The problems with formal education

Arnold Carton has written a very perceptive OP entitled “The problem with Y” in which he discusses the difficulties boys have in educational environments, with some  research showing that having a Y chromosome can be as big a disadvantage as coming from a deprived social or economic background.

He writes very much from a teacher’s perspective, but it got me thinking about my own fairly mixed experiences of being on the receiving end of a lot of formal education, not all of which seemed to benefit me as much as the informal education I got through life, relationships and workplace. It has made me fairly sceptical of what I call the over formalisation and standardisation of the educational and training processes in our society.

What follows started out as a draft comment on his post, but when it exceeded 1,000 words, I decided that I had better post it separately from his post, as it is largely autobiographical and would have detracted from the serious research and teaching experience that went into his post.

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When I was sent to boarding school in Dublin aged barely 11, I was perhaps one and a half years younger than the average for my class. The educational standard of the school was not a challenge, but the social milieux was. The school was still a single sex school at the time and there was still quite a bit of bullying going on, although I believe it had been even worse before my time in the mid ‘60’s.

It didn’t pay to be seen as being too clever in class as that would upset the class bullies who were generally not the brightest. Being a dreamer and a loner also didn’t help. Others were much better at networking with the bullies and were often the worst members of their gangs. There was still quite a bit corporal punishment in the school and some of the staff weren’t too sympathetic if you got on the wrong side of the wrong people. “Serves you right” was more likely to be their attitude.

My one saving grace was that I was a fast runner and reasonably good at sport – as sporting performance was key to having status in the school and amongst your peers. Far more so than academic achievement which was more likely to see you denigrated as a swot or teacher’s pet. My sharp tongue didn’t help. On more than one occasion my speed was the one thing that saved me from a hiding. I could hide out until tempers had cooled and it was safe to return.

One teacher – in Maths and French – who was good at neither, was also the rugby coach, and rugby was compulsory for the junior classes. I didn’t like rugby because it gave the big (and older) boys a great opportunity to bully the smaller ones. I used to hide out on the wing and kept well away from the rucks and mauls. He regarded me as a softy, which was a criminal offense in his eyes. On one (rare) occasion I got the ball out wide in space and was tearing down the pitch about to score a glorious try. It would have given me the bragging rights for at least a week.

The coach, who was refereeing the scratch training match, stuck out a foot to trip me up and stopped me scoring against his favoured physically robust players. I walked off the pitch and swore I would never play rugby again, and from that day on, no one in the school ever tried to enforce the compulsory rule against me. It helped that I was ok at hockey and the best table tennis player.

In later years, just as I was leaving, the school combined with a girl’s school and became co-ed. Some classes had become mixed in advance of the full merger and the girls had a huge civilizing effect on the boys. The bullying culture seemed to vanish as the boys became more interested in girls. The girls were also far more studious, respectful, rule abiding, clean and tidy. It didn’t help if you were dirty, untidy, rough, disruptive or appeared stupid in class if you wanted to get on with the girls. I don’t know if the girls got much out of the amalgamation, but the boys certainly did, and especially the shyer, less sporting or less physically imposing ones.

I never found studying in school or college easy. My attention far too easily wandered off in entirely different directions. ADHT or the autism spectrum didn’t exist in those days, but I suspect in today’s world I would have been a candidate for either diagnosis, together with depression when things didn’t go my way. I was always unreasonably over ambitious, imagining I could be the best at whatever, without being able to put in the hard yards. Failure didn’t sit well with me and my unconscious response was to punish myself emotionally. It took me a long time to work out that that was what was going on.

I chose psychology as my subject in college despite not having a clue about it.  Even biology was only taught to the girls in their school prior to amalgamation, but I had a sense that I needed to figure out what made people tick. Unfortunately the TCD psychology department was dominated by behaviourists from the Skinner school of (lack of) thought and the whole course was centred on treating students like rats in a Skinner box.

This involved making students sit tests answering inane questions about an inane text they were forced to read, and if you didn’t pass the test, you weren’t allowed sit the exams. The whole premise of the “psychology” was that the rats were in a closed environment and had no choice. It was a breeding ground for a fascist mentality. I decided to test the theory and refused to complete the facile tests. I was not allowed to sit the exam and was consequently failed. Even an appeal by my sympathetic tutor to the University Council was not upheld.

My parents considered the next 18 months of my life to be my period in the wilderness, hitch hiking around Europe and Morocco, writing bad poetry, and doing odd jobs in London and wherever I could find one. But I feel I learned far more about life outside the sheltered existence of small town rural Ireland and boarding school than I would ever have learned in those psychology classes.

I had begun attending sociology and politics lectures during the expulsion process and 18 months later I was accepted to do an Economic and Social Studies degree starting in second year and thus losing only one year in the process. My parents were suitably relieved although my father formed the quaint idea that I wanted to become a social worker when I knew that was as far away from my skill set as could be. (I later married a social worker instead!).

I became very skilled at getting by on minimum application, doing well in exams after a few days of crisis cramming just beforehand.  I avoided the drudgery of original texts and focuses on short summary review articles to get the gist. Wikipedia has been my saviour in recent years, but in the old days you had to be inventive to avoid having to read multiple turgid textbooks, reading abstracts of related articles instead. My attention in class or lectures would wander off after a few minutes unless the teacher was particularly good. I developed  the discipline of writing copious notes – which I rarely consulted again – just to try and keep my attention focused.

Generalizing from my own experience, I suspect many boys simply aren’t cut out for sitting quietly in class or lectures and directing their attention in one direction for many hours in a day. In later years Powerpoint was my saviour because I couldn’t remember what I had heard, but always remembered what I had seen. Hence I wrote everything down. I also had to learn the skills of reading, empathizing, and sympathizing with other people – it didn’t come easily to me – and I always sought out people who seemed to have far more emotional intelligence and networking skills than I.

I was fortunate in my working life in that I never had a routine or operational job – which would have killed me. Everything was about imagining a better future and managing change projects whether in business process design, organisation, or new technology. I was fortunate in working for a company that was then very good at finding square holes for square pegs. A lot of quite unorthodox people there thrived.

I had two outstanding managers who recognised in me skills that they didn’t have themselves, and, far from being offended or threatened, encouraged me to develop them to the max. They ensured I got the limelight and credit even if they had prepared the ground for me, secure in the knowledge that their subordinate doing well reflected well on them as the manager.

This meant my name was always on the list whenever the business decided it needed a new strategy or to change the way we did something in a radical way, whether it be in production technology, service provision, business process design, management structure, employee communications or performance rewards. In the end they got very good value from me and I was rewarded accordingly. Very few people could have been so lucky.

So, in answer Arnold’s question, girls are very different from boys, but so are many boys and girls very different from each other. We all have different ways of learning and developing, and our one size fits all education systems of class and lecture rooms suit very few in an optimal way.

In my view, the rash of ADHT and other diagnoses growing exponentially at the moment arises at least in part from the increased pressures to conform to a set of behaviours which are actually very unnatural in the context of human evolution. You can’t even get an interview these days to get onto the employment ladder without a rash of formal qualifications to your name which may say little about your natural proclivities and abilities. A lot of very creative people are slipping through the net. More are committing suicide.

I used to tease my late wife that she learned far more in the college cafeteria than she ever did at lectures (which she rarely attended) and I adored the emotional intelligence she had to play to her strengths and learn through social interaction with her peers. In later years our personalities appeared to merge and pass each other out as I became more sociable and she rather less so. We can change, but it can take a very long time.

The best teams are made of people with complementary skills and personalities and a lot of my success as a manager in later life was down to identifying not only the technical skills, but the mix of personality types which were necessary to bring a complex project to a successful conclusion. The maxim “no one is perfect but a team can be” with the right mix of people applies. We can learn and change but it can take most of a lifetime to do so, and we expect an awful lot of our kids at a very young age sometimes.

We can’t be everything to everybody so my advice is to find out what you enjoy and work hard to become very good at that – and that may or may not involve sitting in a classroom and getting formal qualifications. With luck opportunities will come your way that allow you to make the most of your skills. The world out there is nothing like as uniform as a very standardized educational system would have you believe. Our educators are not always the wisest in the ways of the world.

And that teacher who tripped me up? He became an international rugby referee, but not a very good one and his career came to a swift end when he handled a test match very badly.  His authoritarian personality did not sit well with mature adults. Serves him right!