Children, books and education in socialism
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What would education be like in a socialist society?
I don’t mean formal training in ‘professional’ disciplines, much of which would obviously need to be kept.
My two grandkids go to a large secondary school which is reckoned to be pretty ‘good’. For all its respectable credentials, from the things they tell us the school seems to be like some kind of cross between a factory and a prison. They do their homework on laptops and get marked online. Sometimes there are mildly violent ‘incidents’ where one or more students may be sent home. The school hands out disciplinary points and detentions for all sorts of minor transgressions, on some kind of sliding scale.
With people freed from drudgery and poverty, in a way the whole of life in a socialist society might come to be seen as a learning process. But would subjects be formally taught in some kind of school or would children simply take in knowledge and experience from their elders and peers? Would teaching of some core ‘essentials’ perhaps be done in very small individually tailored groups with no standard curriculum?
What about reading matter? Much literature for younger children is well-written and can be very funny, and of course children develop the ability (usually) to distinguish between fantasy and reality. The accepted wisdom is that children’s imaginations need to be fed. But while it can be something of an achievement to get some kids to read at all, has it all gone a bit over the top? Story books aimed at kids are almost invariably about witches, wizards, ghosts, wacky cartoon characters or people with superpowers, with an endless stream of authors and everything having to be ultra-exciting, awesome, fantastic – choose your own hyperbole.
I don’t think we’d want to go back to previous centuries when children were regarded as little more than miniature adults. But is all this fantasy necessary or even desirable for children to absorb? Is it just a form of escapism from the banalities of life under capitalism and all that so-called education?
One of the things that I think would, should change in terms of education in a sane society would be getting rid of the idea that we can only learn in groups that are stratified strictly by age. Prior to the development of the education system where would any body find themselves in a social situation where a person spent most of their time with 30 odd people of more or less the same age. When I was a kid although you spent your school time with an age group, most of the valuable lessons were more or less learned on the street, playing out in fields and woods, etc. In that setting you had some of the kids who were five years older than you and some that were about five years younger. You learned to mentor and support younger children and you learned from the older kids. Surely in a socialist society we would move back to something akin to that system, older and younger children learning to play cooperate with each other, learning to support and being supportive. I’ve always found in adult learning that when there is a diversity in a class room, age, experience, gender, ethnicity, etc. the learning is much more profound and enjoyable.
I have two grand kids who are in primary school at the moment, and to be fair it is a reasonably warm and manageable setting for them, but I do worry about them going off to the bigger schools. Luckily where we live they have a middle school option as well, so kids go off to the middle school at age 8 and stay there until they are 13, which allows a little more time for them to develop before they go off to the local comp.
My granddaughter is only 4 years old and the buggers have her spending time doing bloody homework. Again the idea that learning is something is time limited and only takes place when the state dictates is something I hope will disappear alongside the state. We all learn in different ways, at different times, OFSTED, etc. seem to think that learning can be put into a one size fits all, whilst at the same time encouraging the psychobabble of so called “learning styles”
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