Factory Model Learning

This is Part II of a series Kindergarten Considerations on finding a school for Rain. Part I, Independent Thinker was about Rain’s personality. This series was inspired by Amber Strocel‘s post (Lack of) Educational Philosophy and Melody’s post at Breastfeeding Moms Unite called Seven Reasons I’m Sending My Child to Public School and The Three Big Reasons I Wish I Wasn’t.

When I was in grade 4, I got the opportunity to leave my regular class once a week to go to a special class called Gifted & Talented. We called it G n’ T. I remember doing logic puzzles and tangrams and some experiments with iodine. I remember it being interesting and a lot of fun. It’s almost the only thing I remember about primary school—other than 5th grade when I had my first male teacher who had B.O. and was abusive. I really liked going to G n’ T. We moved at the end of that school year and I never got the opportunity to do that again.

I don’t necessarily think I’m any more gifted than the next person. My husband for instance likely has some level of dyslexia and struggled with reading at school and yet he is much more gifted than I at spatial thinking, problem solving, conceptionalizing in three dimensions, interpersonal communication, public speaking and a host of other things. But me? The reason I got the gifted label in grade 4, was because I am lucky enough that my brain works well in the ways the school system is organized. I have a good memory and I am good at linear thinking, chronological order, retaining facts. As a result, things that come easily to me are reading, writing in the standard essay format, rote memorization and regurgitating information on tests.

As you can imagine I did just fine in public school. I even have fond memories. The Type-A part of me loved the desks in neat rows, the structure, the new pack of Laurentian pencil crayons every year, the predicatbility, the worksheets, the smell of textbooks. You wouldn’t think I’d be the person getting all snooty about the failings of the public school system. But here we are.

So what’s my problem?

My problem is that the school system is set up to make everyone homogenous. My impression of school was that everyone was bored. Whether a C student or a straight A student, we were all bored. To this day, my husband still says he didn’t really know why he was there. How is it that despite the fact that I was supposedly “gifted,” there was only 1 year out of 13 years of schooling where the system did anything at all to make sure that I wasn’t bored? How is it that my husband who disliked reading got through highschool without reading a single book? How is it that my friends who struggled with math would not get extra help from the school and had to get tutors on their own?

I coasted through highschool. I didn’t learn project management or time management. I didn’t learn good study habits. I didn’t learn about self-directed learning – you know, getting fired up by an idea and choosing to find out more about it? I didn’t learn any of the skills that would have helped me be succesful in University.

I learned to do the bare minimum in order to get the grade I wanted. Nothing more. I learned that if I paid half-attention in class, I could spit out the facts on the test and get good grades. I learned that the goal was grades. I didn’t even realize until years afterwards that learning should be fun.

I suppose the question is whether educators agree that learning should be fun. The question is: what do we think public schooling is meant to do? Clearly I think it should have done something different. I really think that public school did me a disservice. I think it did my husband a disservice. I want something different for my kids.

I think kids naturally want to learn. I believe they are all wonderfully inquisitive and bright and interested and motivated to learn. I feel that the public school system more or less stomps that out of them. Why? Because the system is set up to teach kids a pre-determined core set of skills in the most efficient way. The most efficient way will be effective for most kids but it won’t be the optimum way for any of them. It doesn’t teach to each individual child’s skills. Essentially it uses the factory system for education. Maximum output.

The core set of skills that the school system teaches includes reading, writing, math—the 3 Rs—history, science, and so on. But it also teaches following instructions, not questioning authority and sitting still for 8 hours a day. It does not encourage independent thinking. It does not accept that some kids just need to move more. It does not take into account basic differences in personality types from introversion/extroversion to differences in learning style. Essentially I see the school system’s primary goal to be to prepare students to get jobs in the workforce. So then, public school uses the factory model to take a raw material (kids) and transform it into a saleable good (tax paying citizen).

In this type of education system, the goal is not to help each child live up to their potential. Thus, very few really do realise what they are capable of. I think we owe something better to our kids. All kids deserve to be gifted.

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Tonight, Aaron and I are attending an info session at the local Montessori program that is run through the school district. It’s public school. Imagine that! Looking forward to learning more and sharing what we learn in the next few weeks. Join me next week as I continue the discussion on public school with the help of a few experts in Part III of my series on Kindergarten Considerations.