What is school for?
For parents, staff, and students alike, thinking about what school is for is an important issue. This is especially so since children and young people spend a significant part of their lives between the ages of five and 18 (sometimes longer) attending school, as well as taking extra-curricular classes, attending sports and other social events, and, for most students, doing homework.
For some, school is about learning facts and figures, and how to repeat information in an exam (and to repeat more of it more accurately than your fellow students).
For some, school is about learning how to socialise with people from different families, backgrounds or religious faiths, and how to get along with them (whether you like them or not).
For others, school is about learning how to learn: through rote learning (the teacher says something, the student repeats it), through self-study (including how to do homework when other members of the family are watching television), or through debate and discussion with students and staff (‘You say this, but is it true, and what is your evidence for it?’).
One headmaster told his students, ‘The job of this school is to prepare you for death’, which doesn't sound particularly cheerful but contains a significant truth. That a person’s character is established early on in life, and much of the experience that helps that character to develop comes not just during a person’s school years, but at school itself.
At school, you learn how to get on with others, with people who are older than you, those who are the same age, and (after a couple of years), those who are younger than you. To learn how to make friends with people who have different views from your own, to accept living and working in a structured environment – of classes that provide concentrated learning in one subject and then move onto another subject, with different textbooks and different teachers, each with their own way of teaching.
At a good school you don't just learn enough facts to enable you to pass ever more difficult exams. You also learn about values, about what is important in life, and in your life outside and after school finishes. About the basic equality of individuals, regardless of their background, intelligence, or physical ability. That everyone should be respected not for the job they do, or their success in class, but for the person they are.
That doesn’t mean that you must like everyone you meet in school or outside it, but you should try to like everyone you meet (and if they treat you badly, you are allowed to stop). ‘Try to make a new friend every day’ is one approach. ‘Try to treat people they way you would like to be treated’ is another.
And read. You may already feel that you have enough to read every day, whether as a teacher preparing for a class or as a student sitting in that class. But reading is central to learning.
And, if you can, read more than you need. Try to listen to different voices on the same subject and to understand why one writer thinks something happened because of these reasons, and why another thinks different reasons apply. That is why access to different voices becomes so important: those that you will agree with, as well as those that you won’t. The price of personal development is being open to things you won’t like, whether that involves opinions or food.
Keep an open mind, to others and to learning.
Above all, remember that no one person has all the wisdom in the world. Not even you.
Nishant R
Nishant R is constantly in pursuit of enhancing his spiritual journey and spreading 'Light and Love'.
