Lib Ed - reviews

Jamie’s Dream School, Channel 4

 

Jamie’s Dream School was a well-intentioned series of programmes following
twenty disaffected young people aged between 16 and 18, to see what
happened when they were given specialist teaching by experts. They had
each left school with, on average, rather less than one GCSE grade A-C. The
list of people ready to attempt to involve this unpromising group was
astonishingly rich, and included, for instance, Simon Callow, Rankin, Ellen
MacArthur, Cherie Blair and Jazzy B. (There is a full list on the web, at
www.channel4.com/programmes/jamies-dream-school/4od)

The programmes showed a good deal of crowd-pleasing conflict between
students and teachers. Many people probably shared the opinion of Victoria
Coren, writing in the Observer, who blamed the conflict on the students, but
in fact it was set up in the very structure of the school. The students had spent
eleven years or more in a system which had condemned them as useless.
They naturally resented being reminded of that fact, but when they arrived at
Dream School they were made to wear school uniform. In the less successful
lessons they had to sit down in rows while teachers talked at them about
topics which did not interest them. Though most of the courses were far from
traditional, the requirement to submit to authority was unchanged, and the
curriculum, though sometimes sensational, was the same for everybody. It
was the familiar mainstream school approach. Harlem, one of the most
vociferous of the student group, declares on the website, ’Mainstream school
WILL ALWAYS BE RUBBISH.’ In the circumstances the astonishing thing is
not that there was so much conflict between the teachers and the students, but
that there was so little.

The Dream School gave its students individual cameras, time in a recording
studio, the chance to live in a specially assembled bio-dome, a realistic
emergency operation in a hospital, a medieval joust, a visit to the stage of the
Globe Theatre.

There were facilities that could never have been afforded in an ordinary
school, but it was not the facilities that helped to change the young people’s
attitudes. The teachers who succeeded were those who respected them as
individuals, gave them practical activities to do or worked with them in areas
that interested them. We saw teachers who had been finding the class
unmanageable having serious and sensible conversations with individuals
whose faces lit up when they were given personal attention. Jazzie B inspired
delight, as did Andrew Motion and Tinchy giving a class together (an episode
available on the website which was not shown on TV). Nor were we shown
the percussion group Stomp and the stunning break-dancers, Soul Mavericks,
who had the group working with unfeigned enthusiasm and commitment.

The real head-teacher, John d’Abbro, who was playing the role of head at the
Dream School, says in an interview on the website, ‘For me successful
teaching is down to the quality of relationships.’ However, like many other
people, he is still worried about the fact that half the population leave school
with fewer than five GCSEs. This anxiety is irrational. What happens if
everyone leaves school with five GCSEs? Are we planning a society with all
chiefs and no Indians? More importantly, do we really need to divide
ourselves into chiefs and Indians? Should the purpose of education in a
democratic country really be so deliberately divisive?

It is not 5 GCSEs that matter, it is a sense of purpose and self-worth. Jamie’s
Dream School, almost by mistake, demonstrated that young people who have
been humiliated by years and years of so-called education, regain their self-
respect when they are treated as equals.

The experiment described in Dartington in Conisbrough1 was similar, in that it
involved a group of fifteen teenage boys who were among those thought to be
least likely to gain anything from an extra year of schooling when the school-
leaving age was raised from 15 to 16 in 1973. There were no celebrity teachers,
there was no special equipment. There was only an opportunity for the boys
to choose for themselves what they wanted to do and to decide how they
wanted the group to be run. In their previous year at school their average
attendance had been three days a week. By the third week of the new scheme, it was up to 98%, and never afterwards fell below 92%. All went on to enjoy
their careers. and two of them are alleged to have become millionaires.

The young people at Jamie’s Dream School were between one and three years
older than the Conisbrough group, and yet the effort was still made to turn
them into obedient, uniformed school-children. Had the school been run on
more democratic lines, had the students been consistently treated as young
adults rather than retarded children, the results might have been even more
impressive.

1 The book Dartington in Conisbrough by Pat Kitto, available from www.libed.org.uk, reviewed in our last posting.

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