Money, School and Red-Tape: Education for Kids in Hull (1/2) By Margaret Ryan

(1/2), (2/2).

Education in Hull is changing. Almost a third of our secondary schools are being demolished. Nearly £200m is to be invested in new schools. So let us not mince our words - the Building Schools for the Future (BSF) project proclaims that this is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to drive reform of the secondary system and improvements in educational standards (in Hull), through radical improvements in the quality of school buildings.

But will this project encourage a policy of liberal education in schools? Taking this further, shouldn't we be led to ask what are our schools for? And finally, what are the chances of this educational initiative succeeding where so many in Hull have failed? As a reader of www.thisisull.com, you would do well to consider first what it means to have a liberal education. I call upon my good man Robert Hutchins - dead American teacher - to tell us that a liberal education frees (a person) from the prison-house of class, race, time, place, background, family and even nation.

Building upon Robert's assertion, I believe a liberal education is about creating open-minded, self-sufficient and tolerant personalities. A personality that understands that while in schools we may have met one person with a different characteristic - of race, sexuality or music taste for example - we can now understand that such characteristics are not extreme as the young and inexperienced make it out to be.

Does this sound like the kind of qualities you want to encourage in our children? I agree. But how far should, or could, schools provide a liberal education? Some of us could say schools should challenge all the assumptions of a pupil, allow them to decide upon what is to be valued in education, and what is not. After all, shouldn't schools be about creating free-thinkers? Schools are not, and should not, be about creating free-thinkers, at least in the way I believe. Because what is a free-thinker? Would you agree that a free-thinker is someone who is able to formulate premises and hold beliefs free of validation of others? A useful tool, undoubtedly, for those who must think unlike their peers. And for the many people trapped on sink estates or in loveless relationships, free-thinking is necessary for fighting passive assumptions, for changing lives.

Free-thinking can also, however, inspire civil violence, terrorism and hatred. Free-thinking can also negate shared rationality and incite mass murder in Jones-Town. Free-thinking means that I do not have to listen to my family, my friends, or my colleagues before I make a personal decision. This is not an education for children. Instead, the most important function for schools is to make children appropriate for society.

What does that mean? Firstly they make people able to count, and able to write. The moral education? That is an uneasy and unquantifiable afterthought. But in order to make people better able to read and write, contemporary education must acknowledge the aspect of moral education. Intelligent children from an anti-education background are unlikely to read or write effectively - Piaget and the canon of psychological theory says that our IQ is set at the age of 12. The fundamental problem that Hull currently faces, then, is that the intellectual development of our youth depends on factors outside the scope of schools. As a professional cog in the educational machine, that is an uncomfortable notion. It is also a notion that belies most of what can be done to improve education in Hull.

Continued .... Next Page (2/2)

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