Making Better Schools
If a car is a dud, it doesn’t matter how often you respray it, change the tyres, fit spunky new seat covers, it won’t go. You can install a reversing camera, BOSE sound system and satellite navigation, but it will continue to sit in your driveway, gathering bird droppings . . .
As a school student, student teacher, teacher and author-in-residence, I have spent more than 50 years bemused, baffled, frustrated and appalled by the blind adherence of governments, bureaucrats and school leaders to a model that is inherently dysfunctional. Changes to the curriculum, the timetable, the architecture, the seating, made and continue to make no substantial difference. Increasing teacher training from two years, to three years, to four; paying teachers more; keeping students at school longer; abolishing streaming or gender segregation or corporal punishment . . . as welcome as some of these measures have been, they can never compensate for the fact that the model is unworkable. For all the talk of excellence/realising your potential/achieving your dreams, schools are still sitting in the driveway, belching out toxic gases.
Recently, when interviewing a woman who wanted to enrol her children at Candlebark, I asked her the obvious question: ‘Why choose this school?’
She looked at me with a steady gaze and answered, ‘Because the other system is broken.’ Then, after a pause, she added: ‘It was broken when I went to school, in the 80s, and it’s even more broken now.’
After all my years in education, trying to articulate what I thought was wrong with schools, I could only admire the brevity and force of her statement. Yes, the system is broken, and always has been. The problem is pretty easy to identify. The model is based purely on economic grounds, and as soon as we recognise that, we realise why it was never likely to work. As a consequence of the Industrial Revolution, the modern school model was designed to soak up the greatest number of children possible, squash them into the smallest space possible, and assign the fewest number of adults possible to look after them. This got children out of the way, and freed the maximum number of adults to work in the coalmines and factories, thereby adding to the wealth of the industrialists and mine-owners. How could such a model ever succeed in teaching children to be thoughtful, discerning, creative, generous, responsible and mature?
Despite the horror stories about schools that I have recounted, I can say that Candlebark and Alice Miller are successful. The atmosphere of both is energised and positive. The kids are good-natured and welcoming. We do remarkably well in every form of competition with other schools. Our graduates have been spectacularly successful, often in surprising ways. Thumbing through our regional newspaper this morning, I found an article about one of our ex-students. The article began: ‘A young Gisborne fashion designer has been rewarded for her hard work. Megan Taylor, 22, was last week named the 2018 inspirational student of the year at Kangan Institute’s graduation ceremony and awards night. Ms Taylor has moved on to study for a bachelor’s degree after finishing her advanced diploma in fashion design. She suffers from a chronic pain condition known as hypermobility spectrum disorder. “It just adds an extra layer of stuff to deal with throughout the day,” she said.’278
The fact that the Western model of schooling functions fairly well for many young people, some of the time at least, and does not often result in riots and catastrophe, is a tribute to the good nature of most young people, and the patience and strength of their teachers. Of course, for many other young people it is an unmitigated disaster.
striving for schooling perfection
If we set out to design a perfect school campus I think most people would agree on the essential, tangible elements. Firstly, space, and lots of it. In Australia we are blessed to have the space we do, yet we give more of it to car parks, golf courses, shopping malls and freeways than we do to kids. Many schools with 300 or more students have recreational space equivalent in size to a couple of basketball courts.
Next, we would want interesting buildings, good resources and challenging playgrounds. We would probably also ask for great internet connectivity, an organic garden and a variety of farm animals.
None of this is difficult to achieve. But the fact that schools tick so few of the boxes I’ve just listed is evidence that our much-vaunted ‘caring for children’ is as meaningless as mass mailings of Christmas cards from a politician. Forget the mindless bleating of ‘children are our future’, which has become the mantra of the 21st century. Let’s look at the present: why are we so cruel to children? Our actions don’t match our rhetoric. We talk a beautiful talk, but we walk a walk of shame.
In 1998, an Australian newspaper published a letter from a lady named Gloria Yates, living in Petrie, Queensland. She wrote ‘Our usual caring attitude to juveniles is showing again. Is the press mad? Are all the politicians completely barmy? . . . I have taught children for thirty-four years and am now retired. I can’t remember a time when politicians were so much against children . . . I grew up in wartime Britain where children were loved and cared for. God help us all if this child-hating scenario is our blueprint for the future.’279
Unfortunately, Gloria’s concerns, set out so clearly in 1998, are still valid today.
Candlebark, founded in 2005, is 50 minutes from the Melbourne CBD, in 1200 acres of forest, 850 acres of it bought in 1998. It had been operating as a camp for adults and/or children who were deaf or blind or both, and had nine good buildings, including a beautiful double classroom. An imaginative government could have bought it for a school, but no representatives from the Department of Education were glimpsed at the auction.
The buildings have been extended and modified, but remain simple yet attractive; there is an organic garden; there are sheep, pigs, horses, chooks, geese, ducks, goats and a cow called Hettie, who, at age nineteen is working towards her ambition of becoming the world record holder for bovine longevity, hoping to beat Big Bertha, who died in Italy at age 48.
We have 170 students at Candlebark and 200 at Alice Miller – we are small by choice. We could have had 500 at Candlebark alone if we had taken everyone who applied. But we don’t screen kids; in fact we take more than our fair share of ‘challenging’ students.
You could say that we ‘fail’ with some kids, but that is a relative term, and one difficult to measure. I can think of only four children in fourteen years whose behaviour appeared to deteriorate whilst at Candlebark, but in each of those situations we were dealing with family backgrounds so difficult that we were unable to make a great enough impression upon the parents or the child.
staying ‘unbroken’
As a general principle, in the face of poor parenting a school cannot succeed. We can ameliorate the behaviour of the child, we can improve his or her resilience, self-control, values, confidence, trust, attitude and work ethic, but ultimately, we will always fail. That’s no reason to give up of course: a 5 per cent improvement in a child’s emotional health may make the difference between his or her being able to have an enduring relationship or not, between his or her being employable or not. It may significantly reduce the risk that he or she will commit suicide. But for these students, unless they get long-term, skilful, professional help, life will be a painful struggle.
Our worst situations have developed as a result of parents who actively work against the school, subverting what we do. On a number of occasions, we have been baffled as to why parents enrolled their children in a school with which they seem to have little sympathy. For instance, children who have never spent a night away from home, and experience severe distress when separated from their parents, are likely to have a difficult time at a school such as ours, with an active program of camps and excursions. Most of our students will have twenty or more nights a year away from home each year, on trips or sleepovers.
If parents are rigid, controlling and authoritarian, they are unlikely to sympathise with our approach to education.
nancy
Nancy was a Grade 1 girl whose teacher one day took off her engagement ring to wash some dishes in a sink. When she went to put the ring back on, it had vanished.
We searched everywhere for it, without success. We then turned to the Candlebark parents, asking for help, and explaining how upsetting the loss was for the teacher. We got no immediate results, but a couple of days later the teacher came to me with a strange story. She had been at home, on a Sunday, when Nancy and her mother came walking up the driveway, gave the teacher a bunch of flowers, and expressed their regret for the emotional upset she had experienced. Nancy’s mother then added, mysteriously, that she was sure the teacher would get good news soon. On the following Tuesday morning, the ring was found, carefully placed in a conspicuous position near the driver on the floor of the small bus that Nancy caught each day.
Nancy told us strange stories about being abused by her mother, but when we approached the parents they scoffed at the verisimilitude of these reports. They retaliated with strange stories Nancy had told them about being treated badly at school. The parents believed every word of Nancy’s accounts. I asked them how it was that we were not to believe Nancy’s stories about home but the parents had no problems believing her stories about school. They had no answer to my question, but a couple of weeks later withdrew Nancy from the school.
The TV series The Naked City, which ran in the late 1950s and early 1960s, concluded each episode with an anonymous voice intoning the words: ‘There are eight million stories in the naked city. This has been one of them.’ There are unlikely to be eight million stories in the lives of Candlebark and Alice Miller Schools, but there have certainly been many already, and no doubt there will be many more.
But why is it then that we are not ‘broken’, to use the word chosen by the mother whom I had interviewed? I have already outlined some reasons, but there are many more. One is simply that we have lots of adults at the schools. An inevitable by-product of the economically driven high ratio of adults to students in most schools is the development of subcultures that are rarely glimpsed by the adults but are often more powerful than the culture the adults claim to be inculcating. The large number of adults employed at Candlebark and Alice Miller makes it easier for us to determine and manage the culture, and makes it harder for disaffected students to succeed in initiating or developing a negative subculture.
Much has been made of research purporting to show that class sizes do not make any difference to students. Unfortunately, this research, including the data most often cited in recent years, from Professor John Hattie of the University of Melbourne in his hugely popular book Visible Learning, refers only to academic outcomes, in other words, how well students perform on standardised tests and the like. The data ignores emotional development, social development, spiritual and psychological development. Hattie is honest and explicit about what he explored in the book. In his first chapter, he writes: ‘[I]t is important from the start to note at least two critical codicils. Of course, there are many outcomes of schooling, such as attitudes, physical outcomes, belongingness, respect, citizenship, and the love of learning. This book focuses on student achievement, and that is a limitation of this review.’280
We have small classes and generous staff-to-student ratios because we regard the non-academic aspects of a child’s life as having tremendous importance.
kids need first-hand experiences
In starting Candlebark from scratch I had no complex philosophical treatise on which to rely. I had only a few basic beliefs. The most important of these was that I wanted students to have first-hand experiences. My absolute priority in running Candlebark, and later Alice Miller, was to provide students with a wealth of these.
I had become increasingly concerned by my conversations with young people, which seemed to be more boring with every passing year. Intrigued by this phenomenon, and hastily dismissing the possibility that I might be suffering from ennui, or that I might be the chief contributor of boredom to the conversations, I began to analyse the students’ words. It didn’t take long to realise that they talked almost exclusively about second-hand and third-hand experiences. Mostly they talked about what they had seen on TV the night before. If they talked about real-life experiences, it was usually about their grandparents’ or parents’ exploits. I came to the conclusion that these young people had almost no stories of their own. Their lives consisted of coming to school, going home, doing homework, watching TV, having tea, watching more TV, doing more homework, and going to bed. A trip to the mall was an excursion. Their lives were boring, and as a result they were boring.
Recently I watched a ‘wonderful’ example of ‘stunning new technology in education’. An American teacher toured the Large Hadron Collider on the border between France and Switzerland, near Geneva, whilst his students, sitting in a classroom in California, watched in live time and communicated with him. This was supposed to be an advance. The adults have the experience; the students sit on their butts back at school and watch someone else doing stuff.
In 2019, I received a poster from Google advertising ‘Google for Education’. It was headed ‘10 teacher tips to spark classroom learning with G Suite for Education and Chrome Books’. One of the ten tips had the subheading ‘Class trips without the bus trips’. The body of the text read: ‘Explore the world with Expeditions and immerse your students in one of thousands of virtual reality journeys. Check out the Expedition app.’
Fake experiences cleverly designed to trick students into believing they are having real experiences. Is this the future of education?
People need their own stories. Our stories define us, shape us, enrich us. They help us grow. Stories do not come from watching TV or playing Xbox games or having virtual reality journeys. They come from riding skateboards, climbing trees, making jam, catching a ferry, meeting people, going to Sri Lanka, touring a factory, nursing babies, holding a post for a road surveyor. Too many young people have never seen an echidna nosing its way through the bush, or been to a music festival, or gone abseiling in the Arapiles, or replaced a clutch cable, or ridden a camel.
In starting Candlebark, I also thought it important to counteract the prevailing hysteria that values physical safety above all other considerations. Children can only grow emotionally, socially, spiritually if we step back and let them be adventurous. At my schools, we encourage children to run, jump, roll, climb, ride bikes and skateboards and RipStiks, engage in stick wars and British Bulldog. They play outside without regard to the weather. We are a bit of an outpost against the psychically ill 21st-century adults who wish to wrap children in cotton wool to protect them from physical harm.
Two schools that have a similar approach, and have influenced me strongly, are Fitzroy Community School in Melbourne and Tudor House in Moss Vale, New South Wales. These schools have many outstanding features, but one that strikes me is that, unlike nearly every other primary school in Australia, it is almost impossible to find an overweight student among their enrollees. The students look healthy, because they are engaged in healthy activities every day of their school lives. The same can be said of Candlebark (although, shamefully, not of its principal!).
The unofficial motto of Candlebark and Alice Miller is ‘Take risks’. I used to call it our secret motto, but I’ve talked about it too often for it to be classified as a secret any more. It means ‘Be adventurous’. It doesn’t mean ‘Be reckless’. Usually I add, tokenistically, ‘Take care’, but all humans, except perhaps some with severe mental disabilities or some who have reached an extreme of self-destructiveness, know to take care. If they don’t, a thousand repetitions of ‘Take care’ will not change their behaviour. It’s like the mindless calls of ‘Don’t fall!’ or ‘Be careful’ to children who are climbing a tree or a set of monkey bars.
Our children get injured, sure, but mostly at home, doing banal things like crossing the room to get food, or playing Monopoly. Despite the daring stuff the students do at school, our rate of significant injuries is extremely low. We have lots of grazes, scratches and bruises, and a very occasional broken bone, but far fewer accidents than other schools of comparable size. I can only put this down to the fact that our kids learn quickly to take care of themselves.
Occasionally we intervene in risk-taking behaviour. I remember a thirteen-year-old student who threw himself around so wildly that he was constantly getting injured. One day I said to him, ‘I’ve got a theory that the reason you keep hurting yourself is because you want to build up an immunity to pain, until you become impervious to it.’ I didn’t add ‘And I reckon it’s because you have so much emotional pain inside you, and you’re trying to immunise yourself against it.’
He looked at me in shock and stammered: ‘You know me so well.’
His behaviour started to change after that conversation. He’s now a hardworking, successful builder who is highly respected for his work ethic and strength of character, and the quality of his constructions.
I believe that the harm inflicted on Australian children by the cotton wool approach is crippling, and lifelong. The madness of modern attitudes is found everywhere, but perhaps the United Kingdom leads the world in the insanity stakes. James Williams, a science lecturer who played the role of a housemaster in a British TV reality documentary series called That’ll Teach ’Em, reported that on the program:
We had to make the children wear crash helmets and knee pads for the go-kart race – the health and safety advisor insisted on it. Ironically, the only person injured in the race was one of the cameramen, run over by a wayward go-kart when its wheel came off. He wasn’t wearing a crash helmet or kneepads . . . once I was asked to comment on a tragic accident that happened in a school. A pupil put an arm through a window at break time. A very nasty cut, but no permanent damage was the result. The parents called for all glass in schools to be safety glass. The local authority, sensibly, said this would cost too much. The parents’ response was that the council put cost before children’s lives. A great sound bite, but is it really true? I wondered if all the glass in their house was safety glass . . .281
In 2009 Britain experienced, and, fortunately, survived the ‘Marcus the Lamb’ controversy. Marcus was a lamb hand-reared by students at a school in Kent, to help kids learn about the food cycle. As the logical end point in the process, Marcus was slaughtered for his meat, which was not eaten by the kids but was sold so that the school could buy more animals. However, a group of parents campaigned powerfully against the killing of Marcus,282 and the case became such a cause celebre that eventually the head teacher of the school resigned, after being subjected to vitriolic abuse (she was reinstated in 2010).283 That strange wailing sound heard in Kent in recent times is the ghost of Beatrix Potter, come from the grave to haunt Marcus’s supporters.
Like everyone, I have my mantras, my mottoes . . . my parables. For me, one of the most powerful is a story I was told just before Candlebark opened. It concerned the acquisition of a country campus by a well-known big-city private school, which the school intended to be an adventurous and innovative place for Year 9s, rather like Geelong Grammar’s Timbertop. One of the features of the project was that the rural campus was equipped with a fleet of brand-new bikes. When the kids had free time they could go for a ride in and around the quiet little town where the campus was located, or out into the countryside.
However, after the first semester, the school had some concerns, and so decided to restrict the rides to groups of three kids minimum. After the second they added the further restriction that a teacher had to accompany the students. After the third they limited the rides to within the boundaries of the town. After the fourth they said the rides could only happen at weekends. After the fifth they banned bike rides when rain was forecast. After the sixth semester, they sold the bikes.
I’m sure I’ve got some of the details wrong, but that was the gist of it. And I understand how stuff like that happens – there are various forces that act upon schools like boa constrictors, and whether those forces move slowly or quickly, the relentless pressure they exert has the same eventual, fatal, effect, unless vigorously counteracted.
I am determined we will never ‘lock up the bikes’, either literally or metaphorically. The effect of the story on me was to make me highly sensitive to any attempts to strangle the spirit of the schools; so much so that I can, as I suggested earlier, become quite feisty when I feel people misunderstand or try to sabotage the adventurous approach we take. Truly is it said that the wanderer’s danger is to find comfort, and we do not see it as our job to keep students comfortable. Thus, we have had students hike across the New South Wales border to the top of Kosciuszko then canoe the length of the Snowy River to Bass Strait – a six-week trip. We have had students travel from Broome to Darwin, spending time in Aboriginal communities along the way. We have had them hike the challenging Overland route in Tasmania from Cradle Mountain to Lake St Clair; walk the Great Ocean Track; travel to Italy, to Montenegro, to Tanzania, to Madagascar, to China, to Mongolia, to Albania, to Spain, to Poland, to Germany, to France. Every year we have kids from Foundation onwards doing a four-day camp in first term, which involves a three-hour drive away from home and staying in tents. Parents of Foundation kids can sometimes get nervous about this, but the kids have a wow of a time.
Sometimes we drop students in the forest, three days’ walk from the school, and have them hike back. We have five-day bike camps in the Macedon Ranges area every second year, where kids ride a couple of hundred kilometres, staying at a different campsite each night.
They go on canoe trips, skiing trips, abseiling and rock-climbing trips.
But part of our mission is to explore social, political, religious, spiritual, psychological and philosophical ideas with the same courage with which we send kids on five-day bike camps or to canoe the Murray River or to hike the Australian Alps. One of the ways we do this is by engaging with the world whenever and wherever possible. For students at the two schools, the classroom is a convenient meeting point and a useful springboard, but it is not necessarily the place where the most powerful learning happens. So we send groups to the MONA gallery in Hobart, the WOMAD festival in Adelaide, to galleries, museums, live theatre events, dance performances, movies and movie festivals, writers’ festivals, parks and zoos and gardens and playgrounds. Like many schools, we take groups to Canberra, to explore places of interest there.
Every student will have at least half a dozen sleepovers a year at school – some will have twenty or more – which may have some educational focus but are often ‘just for fun’. As I write this, there is a sleepover at school for the Grade 3s. Two nights ago a motley bunch of kids had a book-reading sleepover . . . just so they could have a few hours of uninterrupted reading. That sleepover was for any kids who wanted to come. Next week Foundation kids and Year 1s will be camping for two nights at Healesville. The Year 7s come back tomorrow night after twelve days in New Zealand, where they’ve been hiking, rock climbing, ocean kayaking, and doing a Lord of the Rings tour.
All of these trips are included in the school fees. Parents are not charged extra for them. We do this partly to reduce administrative costs but also so that parents cannot deny permission on financial grounds for their children to go. It also means that we are not forever nagging parents for further amounts of money.
The only exception to the ‘no extra costs’ rule is the big Year 9 trip. We run this every year, and it is always of six weeks’ duration, with two or three teachers from the school accompanying each group. We do this trip for a number of reasons. The first and obvious one is that we want children to discover new countries, new societies and new cultures, and to overcome the difficulties inevitably encountered in global travel. We do it because we want them to learn to trust the world, to understand that courtesy, friendliness and ‘mateship’ are not exclusively the province of Australians, but can be found everywhere. But we also do it because we believe that Year 9 is a good time for students to begin to strike out on their own, to move out from under their parents’ protective wings. Adolescents who turn on their parents, reject them completely, leave home and have no further contact with them, are in as invidious a position as adolescents who are under the suffocating day-by-day control of suspicious and authoritarian parents. As I noted earlier, members of this latter group are likely to still be living at home when they are 40, lonely, immature, and filled with passive-aggressive feelings.
One of our rules for these trips is that students are not allowed to contact their parents, except with special permission, and parents are not to contact their children. Not surprisingly, some parents fiercely resist the potential loss of control that the six-week odyssey represents. An informal survey of students by teachers one year revealed that 25 per cent of parents were plotting ways to subvert this important aspect of the trip by making secret arrangements with their sons or daughters for direct electronic contact. Remembering the bicycles, I fight the good fight relentlessly with such people.
As a general rule, we do not spend time asking students to reflect on their experiences on hikes or camps or excursions, or to write journal entries about them. We do not ask searching questions like ‘What did you learn as a result of this?’ or ‘How have you changed since the trip?’ Adults are not subjected to this kind of interrogation – except in some ghastly workplaces, which should be avoided at all costs – and kids should be likewise exempt. Once the experience is over, it’s over. We leave the students to process it consciously and unconsciously, not knowing whether it will change them a little, a lot or not at all.
Gary Younge, in Another Day in the Death of America, describes the South Side of Chicago as a place apart, a territory where violence is commonplace. He observes that many of the people who live there stay within the boundaries of the South Side and never go downtown, to the CBD. He quotes a community organiser as suggesting that the ones who do go outside the boundaries are like escapees, with the implication that their lives will be all the better for having gone out into the world.284
It doesn’t matter whether we are in the South Side of Chicago or South Yarra in Melbourne or the west coast of Tasmania or Westmead in Sydney, the more we can travel, meet new people and have new experiences, the more tolerance, understanding and wisdom we are likely to acquire.
These adventures can only take place if teachers are creative and adventurous in initiating and organising them. As principal, I’m clear on my main role. It’s to say yes, whenever possible, to everyone who comes into my office. It did not take me many years of working in schools to realise that each of them should have a flag fluttering from the school’s tallest point with the word ‘NO’ emblazoned on it. For this is the secret motto of virtually all schools.
When teacher Donna Prince asked me one day if she could start an Explosions Club at Candlebark, I didn’t bother to ask for details, but told her to go right ahead. As a result we have had many exciting blasts, including pyrotechnic displays. Kids who in the past have not been particularly motivated by attending school are, for obvious reasons, among the keenest to join the Explosions Club.
For some schools, as well as ‘NO’ a second motto may be appropriate: I remember doing a six-week residency at one of Australia’s most famous private all-girls’ schools, and being convinced by the end of the first week that they should have a flag fluttering from their flagpole with the word ‘SHHHH’ prominently displayed. Wherever I went in the school, I heard teachers saying, ‘Shhhh, girls, shhhh, be quiet now.’ Explosions Club was never going to become a part of their program. The girls were apparently being taught their future roles in life.
Recently I came across some notes I jotted down whilst listening to Michael McGirr, head of Faith and Mission at St Kevin’s College Toorak, and author of a number of quirky books including Snooze: The Lost Art of Sleep. He had talked about the artificiality of the light in Western society and the unhealthy desire of many people for a culture in which there is no darkness.
I want to provide a natural light for young people, and I absolutely accept that the light will throw a shadow. But, as McGirr said, these days it often feels that the light at the end of the tunnel is the glow of a mobile phone screen. When my wife and I went to Mexico, arriving soon after the Festival of the Dead, we were struck by the way death and images of death, particularly skulls, were woven into the fabric of everyday life – for everybody. This seemed altogether healthier than the typical Western fear and avoidance of death.
One result of our first-hand-experiences approach at the two schools is that our students are bright-eyed and bushy-tailed all day long. At bus stops they stand out from kids from other schools because they are exuberant and lively. They can’t wait to get on the bus. In class they are alert and engaged. They have more free time, and hence less class time, than students at conventional schools, but that doesn’t hurt them, because as well as being wide awake in class they have a positive attitude, which naturally enough leads to faster learning. I’ve often taught middle-school maths at Candlebark, and found that we can knock off the syllabus for the whole year in just two or three terms.
treating children well
Above all, we treat children well. Not as equals. Our schools are not particularly democratic. But we treat students with courtesy and generosity. Before starting Candlebark I ran residential writing courses for adults and children. One person I employed as a supervisor for a camp started referring to the students, in their hearing, as ‘kiddies’. The age range of the participants was twelve to sixteen.
I understood his reason: he had not long left school himself and was anxious to establish his superiority. But that didn’t stop me telling him, after two warnings, that if he used the contemptuous word again, I’d sack him.
The adjective most commonly used by teachers at other schools to describe our graduates is ‘mature’. It seems that our students are unafraid to ask questions or take the lead. They treat teachers courteously but warmly, and they show a sophisticated understanding of complex issues. Sometimes, thanks to their parents, they would be like this anyway; sometimes it’s a mixture of influences from home and school; sometimes we have done most of the work ourselves.
In 2013, I had an unsolicited letter from a teacher at another school, who had encountered two ex-Candlebark students in one of her classes:
Aside from Amy being a really lovely girl, as we got in to the swing of the semester she stood out because she is my very favourite thing in a student: a thinker who holds me to task. She asked ‘Why’ more than almost every other student. ‘Why was it that way?’ ‘Why look with that perspective?’ ‘Why believe what Thucydides says is true?’ And I loved it. This year I am lucky enough to be teaching her again in Philosophy and I also met Bryony in Classical Societies. Bryony, as you know, is another exceptional student.
Having sung their praises I want to clarify; I am not saying that either of them always get everything right or that they are perfect. But both of them are actively involved in their education and take responsibility for when things go right and things go wrong. They think about it and engage with it rather than opening their mouths and waiting for me to spoon feed it to them.
I was determined to strip out from the schooling model everything that could not be justified on sensible grounds. As well, to use a much-overworked expression, I did not want teachers to waste time ‘sweating the small stuff’. So many schools are obsessed with students wearing the ‘correct’ uniform. At the start of the 2018 school year, a Melbourne government high school sent home at least seventeen students for wearing the wrong socks. Another fifteen were given ‘all-day internal detentions’ for violating the uniform policy of the school.285 Our solution to these chronic and unproductive confrontations: let’s do away with uniform. At a stroke, 20, 30, 40 per cent of the potential conflicts between students and teachers are eliminated.
Report-writing? A waste of time and energy – the involved parents already know how their children are going; the others don’t read the reports anyway. Solution: reduce reports to a letter grade, sent out twice a year – the bare minimum to ensure we comply with government regulations. Staff meetings: nearly always a further waste of time and energy. We have one a week.
To cut out the endless chasing of kids and parents for permission slips and money, we require parents to sign a generic form when they enrol their children, giving us permission to take their little darlings anywhere we want, any time we want.
Acting on yet another cue from Fitzroy Community School, we have no staffroom at either Candlebark or Alice Miller, so that contact between teachers and students is maximised. This also reduces the politicking among staff, an activity that can cause considerable damage in many schools. Our staff, almost without exception, embrace experiments, adventures, new ideas. When experts at educational conferences talk earnestly about the difficulties of persuading teachers to be innovative I can (smugly) get out my iPad and play Crossy Road.
I wanted the school to be completely mobile, so we have invested a great deal of money acquiring a fleet of buses sufficient to transport the whole student body at the drop of the proverbial hat. Most of the teachers have bus licences. The kids are a delight to take on excursions and camps, and staff frequently remark that taking them off campus doesn’t feel like work.
I was aware from my time at Fitzroy Community School that eating together creates a lovely vibe, which helps make the school feel like a warm place. From the start, we have provided morning tea and lunch for all staff and students, every day, and as well we make food available throughout the day. We do not haggle over money in our efforts to make sure the food is outstanding. When the chefs we have employed over the years ask me about the budget for food, I tell them, ‘Just get what you need.’ We don’t buy generic or plain-label brands, even though some of them are of good quality. We buy high-profile brand names, because by doing so we send an implicit message to children that they are respected. They know that we are not palming off cheap stuff on them just because they are kids. We spend about $400,000 a year on food.
teaching creativity . . .?
I haven’t made any claims in this discussion that Candlebark and Alice Miller Schools are ‘creative’. It’s a word that’s thrown around freely in recent years, but it’s hard to define, and it’s a difficult concept to teach, especially when teachers at so many schools are conspicuously lacking in creativity. I think we do help to develop the creative powers of our students, but almost incidentally, by encouraging them, for example, to find their own voices and develop their own identities, in writing, in singing, in painting or potting or sculpting, in drama, in playing musical instruments.
English teacher John Mazur brought the following poem to my attention in the late 1970s. It has been given many different titles over the years, and no one seems to know its origins, but it is popularly supposed to be by a teenage boy who committed suicide a few weeks after writing it. I seem to remember that John called it ‘Stiff’. It’s very powerful for many adolescents.
He always wanted to explain things
But no one cared
So he drew
Sometimes he would draw and it wasn’t anything
He wanted to carve it in stone
Or write it in the sky
He would lie out on the grass
And look up at the sky
And it would be only the sky and him that needed saying
And it was after that
He drew the picture
It was a beautiful picture
He kept it under his pillow
And would let no one see it
And he would look at it every night
And think about it
And when it was dark
And his eyes were closed
He could still see it
And it was all of him
And he loved it
When he started school he brought it with him
Not to show anyone but just to have it with him
Like a friend
It was funny about school
He sat in a square brown desk
Like all the other square brown desks
And he thought it should be red
And his room was a square brown room
Like all the other rooms
And it was tight and close
And stiff
He hated to hold the pencil and chalk
With his arms stiff and his feet flat on the floor
Stiff
With the teacher watching
And watching
The teacher came and smiled at him
She told him to wear a tie
Like all the other boys
He said he didn’t like them
And she said it didn’t matter
After that they drew
And he drew all yellow
And it was the way he felt about morning
And it was beautiful
The teacher came and smiled at him
‘What’s this?’ she said
‘Why don’t you draw something like Ken’s drawing?
Isn’t that beautiful?’
After that his mother bought him a tie
And he always drew airplanes and rocket ships
Like everyone else
And he threw the old picture away
And when he lay out alone and looked out at the sky
It was big and blue and all of everything
But he wasn’t anymore
He was square inside and brown
And his hands were stiff
And he was like everyone else
And the things inside him that needed saying
Didn’t need it anymore
It had stopped pushing
It was crushed
Stiff
Like everything else.
The difference between a repressive school and one that encourages and nurtures creativity is not that the latter allows students to spend all day hugging trees or scribbling mindlessly on bits of paper . . . or rolling around on the floor. One of the paradoxes of life is that the imposition of limits can actually lead to greater creative expression. It is the nature of the limits that matters. Wearing a tie or ‘doing a drawing like Ken’s’ are limits that are repressive and without merit. They are limits designed to make students as identical as possible. I have sat in an assembly hall of a big private school in Victoria and heard a senior teacher articulating her school’s uniform policy with the words: ‘There’s a reason we call it uniform – it’s because we want everyone to look the same.’ That was in 2015, not 1955.
But some limits can lead to liberating and delightful outcomes. When I ask students in writing workshops to describe the ocean without using the letter ‘a’, I know I am far more likely to get something fresh and remarkable than if I give them a blank sheet of paper and ask them to write anything they like, on any topic they like, in any style or genre they want. Brian Eno’s famous set of cards known as Oblique Strategies – prompting musicians with such phrases as ‘Honour thy error as a hidden intention’, ‘Ask your body’, ‘Work at a different speed’, ‘Repetition is a form of change’ – incorporate limits that were subsequently used by artists like David Bowie to enhance their music. The brilliance of the bestselling solo jazz album of all time, and bestselling solo piano album of all time, Keith Jarrett’s Köln Concert (1975),286 is directly attributable to the limits imposed upon Jarrett by the inadequate, defective piano upon which he had to perform.287
The anonymous poem ‘Stiff’ captures the yearning of adolescents for freedom from restrictions, limits and criticism, but the wise adult knows that the young person actually needs something rather less vague. And to develop their creative powers, children and teenagers need support, appreciation, and a warm and positive relationship with their teachers. In particular, most need specific feedback, from people with expertise. In responding to students’ writing, I make comments like ‘Too many adjectives – one per paragraph is often enough – and even one can be too many’, ‘Name everything in your story – what did they actually have for breakfast? What was the colour of the bus? How did they pay for the ticket?’, ‘Too much narrative – maybe break it up with some dialogue?’, ‘Show, don’t tell.’
Sure, the notion of freedom is superficially attractive, but true fulfilment comes from doing outstanding work that has the creator’s personality and spirit stamped all over it. Work that is both sophisticated and unique.
In recent years, we have seen a staggering growth in the levels of anxiety among children and parents. This impacts on us every day, and sometimes I feel we run ourselves ragged trying to support anxious children and teenagers, and pacify panicky parents. It’s as though we had the epidemic of eating disorders, then the epidemic of self-harming, and now, although those other behaviours are still with us, we have the phenomenon of panic attacks.
If a student is well mentally, problems become manageable, and can be seen in their true light. He or she will be able to cope with everything school and life throws at him or her. If the student is not well mentally, he or she is at grave risk in every imaginable way, and learning will take place with difficulty, and often at a painfully slow pace.
A commonly held belief these days is that by teaching people to be creative we can solve their problems. But tortured minds cannot be comforted by creativity. A million words after writing Look Homeward, Angel, Thomas Wolfe was still tormented. After a million notes, Beethoven was not happy; after a million brushstrokes Van Gogh cut off his ear, then committed suicide.
Yet as individuals we are driven to dance, sing, write, play music, act, compose, sculpt, paint. Perhaps it is no more than ‘just’ a drive, but if so, it is almost as primitive and compelling as the need to breathe and eat and drink. It’s possible that the more disturbed our world feels, the more we are compelled to dance, whether with feet or paintbrushes or words.
When a society is fascist and repressive in its nature, it seems that wild and extreme art movements are likely to develop, even if much of such activity is underground or banned from public view by authoritarian regimes. In postwar Japan, for example, the Gutai Group, established by Jiro Yoshihara, found art in the shooting of paint onto a canvas with a cannon and the artist Shozo Shimamoto smashing his way wildly through laminated rice-paper screens. Atsuko Tanaka created Electric Dress, made of lightbulbs; Kazuo Shiraga wrestled in mud or hung from ceilings whilst painting with his feet. ‘Bid farewell to these hoaxes piled up on the altars and in the palaces, the drawing rooms, and the antique shops . . . lock up these corpses in the graveyards,’ Yoshihara wrote in his 1956 Gutai Manifesto.288
It seems that we have an individual need to express the self, to explore it, to try to define it, probably so that we can connect meaningfully with our inner natures and as well give a sense of ourselves to others. This can be proactive or reactive or both. We have a need to react against oppression and we have a hunger for beauty. All of this is true for the individual, and true for the conglomeration of individuals we call society. The sense that art sustains us, and offers comfort and nourishment, may derive from that.
In this process, art poses at least one problem: how do we find beauty, and perhaps even comfort, in art – for example writing – that is grim, morbid, troubling? Yet this is not so difficult. There is beauty in the dark places. The shadow is as intriguing as the tree. Death is as important as life. Water is vital and beautiful, and so is blood. I find much that moves me, much that is compelling and often noble in every life, no matter what troubling elements it also contains.
If a piece of writing is a beautiful thing in itself, that is enough. If a piece of writing gives a sense of an author striving for truth, that is enough. If a piece of writing is disturbing, I thank the author for having the courage to go to that place and the generosity to take me there too.
the schools we need
So, how can we create genuinely good schools?
Ideally, students should know that they won’t be assaulted spiritually, emotionally, mentally, physically . . . by students or by teachers. From teachers, that they will receive a fair hearing, they won’t be unfairly convicted and sentenced, they won’t be insulted, they will be given the same amount of time and attention and love as the next boy or girl. There will almost certainly be times when they don’t feel safe, when things go badly wrong, but that’s life, and school should be a place where these situations can be explored, so that learning ensues and progress is made.
Students should have meaningful roles within the school community. If schools must have prefects and captains, every student ought to be given a turn at these positions. Some kids can surprise big-time when allowed the opportunity. In most schools, most students have no meaningful role, and it’s one of the reasons they get angrier and angrier at the educational system as they get older. When they in turn become parents and send their own children to school, they will still be angry, and are likely to take that anger out on their children’s teachers.
Students need to be taught from the first day that there are many choices in every situation. (Maybe people who kill themselves do so because they think there’s only one choice.) If a Grade 1 student has an argument with another student, there are a number of ways for him or her to deal with the matter. Among the options are apologising, mediation, never speaking to the other student again, making a ‘victim impact statement’ to the other person, bashing the other student up . . . one of the great truths of life is that we are free to do anything we want, as long as we accept the consequences.
Schools would do well to treat students with increased courtesy and respect. The youth worker in a Melbourne shopping mall described on radio how this policy changed the behaviour of teenagers in their centre. When all shopkeepers and retail assistants in the mall were persuaded to start being incredibly nice to the teenagers hanging around there, the vandalism and aggression problems they’d been enduring disappeared almost overnight. The golden rule is to treat young people with the same courtesy as we treat adults. If we don’t ask adults to sit on the floor, we shouldn’t expect it of children in schools. Their bums are made from the same material as ours. If adults who knock on the staffroom door are not left waiting for long minutes, then children should not be ignored in the way they so often are. If a school allows adults through the main door of the school and into the administration area, then young people should be equally welcome. Children should not be compelled to share their most precious toys with strange kids – adults don’t share their precious toys with strange adults.
Schools need to understand the need of young people for physical release, and the emphasis children and teenagers place on competition. At the same time it must be understood that some timid or studious or ‘alternative’ boys or girls don’t feel this way.
sniffing out a good school
So how do parents seeking a good – or even excellent – school for their children get meaningful information to help them make a choice? Well, start by tossing the school’s prospectus in the bin. Don’t bother reading it. Every prospectus says the same: ‘fulfilling individual potential’, ‘positive, caring atmosphere’, ‘zero tolerance of bullying’, ‘extending the gifted and talented’ . . . a sea of blah, or, to repeat Don Watson’s word, ‘clag’.
Also, ignore anything the principal says. These people are better spinners than Shane Warne and Muttiah Muralitharan combined. As a matter of courtesy, prospective parents might have to endure an interview with the principal, but they would be well advised to get it over with as quickly as possible.
And believe me (after all, I’m a principal), life is too short to waste time staring with glazed eyes at the My Schools website. NAPLAN results are statistically unreliable and dangerously misleading. The website itself is morally indefensible.
But there are ways . . .
Before prospective parents bow themselves out of the principal’s office, they should request a tour of the school. It’s best to ask if some kids can show you around. Of course, the principal will choose the most compliant children available, preferably his/her own son or daughter or, failing that, the school captains. Nevertheless, this doesn’t mean you can’t get them in a corner at the first opportunity and subject them to intense interrogation.
The killer question to put to them is simply ‘What’s the worst thing about your school?’
Taken by surprise, even these hand-picked fall guys are likely to gasp out an honest response.
And if the answer reflects badly on the teachers, thank the children kindly, and head for the car park as fast as can decently be managed. Comments like ‘Well, some of the teachers are a bit boring . . .’, ‘The teachers are really mean’, ‘Mrs Daniels – she’s not very fair sometimes . . .’ simply won’t be heard from students in good schools.
The kids’ judgements have to be considered in light of the fact that Australian children are on the whole very nice people who will strive to give the best possible account of their school, so you can be sure that even the mildest of these responses conceals a hellhole to which parents should never consider consigning their loved ones.
Students in good schools will reply with positive statements like ‘Nothing really, it’s heaps better than my last school’, or they’ll highlight issues so trivial that it’s obvious nothing of substance is wrong, like ‘I don’t like the orange curtains in room 15’, or they will mention something that might be considered by many parents a plus, like ‘We have to work too hard’.
If they say the school is too strict, it probably is, but of course some parents relish the idea of having their children spend up to thirteen years getting their spirits broken by the peculiar varieties of fascists who are too often found in the teaching profession.
I was fascinated by a conversation I had when teaching at Geelong Grammar. A man ‘prominent in public life’, as they say, arrived to enrol his son. He confided in me that he had himself been a student at the school, 30 years earlier. Naïvely, I exclaimed, ‘You must have loved it, to be sending your son here.’
‘No,’ he replied, ‘I hated every minute of it.’
‘But . . . but . . . then why . . .?’ I stammered.
‘Because I suffered through it, and so can he.’
Ah yes, he probably thought the school was ‘character-forming’. And who knows, perhaps he would not have been ‘prominent in public life’ had he not gone to Geelong Grammar. Perhaps he might have been just, I don’t know, a good father.
Almost as helpful as conversations with children about schools are conversations with teachers (but not those in positions of responsibility, whose vested interests weigh too heavily upon them).
Conversations with other parents should be treated with caution, as their views are often based on issues too subjective. If a teacher has, at any time in the previous twelve months, raised the faintest suspicion about the veracity of Angus’s story of having his lunch money stolen by a gang of Grade 2 thugs armed with steel bayonets, one or more of Angus’s parents may be irredeemably prejudiced against the school.
The other way of evaluating the real worth of a school is to gain access to its two least accessible rooms: the kids’ toilets and the staffroom. God forbid parents should even hint that they want to see inside the kids’ toilets, unless they want the SWAT squad to be called, and then find their face, or, more accurately, a photographic image of their face, on the front page of the tabloids the next day. But parents can try to arrange for the building to be cordoned off whilst they sneak a look inside. Ideally, they should be greeted by facilities that are sparkling clean, with good-quality toilet paper that will be soft on their little one’s bum, and fragrant but environmentally sympathetic soap. Strong doubts about the school should be raised by the sight of a vile and smelly place decorated with crude graffiti that induces instant constipation in all who venture near.
The quality of the lavatory facilities is a good indicator of the regard in which children are held in a school; far better than any number of glossy brochures stuffed with photos carefully calculated and staged to show the gender and ethnic mix the school believes will be most attractive to the customers they want to enrol.
If parents are able to talk their way into the staffroom, they should do so with nostrils quivering and senses on full alert. A drab staffroom populated by dispirited teachers is a red flag. Nothing on the noticeboards but ‘Regulations Pursuant to the Act of 1999’ and memos pertaining to ‘Shoes Purchased for the Purposes of Teaching Physical Education, Tax Deductibility of’, plus a few photos of kids with potential anaphylactic reactions? A sink full of unwashed coffee cups? Aggressive notices warning that those who use other people’s coffee cups are ‘Selfish, and Lack the Right Spirit’?
Forget etiquette, just run for the car park.
When a visitor enters a good staffroom, people will come up and introduce themselves. There’ll be bright and lively chatter, and lots of laughter. Children who knock on the door will be treated with courtesy and not left to wait for ten minutes in a cold corridor whilst the teacher they want to see finishes her crossword and has a second cup of International Roast.
The truth about Candlebark and Alice Miller is that everything we do could easily be replicated in other schools and school systems. Yet although we have almost daily visits from educators from all around Australia and overseas, and although they invariably leave singing the praises of our methods, they are very quick to explain why they couldn’t possibly change the practices they are currently following – practices that essentially have not changed in more than a hundred years.
Yet we should not despair.