Richard Hogan: Our outmoded schooling system is redundant to teenagers
People's Reflect Video Content And Digital And Naturally Them Natives, Interests Creating Ought Es To Are Skillset Teenagers Now Curriculum The To For Young Schools
If you really observe a teenager for more than five minutes, you will see how they consume information. It is instantaneous, abbreviated, and devoid of extraneous detail. Teenagers know what they want and they know how to get it. I have observed how they even find ads challenging to tolerate, hence the popularity of platforms like Netflix and TikTok. In short, the teenage world has irrevocably changed since the arrival of the smartphone in 2007. Teenagers today have never lived without such technologies.
They are digital natives, teachers are digital immigrants, and those in charge of educational pedagogy might even be described as digital aliens, with little to no experience of this new world. A couple of years ago, as I was going over the previous year's Leaving Cert English paper with the class, laughter broke out as I read over the questions — one was asking the students to write a blog. When I inquired about the source of the laughter one student proclaimed; "Blogs? Who writes them anymore?" It seemed that the department’s efforts to be hip and relevant missed the mark by about 5 years. It was vlogs, I was told they do now, in other words, short personal video logs.
Over the years, observing teenage clients and being a parent and watching the development of my own children, I have come to think that children come into this world with some sort of pre-knowledge which equips them for the demands of the world they have been thrown into. The pandemic disrupted so much of our lives but through such disruption, change occurs.
The pandemic catapulted us into the future and changed how we think about the work we do, and how we do it. The global health crisis signalled the arrival of the era of the "hybrid worker." Up until 2020, working from home wasn’t really considered a viable option by the majority of organisations. We were all in the 9-5 mentality of work. You go into an office space in the city, you work there from 9am until 5pm and you go home. You eat, you sleep, and you repeat for five days of the week.
Our school system was designed to produce obedient factory workers that could manage the monotony of such a process. But that has changed, and the teenagers today are different from previous generations of teenagers and the world they are going into is different from the world I arrived into as a young adult. So, they will find that transition into this new working world straightforward. But has the way we teach them changed?
We now know we don’t need to produce a mass of obedient factory workers; that way of life is gone. This new generation of workers will decide when they work and how they work. How we teach them needs to reflect the modern world they will be going into. I think teachers can really struggle with the role they are asked to perform. They have ideas of inspiring their students, maybe even romantic notions like the one highlighted in but they quickly learn that the system is riddled with paradoxes.
Students are told to be autonomous while being told to sit there, be quiet and "do what I say." Teachers are asked to inspire and motivate their students while the system they are navigating was created to kill inspiration and produce obedient workers. This has to change.
I have been struck over the years by how teenagers struggle with the structure of the school. The rigidity of class time, the passivity of their involvement in lessons, their powerlessness to the subjects they are studying, and the sense that they are unified and lacking individuality all impact them, and some find the experience intolerable.
In my observation, the school system and the way it approaches learning needs to be overhauled to include this new teenager. I meet children and young adults, regularly, who find the educational system incredibly monotonous and I often hear the same description of "conveyer belt" articulated by these students. They feel a profound sense of powerlessness, and I often reflect on the fact that they are brought to me because they are grappling with the fact that they have no autonomy and find the whole process numbing.
The questioning of the system is viewed as an interpsychic pathology by the system. I have often found myself grappling with the advice I give to students about academic attainment. I have questioned whose needs am I meeting when I hear myself telling students about the importance of their school work. I believe that education frees children and opens up opportunities. But we have to look at the way we are educating children and modernise it or we will continue to see children refusing to go to school.
Modern educational pedagogy has not considered this new emergent child, their needs and preference for learning. If we want our children to thrive, enjoy their educational experience and become critical thinkers, we have think about them at the centre of the process. Their worlds have changed, and how they learn needs to change.
