Eduf**ktion: Out of the mouths of teens

“In high school, we should be learning about the real world, how to pay my (sic) taxes, apply for jobs, mortgage my house, buy a car, things that we will actually use in the future. So far, I’ve only learned that whatever I manage to get done in a short amount of time isn’t enough. What’s that? You did your homework, but didn’t do one question because you found it difficult and you were struggling? Well, there’s an ‘unsatisfactory’ for homework on your mid-term report! Now, that’s just not ok.

“ … What my point is, we all struggle, and work, and stress ourselves over things [school subjects like Biology] that aren’t important in the long run.

“…Two years after high school, and the majority of the students who’ve graduated have already forgotten anything they’ve learned in the last four years of their school career. Stressing myself over end of year exams, because if I fail, I have my parents on my back, asking me why I didn’t try hard enough, my teacher telling me I could have focused harder in class and my peers simply telling me that I’m stupid? Ridiculous.

“ … I’m not saying to treat me special because I struggle in the subject but because I’m a student who would like to learn things by a teacher, and not a book (sic). Actually do the teaching that you were taught and you are paid to do (sic). Don’t just give me worksheets to do and expect me to take a test on the topic two days later.

“You know … the school system is really screwed up … ”

Thus says fiery 15-year-old Kiwi student, Anela Pritchard. She gave her Alan Ginsberg-like speech at her school here in Auckland, then posted it on Facebook where it got loads of hits and she was interviewed by the Kiwi media.

At the same time Anela was, depending on which source you use, suspended from her school, or dismissed for a few days to cool off, or asked to leave school for a while “for her own safety” from her peers. She is delighted with all the media attention which she handles well; it’s cool to be a hero for being a rebel with a cause, and her dad supports her stance. Good on yer, honey.

I entirely agree with Anela’s impassioned plea. This is not just the ravings of an angst-ridden teenage girl. What we learn at high school does not match the hands-on, work-related tools we need in the “real world”, as Anela puts it. I too learned heaps about the Napoleonic wars and how leaves breathe through stomata. Late at night I memorised fancy words which for some freaky reason I still remember, like phosphoglyceraldehyde. Marvellously useless stuff.

The South African history I learned was mostly a lie (I knew it at the time): the apartheid government was so “misunderstood” by the world in the self-sacrificing way it handled non-white people and tirelessly and lovingly protected blacks from themselves. I can blather on.

The point is this: Anela is speaking for a lot of teenagers in many countries like New Zealand and South Africa. These education systems do not instil in us marketable skills, how to think entrepreneurially, how to take initiative, how to cope when jobless, or when tragedy strikes, or when your partner walks out on you …

Hang on, hang on. Can schools equip us to deal with all that? Can these institutions be expected to? You cannot know how to handle being unemployed until you — not your dad — are the one paying the bills, and suddenly there is no money coming in and the wolf at the door is about to have puppies. Nor can a school teach a student how to handle a bullying boss, a pay cut, clients refusing to pay, or the trauma of moving countries.

So what on earth should a high school teach? Would teenagers, as Anela suggests, really want to learn about taxation, or budgeting (which underpins getting a mortgage or buying a car)? Surely most self-respecting teenagers would be bloody bored. Taxation doesn’t matter until, one day, it’s your thousands of dollars you may be getting back or losing to the tax man. The best way for a teen school goer to start learning skills like how to handle pay cuts and shitty jobs is to get out there and live life. Alternatively, the student is more likely to learn some of these skills in a part-time job.

Why do I say Anela has got it right when, clearly, she (perhaps speaking for all of us) is expecting so much of schools? Because, in these times, schools are one of many necessary institutions of manpower inefficiency. Yes, I wrote inefficiency. If most of what school goers were required to learn was scrapped, because it does not prepare them for the “real world”, then the students could be finished with school by, arguably, the age of thirteen. However, this would put a huge amount of teachers out of jobs. It would also adversely affect the tertiary institutions that train the teaching industry, never mind the supporting service sector, such as property and grounds maintenance teams, administration, clothing suppliers and text book publishers. The ripple effect would be devastating. The inefficiency is functional and necessary for the economy.

What is inefficiency? It is the greater, desired output from a given quantity of necessary inputs*. Fuel efficiency is how many miles a car will go per litres of fuel. A chainsaw’s efficiency is how quickly it saws timber for the least cost.

So here is an interesting question. What, then, in these times where technology is outdated so quickly, is high school teaching efficiency? The template would be something like: Ensuring the student acquires X amount of usable information or marketable skills in a concise (Y) amount of time. That, ladies and gentlemen, is a very tall order.

Teachers spend a great deal of time creating an environment in which students are kept busy. The learners are under the illusion they are achieving “something worthwhile”, or “acquiring valuable skills” that perhaps “enhance their self-worth” because of their sense of doing something “meaningful”, whereas being able to regurgitate in a test the anatomy of an insect or the core history of your country has little “real world” application or marketability.

The functionality of inefficiency can be seen in a number of sectors, especially the government. WINZ in New Zealand serves to help the unemployed to find jobs. They are very ineffective at doing this. Case managers are hopelessly untrained. The benefits (“dole”) provided to the unemployed is not money the benefactors can actually live on (they have to do cash jobs under the table to survive). But this organisation creates a multitude of jobs (with market-related salaries) within WINZ, from accountants to case managers and IT support. Like schools, WINZ’ lumbering infrastructure also creates employment for external service providers.

Yes, perhaps with the exception of mathematical subjects (and this relates to the learner’s desired career) we learn little at high school that we need afterwards. However, as Mary Egan, former vice president of Starbucks says: “Excelling at a job is about doing the things you weren’t asked to do.” Or, for that matter, weren’t taught to do.

*See Peter S Wenz’s new book, Functional Efficiency: The Unexpected Benefits of Wasting Time and Money, which superbly demonstrates how we need inefficiency to promote consumerism and boost economies.

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