Please tell me what has changed ?
To me, school was a thing I understood very little about. Every day of the week, for year after year, I would leave the security of my home, and walk to the insecure world of my school. As my journey became shorter and I drew ever closer to school, I could see how I merged ever more into the increasing number of similarly clad youths. I longed for this invisibility and feared, once in the classroom, any question from a teacher that would disclose my presence. My friends were few, and the only purpose I was given was to please my teachers. I was to do what they told me, and to understand all the information they gave to me. I did what I was told, but I understood very little.
I paid attention, but missed small parts, and so could not see the same picture the teacher thought they were painting in my mind. If I raised my hand to ask a question, which I seldom did, the response I was given seemed too abrupt. I did not dare interrogate the mind of the teacher to gain the precise connection I needed between their mind and mine. Nor did I know how. I had learned that the teacher only had so much patience, and would soon become frustrated if I struggled too much to connect what they were then saying, with something I had not understood earlier. It was my fault, I was told, because I had not paid attention. I did, of course, or at least I tried, but stuck near the back of the class, the ramblings of the teacher always seemed just beyond what I could make sense of. Besides, if I sought too much help the other children would make some comment, which I learnt to avoid by keeping to my own counsel. When I did ask a question, and in return was asked if I understood, I would nod my head to imply yes, but was as much lost then as before I had raised my hand. I had, after all, been trained from infancy to accept information, and at 16 or 17 had still not learnt how to question it. Each lesson was as blurry as that which had gone before it. Equally, I had been raised to trust the mark of the teacher, and so conditioned into an acceptability not to wonder what other children did differently to gain the higher marks they did. School was just a vast processing system, and I was processed on my ability to keep up with what was happening.
When I eventually left school, I did so with almost no qualifications. I failed nearly all of the nine subjects I had been put into. It seems incredible now to say that I was 5 years old when I entered school, and 17 when I left, and could not in all those years of guidance leave with a certificate that showed any level of competence. The grades I obtained in nearly all my subjects were below recognition, and so like many before me, and so still today, I moved from school into the dull routine of factory work.
When I am asked why I dedicated 30 years of my life to helping children in school, I tell my story and explain why education has to change this century.
Roy Andersen www.andersenroy.com