Sometimes I think I am the worst kind of educationalist. After all, I don’t believe in education.
Let me qualify that. I don’t believe in education the way the West says it should be. And, as a result, I can honestly say I don’t want my kids to get the best possible results at school. I don’t want A grades, I don’t want a fistful of A levels, I don’t want a 1st at university and, as they are budding musicians, I don’t want Distinctions at all their grades.
Does this sound a bit dodgy from someone who has been teaching for 18 years? Hypocritical for someone who is proud to have seen many hundreds of students get their GCSEs, A levels and degrees and been a part of that? Bizarre utterings from someone who has tried to push musical talent to find its best in every student and had many go on to become professional musicians themselves?
Well, it all depends on what you call education and why you think we should be teaching it at all.
For many years, I saw in the UK an increasing pursuit of education at all costs. Schools proud of almost all of their GCSE students taking up A levels, or how they have pushed more ‘D’ grade students into the ‘C’ bracket and so on. Universities now seem to be full to the brim of students who, years ago, would never have made it to a degree at all.
I have to question the motives of the institutions that allow this to go on. It is fairly obvious that most of the time it comes down to money (either saving it or getting more of it) and a lot has to do with prestige. Schools want to outperform others locally and, with OFSTED breathing down their necks, they feel compelled to do so or risk losing jobs.
But being here in Bangladesh has helped me to voice the deep suspicion I felt for years in those institutions. Why on earth do we want to educate children at all?
Now don’t get me wrong, I love learning. I even love taking exams. And I certainly love pushing myself further to develop my skills and knowledge. This I want to encourage in students. I want them to surpass themselves and, in doing so, to deepen their love for learning. But do I really care if they get an A or a B or a D? Not really. Most of what I learn now I am really rubbish at (you should hear my Bangla – beshi karap) but one young man taught me that it does not matter.
Many years ago, whilst at university, I began teaching students on the piano. One boy came to me and barely uttered a word in every lesson. But he listened carefully and slowly worked his way through music books. Very slowly. He seemed to have no real talent at all. Indeed, after many years we started Grade 1 work with a year to take the exam. We ran out of time. I had to buy new pieces and have us start all over again because he took so long. The traditional teacher’s advice at this point is that the lad had no talent and should give up.
But how could I do this when I knew from his mum that every morning he would get up and immediately practise without having to be told to do so? He was doing everything right, he was just taking a very long time to do it!
I have never been over-awed by student’s talent – I’ve seen a lot of it over the years but students themselves tend to see it that they are the only ones who have it. I have had to deal with students and parents who thought their little darling was the talent in the school and should be given special treatment. I have never agreed with such a way of thinking, instead, it is the ones who show the effort, the love, the desire to learn that interest me. And so I stuck with this boy.
Eventually, he took his grade one exam – and got a merit! Then he went on to do grade 2 and got a merit for that too. And so on it went until, eventually, he was a very fine pianist with a string of grades. He taught me a lot in doing that. No matter how difficult or lacking in the traditional view of ‘talent’ a student is, if they have the desire to learn I have the patience to teach. Conversely, no matter what skill or genius they have, if they are lazy or obnoxious then they can go find another teacher.
So what does this have to do with my kids getting an ‘A’ or my views on education?
Well, here in Bangladesh education has a purpose. Get a grade, get a job, get a wage, get food on the plate for you and your family. Simple. Honest. Necessary.
But in the UK it is ostensibly about that but really it is – get a good job, better than the next guy. Get more money, work less, have better holidays and better stuff. Avoid having to do the crap jobs.
And that last sentence is where I really have a problem. The person I have learned more from here in two years has been my ayah. Poorest of the poor, no real education (she can read and write Bangla to a level but that is all), with many in her family to look after yet she is hard-working, honest, efficient, and intuitively clever and thoughtful. The last person outside my closest and personal friends I respected this much was Mark Ashton, our wonderful vicar from the Round church, Cambridge who, even up to his death earlier this year, showed the most amazing knowledge, care and compassion I have ever had the honour to witness. And I see similar in Bangladesh, the same hard-working down to earth, humble and honest attitudes from people who have very simple jobs.
The fact is, we still have to have people do these essential jobs. We need farmers, crop harvesters, road sweepers, cleaners, cooks, plumbers, builders and so on just as much as the doctors, teachers, politicians, lawyers and other so-called ‘intelligent’ careers.
But our insistence on seeing these latter jobs as more important or better or more worthy or deserving of greater respect is utterly abhorrent to me. How can I tell one man or woman that because they grow rice I am more important than they because I teach others to become doctors and save lives or similar? Whose work am I eating from my plate each day? What will those imaginary ‘saved lives’ eat each day? If you leave it to me to grow my own food I will starve! I can’t do it! I have no idea how to keep plants of any sort alive even though I teach kids all about plant nutrition and can tell you the chemical formulas behind plant growth. Head knowledge and actual experience are very different things.
So… my kids? Well I am quite proud of myself that, thus far, I have not done what many friends predicted would happen. I am a bit of a rebellious teacher and I have been told many times “Ah, but it will be different with your own – you’ll see”. Well, so far the critics have been completely wrong. I don’t want my two children to get the top results, be top of the class or end up with the best jobs.
I want them to be happy.
That’s what I have learned here. That even in the midst of troubles, poverty, crisis and death, Life pulsates all around. The ones I respect here are not the boro lok - the rich and the important. They are the ones that whatever their circumstances have found peace and take joy wherever they can find it. That is a gift the West can never give to the people of Bangladesh. I think we need to learn it from them.
I want my children to learn well and make good use of their educational time. I want them to learn how to learn and how to enjoy it and this is what I have always tried to give my own school kids. The best compliment ever paid to me as a teacher was not actually said to me. It was after a particularly difficult and boring music lesson I had to give to some year 7 students. As they were all leaving I overheard one say to another “I really love music lessons. I’m no good at it, like, and I can’t do it well but I really love the lessons”. The kid had no idea I was listening but I was deeply touched. Even after a ‘dreadful’ lesson, if I was keeping kids interested in being in the class and keeping them on the road to learning it really did not matter what I taught them or how well they did. They were learning to love learning.
I want my kids to learn, love it and get the best grade they deserve. I want them to get grades that, in the end, they can say “Yep, that seems about right”. I want them to get the level of job that is appropriate for them. If that means stacking shelves for the rest of their lives because that is the right intellectual level for them and they will be happy doing so then I will be so very proud of them. We need shelf-stackers!
When I left school after A levels I was militantly anti-university and determined to be a bin man. Indeed, my first job was putting radios and speakers in to cars – quite a physical job because I had to do lots of drilling and cutting and lifting of seats out of cars. It didn’t need an A level in Maths to do it. I loved it. But another vicar, Peter Lawrie, from my church as a youth – St. Johns, whitwick – very wisely pointed out to me (poor man, I was accepted as one of the family so he got to hear my outrageous rants on an almost daily basis) that if I, an intelligent and qualified young fellow, became a dustbin man I was taking away the job of another who did not have my qualifications and could never do the type of job I was ‘mentally’ appropriate for. He was right. If had remained doing car radios I would have been bored stupid within years and probably hating life by now. I needed the more intellectually demanding work.
So, if you are a student and you hate the idea of going on to university – don’t go! But, beware, the job you get instead could be the rest of your life. Can you live with that? If you can, then go for it and be proud of the work you do.
For as long as we insist on telling people that one job is more important than another rather than honest work being more important than dishonest, we will continue to have the unhappiness in the workplace - the selfish drive for better pay, better conditions, better possessions well beyond that of basic human needs. We will continue to have too many students taking university and dropping out feeling failures instead of happily pursuing a valuable job that requires less mental energy but more physical. A car mechanic and I are just as clever as each other. Only my job hurts my head at the end of a long day and his hurts his hands.
We should work with the view of doing the best we can rather than pursuing the easiest and most comfortable option. If, in your work place you are saying “There must be more than this” than ask yourself “Do I want more for me or do I want more so I can benefit others better?” If we don’t, we will never be satisfied. Greed is always hungry.
Of course, after all this expounding and theorising (which I do practise with all children), I realise that my father was doing this with me long ago when I was too young to get it. He used to look at my report card from school and totally disregard my As and Bs. He knew I was clever, he didn’t need no teachers to tell him that. Instead he looked at the numbers by the side that indicated effort. God help me if he saw 3, 4 or 5 which was satisfactory to very unsatisfactory. Anything less that 1s and 2s meant trouble because I was not pulling my weight, not doing my best. My family are very sporty but, alas, I am not. Yet, if my school report indicated that despite the E grade I was putting in really very good effort then my father was happy and made me feel proud.
But then I was always very proud of my father too and as the first anniversary of his passing away approaches at the time of writing, that pride has never diminished. Yet, I am not aware of any A grades he may have achieved and he never went to University. He worked hard all his life and had a reputation for being honest. He did his best and I don’t think he could have asked for more from himself. That’s what I want for my kids.
All of them.
