We all are the products of different schools located in different countries and still, we can all relate to the stories from school told by friends local and foreign. Schools and universities are very much the same wherever you go but is it something we should celebrate or do the concepts of teaching, learning and education require a drastic change and review?
For over 20 years I served as a school teacher for kids ages 12 to 18. During all this period I experienced the same as many of colleagues, from the young teacher full of idealism thinking "this profession is more than a mere job, is a mission" to the tired beaten up teacher trying to survive the system one more year to retire under better conditions.
I admire and feel a great measure of respect for old teachers that till the last day of work they do it with enthusiasm, passion and a strong sense of dedication emanating from a strong belief that what they do makes a change and has any value. By the time I finished teaching I wanted to get away from that as much as possible feeling that mostly, public education was a farce, a joke that was performed on both teachers and pupils as equal partners.
It took a few years and time to put things in perspective, to have enough clarity to draw the correct conclusions out of your own experience to summarize the main points of your journey into a concrete evaluation of the system that you can explain firstly to yourself and then to a greater audience because I do believe today that there is a lot of misconception regarding what education is due to the centuries we are practicing it almost in the same way, by the same means and with similar goals.
Let's start with the basics, I say that something is wrong with the system, if so many kids hate school, so many drop out, so many remember school years as traumatic period, something must be wrong with it. Do not misunderstand me, I am not saying that there is something wrong with the teachers or school masters, they might be doing their work as good as it can be done but yet, something is definitely not working right. It is true that parents and educational figures are not supposed to comply with every whim the kid may have or to bend the rules in an effort to please him but before we impose such rules, let's make sure that they make sense and they really work on the best interest of the child.
