Evolving Education and Breaking Boundaries

Imagine that you are a scientist, a palaeontologist studying fossils, and on one long and dusty dig you come across an exciting new find. An object 15cm long, yellow in colour, hexagonal in shape, with a hard, grey core running through it, and a little metal cap on one end with a rubber lump. An incredible new discovery, unlike anything that has yet been found. You eagerly write up your new find, publish it in the most reputable journals, and declare that a new species has been discovered.

Sometime later another find is made, by another scientist. In many respects, it is just like your own - the hard, grey core, the hexagonal shape, the yellow colour. Except this one is only 2cm long. Clearly, the scientist claims, it is another species. Maybe distantly related to your own discovery, but that must have split off and gone its own way many millions of years ago.

As time goes on further discoveries are made. Some are 10cm or 15cm long and are grouped with your initial find. Some are much shorter, only a few centimetres, and are placed in the second group. Of course, one day a discovery is made that fits neatly between the two groups - neither short nor long. Some argue it’s definitely part of the first group. Others argue it must be part of the second group. And yet other scientists say it is a group all of its own.

In time, there are three well-established and much-researched groups. These are written up in textbooks and taught in universities. Scientists may still quibble over new finds and which group they belong to, and there may even be fringe voices that say that really there’s no third group at all, but generally, the consensus has been set.

The scientists in question have acted as we all do - they have tried to bring order to disorder, to seek out a pattern in the chaos. Of course, nature has not given us 3 separate groups, despite how things appeared to us. It has given us a spectrum and we have placed the lines of division where we want.

In all of this, then, the important question to ask when trying to divide up the world is, what purpose does this serve? What goals are we trying to achieve? What is the value of doing so?

Human beings are pattern-seeking animals - and this is of huge value to us. It allows us to recognise new dangers based on those of the past, and it let our ancestors notice predatory animals and sources of food, but our imposing of patterns upon the world can lead us to create divisions where no divisions need to exist or to believe that these divisions are somehow natural and inevitable. This is not to say that there is no value in this, but rather that we should be critical and flexible with such things, always asking ourselves, what purpose does this serve?

In my day-to-day life, there’s really little need for me to know the names of a wide range of trees, or of all kinds of different fish. I know the names of the ones that show up in my life or that it might be useful to know, but that’s it. If I were a marine biologist or a lumberjack those things become much more important. In all of this, then, the important question to ask when trying to divide up the world is, what purpose does this serve? What goals are we trying to achieve? What is the value of doing so?

We teach and learn in just such a divided world. Despite their many differences, most school systems usually follow two central kinds of classification: age and subject. Schools around the world divide students based on their date of birth into grades, years, or cohorts, and then based on the subjects they are studying or the examinations they will be completing. You may be in 12th-grade English or 10th-grade Art - these are the divisions we use to regulate and ‘taxonomise’ the ecosystem of the school. These are such established and affirmed divisions that they may seem ‘natural’ or ‘inevitable’ - how else could things be done? But they are all our own creations, of course.

Just as with our palaeontologists and their pencils, we are imposing order, but to what end? We must ask the question of what goal we are trying to achieve. What purpose does this serve? I would suggest that the taxonomy of the school, along the lines of age and subject, is not designed for the benefit of students. It does little to enhance their learning and is often a barrier to it.

It is an instrument of bureaucracy, administration, and control. We do it for the paperwork, not the pupils.

In a classroom somewhere a student is asking their teacher, is this English we are studying or history? What a strange question to ask in the middle of a class on Shakespeare - but these are the divisions our school systems build into the minds of students. Are we doing music now or mathematics? Is this a physics class or philosophy? We do both a disservice to learners and to the knowledge and disciplines we love when we hold fast to the boundaries erected around us as teachers. Boundaries are built, not for the benefit of teachers or students, but for efficiencies of organisational models, labouring under the weight of the status quo.

What interests me in dividing up the world of fish is which I can eat and which I can’t - this isn’t helpful to the marine biologist but we have different aims and goals. So, too, would we divide up the ecosystem of the school in very different ways if we approached the task from the perspective of students and their progress rather than from administration and organisation? How different would our lines and boundaries be drawn if we sought to organise the school to further this different set of ends and goals instead? What form would it take? How renewed would the ecosystem be?

Every lesson that is taught has the chance to reinvent and rethink teaching and learning - even if only incrementally.

This is a call to speculate and imagine, but it is not idle speculation. Every lesson that is taught has the chance to reinvent and rethink teaching and learning - even if only incrementally. As educators, we can think deeply about the structures we operate within and the aims and ideals we uphold. We can reflect on whether these things align and, where they don’t, how we may bring them into better agreement. We may begin by worrying much less about which pencils should be grouped together and, instead, asking ourselves what it is we hope to create with them.

If we had, as our highest aim, our students’ learning and growth, where would we draw the lines?