Rethinking what we want from a good school: Creating better schools one practitioner at a time

It is a repository for our highest ideal as humanity, an investment in bequeathing knowledge and skills to our children so they may live more fulfilling lives. That is why families sacrifice immediate income and labor, and children give up autonomy and time to attend schools. That is why we invest significant resources and goodwill in ensuring that children get an opportunity to attend schools.

Yet, the disappointing truth for many children is that schools are an empty promise. They go there full of hope and encounter constricting systems, overburdened teachers, and unimaginative environments that deprive them of opportunities to grow and blossom. They are controlled through the violence of corporal punishment, sexual harassment, and bullying, and deprived of an opportunity for a meaningful self-definition. As a result, large numbers of children are not thriving at such schools, and many are voting with their feet, emerging with disappointments and a diminished sense of their place in this world.

This violence is profoundly consequential. Its effect permeates every aspect of children’s lives; from when they will marry, the size of their family, to their physical, mental and economic health. From social outcomes to life-span truncation, such a violence undermines the entire architecture of their possibilities. We could do better; we should do better.

So why don’t we?

Part of the problem is that there are no easy answers or quick fixes. For many countries in the Global South, the magnitude of the problem is daunting. They have a young population in need of an investment and limited resources to respond to that need. The policymakers have other things competing for their fraying attention and paternalistic views about children and their place within our society undermines a sustained focus on this problem. In such a context we are unlikely to come up with a magic bullet that solves the problem efficiently. What we need in a multilayered response and an important part of that portfolio of solutions is reexamining the purpose of schools. It will require shifting from an instrumental view of a school to a more expansive conception of what school is for. The status quo signals that a good school teaches children how to score well on tests and obey instructions diligently.

We all imbibe tropes of a good student as someone whose head is buried in books most of the time, whose discipline is measured by their test results. But what if we tried to characterize a good school as one that enables children to emerge to their full potential and access the full diversity of their possible selves. What if we expected our schools to nurture independent thinkers rather than compliant workers. What if we insisted that a good school should not fetishize linear learning but also foster creativity, and cultivate imagination? What if we conceptualized a good school not only as an academic experience but a social one too, and that it should not only transfer information but capabilities too. What if we were to insist that a good school helps a child develop not only cognitively but socially and ethically too. Such an enterprise could be framed as preventing lifelong violence against children at school.

I am not suggesting that such a shift is simple or easy. Far too many people have been assiduously thinking about this for that oversimplification. We have indeed developed global goals and education is a central part of that vision. But one glaring blind spot is that we do not pay sufficient attention to children’s experience of school. We worry about their cognitive development, and measure how good they are at absorbing information. We document classroom sizes and teacher to student ratios. We track enrollment, tinker with pedagogy, and rank schools on an abstract scale. These metrics are important and necessary, but we should also pay attention to the actual experience of school; how children feel at their school, what values they imbibe, what the operational culture of school signals to children, and what impact that has on their sense of self and their prospects in their community.

A growing body of practitioners are beginning to take on this challenge and beginning to recognize that the work of creating a good school is integrally linked with the work of prevention of violence against children at school. Such work is not an outlandish or an impractical idea. It could be argued that in a modern, globally integrated economy, such a school is a necessity. If we are to give children going to public schools in the Global South a chance to be able to hold their own in the competition of ideas and innovation, if we are to enable them to take their rightful place with verve and tenacity of thought leaders, we need to equip them with these capabilities. Without such rethinking, we are likely to condemn them to subservience, and subjugate them perpetually to the status of a global underclass.

If you are a policymaker or an educator, you may well wonder if this is facile rhetoric, with no reference to reality. You may wonder about the practicality of such ideas when an educator is facing a rowdy class of 75 students, or an under resourced and overstretched operating environment. No one in their right mind would say this is an easy problem to solve. The magnitude of the problem is daunting, and the fruits of any intervention are not going to be visible immediately. But that should not delay us from beginning the work. The status quo is only fomenting stagnation, and a pivot is needed to begin the work of laying the foundations for a way forward. There are initiatives out there that are beginning to break ground for the long road ahead.

The education sector is still reluctant to own the problem of violence in schools because of an underlying assumption that violence against children is a social problem that is best addressed in the home or the community. Therefore, the thinking goes, limited time and resources of a school should be reserved for addressing tangible outcomes, such as acquisition of cognitive skills and fostering learning outcomes. In such a climate, any credible intervention that goes counter to this status quo needs to persuade educators and officials that the psychological health of learners has a profound influence on their process of learning. This requires popularizing an expansive vision for schools and enlisting diverse stakeholders to promote such a vision. It requires galvanizing a significant proportion of actors within the education delivery system to endorse, amplify and implement the central ideas underpinning the intervention. It requires popularizing an expansive vision for schools and enlisting diverse stakeholders to promote such a vision. Without investing in developing such an ‘opinion infrastructure’, the efforts won’t succeed.

Many school practices are mired in a deeply hierarchical structure and are profoundly influenced by outdated models of the learning process. A significant proportion of education practitioners believe that fear and stress are the primary psychological levers for fostering learning in students. To dismantle this assumption and create a more progressive approach informed by evidence requires input at the policy, oversight, as well as at school levels. It also requires engagement of parents and opinion leaders at the community level using tools, learning materials and learner-centric processes that make the case that when the environment is inclusive, respectful and safe, more learners are able to take the risk of exploring new ideas and integrate them in their emerging worldview.

Each school gains support from and conversely has an influence on how ideas enter a community. For example, schools may have a mandate to act as an incubator of fresh ideas and innovation, and therefore the community is likely to tolerate a level of exploration that it may not in the home, or elsewhere in the community. Therein lies an opportunity to introduce a carefully designed innovation aimed at fostering a school-wide reflection on values and norms that determine attitudes and behavior. The aim here is to influence the school’s operational culture instead of targeting a narrow range of behaviors that could be identified as violence, resulting in a longer-term and sustained outcomes.

Instead of disembodied messages or isolated behavioral prescriptions, offer an overarching vision of the journey with easy milestones that can be managed and navigated by a significant proportion of the school system. Offer a process of exploration and reflection instead of a blueprint for action. Integrate ideas for collective learning and a tracking system that allows the entire school to witness and recognize progress. If the process is efficient and elegant, it will allow the psychologically important phenomenon of ownership and agency to emerge, and it will likely create preconditions for sustainability.

The intervention may have been conceived elsewhere, but the implementation has to be led by people near the school. Thus, the design has to embody clear, meaningful and leadership roles for multiple members of the school community, and it has to be flexible enough to accommodate diversity of skill and capacities, including those of children. The ideas promoted by the intervention may be innovative, but the activities have to be familiar and linked to behaviors that speak to the identifiable values that the majority of the school aspires to.

Implicit in this whole school approach is the idea that prevention of violence is about addressing the system rather than behavior at an individual level. The unit of intervention is the school and not the individual teachers or students. The outcome being sought is not the specific behavior change (though that will emerge) but transformation of the operational culture that fosters a new way of valuing and relating to each other’s dignity as humans.

Such a culture is not only likely to reject violence but also provide fertile ground for developing agency, a sense of citizenship and yes, an expansive cognitive toolkit that may be conceptualized as learning outcomes. Such an approach yields long-term outcomes not only from the narrow lens of education but of life -outcomes. Isn’t that what education is for?