“We have all seized the white perimeter as our own
and reached for a pen if only to show
we did not laze in an armchair turning pages;
we pressed a thought into the wayside,
planted an impression along the verge.”
Marginalia. Billy Collins In “Sailing alone around the room” 2001 Random House p94
I realise that some of you will judge me harshly but I have never been able to write in the margins of any of the many books that I own. Reading Billy Collin’s Marginalia poem makes me wish that I had. And I will concede that there are a number of artichokean blog posts that would have made more meaningful if I had tagged their margins with – “Pardon the egg salad stains, but I’m in love” scribbles.
Reading “Marginalia” makes me wonder. I wonder if an (e)Marginalia will be the new Twitter Web2.0 application, and I wonder:
What is it like to attend school fot year after year after year without leaving “an impression along the verge”?
What is it like to be anonymous to the institution, the department, the teachers, and to the other kids?
What is it like to be the kid that your secondary school subject teacher cannot identify without reference to the mark book even with the enrolment photograph for reference?
What is it like to be the kid who transferred after the first week but still receives glowing comments about how they were progressing in physical education in the term 1 report?
What is it like to be marginalised and ignored by the institution?
When we work in big secondary campuses in New Zealand, institutional anonymity is not restricted to the students – anonymity is also afforded to staff – not being valued enough to be known as an individual is a condition applicable to both staff and students in the institutions I visit.
I once created a fictional staff member complete with their own staff pigeon hole who co-existed with the real staff at school quite happily for the term (putting requests in the daily notices, holding meetings and booking various campus facilities) until a member of the SMT worried that their teacher registration might have lapsed and after finding no records in head office checked with accounts to see what salary scale we were paying. Which is why our recent MoE enthusiasms for “personalisation” make me smile in a distrustful kind of way . Talk of personalisation and learning communities in education is revealed as a cynical linguistic manipulation when the existing school culture is one where we don’t know our neighbours, be they fellow teachers or students.
Working with many different schools in the day job leads me to observe that the bigger the educational institution the more likely it is that you will be able to describe your daily experience in Billy Collins like “Sailing alone around the room” terms. Ask for a staff member by name in many large New Zealand secondary school and you will be too frequently met with blank stares and redirections. “I’m not sure – perhaps you should ask ....”
Is no wonder that the dislocated and institutionally anonymous mark their name on other surfaces on the way to the exit. Perhaps I expect too much – perhaps the anonymity afforded is integral to the institution of school – perhaps “the holes are part of the whole”.
“Dross is integral to the urban landscape. The holes are part of the whole.” “First we had cities: space for living and working. Then came suburbs, for living in and commuting from. A couple of decades ago we got edge city, where the world of work came out to meet the ‘burbs again in an extended version of urban sprawl. Now beyond the sprawl we have drosscapes.” New Scientist 4 June 2007 p56
Whatever we believe about the value of these drosscapes of institutionalised education there is no doubt that they embarrass us. The many ways in which statistical data can be manipulated means we will never know whether that claim (in the recent Radio New Zealand interview with COMET Trust executive Stuart Middleton) that New Zealand has the poorest record in the OECD for the number of 15 to 19 year olds in full or part time education is both reliable and valid. I find it hard to credit that twenty percent of our students have already left the school system before the end of compulsory schooling at 16? Do we really have 25 thousand 15 to 19 year olds who are not in education, employment or training or are these figures a manipulation of data to suggest untruths?
Pursuing statistical representations of what is going on, or what is not going on, in education is beyond a simple googler in the edu_drosscapes of the wobbly isles like me – I have already spent far too much time scanning OECD reports, searching spreadsheets for educational data on New Zealand. Fortunately I can refer to people with far greater research facility and support systems ..
In New Zealand only 60% of students are still at school when they turn 17 – a 42% increase in the number of students granted exemptions to leave school before they turn 16 since the last time we counted in 1999. Scoop
“More and more young New Zealanders are opting to leave school early. Around 4,000 each year are leaving before the official leaving age. One-in-five has left by age 16 and two-in-five have left by age 17. When these young people leave school they are becoming lost from learning. Many of the young people who do stay at school aren’t getting much out of it. Their interest in education is strangled by a vicious mixture of boredom and low aspiration. More than one-in-ten has no formal achievement record for their time at school, 30,000 play hooky each week, and many fail to achieve even basic NCEA literacy and numeracy standards. A horrifying 53% of Maori boys leave without obtaining even NCEA Level One. Many of these unqualified school leavers end up becoming another negative statistic, alienated from education and not equipped for skilled work. Some might one day want to do an apprenticeship, but won’t have the reading and writing skills to start it. Scoop John Key Leader of the National Party
If the stats are valid and reliable then there are several reasons why a government might respond by increasing the school leaving age - despite the evidence that the existing school leaving age is not holding students in school – Raising the school leaving age is a quick and dirty measure to reduce unemployment figures and a win win move in suggesting to the voting public that you are increasing the proportion of kids in the skilled labour force. But anyone who has worked in a secondary school knows that attempting to enforce an increase in school leaving age will not reduce unemployment figures or increase skills – In truth the move is far more likely to lead to mass truancy – and a criminalisation of up to 40 percent of New Zealand students who find turning up to school each day intolerable.
Solving the right problem in education wrt notions of school attendance relies on thoughtfully locating those Lucychillean “thar be dragons” references and encouraging Sc's dreaming of "big ideas" - I don't think increasing the number of years of compulsory education is going to do it.
If you have never planted an impression along the verges of a school, if you have never had cause to scribble in the margins of the institution “Pardon the egg salad stains, but I’m in love.” then it is absurd to imagine that increasing the school leaving age is going to persuade you to stay.
In our current user pays educational landscape (that ensures kids rark up debt if they choose to learn in one of our nine hundred plus tertiary institutions - rather than a school when they are 16)
"Nine hundred-plus institutions seem a bit of overkill for a country of four million people" OECD Thematic Review of Tertiary Education New Zealand)
we'd probably be better off getting rid of the school leaving age all together and instead giving each kid so many years worth of educational credits to be used however and whenever they wanted. Then the disenchanted and disengaged could step out for a while and look at what was on offer in the world outside without financially compromising their future educational opportunities and outcomes.
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