Banbury Crossroads School - Calgary

During February, we celebrate human relationships. Valentine’s Day highlights the joy inherent in loving someone, and Family Day sets time aside to focus on creating positive bonds within family groups. We are wise to recognize the merit in this most elemental of human organizations the family. It is through the intimate sizes of these small units that parents and other elders are able to provide the nurturing and instruction that children need, in order to participate successfully in our complex culture. Families are very efficient in this regard because family members usually care about each child individually, and they care about intellectual understanding, moral reasoning, physical development, creative exploration, and emotional growth that occur within each child individually. It is for this reason that our school is based upon the structure of the family. This decision in effect means that we provide a learning environment for children that challenges the practices in more institutionalized schools.

It may be helpful to realize that the structure for our typical Western educational institutions was created according to the model of the factory system that was developed during the Industrial Revolution. Mandatory public education was only instituted around 1854 when the Factory Act in England was issued. It was set up to deal with the youth who ran loose on the streets of the factory towns. They were not allowed, according to the child labour laws, to work yet in the factories, but at the same time had no useful work or occupation to do in an urban environment. Some factory owners had realized before this time that it would be helpful to provide an education for the children of their workers because it would be training for that setting. (Remember also, that the children of the affluent received tutorial instruction in their Banbury, before setting out for university.) It was a stroke of genius for the factory owners to create schools like factories because the children learned to obey the teacher (the boss) and to value conformity through such elements as mass punctuality, uniformity of instruction, and uniformity in expectation of the product. They also learned to solve problems that other people gave them, on their desks, according to other people’s organizational plans. This experience would prepare them to handle their tasks more efficiently on the assembly lines. In our era, enlightened people have complained about the pitfalls of this approach, the major ones being that it does not satisfy the needs of individuals and that it does not allow for big-picture, creative and critical thinking. These problems are actually very significant, especially in a democratic political structure. These problems also create many of the social ills that our society is beset with, and which keep social workers busy, very busy. The ideas that bigger is better, that education must revolve around economic bottom lines, that the organization of activity is more efficient for the teacher if it involves children all of the same age (and thus with the same expected ability to understand instruction) are all extremely problematic. These ideologies have produced huge schools and classrooms wherein students cannot possibly care about all of their classmates. This, in turn, leads to reasonless bullying and the impracticability of showing them how to solve problems or deal wisely with their feelings. The isolation felt by many, many students in thousands of schools across the Western world also comes from the connotation felt within classrooms that students are supposed to learn how to be alone in a crowd. They are told, – Pay attention to your own work, not to your neighbor’s! The ostensible purpose for saying this is to promote concentration, and that is a useful object. However, it ought not to happen all the time, since this solitary focus does not promote cooperative learning, a skill very suitable for work in the adult world. Another problem is that the minute adults organize children by age, instantly, competition is introduced to the group because you cannot avoid seeing the differences that are there in children of the same age. Competition amongst young children is not helpful in their quest for self-esteem, since it leads to frustration and performance anxiety. Furthermore, it promotes selfish behaviour, and it reduces moral reasoning to its lowest ebb with the belief that winning at others’ expense is not only justifiable but honorable. As you can see, there are many and sundry reasons for encouraging educational reform in our culture, especially as our culture particularly reveres the idea of liberty, and liberty cannot exist without mutual respect. Our school is a living example of this principle, and we are very proud of it. (read more here)