International Day of Education
Secondary school curricula are full to the brim. Every subject is fighting for more timetabled lessons and struggling to complete a packed GCSE scheme of work in time for exams. In part due to this pressure, pupils are cognitively overloaded all day, every day, by the information from several completely different subjects, which flies at them off the whiteboard.
No wonder students don’t like school much, even though one of the biggest focuses as a teacher nowadays is making the lesson fun and engaging in order to motivate the class. Much ink has been spilled on books and articles that have tried to deconstruct why exactly pupils dislike school and what can be done about it, but few seem to hit the mark.
In my experience as a teacher, students dislike school because they fail to see the relevance of what they learn to their everyday life. In many cases, there is no such relevance. Take modern languages. They are a highly useful (if not essential) skill, hugely transferable and favourably viewed by most employers. They enable students to become global citizens and open their world to places they may never even have heard of.
For these reasons, and more, I am a languages teacher. And yet, one glance at GCSE textbooks would fill anyone with despair. Students are asked to learn how to read, write and speak about where they spend their holidays and what volunteering work they do on the weekends. Most of my students have never left their London borough, and several are reliant on volunteers at food banks or spend the weekend as a second carer to their younger sibling. The curriculum has no relevance to their current or future life as they see it.
Leducate helps enormously to plug the gap between what is taught in schools and what actually happens in modern society. Most students in my classes already directly encounter government functions such as social services and the police on a regular basis, and every single one will enter into situations in adulthood where they have not been taught by the national curriculum what they can and can’t, should and shouldn’t do in this situation.
Leducate provides a curriculum with visibly real-world applications that students can and will easily buy in to. The programme it offers will teach them at least a little bit of the reality that lies beyond them at the age of 18, when they begin to have to fend for themselves, and prepares them for what knowing how to discuss in French the pros and cons of living in a city unfortunately does not – real life.
Perhaps most importantly, Leducate’s curriculum helps to alleviate some of the fear of the unknown adult world which lies ahead of them. As John Holt, in an excellent book, How Children Fail, points out, children ‘fail because they are afraid, bored, and confused.’ They are afraid of job prospects, falling into or staying in poverty, bored of remembering “Divorced, Beheaded, Died, Divorced, Beheaded, Survived,” and completely confused as to how this will help them in any way.
It’s often difficult in schools to bridge the gap between classroom content and how it will help pupils in the real world. With Leducate, there is no such distinction – everything they teach is valuable and eminently applicable to all manner of real-life situations, as well as essential learning for students from every socioeconomic background. If it were implemented in my school, though I may tell the students I was attending the classes “in order to make sure they behave,” I too would be surreptitiously making notes at the back.
Joe Myers, Teach First teacher