The Water in the Baltic

The Water in the Baltic 

We’re all sat on single-person desks, approximately one hundred of us in total, the desks ordered in horizontal and vertical lines, located inside an old gymnasium - a basketball net still hangs at the top of the room. We’re ordered to be silent. Phones must be switched off. No technological devices allowed on our person. Labels must be torn off of drink bottles incase hidden notes are inscribed on the inside. If any of us wish to use the toilet we must put our hand in the air and ask permission and we will then be walked to the toilet by an invigilator who will wait outside while we empty our bowels and bladders. If not, we spend the entire of the two, three, however many hours, sat hurriedly writing until we are ordered to stop. The situation just described felt somewhat embarrassing and degrading at 15 and is much more so now at 21. I pity the “mature students” sat among us. Not that anybody else seems to feel this degradation: academic exams are a fact of life, have always been done this way and thus it is accepted that this is the way they must be. This is how we show what we’ve learned. 

Most essays that aim to criticise the education system begin with pronouncements that sound like conspiracy theories (not that there’s anything wrong with conspiracy theories). Marxists theorise that schooling is nothing but a tool of Capitalism that teaches citizens to be “docile and obedient” from an early age. It prepares the working classes for the 9 to 5 grind and programs them to worship productivity and see it as the remedy to all of their ills. Education certainly does this but it is wasn’t purposefully designed for these reasons; modern education wasn’t thought up by a roundtable of mustache-twirling fatcat businessmen who poured scotch and laughed maniacally as they laid out their plans to control the masses. The current education system is simply the latest domino on a line that has been falling for the last few hundred years. There is no single explanation for why education is how it is, only a myriad of smaller actions that have added up to today’s flawed system. And, despite a few hundred years to refine their arguments, Marxists, and detractors of education in general, have come up with few good ideas for improving education and no all-encompassing system that could replace the present one. 

The discussion around education can be made difficult by one factor: everyone hates school. Few people graduate with no horror stories to tell. It’s commonly called “the best years of your life” but I’ve never met any person who’d say this and mean it. If I did I’d feel sorrow over the life they must have lived since. Bullying, strict teachers, boring lessons, grades that told you you were stupid, pressure from parents, a shitty social life - whatever it was, everyone has a reason to look back at their school years through darkly lit lenses. Which makes it hard to filter out personal hatred from genuine arguments.Should it really be an accepted fact of life that the core focus of most people’s lives until the age of 18 is something that makes them miserable? Is “educating” them a good enough consolation for this?

The modern system of education, at least in Britain, was born in the 18th century as a symptom of the industrial revolution. The economy boomed, cities grew, urbanisation spread, all of which created a plethora of new jobs, most of which were dirty, unsafe and laborious. Factory owners didn’t want to work the production line and landlords didn’t want to sweep chimneys so instead children were herded into these jobs. Unless you were a child of wealthy decent it was likely you would end up in the workhouse. These children lived on scraps of bread and unclean water and worked excessive hours in the mud and the smog. Charles Dickens portrayed these unlucky children in books like David Copperfield and Oliver Twist and hoped that the success of his books would bring attention to this forgotten generation of youngsters, which they did to some degree; but in the minds of most, children were a cheap source of labour. The Factory Act of 1833 prevented children under the age of nine from working; it also enforced many other forms of protection, like stopping children from being made to work at night. But what to do with the excess of children no longer being made to work? It is here where the modern education system was born. Before then, education had existed but only for the children of wealthy aristocrats and for the training of clergy but until then formal education had not existed for the working classes. 

Of course, the aesthetics of schools have changed much since then, as has the technology and language involved in education, but the system of schooling itself is still the one that was used more than anything else for dealing with the excess of unprotected children following the abolishment of forced labour. 

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It’s impossible to talk about modern education without talking about Finland. And it’d be hard to talk about what’s so good about Finnish education without first talking about teaching. Going back to the common hatred of education: most people don’t look back on those that taught them very fondly either. Look at the attitudes of the average student of a university teaching course - I’m not going to generalise here: I imagine there’s many teachers-in-the-making with a fiery passion for their work, but - these courses typically attract students who don’t know which path they want to take beyond that they want to go to university. Many teaching courses require only low grades to be accepted; the end result, in many cases, promises a job that won’t be too tenuous. British teachers are famously underpaid and numerous strikes have made little headway into changing this. Which is a shame because - vanquishing any negative underlying feelings toward the teachers of your own past for just a second - teaching is a golden profession. A noble line of work like that of doctors, nurses, firemen or lawyers - all of whom are considered key pillars of society. Teachers are invaluable but, culturally, at least in Britain, they no longer stand on a pedestal. Most are hated by their students and looked down on by the parents of students. Teachers are there to pass on wisdom and skills; imagine the reward of helping young people progress through life, but also the difficulty involved; then imagine, despite your passion, you are undertrained, the teachers around you show little discipline for the job, you’re paid scraps, and must respect the rule of “the customer is always right” when dealing with parents. A country with poor teachers is comparable to a house of cards built with a flimsy deck. And a culture that shows little respect for teachers is destined to create few great ones. Many of my highschool teacher saw the job as more of a stopgap inbetween better things than a life-long career. 

Going by statistics, Finland is the most well educated country in Europe and is annually challenged in worldwide rankings only by South Korea. A lot of which has to do with teaching. Teachers in Finland are given more rigorous training: they must achieve higher grades to teach and be willing to spend longer in university. Possibly more importantly, Finnish teachers are trusted enough to teach topics any way they wish. The result is a culture that puts teachers on a societal pedestal and reaps the rewards of doing so. 

Living in freezing cold temperatures, as the Finnish do, is hardly the perfect environment to foster motivation, especially the motivation needed as a youngster to get up early in the morning for high school. Yet neither is there “something in the water” (as the saying goes) in the Baltic Sea: Finnish people aren’t naturally smarter than anyone else, it’s their traditions that allow them to surpass other countries. Surprisingly (or what may be surprising to the English, at least, who are constantly fed the idea that “more is better”), it tends not to be what the Finnish do have but what they don’t have compared to the English that makes their education better. In England, children enter schooling at the age of four, five at the latest; on a rare occasion a British child will, by the decree of her parents, start school later, but usually to many objections: the child won’t be properly socialised from an early age, will be behind the other children academically, possibly creating a gap that will never be filled, and the child won’t know any of the other students who may have already formed into cliques by then, and so on. In Finland, the youngest children to enter schooling are seven years old and going by the statistics none of the naysayers have been proven right. There’s a multitude of reasons why this might be: these children get to spend more time with their families, forging stronger lifetime bonds; the enjoy the innocence of childhood untainted by school for an extra few years; and they don’t get awoken to the pressures and stressors of school life until a later age. Schools in Finland also run for less hours of the day than those in England and teachers only very rarely give out homework - both practices might sound counterintuitive but in reality allow the pressure of school to be left in the classroom and the recreation of family life and friends more time to be enjoyed.  

Looking into a different area: Finnish schools don’t use “sets”. Anyone who has had the displeasure of making their way through the British schooling system will have been, from an early age, placed in specific groups for Maths, English and Science based on how well they performed at a young age. On paper this makes sense. You’re not as good at maths as others in your age range so you are placed in a group with children of a similar level and you get taught the simpler stuff and take things at a slower pace to make sure you understand the basics. But over the span of many years this creates a large divide where once there was only a small one; possibly a big enough divide to mean those in the higher sets passing their high school exams and those in the lower sets failing. Moreso, while schools label each set with numbers - “Group 1” “Group 2” etc - children will soon give each set their own titles: the “smart” set, the “stupid” set. Getting told you’re bad at maths from an early age likely means you’re always going to be bad at maths, not because your brain is fundamentally incapable of working out numerical problems but because you begin to think it is; you’ve been labelled as stupid, so you think you’re stupid, so you see no point putting the effort in, so you end up with teachers and grades that reinforce the idea you’re stupid. 

Finally, in Britain, if you’re lucky enough to be born into wealth, if you are what the upper-middle class might refer to as “good stock” and live in an affluent area, particularly in London, then it is likely you will go to a private school and go on to be an undergraduate at Oxbridge. I almost pity the kid that David Cameron used to be (almost), and all the other kids like him, who had their lives set out from childhood - they knew where they’d go to university, what they’d study, what smarmy clubs they’d be members of and which political parties they’d run for. They lost out on the uncertainty and bewilderment of youth and all the curiosity and discovery that comes with it, and, at the risk of sounding bogus and “hippy-dippy”: if you never lose yourself it means you can never find yourself. In Finland it is illegal to charge money to attend school, any school; Finland only has “comprehensive” schools, no private ones. There is no section of education cordoned off for the wealthy and the “elite”. Any government spending that goes towards Finnish education is spread between all schools and not only the highest performing.  

It’s a possibility that, by now, you’re getting bored of reading the word “Finland” and think I’m doing nothing but going on and on about how great Finland’s education is compared to England’s - which I am. But it’s not only to show how Finland are ahead in education but to more easily show what is missing from our own system. I understand that the Finnish way of doing things couldn’t be copied over to the UK exactly as is: the population of Finland is less than 10% the size of that of Britain. The countries are too different to solve problems in the same way.The real point I hope all of this illuminates in a sideways sort of way is that everyone alive today has grown up with the same system of education in the UK as the generation previous to them and this has created the illusion that the system is fixed, unchangeable and the best way to do things, when it is anything but. It can not only be changed but must be. 

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If you treat someone as a customer they they’ll act like one; as far back as the 1980s UK government legislation has referred to students as “customers”. University tuition fees have been a constant since 1998. In 2000 they were raised to “up to £9000” with the implication of that “up to” being only a select few courses - prestiges degrees, or ones needing larger funding, like training to become a doctor - would cost the whole 9000, yet every course rose instantly to the maximum price. The debate over tuition fees is typically sidelined for being a simple issue when really it is a complex one. Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party made the removal of tuition fees one of their key policies and many chose to see this as a popularity-driven choice to secure the votes of students. But it’s not not just a debate about money. Most students don’t care about the debt. Tuition fees harm learning more than they harm wallets. Education that you are essentially “buying” attracts different types of people to those who are attending for free due to high grades and a passion for the subject - it pollutes the attitude of every university. 

The image of university for a lot of the 20th century was more romantic than now, built on mystique, exclusivity. If you don’t know the writers associate with the Beat Generation then you’re missing out - finding success in the 1940s, they were the first writers to deal with sex and drug use and their bohemian lifestyles set the cultural stage for the Hippy 60s. Many of their books were banned on release but are now considered classics. The most well known of these writers - Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs - all met while attending Columbia University in New York. They weren’t looking to buy anything, least of all a well paying job, which was good because the university wasn’t selling. These type of people, particularly artists and unconventional thinkers, created the romantic image that drew me to university. What I found there was very different. The focus was on passing assignments, not particularly on learning the content. Despite paying thousands to be there, attendance was compulsory, made so by lecturers as their pay would be docked if too many of their students had low grades. There was no feeling of rebellion in all the drinking and partying - the university thrust it on to everyone, whether they wanted it or not - the government essentially funds millions of individual nights out a year. I realised we weren’t all paying £9000 to grow up or advance in life, we were in reality paying it to extend our adolescence. 

Claiming this “romantic image” of university was the only reason I applied would be a lie. Like everyone in my high school, university was drilled into us almost as a requirement; the obvious next step in life. And what would I have if I didn’t go? I’d have to find myself a retail job, live with my parents and hang out with people I was sick of hanging out with. School was an easy escape. At the time I wondered what the minority not applying to universities would do and felt an unverbalised snobbishness at the feeling that my life would from now on be unquestionable better than theirs’. After a while this feeling vanished. These people were working actual jobs, getting experience, not getting in debt, and they all seemed content with the path they’d chosen, while what was I doing? I loved university life, the socialising, the drinking, the girls, living away from home, few responsibilities, late nights and few early mornings, but none of the positives of my time at university had anything to do with university itself, which involved doing the things I thought I’d be free of when school ended: getting up early so that people I disliked (many of them poor at their jobs) could talk at me so I could later boredly revise what they’d said so I could degrade myself in old gymnasiums. There is a famous quote by Frank Zappa that I’ve loved for years and think is relevant to all this: “If you end up with a boring miserable life because you listened to your mom, your dad, your teacher, your priest, or some guy on television telling you how to do your shit, then you deserve it”. I thought I was avoiding all that at university when really I was living the exact life that had been carefully set out for most people of my generation. I thought by doing an “arty” course, in my case Film and Television Production, and spending my government loans on intoxicating myself, was me walking my own path when of course it wasn’t. The film course didn’t attract many weird artistic types like I was and that I wanted to meet, most were the type of student already described: people who were willing to pay an institution thousands to give them a piece of paper that will hopefully earn them a lot of money in the future. 

Zappa also said: “If you want to get laid, go to college. If you want an education, go to the library”. 

(AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL NOTE REGARDING THE AUTHOUR: I completed one year of Film and TV, by then having realised that it wasn’t for me. There was quite a high number of dropouts but, expectedly, a higher number of people who stayed. Of the people who stayed: some have regretted it, some haven’t. Here I’d like to dispel any illusion that I had the balls to go off on my own direction the way someone like Frank Zappa would have done. I loved university life and so applied for something more academic: a degree in Criminology. It was the most interesting of all the courses I could find and looks better on a CV than something “arty farty” like a film course. It wasn’t that I wanted to stay and party, although that influenced my decision, but that I didn’t want to go home. I’d been severely depressed there, didn’t like the people, and as said early what is waiting for most people after finishing school but a soul-sucking job they don’t want to do? I found all the same problems in this more academic degree, more so actually, including the existential-crisis-inducing tedium of academia itself. It was one of the major Catch-22s of my life and something that I’ve still not thought my way around or think I could properly express other than in writing.) 

There’s so little focus on the gathering of knowledge at university because most lecturers don’t feel it is their job to pass on knowledge to students, they feel it is their job to teach students how to get a degree. Most people know that essays don’t test much other than your ability to write essays: extra points are given for writing things in needlessly complex language, bullshitting for paragraphs on end, and including references to papers and books you haven’t read. Exams are similar, they hardly show your accumulated knowledge - exams test your memory, your ability to prepare well, and your ability to work speedily in a pressurising environment (which many people can’t). And still these are the predominant ways of testing students. My point is: university is like a video game and if you’re a student who has realised the tricks of how to play then you can bypass most of the “learning” process quite easily. 

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If you’ve ever spent a short time in the presence of a baby or young child you’ll know that curiosity is one of our species’ innate feelings. We must learn how to talk, how to work, in most cases how to think, but our wish to look into the unknown is present from birth. Curiosity brings joy: it is out of this that most people’s reminiscences of the “wonder” of childhood come from. How hard it must be to bash curiosity out of the human brain yet schools do it every day. Most people leave school with the desire to never read a book again, with a hatred of authority, and a confident belief that anything involving learning or finding out something new must be inherently boring and unlikeable. If no changes are made to English schooling then the money spent on them may as well be spent building robots instead, both will essentially be the same: mindless beings who can carry out basic jobs and very little else.