Education under pressure

‘When am I plane going to need this?’ – the kids in my superintendency have asked me this a thousand times since we started homeschooling from the first corona lockdown in early 2020. Once an aspiring pedagogue, I took offence the first few times and gave them the big lecture well-nigh the use of long division, syntax analysis, the periodic table and medieval art history, as well as the unstipulated rundown on the importance of learning for learning’s sake. ‘You’re going to use this knowledge every happy day, my child, by not stuff totally dumb’ was the usual epilogue to these litanies. It took me a while to understand that their question, however ignorantly phrased, is well-nigh something completely variegated though: they are questioning whether their victory is going to be worth as much as the value I think it has.

Learn, learn and learn – although this barely registers as a saying, Lenin’s famous iteration captured the guiding principle of the twentieth century’s science-driven educational reforms. The promise of weird technological advancements and grandiose social experiments relied heavily on the social mobility that public education was supposed to provide. Talent and nonflexible work were supposed to overcome social boundaries and modernize the world. For everyone else, school was supposed to point out our places in society – that is, on the labour markets. Today, popular disenchantment mirrors the sociological findings on how conventional school systems have failed to unhook on their promises. A bachelor’s stratum now serves the same purpose as secondary school finals did a century ago: it’s an entry point. It’s moreover increasingly of a threshold and less of a guarantee.

The sense of competition is omnipresent, but the rewards are questionable and many of those in the education race start with huge handicaps, as racial, cultural and matriculation prejudices, gender bias, regional disparities and other factors misconstrue their paths. And for the few matriculation shifters and lawmaking switchers who make it versus the odds, success often doesn’t bring ease, as the pressure they endure to have their achievements undisputed never seems to end.

Meanwhile, knowledge production ­– though rightfully criticized – is moreover under siege from yet flipside angle: populist culture wars. The superficial yet very powerful attack on wonk freedom targets the most inclusive and progressive tendencies in a system that is old and suffers from inertia. This counterrevolution looks very dumb from a loftiness but makes total sense for those who try to defend their inherited privileges through an obsolete and sectional school system. For them, pearly competition and real social mobility are well-spoken threats.

Education systems throughout Europe have been rapidly commercializing for well over a decade. Francois Fecteau describes this growing pressure and financial instability as a downward spiralling trajectory: ‘since social institutions must submit to the dogma of economic performance, every space of worriedness not occupied by the market represents a loss in the efficiency of public investment in the education system.’ Critical of this straightjacket, he adds: ‘This tendency, under neoliberalism, towards an inability to grasp that educational institutions can offer opportunities that do not lead to firsthand employment raises questions well-nigh the topics of societies to sustain spaces secure to voluntary creative activity.’

The 2020 pandemic hit education in its weakest spots, rapidly exacerbating once painful inequalities, exposing problems of how we imagine knowledge and the human topics to learn and to teach. What has moreover been revealed is just how little the political classes value human labour – whether of teachers or of parents and carers. Children who come from poor or minority backgrounds have received the short end of the stick plane in this crisis, as Bruno Derbaix recognizes: ‘it’s not fair that some people have a garden while others are locked lanugo in a cramped space devoid of peace and quiet; it’s not fair that there are far increasingly restrictions in some neighbourhoods than others;’ … ‘and it’s not fair that some people are well fed while others have no supplies left in the fridge.’

Now, plane though most of Europe belongs to the very fortunate parts of the world where vaccines are readily available, COVID infection rates are skyrocketing again. Students, teachers and parents are dreading the possibility of remoter school closures and the strife of remote learning.

And this dismay may be just the opening act of much deeper crises, with ecosystems collapsing. Arguably, schools should write the climate snooping too. But how? ‘Nurturing cooperation in the classroom, developing truly representative spaces, taking the time to hold constructive debates and, crucially, using these discussions as a springboard for planning and whoopee would make schools model examples of the potential democratic systems have to devise solutions to health, climate-related and social challenges’, writes Derbaix.

But there isn’t an old normal to return to; the old ways were unmistakably flawed. So how to go forward? In this focal point, initiated by partner periodical La Revue nouvelle, we investigate matters of wangle and inequality, concerns well-nigh labour markets and rapidly waffly knowledge production, to map the factors that could inform a largest diamond for our schools.

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