Alternative action plan for the school – adressa.no

I have through many years, first as a student and then as a father and stepfather to a total of five children and young people, accompanied them to the school. I was so provoked by how lacking I found the school to be when I went there myself, that I fled from it as soon as I could. In fact, I chose to quit when I returned home as an 18-year-old after an exchange year in France and had to go to the second year of high school all over again. It was completely out of the question. I marched out and took the last two years as a privateer. I took around 25 exams around Nord- and Sør-Trøndelag and managed all in all well, thanks to myself and a friend I worked with, not the system.

Until then, I had often been understimulated, but luckily had some teachers who saw me. Those teachers helped me become who I am. But I experienced, and still experience, that meeting the good teacher is a lottery. And the consequences are great. Many leave school with a feeling that they are unfit and that there is something wrong with them. Others leave with so-called good grades which often primarily show that they have become able to reproduce knowledge in a way that is beneficial to society.

It is society’s obvious task to offer each individual child the very best for that particular child. Norway and the world need tens of thousands of minds who are able to think outside the box. It is not necessarily difficult to facilitate this, but today’s Norwegian school is so far inside the box that it does not see that there is anything outside.

We pay brokers, lawyers and many other millions in annual salary for jobs that are nowhere near as important as giving our children the desire to find out about the world and themselves. It is difficult to point to something that is more crucial for the future of a society than teachers who are highly professionally trained, curious about new and up-to-date knowledge and genuinely motivated to find out how each individual student can be helped to fulfill their potential. The teacher must be allowed to escape being hung up in new public management’s idiotic labyrinths of goal management and rule of form. Fortunately, there are already many good teachers, but to make the teaching profession really attractive, society must show that we appreciate it. And since we measure most things in terms of money, increasing teacher pay would be a sensible place to start. The starting salary may well be, for example, nine hundred thousand, and after ten to fifteen years, the salary should approach one and a half million. My pleasure. Presumably, it will be one of the most economically profitable investments that it is possible to make.

Then there is the fact that people are different. This is what the Norwegian unitary school is struggling to take on board. In connection with research for something completely different, I recently came across an enjoyable YouTube clip of Tor-Mikkel Wara from the Frp’s national meeting in 1989. I am far from Wara politically, have never previously quoted him, and am unlikely to do so again, I don’t trust his party’s school solutions either, but still, truth is truth. In a rant against the then AUF leader Turid Birkeland, Wara says: “People are different. Let’s respect that. Let’s take that into account, and there is nothing negative in that point of view.”

Exactly. It is just a fact. Different starting points and interests must be met differently. When everyone is going into the same shape, it goes without saying that opportunities remain unexploited. I have personally observed how a prestigious secondary school in Oslo, where the headmaster said at the welcome meeting that he should have the city’s highest average, finished speaking, was not able to meet someone who was talented, but a little different. The school had no idea what to do, because the days flew by with one national test after another. Some smart kids see through the scheme, realize it’s bullshit and lose motivation. Others drop out because the pressure gets too hard. On another occasion, when one of my sons’ class was learning about the Holocaust, the kitsch film “The Boy in the Striped Pajamas” was shown. This is what teachers do who mean well but don’t know any better. We are completely dependent on teachers who know what they are doing. A school that deprioritises reading eventually produces teachers who have not read themselves, and who quickly end up reproducing what a narrow-minded school system has taught them to reproduce.

The strange belief in equality makes us less able to cope with difference. In an article in Aftenposten Innsikt in March, it emerges that Canada experiences less involuntary school absences than Norway because they have started to tailor education for students who do not reach their full potential in regular schools. If the public joint school is to have a future, Norway must follow suit.

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