From April to June is when most schools enter revision and then exams. Under systems like the IB graduating students go through a series of exams which are all or nothing. During this time, teachers will monitor the exams, pacing the aisles between students, counting steps and the days until summer break.

When my school started their positive education initiative it meant starting sessions with an optional 5-minute meditation. Supposedly, studies have shown that even this can help improve scores, or at least that was one of the reasons given during our professional development meetings (meetings where adults write things on oversized sticky notes and pretend their collaboratively learning). It was around that time where I moved from the poor students camp to something is really wrong here.

Spend enough time in any profession and you’ll eventually learn where it all went wrong. By wrong, I mean when that profession lost its roots, was hijacked by bureaucracy and crossed the point where the only hope was throwing everything out and starting from scratch.

This point in time where things fall apart is subjective, as are the reasons, but that doesn’t make them any less valid. A thing can be falling apart for years or decades, or in the case of the countries, for centuries. With public education it’s probably pushing towards the century marker, though with the seemingly never ending teacher shortage the wheels to appear to be wobbling more than usual and maybe we’ll get a full breakdown at some point.

Like many professions, the norms within education have waxed and waned. From corporal punishment and strict dress codes to the [self-esteem movement] and anarchist schools and then back again. Well, not all the way back to corporal punishment, but schools have expanded their zero tolerance policies over time to include a wider range of offences. Other schools moved on to things like positive education.

You might be surprised to find that none of these things have really helped. Things still seem, subjectively speaking, a mess. If I did enough research I’m sure I could back it up with data, but I’d rather speak anecdotally about the last decade and a half I’ve been in the classroom. In particular, I’d like to speak about the Positive Education movement, with which I have first hand experience.

Like all education initiatives, from No Child Left Behind to the much ridiculed D.A.R.E program, Positive Education, purports to solve, or at least ameliorate, a growing problem amongst students, which in this case is their emotional wellbeing.

In and of itself, this sounds like a noble idea, but as with most education initiatives it has suffered from poor implementations, and continued criticism. Even pre-covid students were plenty stressed about school and life in general.

None of this is new, and if you’ve been in education you’ll know that fads like Positive Education come and go. That research supporting its merits will soon be doused by counter studies that show how the earlier results were wrong and how it’s actually the opposite, but don’t worry there’s a new idea emerging which is going to change everything. I’m not interested in this cycle as much as the continued need for one.

Standing in the back of the exam hall as students sat quietly in contemplation, while a teacher guided them through meditation, made me want to tear everything down. Not because I’m against student wellbeing or meditation, but because we keep putting bandaids over the festering wounds of education.

As schools, educators and students, we spend ungodly sums of money to be initiated into the latest techniques on how to effectively teach, make students feel valuable and cared for, and most importantly, because this is the goal of all those efforts, raise those scores. The pressure students are under, from within and without school are causing a rise in suicides, but also, as a teacher, you can see a palatable change.

There is something wrong in education, and it’s not the teachers, students or even the admin. They are the symptom and victims of a system which is continually being tweaked in order to improve whatever metrics are being used to assess the schools. We need a Goodhart’s law for education, as all we’re doing is chasing these numbers.

Students and parents push teachers for better predicted grades, because those help with university admission, and then they ignore actual learning to memorize past mark schemes, because you can reach a decent grade in most classes that way. Teachers teach to the exams, because that’s how they get their results, and the admin looks for any edge they can get (ie. meditate for 5 minutes) to boost overall scores.

Everything is done under the guise of what’s best for the student. Of course, maybe I’m wrong, and this stressful time where we pit students against each other in a Hunger Games like struggle to achieve top marks and get into the limited spots at the best schools is for their own good? If we’re not struggling against our fellow man for the prestige of going to the best university, then what’s the point?