A guest blog by Lucy Crehan (@lucy_crehan)
I’ve spent the last two years learning about the best education systems in the world – from the inside. It was a particular moment in a year 11 Science class four years ago that set me on this journey. They had their GCSEs coming up in a few months, and we still had a lot of material to cover. Abdul, a boy who was quick to grasp concepts but slow to do classwork, put up his hand.
“Miss, why do we sneeze?”
My first instinct was frustration. Here we were with the whole of the digestive system to cover by Friday, and he was asking me irrelevant questions.
“We don’t have time for that Abdul”.
He slunk back into his seat. On the train home, my only time for reflection, I worried about that encounter. What had I become? When did the interests of children become irrelevant? I thought that it might be when schools were threatened with takeover if they didn’t get the required number of C grades, and yet, we were told by politicians that this was the kind of thing they did in the ‘top performing’ systems.
In that case, I thought, maybe we shouldn’t be copying the top-performing systems. I signed up for a Masters degree, keen to learn more about how education systems could be run better, and discovered something that came as a shock: these countries were not doing what our politicians said they were doing. They were designing education in a completely different way, different from us, and different from each other. And yet despite their differences, they were all getting top grades in Maths, reading and Science.
I had to find out more. I read a lot of reports and studied a lot of graphs, but they didn’t give me any idea about what education actually looked like in each place, only about what policies were ‘officially’ followed (you will know from experience that these are not the same thing). So I decided to go and have a look for myself. I emailed teachers in Finland, Canada, Japan, Shanghai and Singapore (terretories which are regularly at the top of the education-superstar charts) and asked if I could come and help out in their schools. I spent at least three weeks in schools in each country, teaching, watching, listening, and asking lots of questions. The teachers became my friends. I stayed with many of them. And I came to learn what education is really like in these places.
I’m now writing a book about my travels, in which I’ll take readers on a guided tour of these education systems, painting a picture of school life, and making sense of the theories, facts and figures through the stories of real teachers and children. I’m hoping to publish my book with Unbound, but whether this will happen depends on whether enough people pre-order it!
If you’d like to read this book, or think it’s an important book to ‘get out there’ (so that politicians can’t keep making stuff up!), please go to www.unbound.co.uk/books/cleverlands and order a copy. Thanks!
I spent 5 years teaching local students in Singapore. I didn’t see any teaching that was significantly superior to anything I saw in the UK or have seen since.
What I did see was a cultural difference. It is essentially an authoritarian state. Teachers must comply with the state’s directives and they do so without question.
Despite Singapore’s bright lights, most of my students’ families lived in relative poverty. They lived in state provided housing and drove taxis or sold food in hawker centres.
The kids were driven to succeed and were wholly supported by mostly close knit families who saw education as a way out of poverty and the teacher as a significant figure in achieving that goal.
Comparisons are often made with other parts of the world to show us all what we should be doing but sadly it is not helpful.
It is like comparing apples with oranges.
I think that’s pretty much the point of Lucy’s book 🙂
All the best with your book and valuable project Lucy. My favourite ‘purpose of education’ right now is to “Walk the Path of Various Arts & Skills until You can no longer be Deceived by People in General” from 16th Century Japanese warrior but, anyhow, wisdom is universally true. Well intentioned people deceive and deceive over and over because we can all only present our own view. A persons view changes by that person humbly choosing to explore a field that is interesting or important to that individual. I call this “Apprenticing Yourself” and it’s how people have learnt for centuries. In this journey we intuitively read, record, find real-world peers and engage in conversations with experts who care about this field too. We learn from people within a community who actually give a dam about what we care about so we’re free to speak our evolving truth without being shut down (like, by a stressed classroom teacher who’s trying to stick with the syllabus). The approach you’ve taken to this project is a great example of this kind of truth seeking. I’d love for teenagers in school to have similar space and freedom for their own truth seeking work. My options, as I see them: wait for our system to become enlightened, or do what I can with what I have and start making a difference even to a few people. I’ve gone for the second option.
I teach in a Polytechnic in NZ, through the arts. Many of my students are lost, don’t know what they want to do or have unrealistic expectations We are living longer, change jobs more often, live more variously….learning to think creatively is essential. They may not think it useful right now but in the future I hope they will have recourse to the thinking skills they are learning.
Lovely post and quote…thankyou.
Hi Michele, you’ve got a supporter here that creativity is important. We’re not going to get out of our global mess without it! Personally, I’m a huge fan of unrealistic expectations as a driver for creativity. The more unrealistic, the more we’re called to be creative to move towards them. Expectation: not only to stabilize our environment (not enough) but to regenerate it. Expectation: end to all physical conflicts over our world. Expectation: dramatic reduction in teen self-harming and suicides. Expectations that may never be reached are the ones we’re needing now. Nothing will unleash human determination and creativity more.
I have traveled many parts of the world in my three years since graduating and am about to start my PGCE in September. This book excites me more than any other! One of the best things I did while travelling was volunteering with children in Thailand and help build a community shelter for them to live. I would love to spend three weeks in different schools around the world like you did. Maybe I will get to one day. One thing I believe which makes a huge different in teaching is the attitude in the children. I feel children have got lackadaisical towards school and education in this country, more so than others. So I am keen to read what you have to say. As soon as my maintenance loan comes in, I know where I will be first of spending my money.
[…] A guest blog by Lucy Crehan (@lucy_crehan) I’ve spent the last two years learning about the best education systems in the world – from the inside. It was a particular moment in a year 11 Science class four years ago that set me on this journey. They had their GCSEs coming up in a few […]