing things if they do not want to do them. These days, we are
beyond the use of physical force and corporal punishment in education, however,
we still use psychological tricks to force them into complying, mainly grades
and punishment. This is unfortunate, because psychological research shows that
these ways of motivating people extrinsically
is much less strong than an intrinsic motivation.
A motivation that comes from the outside, e.g. (the fear of) loss of grades or
punishment, is much less strong than a motivation that comes from the inside, doing
something because you really like it or find it really meaningful. More so,
continuing to award extrinsic motivations such as grades or (the promise of)
wealth, can lead to a disappearing of the original intrinsic motivation.
However, our traditional education blatantly ignores these psychological
findings.[4]
The fact that we consider it normal to use
(psychological) force in education is not only detrimental to our students’
motivation, it is also detrimental to the students’ self-confidence and to the
student-teacher relationship. First
the self-confidence part. This part is more obvious. Our kids are constantly
graded. They are continuously judged and ultimately reduced to some numbers on
a paper where it matters most whether one fails or passes. This leads to
considerable stress and uncertainty amongst our young, because, as we all know,
young people, especially teenagers, are very sensitive to judgement. In the
worst case, it can lead to apathy. This is wat I saw in many of my students:
they had been told so often, either explicitly by a teacher, or implicitly by
their grades, that they were useless students, that they started believing it.
They had given up on themselves. They no longer thought it was any use teaching
them, and they sometimes even told me. Needless to say, that teaching really
becomes hopeless then.
‘Behavior issues’
Next to motivation and self-confidence, the use
of force also destroys the relationship between teacher and student. It causes
all kinds of so-called ‘behavior problems’. Let me explain. In the ‘problem
school’ where I taught, behavior issues were quite common. It was hard to have
a 50 minute class without insults (or worse) being thrown around. Teaching was a
daily struggle for control over the students. And I felt I just could not do
this. I did not see the point. Why could we just not get along? Teachers
usually blamed this on the students being disobedient or disrespectful and
punished them for it, but I did not believe in that.
Thay’s teaching, stopped me from putting the
blame on them so easily and made me look at things from the students
perspective. I realized kids, and especially the kids in the school I taught
in, were just not made to sit still and listen all day. Moreover, I thought it
was unfair to make them learn things that for the largest part they never asked
for, did not interest them, they would probably forget and never need again in
their lives.
The use of force is rather destructive for
human relationships, as Marshall Rosenberg explains in his famous work on Non Violent Communication. It only gives
the other person two options: subdue or rebel. It disconnects us from each
other and from hearing each other’s feelings and needs. You objectify the other
person and reduce him to an instrument of your will that you use to try and
achieve pleasurable situations and avoid unpleasurable ones. In short, it stops
us from seeing each other as human beings. A relationship based on force, is a
relationship based on mistrust, on the belief that it is either impossible or
undesirable to meet the other person’s needs. And as I said before, the use of
force in education, is based on this very disregard for the student’s needs.
This mistrust is what I saw in the eyes of my
students as soon as I entered the classroom. I could tell they mistrusted me,
just because I was a teacher. Being judged in such a superficial way, was very
hard for me. In response, I tried being kind and doing my best for them. In
normal life, this usually makes people more kind hearted. Here however, no
matter how hard I tried, I still had lots of unpleasurable encounters with
students. My colleagues would tell me to not be so soft and ‘toughen up’. I
chose to respond differently. If what had always worked for me in normal life,
did not work here, there must be something really abnormal about this situation. If what I hold true and have always
practiced in human relationships, does not seem to function, there must be
something dysfunctional about the
relationship. I refused to blame both myself and the students for the problems,
but rather looked at the system and the philosophy behind it. And this is how I
came to change my views on education.
Of course, most teachers will counter my
argument by saying that if they do not punish the students for their
misdemeanors, then all hell definitely breaks loose, and if they do not force
students to do something, they will definitely end up doing nothing. At first
glance, this is true. If we do not grade a task, students will put less effort
into it. However, I do not believe this is the case because students have an
inherent need to be forced (some of my colleagues would even go so far as
saying that kids ‘like’ to be punished.) I think it is just because they have
been conditioned in such a way that they have lost all their intrinsic
motivation. Sometimes my students would even ask me to get mad at them, yes
they would even get angry about it, claiming that only then they would listen
to me. This made absolutely no sense to me. Their demand just proved that they
have been trained by the system to only respond to punishment and reward, and
to disregard what matters in normal human relationships.
What we want our students
to learn
It is true, in our punishment and reward based
system, we are able to ‘force feed’ a lot of knowledge into our students.
However, I think on a deeper level, we are teaching them much less wholesome
things. We teach them that forcing people is a good way of achieving what you
want. We teach them to use anger instead of listening to each other’s feelings.
At best we learn them how to sit still and listen, but what use is that? It
might be useful in an authoritarian regime, or at least in a very static and
hierarchic society (like the society that spawned our education system
centuries ago), but it is definitely useless in our ever more free and rapidly
changing 21st century.
Moreover, we teach them they are inherently
bad. We teach them that they should be forced into things because they do not
know what is good for themselves. In this way, we take away their
self-confidence and their sense of responsibility for their own development. We
do not learn them to accept themselves. We fail to reinforce their inherent
goodness and their desire to explore the world. We take away their passion, we
take away their dreams. We are not focused on the many needs and troubles
growing up children and adolescents face in this ever more complicated society,
we are more interested in shoving knowledge down their throats.
To me, my experience in a troubled school made
one thing very clear to me. Freedom is essential to any form of education.
Students should be made responsible for their own future. They should be
allowed to follow their interests and passions. A teacher should not function
as a dictator telling them what to do and criticizing them, rather as a guide,
encouraging them, making them believe in themselves and helping them to find
their own path. Our traditional school system is fundamentally inapt to achieve
this. Alternative schooling methods such as Montessori
Education, Waldorf Education, Democratic
Schools or Unschooling, just to
name a few, are more promising in this respect. An analysis of alternative
methods and more concrete guidelines go beyond the scope of this essay. The
basic idea is clear however: forcing a curriculum on children is
counterproductive. As the saying goes: you can lead a horse to water, but you
cannot make it drink.
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| How can we make kids grow? |
[1] According to Unicef over 91% of children worldwide
attended primary education and 83% attended secondary education in 2013.
[2] The first schools in the West were medieval
monastery schools where the ‘Seven Liberal Arts’ (Septem Artes Liberales) were taught.
[3] I’m referring here to the
theory of constructivism, most
famously put forward by psychologist Jean Piaget.
[4] If you want to know more on this
topic, look op ‘Self Determination Theory’.
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