Dear Editor,
My work as a teacher educator is really a manifestation of my deep concern about how teachers are teaching and children are learning. I suppose this makes me exceedingly ordinary and places me in the company of multitudes. But to confess as I do now, that I am not in the least interested in examination results probably puts me in a small and very unpopular minority. But as a practitioner in the field of education, I often feel the urgent need for drastic social change that only education can truly bring about, in the vein of Brother Bob’s “total destruction is the only solution.” Let me relate an episode that concerns teaching here.
Almost exactly one year ago, my mind was troubled when two third formers (8th graders) visited my home and pressed me for help with their field work projects in Social Studies. When I began to engage the young women in conversation about their work, I was reminded of Sparrow’s “If mi hehd woz brait a wud a bin a daam fuul.” (I unapologetically use the approved writing system for the Guyanese language.) As I listened to how they reported on the instructions they were given (or not given) by their teachers, I confirmed once again how much the school system entices us into what I would call a continuous and accelerating disconnect from our passionate individuality and our communal selves, and my rebellious spirit rose and whispered to my inner self, “If a child were really to take the school system seriously, s/he might truly turn out to be a damn fool.”
The young ladies were attending schools in two quite different communities, miles apart from each other. But they were both tasked with identical projects (with the subject matter being the only freedom of choice between two options!) and were given almost identical ‘non-instructions’ about how to go about their projects. They were tasked to read on the subject, construct a questionnaire of 15 questions and carry out surveys in their communities among 25 persons; then write a report of their findings. They had a choice of researching either historical monuments or flooding. They both seemed interested in what they had to do, and I got the impression that they felt that their projects enabled them to participate in real problem solving on issues that were real and important to them.
But the teachers were apparently interested only in the final written product, and it did not seem to me that the students had been walked through the process in a meaningful way to understand the essential and far reaching social value of what they had been tasked with: Why are we doing this? What problems can it solve? What kind of people shall we target to give our questionnaires, and why? How can I engage the people in my community through this project? How can I make this work really effect change in my community? …
As I watched the girls struggle with constructing their questionnaires, I saw how easily the creative opportunity to engage community could be lost. One of the girls kept starting over one of her questions on a new part of the page every time I raised a problem about it. It reminded me of something a primary school teacher once told me. She said that her own little primary school daughter would often erase her writing so much in the effort to ‘get it right’ that she would often have holes in her exercise book pages. Thus, from early childhood, we teachers put pressure on students to produce something on paper before they think it through and talk about it with the most important people in their lives, their families, their peers and their teachers. We seem to place little emphasis on what we feel and think, and even if we do, we seem afraid to voice these things. So we focus on the written page as though it had a life of its own bequeathed by an alien deity more powerful than our petty selves. Inevitably, the students who are ‘good at English’ usually get something written down, but that is no guarantee that they have felt it and thought it through deeply, or engaged community in any real way.
And of course, put the student before a computer with internet access and you might almost guarantee that there will be little or no profound feeling or thinking at all. The ‘cut and paste’ culture steps in; the parents’ shallow pockets are emptied at the internet cafés, and the anaesthetizing of the mind and spirit continues.
Here is my prayer for teachers at the beginning of this new school term: May your inner selves explode from your strait-jacket prisons so that the blaze that opens the skies guides your students through the dark pathways of fear. May your students walk in that warmth by your sides, sharing dreams. May your school principals throw the keys to those prisons into the deep rivers of the mind’s landscapes; and may they silently rust at the bottom of their watery graves.
Yours faithfully,
Charlene Wilkinson
