This is a tough one. I think, overall, it feels wrong for them to strike since it’s the children and parents who end up paying the price for their absence. I read that they work 60 hour weeks, on average, and that Primary school teachers work longer hours than those at Secondary school – both facts that I find hard to believe. So, I’m going to get in touch with an old friend of mine who teaches at a Primary school in the West Country to discover her point of view as I know she’ll be honest. I suspect I’ll find that the truth lies somewhere between the general public perception that teachers are a bunch of whingers, the official figures and the union position.
The real tragedy of our education system is that is incredibly efficient at stripping away the curiosity and joy of learning that all four year olds start school possessing in spades. I’m a naturally curious kind of a person but I reckon it took ten years after leaving school for me to recover the thrill of learning anything academic (I did continue to learn to write professionally and taught myself to program computers). And yet for many people, it’s as if they believe their learning has ended on their last day at school.
This is a problem for society because, in today’s fast moving world, if a person stops learning, they fall behind. I reckon if you shadowed entrepreneurs, watching them at work, the one thing that would unite them all is a passion for learning – whether that’s to develop new products, new ways of marketing, better ways to run a business or just for the joy of it.
It’s also a problem for the individuals concerned because they miss out on one of the great joys of life – the thrill of personal discovery. Spending 14 years at school causes many kids to associate learning with pain and many never shake that off. Learning and failure go hand in hand (just watch someone learning to play the piano) whereas failure, in the education system, is something to be marked down for and avoided.
A toxic undermining of such an essential aspect of life
I used to live on the outskirts of a high-unemployment area and would pass, whilst walking the dog, young people shuffling to the corner shop in their onesies for fags – their only exercise of the day. Looking through the windows of their flats, it was easy enough to see them watching daytime TV on their 50 inch LCDs. And yet, in their pockets, they carried a smartphone that could, potentially, open up the sum of all human knowledge for them to explore (even assuming they didn’t own a laptop). Rather than learn something and skill themselves to make finding a job more likely, they wait for someone else to provide one – this is the legacy of our education system. I’d go on strike to change that.