Good little thing on ABC2 tv Wednesday night, 8.30, called ‘We are the people we’ve been waiting for’.
It was about education, schools, education in schools.
I didn’t see it all and I can’t find (yet) how to get another look at it, but I caught some of it and it seems to me what it was saying was very heartening – they seem to have the right idea.
It was from England. Or the UK at least.
Somewhere near the beginning they were saying that education as we know it was created in the 19th Century and its mission was to create workers for the Industrial Revolution. And its mission has never been readdressed.
They were saying that the purpose is to inculcate a certain amount of knowledge – whether or not it is really needed – and not to create a better person at all.
They were talking about schools in which difficult pupils, often given up on, achieve great things, simply because they are given some control over what they learn and how they learn it.
I want to see it again and get the detail.
I’m fully in agreement with what I have seen so far.
And somewhere else, I think on the radio today, I heard someone boldly stating that education is aimed at producing university graduates in the mistaken belief that is always necessarily a good thing.
And further stating that we’ve long looked down our noses at ‘vocations’ – i.e. tradesmen, trade training, people who leave school early and start learning and practicing a trade.
Completely overlooking, they said, that Medicine itself (universally seen as a bit of an educational and career holy grail, with good cause considering what it does for humanity) is itself a ‘vocation’ – a ‘trade’ – ‘hands-on’ physical job.
Yes, I couldn’t agree more.
There’s numerous aspects open up from consideration of all this.
Two spring to my mind immediately (actually permanent ‘bees in my bonnet’):
1. Education is sorely amiss, awry in its whole direction and attitude and
2. Medicine IS truly a ‘tradesman like vocation’ and should be seen and taught and practiced as such.
Considering the second I don’t mean to detract from the worth of a doctor nor diminish respect for them and what they do at all.
But I have seen doctors working for more or less the common wage – still well above the poorest or the mean in their country – but far below the remuneration and benefits of doctors in our society.
I was quite shocked to see it at first. Because I had this lingering reverence, awe, for the profession.
But does it need that reverence, that awe, that almost sacred standing?
No, it doesn’t. It needs de-mystifying and spreading out in a tradesmanlike manner across the population.
We don’t need a sacred arcane priesthood of witchdoctors. We need the fundamentals of doctoring to be widely disseminated, understood, practiced.