Recently, I participated in a public speaking competition, hosted at Mount Scopus College – I hear it’s  one of the largest Jewish high schools in Victoria. It’s crazy because I never would have considered Jews as a large community in Australia and I was amazed by how large the campus was. I guess  they just don’t hang around my side of town.

Anyway, I digress. Participants were given four topics to choose from, I can’t recall many of the ones I didn’t do, so whatever. I chose “Secure the Future”, and as I was and still am on my crusade to reshape the education system, it was mainly about that. Some of the content was recycled from the Year 12 English oral I did, because it was to a different audience. I don’t usually recycle material.

The speech is/was as follows:

We are constantly told the world will end – in new and exciting ways! However our logic and reasoning always prevails, and so, “oh-bla-di, oh-bla-da”, life goes on. We have become so concerned about the earth colliding into the sun, about the sky falling. About Rapture, Nostradamus, and the Illuminati watching our every move that we have become wrapped up in our apocalyptic obsessions. We’ve become a society obsessed with our own physical destruction. However, ladies and gentlemen, we will not be saved by a torrent of fireballs anytime soon.

And so we should face the fact that we’ve misjudged the apocalypse, ladies and gentlemen. We’ve misjudged humanity’s downfall. What we should fear most, ladies and gentlemen, is the educational dystopia that encroaches. We need to reshape our education system in order to secure the future.

WHY EDUCATION SECURES THE FUTURE

Think about it: everything we know has been taught to us. What our parents have tried to inscribe within us can be derived from what they themselves have been taught. Even inherent things like emotion and intuition we cannot fully comprehend unless we first study psychology, and sociology. ‘Ology’: A suffix meaning the study of something.

To learn things, we must study them, and as humans – as individuals – we learn, so it is fair to say what we are educated on and how we are educated has great influence on us: the youth of today and the adults of the future. Of Australia, and of the world.

WHAT I AM PROPOSING

What I am surfacing is the need to prepare our students with the ability to secure the future with the way they think and therefore act.  The ability to think laterally, to think innovatively, is currently what the world needs. It might be justifiable to say that something like the global food and water crisis are very large problems, but logically the only way for an issue to be addressed sufficiently is for it to be understood. The only way to address crises of the world and future unforseen crises is to address the foundations of people (i.e. what they are taught, and how).

Something this generation has learnt by now is that everything is malleable – life works in phases. Which music is top of the charts? As pro-ginger I ask you, who really is prime minister? What is the state of Melbourne weather within the next hour? When the rest of the world is so progressive, have we ever thought about progressive education? If GRAMMAR can be taken out of primary school English courses (for better or for worse) a fundamental shift must be possible overall, for better overall.

HOW THE SYSTEM CURRENTLY WORKS

So, after explaining how necessary education is in our ever changing world, it is only right that I justify the contention that there IS a need to change the way the education system works with explanation of the system itself and a few of the listless flaws.

Sadly enough, we are still using a model of education that was founded in a time of horse and cart – in times around the industrial revolution. Times where the schooling system needed to produce factory workers in the image of a factory line. Somehow we’ve managed to (barely) sort out a nationwide curriculum, yet still use an archaic method of factory producing students. And ironically enough, this absurdity is mirrored in Charlie Chaplin’s silent film ‘Modern Times’.

In fact, Sir Ken Robinson – a renowned professor of the arts and education says that “Schooling is modeled off the interests of industrialisation and in the image of it.”Take the VCE for example, a system I just love to hate.

A system where the mark we get depends not on how hard we work or how capable we are, but our supposed utility. How apparently ‘useful’ or ‘intense’ our subject is according to how well the majority does. We are even ranked by number, by statistic. We are also identified by number. I’m not even going to touch on VCAA guidelines, but when put this way, life starts to sound like 1984, and not in the way that the Ghostbusters soundtrack does.

ITS FLAWS: STANDARDISATION

Our current system standardises students in order to satiate a bell curve. If all students are doing great, there is no indication of it because everything is scaled. In this way our system depends on low scores. If there are no low scores, our system creates low scores. This is not a hypothesis. It happens every single year. The scores are scaled so that a broken system seems to be working smoothly.

This mostly happens to arts subjects due to strict adherence of the Scientific method to assess all subjects.  And in the words of George Orwell, “ All are equal, but some are more equal than others” because the scientific method is based on rationalism, objectivity and quantitative analysis – something you cannot measure a qualitative subject such as Studio Arts, or any other subject based around personal growth with. It is never considered that there might just be arts teachers with better methods of teaching than maths teachers. This isn’t the student’s faults. Why is science considered harder? Perhaps because it is not engaging enough in ways that students relate to.

I draw diagrams whenever I can in physics. I find myself swapping pen colours in math methods classes just to stay focused on calculus, because I’m a visual learner. And when I don’t get a correct answer, I rage and scribble the question out, because I suppose I vent best kinesthetically, and some small part of me is an abstract expressionist.

But currently there is no way our current system can manage to monitor individual growth, comprehension, coherency, participation or contextualization. Students who do learn kinesthetically cannot do interpretive dance for every exam that they need to pass, nor can visual learners submit diagrams instead of essays. Considering students only ever get their exams back on request, when all is said and done they don’t even get criticism or justification for their marks. We’ve depersonalized something that is inherently personal: the future of our students.

THE REALITY

The reality is that the indifference of students who don’t learn this way creates indifferent adults within society; Adults who will vote with disinterest and be reluctant to participate within their communities, because they haven’t been encouraged to find their place in the world during the greatest time for self development in their lives (aside from midlife crisis – which we for some reason, happily accommodate for more than the adults of the future).

The ability to solve new problems lies in the ability to observe from different perspectives and all areas of life. If we don’t teach these children and teenagers to learn in ways that work for them, it is the greatest hindrance, the greatest repression of all. It is misinformation within an information age.

The key to society’s progression lies in education. Society thrives off individuals and their specialisations in DIFFERENT AREAS. People who tell the public of events through media and artistic outlets are on par with those collecting the information.

The Anti-Vietnam war movement went hand in hand with the Woodstock festival. A few years ago P!nk’s “Dear Mr President” caught the attention of demographics uninvolved with American politics. Where would we be without the news? Without the weather announcers who most likely are NOT the meteorologists who have collected the information.

HOW THIS CAN CHANGE

So, to finish on a positive note on how to secure our education and hence our future, we must:
1. Encourage curriculum that adapts to different learning styles, I suggest the research of Howard Gardner on learning categories and multiple intelligences for this, and Jung personality types.
2. Encourage contextualisation of information: If our students MUST be graded via the scientific method for clerical uses at this point in time, at least make sure that those assessments are grading ability, not information retention.
3. Seeing every mark gained as a step taken not every lost mark as a failure.
4. Abolishing standardization.

To put it simply, the current education system is much like a bad joke. Bad joke in the way a racist joke is a bad joke, not in the way that calling a juice bar “Bin Latte” is a bad joke. We cannot treat our students and their future as jokes. We need to secure our future by securing theirs.

The thing is, ladies and gentlemen, nothing is static. Everything can and does change. The shifting of education paradigms mirrors the turning world… the ticking clock. We cannot leave the future of this nation deprived of a backbone. We must secure and strengthen with education.

Tell me, and I will forget.
Show me, and I may remember.
Involve me, and I will understand.

Thankyou.