IS EDUCATION IN THE UK REMINISCENT OF THE VICTORIAN ERA?

Do you recall the days when teaching was primarily focused on building connections with students? If you don’t, that’s not my fault. In reality, it seems like ages have passed since discussions on promoting young people’s growth took place in senior management meetings and staff rooms. All that’s left are objectives and data. Schools are under pressure to drive up results, yet this ignores the fact that results are by definition the product of something. The process itself is no longer the main emphasis, but rather the process’ conclusion. Students are becoming more and more like a collection of numbers. Senior administrators are locking themselves in their desks in front of spreadsheets at an increasing number of schools, forgetting even the student names. I can’t think of anything better to give to all the grandgrinds and bounderbies out there than a Dickens book. Although the phrase girl number twenty is used instead of girl on 35.785% of where my spreadsheet says you should be, the idea is the same. The issue, of course, is that parents, educators, and students all together are not offering any support at all while the government and upper management teams bulldoze their way through the educational system on their own. The writing is all over the place—on school restroom walls, on walls, etc.—but the people in authority seem to have forgotten how to read anything that isn’t a series of numbers or individual letters. Are they truly under the impression that parents would inquire at the dinner table about what percentage of a grade their child has improved? No! They talk about how school is becoming an increasingly unpleasant experience. due to high management teams and the government itself. Teachers are overburdened with pointless paperwork that benefits the administration rather than the students. to demonstrate their effectiveness, to gather information for those who left teaching to work in an office because they disliked working with children, and to show that they are becoming less and less focused on the primary reason they became teachers in the first place—the development of young minds. When needy kids stop them in the hallways, more and more frequently than not, the students are racing to a computer to create a report on how they are assisting that student, rather than helping the student directly. Students are increasingly being squeezed by a really stressful vice in the classroom: they desire one thing, while senior management wants quite the opposite. Meanwhile, front-line employees are being laid off and upper management teams have gotten out of control. Some of these top managers, in their sheer conceit, still think they are making a bigger difference; well, they are; they are cutting funding for people who really teach, and they are causing stress rather than assistance in the classroom. I wonder whether they have any memories of their time in school. Which courses did they like taking the most? Which teachings did they learn the most from? unless they are aliens from out of space, and from a planet that has completely skidded off its orbit and is flying at incredible (but statistically measurable and data is being collected by all the inhabitants on the speed and direction of their doomed journey every second of every hours, i would say day, but days have disappeared, as they lost sight by now of their sun!) speed towards its doom, then, they must remember that the best lessons where those when teachers and students had a common goal, where the teacher had time to read up on the subject in detail, rather than fill in spreadsheets to justify someone else’s job, where there was no frustration. and you carry it with you and distribute it whenever you are irritated by outside circumstances. What has happened to rationality? It’s buried behind the babylon tower of pointless criteria and data that is UK education at the moment. Utilitarianism, welcome back (or not, you pick) You didn’t work during the Victorian era, so I suppose it goes without saying that you don’t work today either.

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