Schools Kill Curiosity

I have strong opinions and that can both help and harm me, but in our latest project those opinions are what really took my thinking and work to a level I’m quite pleased with. To end off the year and present in the spring exhibition, our class would focus on the topic of schools and really what problems they bring about. Our driving question was “how might we transform schools to create engaged and informed citizens?” That’s quite the question and there are so many ways you could go about answering it, and that’s what I enjoyed about this project, I could take it in a direction that I was passionate about which would result in work I’m proud of and enjoy doing at the same time. 

Throughout my whole school experience I can’t help but notice that there are always people who say they hate school, and so this project would be great for them as they can voice their thoughts on the place that they’d never see again. However, I can’t wrap my head around that thought, how can someone genuinely rather be at home all day for 12 years of their lives, but this brought us to the first part, and arguably most important of the project, figuring out what the purpose of school is. Everyone will see this question differently, and there’s no problem with that because I believe that there isn’t really a right answer, although, without sounding arrogant, I think I had a pretty good answer to this. To dive right into this project we were tasked with interviewing at least three people and asking them some questions that all focus on their opinions on schools, what they’re for, if they’re good, etc. To be honest, I’m really not a fan of this kind of task as I know that it’s difficult for me to get answers out of my parents, and to no surprise, when I asked my mum her first response was “how am I suppose to know that.” So it’s hard to work with, but eventually I recorded four interviews, with both my mum and dad, my brother, and one of my teachers. Each of these interviews offered something different and that was what I was hoping for, I think that the variety of people I spoke with helped me even understand my own thoughts better and gave me different looks on things which would help me come to my final conclusion; I think the purpose of schools is less so about learning math, science and English skills, but learning how to be human. School is a place where I believe students go to be around other people their age and build social skills to help them in the future. 

What is the Purpose of Schools?

Throughout this whole project I found myself often on the minority side of an argument, when we as a class were addressing our driving question and talking about what is wrong with the school system, I alongside Jordan were both saying that the system isn’t the problem, but rather it’s the students. To this day I still believe this, even after hearing multiple perspectives I still think they main reason students aren’t engaged is rooted in themselves, it angers me when I hear people complain about problems but at the same time make no effort to fix it, and that goes with everything. In the context of school, of course there are going to be people who just don’t care, and I think a lot of people are focusing too much on that, if they don’t care they don’t care, end of conversation, there is so little we can do to fix their mindset and any change to the school system won’t affect that. Opportunities are there, and if you really want to make change, you’ll put the effort in to make it happen, you can’t expect to just sit there and see that change come about. Annoyingly as it was, I realized I couldn’t really focus my project on this idea, as it doesn’t properly answer the driving question, but I managed to keep that idea with my the whole way and think of something where I could bring this thought into another area. 

When the time came to think about the spring exhibition and finalize my main idea and answer to the driving question, I was in a spot of difficulty. From the get go I knew I wanted my final product to be a TED Talk style presentation where I just talk about my opinions as I was inspired by Sir Ken Robinson’s which was about his opinion on school, I’ve been wanting to do that for quite a while and this was the perfect opportunity to do so. The actual content of the TED Talk was still to be decided, but after a lot of thought and conversations I came to the conclusion that we can transform schools by creating environments that promote students natural sense of wonder, cultivates their desire for knowledge, and builds a lifelong passion for learning. To give that statement context there are some more opinions that come along, the first and biggest being that I don’t think people nowadays are curious enough about what’s going on around them, and school plays a part in that. I also believe that everyone has a natural sense of wonder but schools kill that without really knowing. Finally, I wanted to bring in architecture as that is something I have an interest in, and really the answer was given to me, the architecture is was kills people’s curiosity. 

With a solid idea to our question and something that I cared about I could start creating, but of course as exhibitions always go, it wasn’t until the final day that I recorded my TED Talk, but unlike all the other times this happens, I wasn’t stressed at all, really it was my teachers stressed for me. I didn’t have the same stress as I usually do because this time I was confident in my abilities, I had an answer that I was proud of and was communicating it in a way that I thought best describes who I am as a person, it was a win win. Most years at this point I’d say I was shocked that everything came together but this time that isn’t true, that shocked part that is, unfortunately there was a slight problem with the audio but on the night it didn’t matter and for the most part I was happy with the work I had done both leading up to and on the night itself. I know I seem to say this every year, but during the two hours where guests would be free to see whatever they wanted, I was really proud of my ability to speak. I found that I was having conversations with people rather than just talking to them and this made the experience much better for all of us. In these sorts of events it’s not so much about what you create, but what you have to say, but having created a product that for the most part I’m pleased with definitely was a positive. 

My Work at the Spring Exhibition

Weirdly enough and to my surprise, this project seemed to be right up my alley which is something I wasn’t expecting to say. Going back to the goal I created for myself about a year ago, to be myself in my work has really be in the front of my mind throughout every project this year and this was certainly no exception. I feel like I’ve found a variety of ways that I can care about my learning and I think it’s showing. I can only thank my teachers for helping find this passion, and in return I’m producing work that I feel you can be pleased to say one of my students did that.