My school days were not very long ago. And yet, according to all the best information, at the tender age of 19 I have already been through the best years of my life'. Well, perhaps that is true, but if it is, I can see now that I'm going to have a pretty depressing future ahead of me. I'm going to let you in on a secret - I hated school and I hated being a kid.
Well, no, it isn't much of a secret is it? Everybody knows really that childhood is miserable for most of the time. And everyone really knows that school is one of the major factors for most people in making their childhood miserable. But no-one ever seems to give any thought to why school is such a depressing experience or what to do to change it.
When I first became involved in politics, I was still at school. And I spent a lot of time going to meetings about education - and at those meetings, I spent a lot of time listening to discussions about teachers' pay and conditions, loss of job security, parental involvement and many other interesting and important debates that were and are at the centre of the activity around education.
I never found any discussion that talked about student involvement, except at higher education level, or about fundamentally altering the concept of schooling to incorporate some of the ideas that school students express every day about the way they want to be taught.
So I stopped just listening and started saying some of the things that I and my school friends thought about everyone listened carefully and sagely nodded their heads, or (according to my audience) puffed out their disapproval in little snorts. And after each discussion someone in the group would come up to me and say That was a very interesting, point you made. Which school do you teach Ultimately, I believe that the biggest problem with the education system is that students have no rights at all. Teachers and parents can determine so much about a child's life that it feels sometimes as though you are not a person at all.
There is no other place or time (except prison, which fortunately, not everyone has to suffer) when other people have so much control over what you can do.
At school, the word of the teacher is Law -no-one can leave the classroom without permission, no-one can protest at an unfair (orapparently unfair) demand, no-one can ask for an explanation of a rule or a decision, there is no recourse to action if students feel they have been unfairly treated. Children are regularly forced to stay outside in almost all weather at breaktimes. Everyone knows about the legendary standard of school dinners, but despite often quite reasonable requests children are almost never permitted to leave a portion of their dinner uneaten (that is supposing they have the option of a hot meal at all).
Now all of these assertions have their exceptions, but the exceptions are only there because of the decisions of teachers, heads, and parents. Students have never had the right to make any choices about the regime in school, and nor do they have any organised way of even presenting their requests, let alone getting them put into action.
We can at least begin the process of enabling children and young people to have a say in their own lives, by listening to their comments about one of the most influential institutions that all of us go through, and beginning to incorporate some of those comments into our thinking about a truly socialist, and democratic education system. Maybe that can be the opening for school students to gain sufficient confidence in their own opinions to raise some demands of their own. Page 12 June 22, 1991 No. 4 The coming. trol over production'. capitalist result? the education system. And They reform. democratic state.
and the cold war The Bolsheviks' break from reformist parliamentarianism was the key to the overthrow of capitalism in 1917