for my father
In January 2022 my father sent me a blog post about education.
I read it and replied with some thoughts.
He encouraged me to publish them.
He died in September 2024.
This is the conversation as it happened.
David Bridle — 31 Jan 2022 at 07:07
Yes, that is very interesting. I would like to have asked some ideas from the author. What he has seen in his years as a teacher and headteacher? What little changes or even better, what questions can schools ask themselves to be better? I do see he put in about emphasising empathy, arts, etc., which at least starts a motion towards something better.
I feel that while we have a world engaged in ‘Cancel Culture’ and demonising various groups or divisions of human beings, which does seem to take up an awful lot of peoples time, we won’t get into asking the correct questions and establishing a change.
He does hit upon a very difficult problem. While we have our current systems that we think our children need to be prepared for, we may not be willing to rethink what education means to children now. For example, saying to schools, colleges, universities that they need to be experiential learning, and emphasise that exploration of the self, and the ‘soft skills’ should take precedence over the traditional skills. The narrative will break down into businesses, employment, etc. require XYZ therefore, we need to use the old systems.
The idea that if we educated the population to any level of STEAM, we would have in five years enough brain power to shift humanity (all 9,000,000,000 people) into an age of creativity where we would not NEED to do the robotic mundane tasks is too big picture for most people to fathom.
Paul Bridle — 31 Jan 2022 at 07:25
I love what you have written here. You should do it as a blog and put it out there.
David Bridle — 31 Jan 2022 at 07:29
Do you mean this passage of text alone or with the piece below?
David Bridle — 31 Jan 2022 at 07:29
Especially, when you see a signpost outside a primary school detailing the costs of children being late to school, breaking down that a child being late to school adds up to X days per year depending on their level of lateness, 5, 10, 15 minutes. This tells me they have not gone upstream to figure out why they have a problem with parents getting their children to school late, and therefore what could they do to support the community or the individual parent in reducing this issue — not by way of passive-aggressive emotional punishment on a sign that probably cost the school a lot of money to print in metal and hang on the fence at the entrance to the school.
Paul Bridle — 31 Jan 2022 at 08:08
All of it.
David Bridle — 31 Jan 2022 at 08:10
I’ll have to check some facts. Do I need to expand on any of it?
This conversation was sparked by the following post, shared with me by my father:
“An Enduring Task: Boys’ Schools Cannot Remain Carbon Copies of the Past” — Timothy J. Jarvis