teachers

What it means to educate a human being has been debated since ancient times, and despite entire systems of schooling being devised and revised over millennia, the question remains: What is the best way to prepare the next generation to be thoughtful, productive, contributing members of society?

Many of us have ideas about school that are colored by our own experiences, and when we hear about a drastically different model, it challenges our notions of what should be or could be. For example, an American teacher named Stephanie (@ritabteaches), who now teaches in Spain, shared a video listing things she's experienced in her Spanish school that would blow the minds of her colleagues in the U.S.

"Starting off strong, number one, the dress code," Stephanie says. "It's not a very professional dress code. The first week I was there, the principal and the director were wearing crop tops. So I saw their belly buttons, and I've continued to see it since then."

Second, the kids call her by her first name. "They don't even know my last name," she says. And perhaps most unfamiliar to American sensibilities, there's no bell schedule. There's a schedule, and school starts at 9 a.m. and ends at 2 p.m., but there are no bells. "You just transition when you want to transition, so everything ends five minutes late, starts five minutes late," she says. "You just kind of go with the flow, and that's the Spanish culture."

The always-open doors, the lack of safety threats, the hugging, the constantly switching languages, the lack of phones, the relaxed culture—so much of it is unimaginable when all you've seen is an average school in the American public school system.

There's not one right way to educate children.Photo credit: Canva

To be fair, this is one teacher's experience in one school in Spain, and there are undoubtedly a range of educational models there just as there are in the U.S. But it's always helpful to see people doing something differently than we imagine is normal or necessary when it comes to education.

Even the idea of bells marking time for different subjects is ingrained in most Americans' psyches as an inherent element of school, though it's not actually universal. And as former award-winning New York City public school teacher John Taylor Gatto pointed out, the way we use bells in schools is worth questioning. As he wrote in his book, Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling:

“Indeed, the lesson of bells is that no work is worth finishing, so why care too deeply about anything? Years of bells will condition all but the strongest to a world that can no longer offer important work to do. Bells are the secret logic of school time; their logic is inexorable. Bells destroy the past and future, rendering every interval the same as any other, as the abstraction of a map renders every living mountain and river the same, even though they are not. Bells inoculate each undertaking with indifference.”

Studying Back To School GIF by Finch Care Giphy

If something as simple as a bell can be viewed so differently, what other school habits might we want to reconsider?

People in the comments of Stephanie's video shared their thoughts:

"Crazy how dress code actually doesn't impact professionalism at all."

"I love the no phones. Let the kids be kids."

"This is my daughter's third year teaching in Madrid. She says a lot of the same. I love Spain."

"9-2 imagine that ..and I bet those children are happy and well educated in that time frame."

"Bells are part of American capitalism. Bells training is to prepare people for factory work."

"I think schools are designed to educate in the way they'll experience society when they're grown. We use bells, structures, etc. to prepare for our workforce. They remove those because in their adult life, life is more relaxed."

"As an American who has kids in the Spanish school system the physical contact is my favourite...my boys get so many hugs and kisses throughout the day and they feel so incredibly loved."

Many American teachers aren't allowed to hug students. Photo credit: Canva

While it's tempting to assign "good" or "bad" to the comparisons, it might be useful to simply look at the differences as proof that what we think is normal or standard simply isn't. It's difficult to enact necessary change if we can't envision doing things a different way, so seeing examples of school being done differently, but effectively, can go a long way toward embracing the kinds of reforms that might actually improve our education system.

And the truth is, there is really no single best school model because humans are complicated and individuals are unique. Cultures, families, and personalities differ. Educational philosophers themselves have different views on what learning can and should look like, and applying whatever wisdom we've gained about education to the masses is an enormously complex undertaking. But given how important education is to the future of the entire human race, it's worth exploring different approaches.