No one would argue against the value of education and the crucial role it plays in shaping human beings and improving the future of nations by preparing the next generations to embrace knowledge and science. Usually, the official narrative about academic achievement measures the schooling and illiteracy rates around the world, and examining these ratios in light of social variables such, as the gender variable, for example, as well as the correlation between schooling and economic progression and those ratios’ significance for determining the state’s backwardness or its progress.
However, we have overlooked an issue, although it has become prevalent in all countries and in various schools, whether it is a school in an Arab country or schools following the French or American models. This issue concerns a crisis of communication between schools and some of their students, who have become alienated from their schools and have developed an aversion to them, as their relationships with them are based on coercive measures.
Of course, some of the experiences in the world of schooling have been successful, but most schooling models are in a real crisis that is beginning to become apparent with the tensions between students and school, which has undermined the primary social institution’s appeal and their foremost role, making students thirsty for knowledge.
Suggestions by studies from the field of sociology of education about the educational institution’s “crisis” do not imply that the institution has lost its role in bringing up children and preparing them to become members of society. It remains an excellent place for ingraining what Max Weber called “guiding principles”, as well as what Pierre Bourdieu called “constructing minds,” through a knowledge and value system that aims to form individuals’ cultural capital and shape their behavior.
We should not forget that schools dominate our childhoods and adolescence, but their vision of the ideal student has remained static. Schools have not taken societies’ changes into account, and they refuse to accept that the child of today differs from that of yesterday and that the adolescent of yesterday is very different from today’s children and youths.
This same vision disregards how individualism has progressed since the era of traditional society and the societies upon which the wind of modernity had blown. Thus, schools’ dismissal of these changes has created real tension, as the schools do not accept students’ adolescence and do not try to understand them and adapt to the particularities of this difficult phase on their psychological well-being. They do not help students to the same extent that they confront or cut them off, and the repercussions can be seen in dropout rates, the cause of which are not exclusively material.
It is also the result of a communication crisis, which is evident in the fact that this phenomenon is prevalent in public schools. Indeed, the phenomenon of violence between teachers and students is the most prominent manifestation of the communication crisis of today’s schools. Schools only recognize students who conform and are disciplined, and their methods for disciplining students have remained rigid and austere. They are still founded on a perception that the relationship between teachers and students is founded in domination. They lack flexibility and are not engaging with reality and its changes. During the traditional era, educational institutions dominated individuals, and they cannot maintain the same conformity during the era of an active society of individualism, children’s rights and social media.
We have to accept that the students of today do not resemble us when we were their age. Their individualism is far greater than ours, and it determines their relationship with themselves, others and institutions. Students of today refuse the idea of schools being their entire lives. Schools, with their over-crowded teaching schedules, assignments and successive exams, do not change the fact that schools are not everything for the children and youths of today.
True, this crisis impacts almost all social educational institutions, with the crises of the family and the institution of marriage… But the difference is that in schools, as institutions of knowledge managed by knowledgeable administrators, it is more pressing to contemplate the crisis and improve communication with students. What good is adhering to the same educational foundations when it leads to declining academic results as minds also frighteningly decline?
It is important to understand that today’s education system shouldn’t be exclusively instructional. Instead, it should be a system that develops and shapes minds humanely and strives to achieve harmonious human coexistence through common values that are based on mutual acceptance and respect and strive to teach individuals to accept differing opinions.
The school experience seems to lack the three dimensions of the educational experience as defined by François Dubet. Entering, through imagination, the world of adults and the subjective meanings that social actors give their upbringing and the figures of school education. As for the third dimension of the school experience, strategy, it refers to the fact that it is not sufficient for teenagers to be carriers of a project to learn useful things. Rather, the school experience should be endowed with meaning. Students must know how to make the best of their school while practicing the “profession of being pupil” in the best possible manner.
We must strive to make schooling an immersive experience for the cognitive, physical and mental development of students; otherwise, schools will lose their function over time. There is no place in the future for an institution whose foundations are based solely on a vertically hierarchy and systematic and robotic compliance.
