BIG vs small - how to choose the right school for your child

Selwyn Marx, guest · [04:17]Yeah, well, if you look at education, go back three, four, five thousand years, the practice in the past was that Intellectually curious people banded together in very small groups at the foot of a master. So your Pythagoras and, your Greek masters who actually taught, they had little schools, and they were very effective in passing on information. Later on, the religious organizations took over their role and their job, and they had a particular purpose in their schools. But a radical change took place during the Industrial Revolution, where there was mass migration into the city centers, into the towns. There were people without any purpose and meaning on the, on the streets, young people especially. And then, of course, the factories became a phenomenon in terms of the economy. And so the state began to take over edu, the responsibility of education. And in the state taking over, they probably had two main reasons. One was to put people behind the desks in the factories to make the factories more efficient, so they needed to educate for that particular purpose. The other purpose was to manage the social problem that they had of so many young people without anything to do now on the streets. And so they had to look for cost-effective ways in which to manage that, and so schools just got bigger and bigger and bigger, and they had to be more cost-effective because the state was using people's taxes to make that, work. And we're, we're really stuck in that particular model at the moment, where the state is trying to make education as effective as possible in a mass-produced way at the cheapest possible rate. And people are beginning to actually understand that the state cannot do that job properly because the factory floor is no longer needing people for mass production in the same way that it used to. And technology is changing and giving people access to a different way of being educated. And so the small school is coming back into vogue. It's coming back into meaning, and people are beginning to search for that solution in education.

Selwyn Marx, guest · [09:07]Yes. So I've been the principal or head of two schools for the last 27 years. They were both relatively small schools, and through the processes of managing those schools and the appreciation that people had for what we were doing, in both of those schools, we suffered from growth. And, and when I say suffered from growth in this sense, that that's a good thing, but it also, we lose, we lose something in that growth as well. So what did we lose? We lost a sense of intimacy and the ability to actually shape the education uniquely for the children in those classes, but we also became a lot more competitive in another sense. And sport, for example, is very, very important to some people, and you can't actually win any matches and games, in a small school environment. And for the big school context, there are quite a number of families and people in that particular context where sport is very, very important to them. If you think about growing your school and actually becoming more effective in terms of reaching those, the, the, the needs of the, of the learners in that particular context, then more and more people want to join. So then you suffer the problem of growth. Now, that becomes more cost effective in terms of on the finan-financial side, but it, we lose something in terms of the intimacy and the value of actually reaching every child, in that class in a uni-unique way. The problem with big schools is that in order to survive your education experience, and let's not think that they cannot be effective in terms of educating, children. They certainly can. But there's a tendency to treat all of those children in that school and fit them into the bell curve. And then you'll, you, you target your teaching to the middle of that bell curve, and you let either peop- the either sectors of that bell curve on each side actually sink or swim in that particular environment. And that's probably the biggest problem in a, in a big school environment. So many children will manage very effectively, but there are a number of people, that don't. Those people that need extension suffer. Those people that need a bit of support tend to suffer.

Gershom Aitchison, host · [16:31]When we started Edu Inc, we registered from grade one, and we found that in our discussions with parents that a lot of parents, especially parents who are in the socioeconomic demographic that we're in, When the child is born within six months, they've put their child on a waiting list for the private school that the family has always attended or the mom or dad have attended. And usually in the formative, the foundation phase of school, they suddenly realize that their child is not fitting into the mold of the big school and the expectations of the big school. They might be not getting the support that Selwyn spoke about earlier on, and it's forcing them to change their perspective of what schooling should look like. And quite frankly, children are giving more feedback to their parents now. It's the age and the time that we're living in on what they're expecting the education experience to look like. It's not just children are seen and not heard. Children are heard, and we are seeing parents listening to what they're saying. We then found that we didn't have too many students coming in in the foundation phase. So we closed the foundation phase down, and we started in grade four. Essentially, it is the time in the child's learning where they are reading to learn. The foundation phase, grade R one, two, and three, is where they have learned to read. And the academics really start in earnest in terms of actual studying, comprehension, and introduce the introduction of the sciences and the social sciences into the curriculum. So we find students moving into us in grade four and five when the parents and the students have become disillusioned with the legacy that they have in terms of education and the realization that my child needs the support, they have articulated that they want to be in a space where they are seen, and that's the word the children use, and it results in us often having families At one private school, a big private school where the child is thriving and flourishing, and the other child needs that individualized attention and to be seen, they need to have the experience of the small school environment and the relationships that make learning meaningful for them, and that's when they join us.

Selwyn Marx, guest · [22:20]Well, I always used to joke with my parents at times in the prep school environment and said, you know, if I hire a good rugby coach, and that rugby coach actually cannot teach any of the subjects, you don't mind as long as we win the rugby. And I think that that is a problem. I think that the priority in a, in a school environment should be about the thinking, the problem solving, the education. I'm not saying that sport is not important, but sometimes we get it wrong because the emotion of being successful in the sports field somehow emotionally seems to translate into success in the classroom, which is not necessarily the case. And so I think that we need to think differently about the way that we offer education. The whole idea that Schools are sports factories for our national teams, which is, is where our national players come from. They come out of the schooling system at the moment, and so schools, big schools are very effective at actually producing, those sportsmen. But I wonder where the scientists and the people who are actually transforming life for the world are coming from. and I think that, that schools need to be able to be thinking about that, as well. I just think of Elon Musk, for example. Elon Musk was, educated at a traditional top high-end, school in our country. He hated it. It just did not meet his needs. And I'm not saying that every child needs to become an Elon Musk, but it just talks to the point that sometimes we get it wrong. That school is quite famous for its sport, and it, didn't really actually meet the needs of a person like Elon Musk, who's transforming the way that we think about the world in the future at the moment.

Jacqueline Aitchison, host · [24:07]Yeah, it's the, I think it's the legacy thinking trap again. I was chatting to one of the, the local private school heads not so long ago, and he was venting his frustrations on this exact point when he, when he deals with the expectations, the sporting expectations in particular, especially when parents are enrolling a child in a specific school with the aspirations of this child becoming a provincial player or a national player. And he had reached the point where he'd said, well, in the last thirty, forty years, we've produced four or five. So how realistic are you being right now? Are you pushing something that is completely unfair on your child?

Ishan Singh, guest · [29:48]It's interesting how much of a parent's attention goes into sport when choosing a school, and the misconception that a small school can't offer that. I think the advantage, as Selwyn pointed out, is that a small school can equally offer opportunities just with collaboration. And a misconception that people often have with sport is that, it's the only way to develop teamwork. What's the advantage of playing sports is teamwork. And as we saw with our leadership camp last week, that teamwork can be achieved through different activities. And sometimes sports brings out competition more than teamwork. And there are some activities that allow people to work as teams and not leave their team behind, which is the objective. And if we circle back to our, introduction where we talked about Victorian schools, the idea of sport there was to make boys who were cut out for the Victorian life as, as a lord of some sort. Whereas here, we're equipping people with the skills of being able to work together and not leave a member of their team behind, regardless of whether it's competitive or not. I'd just like to

Gershom Aitchison, host · [30:59]reflect on the fact that the team that won was the team that was the least competitive, and I think that's an important lesson because they were more collaborative as a team working together, and the end result was more favorable.

Selwyn Marx, guest · [31:14]That brings me to the thought of teamwork is not necessarily the domain of sport. It should be the domain of the classroom as well. Nobody builds a bridge on their own. There's a team of people that put together, the final product of a bridge. And if you actually can't work in a team around the desk in the classroom, you can't work as a team on the sports field. they're, they're not entirely the same. However, there are huge similarities between the two concepts. And I think that teamwork is all about social ability to actually interact socially and effectively. And you can do that in the classroom. The problem is that if you've got a big school, Your opportunities to work in small groups and in syndicates in around the classroom setup are almost impossible. And so the big schools tend to use sport to actually develop those social interactions and that teamwork, whereas I'm not quite entirely sure that that teamwork that you develop in the sport is always efficient enough to actually build bridges.

Selwyn Marx, guest · [33:00]The world that I grew up in was an authoritarian world. You respected the authorities above you, and I'm not saying that we shouldn't respect our authority figures. I think that's still very important. But the world has changed. Our children are no longer being taught in the old-fashioned way of saying, well, I said so, so you must do. We are working collaboratively, and our classrooms are becoming collaborative learning spaces. Now, you need to be authoritative and rather than authoritarian in that particular space. The problem with big schools, they tend to lean towards authoritarianism in order to keep good order in that. That school space. Whereas in a small school environment, because you know people and you know, and they can't escape in the crowd, you actually find that your relationships there are more transparent, relationships with teachers and in between learners are more transparent, and people actually learn to live their values in a little bit more transparent manner, in a cooperative manner. You actually can't hide in the crowd and do stuff that is not seen. If you hide in the crowd, you can often do things that are unseen, whereas in a small school environment, you have to be accountable for everything that you do, and I think that's good for collaborative learning and collaborative social development.

Ishan Singh, guest · [34:25]When you ask the question, should parents choose a small school, I was reflecting on a cluster meeting that I attended once where a fellow teacher asked me, do we do group work? And that question surprised me because I thought about it, and then I realized that we don't do group work as a specific additional activity. Our classrooms are set up such that everything is group work. The, the teacher is there to mediate learning rather than to teach information, and every activity is, is a discussion. so we don't do group work as, as a scheduled activity. Everything is a collaborative, project. And in the same way, like Salman was saying, that, discipline becomes easier because those are things that we can discuss, we can have a conversation about, rather than having to just refer to the rule book. And the, the entire process is organic in that things develop and we use those as learning opportunities. I think it's important that we recognize that people are different and they benefit in different environments.