THE FUTURE OF THE TEACHING PROFESSION
(Henry Morris, The Village College. Being a Memorandum on the Provision of Educations and Social Facilities for the Countryside, with Special Reference to Cambridgeshire, 1925, section XIV) Contrasting metaphors for the school are the village and the factory. The latter is in fact much closer to the reality of schools as we know them, as its historic origins are in a 20th Century factory model and are exemplified in the structures of school buildings and logistics and in much of the industrial language of supervision, quality control, efficiency and effective inputs and outputs. The village metaphor suggests a form of converse that brings provision closer to people, on a smaller more intimate scale.
An alternative scenario An alternative scenario proposes that rather than moving libraries, internet cafés, fitness centres, football pitches, basketball courts and health clinics into new mega-community ‘schools’, such resources could be moved out closer to where people live and play. For example, internet cafés are now a common feature of high streets and shopping centres. Similarly tutorial centres are, in many countries, to be found in neighbourhoods, supermarkets and shopping centres. Teachers, tutors and education advisers can already be found sited in shop-fronts, supermarkets, high flats, community centres, churches or anywhere that people congregate. Breakfast clubs, study support facilities, football clubs and residential centres, Saturday and Sunday schools (a common feature of urban areas in Malaysia for example) also complement the limited 9am to 3pm experience. In the future, such community-based services may play a greater role as primary sites for learning rather than simply as supplementary, or compensatory, to what is on offer in schools. In other words, the future is already incipient in the present.
Challenging the ‘fossilised’ curriculum Like the old conundrum of the chicken and the egg, the question is, ‘Which came first: the curriculum or the school?’ Before the invention of school, the ‘curriculum’ was a family and community responsibility. In African countries imperial colonisers, brought with them a model of school which undermined the collectivist nature of education in traditional communities, encompassing the total way of life of the society. Education as a shared responsibility meant that the learning of all 114