133 – Schooling and Alternative Education Systems

[00:00:00] Santiago: Hi, and welcome to the IDEMS Podcast. I am Santiago Borio. I am still, for the time being, a collaborator with IDEMS, and I’m here with one of the founding directors of IDEMS, David Stern. Hi, David.

[00:00:24] David: Hi, Santiago. Great to have you on again.

[00:00:27] Santiago: Thank you.

[00:00:28] David: I do like your long summer holiday in Argentina, it’s fun to have the time to interact with you even while you’re on leave.

[00:00:36] Santiago: Yes, I thoroughly enjoy being able to have something stimulating and purposeful to do in such a long holiday. Two months off, without this I wouldn’t know what to do with myself. Thank you for giving me that opportunity as well.

[00:00:51] David: What are we discussing today?

[00:00:53] Santiago: We had an episode recently where we touched upon the value of schooling versus other types of education. It wasn’t directly relevant to the discussion we were having. We suggested that we’d do an episode on this specifically because it’s such an interesting topic.

And what I mentioned in that episode is that a lot of communities were very hard done by the sort of compulsory schooling that was implemented a while back. There were communities that lost a lot of skills that they needed to survive in the younger generations because the traditional education that they were having was not in line with the schooling that was being proposed.

[00:01:47] David: Absolutely. It is one of those things that the need for schooling as we perceive it now, and as it exists pretty much all over the world, is a very interesting construct, because a big part of its value to the students isn’t necessarily just what they learn. Although there are elements of what they learn, reading, writing, the ability to function in a society, which are important in terms of the societies that have been built.

But the main thing is that this form of schooling actually then corresponds to a routine which builds up for a lot of, if you want, modern life. Many aspects of modern life revolve around some form of work. A period where you go to work, you do your work and then you go home. And if nothing else, schooling provides many years of being embedded in a system which is about going to do your work and then going home.

And so fundamentally, I believe that, and one of the reasons that even for my kids that I place value, even if they don’t learn as much as they could in other ways, learning to function in societies is an important role that it plays. But that by definition is detracting from alternative lifestyles or lifestyles which are different. And that is so damaging for communities which are really built around other sorts of lifestyles.

[00:03:48] Santiago: Yes. I’d like to focus on some very rural communities in certain environments where kids were learning maths, kids were learning history, from a very prescribed curriculum. And a lot of the knowledge was passed from generation to generation orally. Some of the experiences, some of the skills, some of the lifestyle created a really big shock to those communities in a way that forced them to somewhat evolve in ways that meant that they lost some of their traditional cultural values.

[00:04:38] David: Absolutely. And I don’t want to dig into the political issue that is this forced schooling, because the way and the intention behind this was not necessarily good. It was exactly the opposite. It was exactly trying to disturb those cultural practices. And so in certain cases, at least, it was a deliberate attempt to disrupt those communities, and using schooling as a weapon to disrupt a community is something which can never be condoned, or should never be condoned.

[00:05:19] Santiago: I wasn’t aware of that intention. It’s interesting to hear about it.

[00:05:24] David: It has been known for a long time that the way you draw people in to the sort of standard lifestyle is through education. Education’s been a tool to bring people in to society as it’s formally structured. And so it has been used deliberately to try and disrupt communities that are not part of society.

Now, having said that, there are cases where this has been done maliciously, but there’s also been cases where it’s been done with good intention of enabling opportunity and creating opportunity to live in modern society.

[00:06:10] Santiago: I was aware of that, that the intention was to stimulate the integration to, as you said, modern society. That people were not being able to integrate to modern society because of the lack of schooling. And the intention was to tackle that problem by making schooling compulsory.

[00:06:37] David: But the integration into modern society, and this is one of the really interesting issues around this, is really about the skills. The schooling is about creating societal structure and societal expectation. That’s where I think there’s a sort of, there is an important distinction to recognise that if you want to impart certain skills, then traditional schooling is not the most effective way, and there’s good evidence of that. But what schooling does provide is an immersion in the societal structures.

And so the important distinction in what you’re saying, and why there’s always been this sort of element of both, is that school is deeply embedded in a certain type of culture, and therefore it is automatically in competition with other cultures. Whereas education doesn’t need to be. And I think there’s an interesting distinction, people sometimes equate school and education.

[00:07:55] Santiago: Yes, that’s certainly true and I, as a teacher, feel that on a daily basis, where there’s parental expectations to educate beyond my remit as a maths teacher, but that’s a whole different story, I think.

[00:08:16] David: It’s not a different story, it is central to this story because if you wanted to give communities the skills to be able to engage, then that is very different from wanting them to fit in to societal norms. And schooling is a way to fit in to societal norms. If you want to provide education, there’s ways to provide education within pretty much any culture.

[00:08:51] Santiago: Yeah, and I’ve seen in many places homeschooling becoming more and more desirable and popular, and there’s a growth in homeschooling that I’ve seen in the last decade or so. That is a really interesting concept because one of the things that schooling gives you is that sense of community, that interaction with peers, being able to socialise and develop those social skills that are so valuable while you’re growing up. There is an inherent risk in homeschooling that some of those interactions could be lost.

[00:09:38] David: It’s interesting, my main interaction with homeschooling is through the fact that I have family in Canada. And homeschooling is actually very big in Canada in all sorts of different ways. Not least because as a country, it’s a very big country, there are people who are remote, there’s all sorts of different reasons why this is an important form of education.

And I have a lot of respect for it. And one of the things which I find very interesting is that my sister, whose kids are going to school in Canada, benefits immensely from the fact that Canada has a homeschooling culture. So she was able to take her kids out of school for a month and homeschool them for a month while they went to visit Southeast Asia. This was acceptable and accepted as being enriching their education. Homeschooling as a culture and as an alternative creates these opportunities.

I still remember meeting in Tanzania on the beach a mother and daughter homeschooling while traveling around the world for a year. And again, what an education. And the opportunities that thinking about homeschooling as part of a broader view on education opens are huge.

[00:11:09] Santiago: Yes, but playing devil’s advocate, as a maths teacher working on a standardised curriculum, having someone go away for a year and not necessarily have that exposure to what is expected and then coming back.

[00:11:26] David: But they do. In Canada, if you go for a month or a year, that curriculum is there and you homeschool on the same curriculum.

[00:11:34] Santiago: I see.

[00:11:35] David: And so the expectation, it wasn’t that they were taking a year out of school or time out of school, during that time there were the resources provided in a way which enabled them to be homeschooled for that period of time.

[00:11:51] Santiago: I see. One could argue that the level of knowledge and expertise that you need in the different subjects within the curriculum could not be there through the homeschooling though.

[00:12:05] David: No, but the whole point is that’s been demonstrated to be wrong. Homeschooling has been extremely effective because good resources and good connections and being connected to other people who are homeschooled, especially with the internet now enabling, if you’ve got those connections, you can achieve equivalent learning with remote education. They even had access to a teacher who was supporting the homeschooling remotely.

And so there was a whole system set up to enable homeschooling to work well.

[00:12:38] Santiago: That’s wonderful. I was not aware of that, and that is incredible, but at the same time, it takes a huge amount of resources.

[00:12:47] David: Well, this is an interesting question. Does it take more resources than actual schooling? Maybe not. I’m not saying that it’s better. I’m saying that I believe done well, this is and should be part of all our schooling systems. And I think it would take on average less resources, because this is what we know from remote education, there’s a big up upfront cost in getting good quality resources and materials.

But once you’ve got those materials in place, with the right feedback systems, as you know, you could then potentially have the learning. I don’t believe it necessarily is more resource intensive. It’s more resource intensive because the parental role in homeschooling is huge, but that’s not a resource you’re paying for.

[00:13:41] Santiago: Yes, and that’s part of what I meant in terms of the resource heavy argument. Not everyone can have the luxury of doing that.

[00:13:52] David: Absolutely not. And the question is, again, we’re coming back to the question in some sense of equity versus equality. It’s not necessarily about enabling everyone to have the same. So not everyone would have access to that, not everyone would want it. But, some people, for various reasons, it might not be because they have the financial resource, it might be because they have family the other side of the world and they could go and visit them for a year.

Yeah.

And this is something where, you know, being able to have that extended stay would be enriching. But going into another education system rather than being homeschooled as part of your own education system, these are two very different things.

[00:14:38] Santiago: Yes. I was talking about standardised curriculums before, the standardised curriculum in one country might look quite different to the standardised curriculum in another. And so joining another education system might not be a positive thing.

[00:14:52] David: Absolutely. If you’re an academic and you get a sabbatical and you go for a year somewhere else, your kids would normally join that new schooling system and then they’d have to come back. That means two disruptions. What if you have a homeschooling program, which would enable them to continue their existing education system. If they’re only away for a year, that might be a sensible option.

You have medics who actually go for a year to somewhere else, it enriches their career. It can enrich the family. There’s all sorts of scenarios around this, where, as you say, these are not simple things. And I think we’ve in some sense deviated slightly from the original topic, but not much, because I think one of the key points is, are we talking about schools as institutions, or are we talking about educational outcomes?

And in particular, if we’re talking about educational outcomes, what if time, effort, resource was invested with local communities who are living different lifestyles to understand how could elements of homeschooling or other be integrated into their communities so that they could achieve certain educational outcomes while maintaining their culture, their society, while fitting that into their existing structures rather than imposing a schooling model, which just happens to sort of fit with a society which then leads to a work model where you go away for work for the day and you come back.

[00:16:29] Santiago: Yes, related to that, I’m not very well informed, but I heard of situations where there’s possibilities of, taking a year out of schooling or a few years out of schooling, to work and gain experience in a way that better suits the biological needs, or whatever sort of needs of teenagers, and they go, they work, they get experience, they gain all sorts of skills, and then they come back into schooling later in life, much better informed on what they want to do, how they want to proceed in their education and future life.

And there’s huge value in that, and there’s a strong argument that eight hour schooling goes against the sort of biological needs of teenagers, where being in a room, sitting down, discussing and potentially being very well engaged is extremely challenging at that age. Being able to maintain focus on schooling for that period of time, every day, Monday to Friday, developmentally speaking, there may be disadvantages.

[00:17:51] David: Well, let me just take that particular point a step further, because I don’t believe that anyone really believes that the current schooling models are the optimal way to educate the future generation. Do you?

[00:18:08] Santiago: I don’t, and I’m a teacher.

[00:18:12] David: So the point is that this is not about whether there could be better ways. We know that there could and there should be better ways to engage and to stimulate a future generation. What we don’t know is, as a society, if we were to find better ways to engage, how does that work at a societal level? What will that lead to in terms of society? Because what schooling performs is a function much more than just an education function. It’s a societal function. It is central to our societies at this point in time.

And, you know, imagining full scale societies that think of schooling very differently, or think of education very differently, it’s exciting but it’s scary. It’s really not clear what this would lead to.

[00:19:05] Santiago: There is an argument that experimenting on those potential alternatives could be hugely unethical because it could go very wrong and we could be creating a lot of damage to the younger generations.

[00:19:17] David: Exactly. You could have a generational issue, which you then can’t resolve easily at a national scale. So it is something where I don’t think professionals within it believe that it is the optimal way or the best way to do things. But what I do believe is that we have an established system and we did another episode very recently about revolution versus evolution. I don’t believe we need to tear down schooling just because it’s not necessarily the best way we could do it.

Can we evolve into something which is gradually better and where we can be learning without tearing it down? I would hope so. Might there be somewhere where, for contextual reasons, it’s already been torn down and that becomes the natural point of experimentation. That’s an interesting idea.

[00:20:12] Santiago: It is, indeed.

[00:20:14] David: Afghanistan, if you’re a woman in Afghanistan who has not access to schooling at the moment, you could be homeschooled and you could find ways to engage, within the privacy of your own home. I don’t know. I wonder whether new models could emerge where we actually get a whole generation of brilliant Afghani women who have been schooled in a totally different way because they’re denied access to schooling.

I wonder whether there’s NGOs and charities working towards this. I don’t know. I don’t know of any. But that’s a contextual situation which is potentially creating the opportunity to think very differently about education. Who’s engaging in it? I don’t know. Maybe no one, which would be a shame.

[00:20:59] Santiago: Yes, indeed. And a lot of the current system or schedule of the eight hour school day is there as well for practical reasons. A few generations ago not necessarily both parents went to work and one would say at home, that could have enabled a bit more independence in terms of schooling and education. Now, in the UK and Argentina and many countries that I’ve experienced, both parents go to work and it would be extremely difficult to provide a different scenario because the kids can’t be alone and there’s this need to have two incomes.

[00:21:46] David: It’s very interesting you frame it like this because, having spent quite a lot of time in Africa, I love the expression, it takes a village to raise a child. The whole point there is that this is something which isn’t seen as a nuclear family job. It’s seen as a responsibility of a wider community. And that’s a different form of schooling and a different form of education.

And these are the cultures which I have so much respect for, where there is just an acceptance and assumption that, this is something which is not small and immediate family. It is something where you’re embedded in the community. That comes with positives and negatives.

[00:22:29] Santiago: Of course. As pretty much everything does.

[00:22:32] David: Absolutely.

[00:22:33] Santiago: I think we could take this discussion in so many different directions that we could do a two hour episode on this, at least. As a perhaps first episode on this topic, I think this is a good place to end, unless you have any final thoughts.

[00:22:51] David: Really just that I’m quite happy with how we’ve evolved from thinking of this as a situation in the past which occurred with questionable motives to actually looking at schooling and the opportunities of alternatives to schooling that could exist in the future. So from looking backwards, we’ve shifted to looking forwards. And I think that’s exciting. And many other people are very much better informed than I think either of us on this. But it’s something which I’m delighted that we’ve been able to at least touch on.

[00:23:27] Santiago: Yes, it’s not quite a thought experiment, but it’s very interesting to look at what could be.

[00:23:35] David: Absolutely. And in your role, and especially that you are a teacher again right now, understanding the value that school brings beyond education is something which we can’t underestimate, it’s institutional, it’s about understanding the value of institutions in many ways.

[00:23:59] Santiago: Yeah. Well, thank you very much, David.

[00:24:03] David: Thank you.