I'll start the year with a little thought experiment.
Education has been a recurring theme here. Particularly my view that it's largely a waste of time in its current form. I think it should be stripped back. Less time, more focus on mathematics, English and spoken communication.
Anyway, I was thinking what if we had real education austerity. What if the government said to parents, "Right, you're only entitled to one hour of state education per week, per child."
What would you want your child spending that hour doing?
I suspect few would say an hour long French lesson, or an hour of school assembly. Or an hour of sex education; or religious education, or storybook time. Or PE, or home economics. Or even history or English literature.
I imagine for most people the thinking would go something like this:
Can the child read and write adequately? If no, then an hour of learning to read and write. If yes, then an hour of maths.
(If you disagree with this the comments are open. Obviously, I have quite strong opinions, but it's a genuinely open question. Plus, as I believe the parent should have ultimate say, not the state, I'll defend your right to choose how that hypothetical hour is spent regardless :)
I think this is a good way to think about things as it really focuses on the question of what the purpose of education actually is. What do you really want for your child. I think most parents when pressed would want their child to enter the adult world with excellent maths, English and social skills.
When they send their child to school they simply assume they'll be getting the maths and the English (the usefulness of spoken communication generally goes unacknowledged). However, school is such a blob of different things the maths and English can get a little lost. There's also that tendency for children that aren't naturally academic to think, "I'm bad at Maths, it's not my thing, but that's okay, I'm good at art and history." Meaning they kind of switch off and give up on the lessons they don't like. As if the real world will overlook your bad maths if you make up for it in some other genre of learning or expression.
Again, the parents just assume. "They have weekly maths and English - they must be doing something. They must be making some progress."
But this really is largely wishful thinking. For many kids any lesson will just be an unfocused blip on another long, messy school day. It's a big blancmange, and at the occasional parents' night any failings will be squarely aimed back at the parents themselves.
You need to read more with your child at home / You need to make sure little Noah does his homework / Little Noah needs to work a bit harder.
Never mind the fact that you've paid for a service.
Education takes up so much of a child's time, and we spend so much public money on it. Yet there's no laser-like focus on getting what we actually want from it. I really doubt adults would be so careless if it was their own time and money.
It really is just a bad habit we've all been born into though. You go to school and that's just the way it is. If you question it the initial response isn't even an education concern, it's "..but who will look after the children when parents are at work?" - a childcare argument. If you really push people you'll get, "What? So you're saying learning about history, or Shakespeare, [or this or that, etc] isn't important?!"
Which is easy to bat away, as firstly, there's an infinite amount of culture. Even if you deem something culturally important, who decides what is and isn't? Who decides what is learnt and what gets left out. Then secondly, and more importantly, compared to developing your reading, maths and social skills, all these things are much less important.
If you want your child to learn about Romeo and Juliet you can plonk them down in front of a documentary, or movie, or YouTube video. You can sit with a cup of tea and learn these things passively. Whereas learning to read and write, and learning maths requires application and practice. (As does developing social skills, which requires making the effort to go out and interact with other humans.)
As with the one-hour thought experiment. If you only had an hour you'd make the most of it. If people were spending an hour of their own time and money it would no doubt be put to good use. They wouldn't waste it on something they could get for free by turning on a BBC history documentary.
Your Child Needs A Haircut
Imagine you sent your child to get their hair cut. They need to get their hair cut as they need to head out into the world and function. It's not a luxury, but a thing that needs doing.
However, the child returns and the hair hasn't been cut. You ask why. The answer comes that the hairdresser instead spent the hour teaching the child about the Spanish Armada. You go to the hairdressers to complain and the reply comes back, "What?! You don't care about the Spanish Armada? You don't believe it's important that your child knows about this important part of our history?"
Obviously, no one would put up with this in real life. They'd immediately say, "I gave you £20 of my money and an hour of my child's time. Specifically to get their hair cut. I want my money back."
This is essentially how the education system works though. And it's often worse, as unlike the imaginary hairdresser, it's often teaching things you'd rather your child wasn't learning, and not just about the Spanish Armada. As per the sex education and various other ideological lesson topics.
