Three Cheers for Elementary School!

This week’s article summary is Our Obsession with Hierarchy Means Primary Schools Often Struggle to Be Heard.

Although the article is specific to Great Britain’s hierarchical top down educational system, the message applies to us "across the pond."

The author lauds primary (elementary) schools for having the “purest form” of education:

• Focusing on the whole child, not just on subjects and their content
• Extending the natural imagination and curiosity of children
• Making learning meaningful and relevant to children (the topic of last week’s article summary on sex education in middle and high schools)

As we know, elementary years are crucial in that they develop foundational habits, attitudes, and skills needed for subsequent success and happiness, but the author points out that systemic educational decisions too often are geared towards the needs and wants of high schools and student preparation for college entrance exams. Elementary schools are rarely asked to comment on or to shape educational policy in terms of program and pedagogy.

The author places some of the blame on us. He feels elementary schools devote too much time thinking (and explaining) how they prepare their students for the next level. While to him “all education is preparatory”, other divisions (middle, upper, college, graduate school) are never abashed to advocate the importance of their years not just as preparatory but for the moment.

The author's call to action for elementary schools is to be more vocal on the national stage about how children learn best, to fight to define educational success beyond national exam results, to advocate for more open inquiry and self-discovery/exploration in classrooms, and to make others see these crucial learning years as important as any other division.

And as the author and we elementary educators know, we have a lot to offer about what optimizes student learning and development!

Joe

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When we consider our nation’s peculiar obsession with hierarchy, and the social stratification of society, it is not surprising that the same malaise of looking at everything from top down affects education as well. 

One consequence of seeing the world this way is that junior schools are often seen as being in thrall of their senior colleagues, relying on them to take the lead in national debates and to make decisions on education matters on behalf of us all.

With their smaller constituencies and profile, it is inevitable that junior schools in both sectors struggle to be heard with anything like the same volume, even though they are the homeland for much of the acquisition of knowledge and skills, attitudes, and values that determine a child’s success in later years. 

These are the years where education resides in its purest form, where foundations are put down, and focus is on the all-round development of the child.

Apart from the fact that it is in the junior years that children learn most of what they know and where children spend the majority of their school years, this is the time when teachers can focus on children and their development, free from national exams that strangle so much initiative and creativity.

This is when children can learn independence, the purpose of education - which is to embed the habit of life-long learning -  how to study and how to acquire proper work habits and attitudes; a time to ask questions, however tangential, before that time when they are told, hush, it’s not on the exam syllabus so it doesn’t matter.

Information, knowledge, advice should go both ways, but primarily from the bottom up. I was never more aware of this than when I moved from teaching in a junior to a senior school. I saw the focus shift from the student to the subject with little inquiry - or interest - in what went before or in the psychology of how children learn.

Junior schools need to be more active in sharing ideas and take a lead in where education is heading.  They need to be proactive, not reactive; leaders rather than followers; innovators, contributing to change, rather than locked in the present.

They need to celebrate their own strengths and the importance of their role, not as ‘preparatory’ to another stage of education - for all education is preparatory - but as the most influential, most important and most dynamic time in a child’s life.

This is the challenge for all junior schools: to project their voice on the issues that affect our children’s future, drawing on their considerable and diverse experience.

The other challenge, more difficult in our hierarchical world, and not so easily solved, is then getting someone to listen.