Michaela’s unspeakable truths
by Marie K. Daouda, Artillery Row:
“Progressive” teaching methods ruin lives to make middle class people feel good about themselves.
The Unspeakable Truth About Children presents Michaela Community School — the strictest school in Britain, led by the strictest headmistress in the world (just ask Google): Katharine Birbalsingh, who has recently been appointed Chair for Social Mobility.
The film, produced by Riverdog Productions, premiered on 11 May at Prince Charles Cinema.
It follows the Michaela pupils in their daily routine. Michaela is an 11 to 18 mixed, free secondary school and sixth form that frequently gets vitriolic attacks on social media for its strictness towards children. It is also among the highest-ranking schools, academically, in the UK.
We often conflate strictness with injustice, believing that any exercise of authority is dictatorial. The worst effects of the French Revolution are still evident in our approach to education. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who argued that man was born free and is manacled by social oppression, nurtured a delusion (presented in Émile, a treatise on education) about children being naturally good, and capable of attaining knowledge empirically, by direct experience.
Yet most of what we know, we learned somewhere or from someone; we did not make it up on our brilliant genius little own self.
Anyone who has met actual children knows two things: First, that they are wrong about many things; and secondly, that they love learning. The core of the Michaela system is to orient the classroom towards the teacher, in a perfectly quiet atmosphere, so that each and every child has the same chance of receiving knowledge.
Katharine Birbalsingh gives a striking example to illustrate how important it is that the teacher takes leadership in the classroom in order to ensure equal chances in learning. When a teacher tries to draw knowledge from children in the classroom, some will get there quicker than others. One would reply, and get acknowledgement from the teacher — while the teacher feels rewarded. However, most of the time, the child wouldn’t come up with the answer because he or she is the brightest, but because out of school, at home maybe, parents would already have made that information familiar.
Read also: Is cultural conservatism the key to educational success? by Rakib Ehsan, Artillery Row
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