I want to homeschool my children…
Surprise, surprise! I (a teacher) am a little bit obsessed with education. The more time I spend in the classroom, the more I believe the education system is broken and failing our children. My husband regularly has to talk me down from the idea of taking our children out of mainstream education and homeschooling them.
I know, it sounds a little off. A teacher who wants to take her children out of the education system. Why is she not an advocate for all those hardworking teachers out there?
A successful education is hinged on the three key components working together: school, parents, pupils. However, if one leg of the tripod fails, the stool collapses.
Schools struggle as they have inadequate funding to meet the needs of the pupils (particularly those who have additional needs and require specialist intervention).
Parents are often unable to prioritise time to sit and read with their young children everyday as we live in a society that requires both parents to work.
Pupils often lack basic manners, respect for adults or the resilience to deal with challenging work or disappointing feedback.
The National Curriculum requires children to learn an unnecessarily broad schema that steals time from their core learning (maths, reading, writing, P.E.).
Schools invest in schemes of work that promote complacency amongst teachers as the resources are almost always preplanned and digital (PowerPoints).
The large whiteboards (or blackboards!) have been ripped out and replaced by screens that become rapidly defunct as technology progresses at an exponential rate. Parents probably don’t even realise their child sits and looks at a screen all day. Teachers are forced to explain and model work on whatever tiny whiteboard they could squeeze next to the interactive whiteboard. The key learning takes place there, not on the screen.
It’s too easy to just cast blame at each part of the triangle. You could blame the schools for not doing enough. You could blame the parents for not doing enough. You could blame the pupils for not doing enough. But rather than engage in the blame game, I would like to focus on all the small changes each party can make, to contribute to an overall better outcome. It may not be perfect, but I hope it will be better.