Vision for tuition by Olivia Paull

VISION FOR TUITION

OLIVIA PAULL scrutinises the value of the rigid state education system applied to the fluid teenage life experience.

“The teenage brain is continuously changing and redecorating.”

School and teenagers. Two things that don’t go together.

Schools. The place of education, the future, and the open mind.

Teenagers. The students will go to any length not to be there. Why? Is it grades, their GPAs or the seating plans? Friends and enemies alike, school is too often considered hell on earth.

We are so quick to blame it on friendships, popularity and perhaps bullying, but why are we not yet considering the method of education itself? The sole reason school exists is to challenge and shape the human brain. Extend it, improve it, develop it. The human brain is a complex construction of neurons and cells, whose construction ideally will eventually allow you to think and process increasingly complex information.

Years of study have been undertaken to understand what the complicated network, the brain and nervous system are made of. Experts have managed to locate and bring to light the different areas of the human brain and differentiate them from one another, potentially encouraging a more optimized and streamlined method of learning.

Take the Hippocampus, for example, a sector in the brain responsible for memory, learning, navigation, and perception of space. It is used most of all for educational purposes, even outside schools. Everybody’s brain is divided into the same sectors, but some are larger than others.

If a person has trouble with learning, for example having dyslexia, ADHD, anxiety, autism, OCD, ADD, or even just a slight variation to their brain structures, their hippocampus will be used differently, maybe even hardwired fundamentally differently. Their way of learning will be different from the average person, ranging from subtle to completely impossible. They could be incredible at math, but find English difficult, or exceptional at drama, but can’t understand other subjects like science where there is only one correct answer.

It may seem only the less ‘normal’ teens are being targeted by me, but that is not the case. ‘Normal’ teenagers have been proven to find education and learning harder compared to any other age group. Due to hormone levels and changes, mental health in this same group varies greatly. The average person has now, in 2022, been through depression before the age of 20.

Despite the depth or length of this depressive episode, it is shocking that this now-normal experience is not considered fundamental enough to alter our manner of thinking about schooling. This is not always to do with school, but hypothetically, let’s say it is. Think of a 15 or 16-year-old student, at any school. Let’s face it- they’re going through a hard time. Distancing themselves, eating less, unable to pay attention, and finding it hard to get out of bed every morning.

In what way is going to school going to help them? Improve their mood? Schools are loud and full of people. The student has exams approaching, and what happens when a student is so low, they physically and mentally cannot pay attention? They don’t know the sums, the equations, the answers to the questions. Eventually, the teacher notices and asks them about it. Tells them they need to pay attention, catch up on the work and pick themselves up or they’ll fail the exam.

The student tries hard to study, improve and simply be better. Tell me, how do they do that when their mind is so preoccupied with the incredibly taxing job of simply growing and changing? Next comes the stress, the pressure and the anxiety. Soon enough, grades become the largest problem of all. Mental health is an increasing issue teenagers in this generation face. The teenage brain is continuously changing and ‘redecorating’.

The education system is, sadly, the opposite: it’s simple, reductive, unchanging. Totally set in the ways of the students before the next. Twenty percent of students suffering from depression or anxiety have admitted it’s because of school. This is only the recorded study. In 2021, 90 percent of 2500 teachers, deputies, and principals from intermediate schools said anxiety was the largest concern for students at school.

As a teenage girl, I can tell you the education system isn’t ‘one size fits all’. Students with mental health issues and learning differences process information very differently. And more often than not, the education system does not meet their standards or even help them reach the standards forced upon us.

If something, say math, was being taught the ‘wrong’ way, a student could become frustrated and upset, because their understanding of math is fundamentally not the same as the person sitting beside them. Imagine this insecure young person putting their hand up to answer a question only for it to be incorrect. Every. Single. Time.

Their grades are low because the way they are being taught the subject is wrong for them. It is no surprise they cannot understand it or achieve it in general. The education system needs to change itself. These teenagers cannot be blamed for being taught incorrectly when they are the only ones in the deal being forced to change.

A proposal? Schools need to be in touch with their students. If a student is struggling with school, talk to them. Get them to explain what they need from their school. Teachers should get in touch with their parents to discuss the next steps, how could you help the student to understand the subject. What changes could the school make to their education as best as it can? Let’s start by simply being open to change in the first place.