Education, Education and the Family, Education and the State, Funding, Home-Based Education, State Schools, Teaching

Globalisation, Schools and Home-based Education: the economic pressures

Sean Casham (2014), writing from an unashamedly socialist perspective, discussed the impact of globalisation on education, in his paper: Globalisation and Education. He argued that globalisation has ensured that schooling is finance-driven rather than education-driven. Measurable outcomes, such as high exam scores, become the educational objective of schooling to attract parents to enroll their children and to secure government funding. These globally originated economic pressures, from such sources as The World Bank (Casham, 2014, p. 2), create insecurity of employment for school staff and ensure that there is a need for particular teachers to prove their ongoing right to be employed. In this context, data collection becomes connected to professional competence, rather than actual teaching ability and learning outcomes in the lives of the children; value is given to things that can be measured and produced, rather than to the elements of a true education. Casham writes: “By focusing on the knowable and instantly quantifiable, we may diminish the more abstract qualities of being human, such as kindness and wisdom” (p. 2).

Casham points out that Waters (2011) wrote: “In Australia, 25% of our young people (aged 15-19 years) have a mental disorder and 1 in 3 young people experience moderate to high levels of psychological distress” (Waters, 2011, p. 75). This figure is an increase on the number of mentally disturbed young people reported in the earlier Sawyer, et al. (2000) Mental Health of Young People in Australia, report. In the Sawyer report it was recorded that “Fourteen percent of children and adolescents in Australia have mental health problems” (p. xi). However, it is interesting to note that Sawyer, et al. claimed that there was “a higher prevalence of child and adolescent mental health problems among those living in low-income, step/blended and sole-parent families” (Sawyer, et al., 2000, p. xi). The Sawyer report claimed to be accurate because “the prevalence of mental health problems identified in (the) survey (was) very similar to the prevalence identified in previous Australian and overseas surveys” (p. xi).

Casham suggests that these globalisation pressures may have a negative influence on young people. Making educational processes finance-driven rather than education-driven may be limiting our human capabilities, and “limiting our human capabilities could paradoxically prove harmful to our mental health and the economy” (Casham, 2014, p. 2). Maseman (2007) pointed out that the increasing trend in measuring school effectiveness “rests on productivity-oriented criteria, and analysis that is used on every level of education from early elementary school up to the tertiary level” (Maseman, 2007, p. 101). This has led to “the increasing homogenization of the culture of education on a worldwide scale, with the accompanying assumption by educators that there is only one valid epistemology” (Maseman, 2007, p. 110). Casham summarises this phenomenon by suggesting that “financial objectives can … be at the expense of a truly coherent focus on school improvement” (Casham, 2014, p. 6).

It is my argument that schools cannot be improved, whilst they are the recipients of Government funding. It is the pressure of Government accountability measures that is apparently skewing pedagogical approaches. Teachers who are anxious about their job security will not be primarily concerned about the educational outcomes of their charges, rather they will be driven by considerations that revolve around assessment imperatives. Testing does not deliver an education. Tests test whether the students have memorised the data that is deemed important to pass the test. An education results in a lifestyle change. Testing involves cramming as late as possible before the test date, then promptly forgetting as much as possible after the test.

Home-based education does have its financial pressures. Home-based education families mostly choose to live a leaner lifestyle than they could if both parents were working and the children were sent to school. However, when there is a resolve to live contentedly within the family’s single-income means, there are no pressures for financial accountability in relation to the education of the children. Time can be dedicated to education, and if there is no state-mandated registration, then the testing regime can be done away with all together. The proof of educational success is not in the results of tests; the proof is in the adjustments to lifestyle that the children make as a result of their educational development.

Casham’s essay is helpful in understanding some of the pressures upon schools and their teaching staff. Those pressures may also be contributing to the poor mental health of many of the children attending the schools. Add the pressures of globalisation to the factors of bullying, academic struggle and the corresponding shame that many children experience, and it is no wonder that a large number (between 14% and 25%) of children exhibit mental health problems. However, Casham holds out hope for schools, and this is where I depart from his analysis. The hope will be found in strengthening families, and then mandating families to deliver an education from the base of their own home sweet home.

References

Casham, S. (2014). Globalisation and Education. Unpublished Masters level assignment.

Maseman, V.L. (2007). Culture and Education. In: Arnove, R.F. and Torrens, C.A. (eds). Comparative Education: The Dialectic of the Global and the Local, 3rd Edition. pp. 101-116.

Sawyer, M.G., Arney, F.M., Baghurst, P.A., Clark, J.J., Graetz, B.W., Kosky, R.J., Nurcombe, B., Patton, G.C., Prior, M.R., Raphael, B., Rey, J., Waites, L.C. and Zubrick, S.R. (2000). Mental Health of Young People in Australia. Child and adolescent component of the National Survey of Mental Health and Well-being. Canberra: Commonwealth Department of Health and Aged Care.

Waters, L. (2011) A review of school-based positive psychology interventions. The Australian Educational and Developmental Psychologist. 28(2), pp. 75-90. DOI 10.1375/aedp.28.2.75

Schooling, Schools, State Schools

It’s not just the children who suffer in schools: schools are poison for everyone

Peter Doulis, a teacher in the state of Victoria, Australia, has recently been awarded $770,000 in damages following a major psychological breakdown caused by teaching in a Victorian state school. The Victorian Supreme Court awarded the damages against the Victorian Government because of the government’s negligence in not removing Doulis from teaching in dysfunctional classes. The students were described as ‘feral’, and were reported to have been “virtually crawling up the wall”. Doulis has been suffering a “chronic severe major depressive condition”.

The Victorian President of the Australian Education Union warned that this is a re-ocurring problem because government’s “aren’t prepared to support our schools in the important work that they do in educating our young people.”

Education Unions have a vested interest in schools and schooling, so their solution to the problem is to throw more government money at the issue. This will not solve the problem, it will only expand the institution that is the root cause.

So, here is evidence of another situation where attending a school is hazardous to health. The behaviour of the students that is identified as contributive to Doulis’s breakdown is the kind of behaviour that would be expected in a mental institution. And why should this be surprising? Both mental institutions and schools are total institutions, as defined by Goffman (1961).

The Secular, Free and Compulsory Schooling experiment has failed dismally, and needs to be scrapped. It will not happen over night, and who knows how many more teachers, principals and students will be afflicted with breakdowns before the lesson is learned. Government-funded schools are not places of education, they are prisons and places that inflict enormous pain on a very large number of people subjected to them.

Goffman, E. (1961). Asylums: Essays on the Social Situation of Mental Patients and Other Inmates. New York: Doubleday Anchor.

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2014-09-05/teacher-awarded-770k-for-dealing-with-feral-students/5722678

Funding, Ivan Illich, Schooling, Schools, State Schools

Reflections on Illich 13: The messianic character of mainstream Western schooling

Illich, I. (1970). Deschooling Society. Cuernavaca, Mexico: CIDOC. Downloadable from: http://www.preservenet.com/theory/Illich/Deschooling/intro.html

”The most important role of schools is to create jobs for accredited teachers, no matter what their pupils learn from them” (p. 31). “The school teacher is a ‘secular priest’” (p. 32).

In his book, The Messianic Character of American Education: Studies in the History of the Philosophy of Education, Rousas J. Rushdoony (1963) traced the educational development in the West that established schools as the new church in society, and identified ignorance (of political correctness) as being the new sin that children must be saved from. He strongly argued that the priests and priestesses of the new church are the teachers that indoctrinate in these schools. Illich summarised this idea by saying that,”(t)he school teacher is a ‘secular priest'”.

On the other hand, schools are structured to meet the educational needs of one kind of child, and that is the child with the orientation to aural/oral/visual learning. This excludes a lot of boys (and some girls) who are tactile/kinaesthetic learners. It is the aural/oral/visual learners who make the best teachers, and the tactile/kinaesthetic learners are not catered for adequately, if at all, in the schooling process. Therefore, the children who get the most out of schools and schooling are those who are destined to become the teachers in the schools. Hence Ilich’s comment that “(t)he most important role of schools is to create jobs for accredited teachers, no matter what their pupils learn from them”.

Schooling is a huge industry that consumes inordinate amounts of public money. The evidence strongly suggests that the more public money directed towards schooling, the worse the outcomes from schools are. Hattie (2011) wrote:

Funding in the Australian school education sector increased by 41% between 1995 and 2006 ([EOCD], 2007) but student performance stagnated in mathematics and significantly declined in reading (Thompson, 2008). In Australia, Jensen, Reichl and Kemp (2011) estimated that per student expenditure increased by over 17 per cent during the studied decade, while student performance declined by 2.5 per cent, equivalent to about one-third of a year of schooling. They noted substantial variation between states, with the decline in performance in the ACT being over 50 per cent of the national average and the rise in expenditure being double the national average. They identified the largest increase in expenditure as being due to reduced student-teacher ratios, driven by class size reductions–with there not being an increase in teacher salaries over the identified period (p. 5).

Government certification processes and Union protection of teachers, has ensured that very few teachers, once in the classroom, can be removed. Incompetence in performance is covered by the smoke-screen of clamoring for more and more government money to be spent on the schooling juggernaut. Decline in educational outcomes is blamed on government economic rationalism.

Schools are not the temples of secular salvation. Education cannot save us. There is only one name given among men whereby which we must be saved, and that is the name of the Lord Jesus Christ. Mums and dads, lead your children to the only wise God our Saviour. He, and He alone, is the only hope of salvation in this life and in the life to come.

Hattie, J. (2011). Leaders Exert More Power When They Control the Topics of Educational Debates (Vol. 59). Adelaide, South Australia: ACEL.

Rushdoony, R. J. (1963). The Messianic Character of American Education: Studies in the History of the Philosophy of Education. Nutley, New Jersey: The Craig Press.

Ivan Illich, Schools, State Schools

Reflections on Illich 11: Schools are ancient and modern, and perpetuate childhood

Illich, I. (1970). Deschooling Society. Cuernavaca, Mexico: CIDOC. Downloadable from: http://www.preservenet.com/theory/Illich/Deschooling/intro.html

p. 28 “The school system is a modern phenomenon, as is the childhood it produces.”

School as we know it in our era has only appeared once before in history, and that was in the Ancient community of Sparta. According to Flaceliere (1965) at the age of 7 a young boy was taken from his family, schooled in a state-controlled total institution, where he was indoctrinated to give allegiance and unquestioning obedience to the state until his death. Spartan girls were raised to be on equal footing with the boys, but the objective was with a militaristic end in view – breeders of strong Spartan boys for the Army. Schools and schooling were designed to create total dependence upon the state, and to form the citizens into military units that responded to the states martial objectives.

In the case of modern schools, their original raison d’etre was also militaristic. The German Kaisers wanted to created a powerful war machine in Europe, and saw state-compulsory schooling as a means of achieving this objective. When the concept of state-controlled education reached England, America and Australia, it was seen as a means of creating a large workforce of factory workers. In the words of Reynolds (2014):

“… the traditional public school: like a factory, … runs by a bell. Like machines in a factory, desks and students are lined up in orderly rows. When shifts (classes) change, the bell rings again, and students go on to the next class. And within each class, the subjects are the same, the assignments are the same, and the examinations are the same, regardless of the characteristics of individual students. … A teacher in a modern industiral-era school was like a factory worker, performing standardized operations on standardized parts. And the standardized parts–the students–were taught along the way how to fit into a larger machine. … the modern school system provided far less scope for individuality on the part of both its producers and its products. But the trade-off was seen as worthwhile: the modern assembly-line approach, in both settings, produced more of what society wanted, and it did so at a lower cost. If standard parts are what you want, an assembly line is better than a blacksmith” (Reynolds, 2014, Standardized Parts and Mass Production).

So, the 19th Century objects of schooling were to create a ready supply of “punctual, obedient factory workers; orderly citizens; and loyal soldiers” (Reynolds, 2014).

Between Sparta and the experiment of the German Kaisers, education was a family and marketplace activity, and was not delivered in schools as we know them today. In that sense, the school system is a modern phenomenon. And since factories have shifted from the West to Asia, at least some of the reasons for schools and schooling have disappeared–training of piece-workers with no jobs at the end of the training process.

I remember the first thing that I was told by my platoon sergeant, when I got off the bus and commenced my military training: “Don’t think, soldier! You are not paid to think, that is what officers are paid to do. You are paid to do as you are told.” Military training militates against maturity and responsibility. As a soldier, others make decisions about what you will wear, where you will live, what you will eat, whether you will sleep (or not), how you will behave, and so forth. Schooling that is based on a militaristic and factory model prevents responsible thinking, the essential prerequisite to maturity. Growing up requires real opportunities to make significant decisions, with actual consequences. Schools perpetuate childhood; particularly in the context of age-segregated cohorts, with age-oriented learning materials.

Education for maturity, education for responsibility and productivity in life requires education in life under the guidance of loving parents, and in the company of supportive siblings. True education orients a child to the twin objectives: to love God with all your heart, soul, strength and mind, and to love your neighbour as yourself. This cannot be achieved in the context of a school, and is not the by-product of schooling; it is the fruit of unschooling with a discipleship emphasis.

Aboriginal Education, Accelerated Christian Education (ACE), Denominational Christian Schools, deschooling, Discipleship, Education, Education and Culture-making, Education and the Church, Education and the Family, Education and the Marketplace, Education and the State, Education Delivery Programs, Funding, Hebrew Pedagogies, Home Schools, Home-Based Education, Indigenous Education, Indigenous Pedagogies, Ivan Illich, Life Learning, Natural Learning, Schooling, Schools, Socialization, State Schools, Teaching, Tertiary Education, Themelic Christian Schools, Unschooling

God doesn’t want you to send your children to school: He wants them to have an education

After climbing to the top of the academic tree of education by earning a Diploma of Teaching (Primary), Bachelor of Education, Master of Education (School Leadership), Doctor of Philosophy (Christian Education) and a Certificate IV in Training and Assessment [mostly self-funded], and working for about 30 years at all levels of school from Preschool to adult education, I have come to realise that the deficiencies in educational outcomes for children in the western world are because of schools and schooling. Schools and schooling have always been the problem.

My new book is now available from Amazon.

Education and Schooling are not synonymous. A proper education does not require children to be sentenced to twelve years locked away in a total institution as if they were criminals, mentally insane, enlisted in the military or part of a religious cult.

The state has no mandate, at all, to be involved in education. Education is the proper sphere of the family, with support from the church, and assistance from free-market tutors and other community custodians of skills and knowledge.

True education should be delivered through unschooling, with a discipleship emphasis. Ivan Illich explored the idea in the 1970s, and the Triune God of the Bible emphatically agrees. You can get this book from Amazon.

Some time ago, now, I walked away from working in a school as a school administrator. I am on the road to deschooling, but am conscious that there is much more of the road that needs to be traveled.

The focus of my research is around Biblical Christian deschooling/unschooling. Over time I will be triangulating the things that I have found in the literature, with interviews conducted with families that are actually unschooling, and comparing the results with the development of my own thoughts over 30 years, as recorded in my personal journals.

I look forward to the day when home-based education is the norm, not just a curious anomaly. Those who would like to read my book, you can get a copy from Amazon.

The dissertation for my post-graduate doctoral degree is located here: Dissertation found at this location .

lanceaboxeducationresearch

Biblical Christian Deschooling/Unschooling

Category Archives: State Schools