Having spent 18 years in formal education it’s got to the point where I need to quit for the sake of preserving my mental health: the generalised anxiety of just being at work is becoming unbearable, so I’m going to quit at the end of this academic year. In short, I can’ts takes no more!
I'm not the only one: nearly 1/3rd of teachers in England and Wales quit within 5 years of qualifying to teach, and in the (paraphrased) words of C. Wright Mills - this is clearly a public issue rather than several hundred thousand private problems.
This post is just the very beginning of an exploration of WHY the English education system induces anxiety, and why it is so difficult (if not impossible) to resist it.
I initially thought I'd be able to bash this post out in a few hours, thinking I'd be organizing the 'problems' into 4-5 categories, but after an hour collecting my thoughts, I've settled on 11 (right click and open the image in new tab to enlarge!):
NB - I am mindful, I’ve studied Buddhism, I’ve been on retreat, I know myself intuitively just about as well as you can without going ‘full-on monk’; I can and do use meditative techniques to manage stress and anxiety: but I can no longer manage the sheer and overwhelming anxiety induced in me by the English education system.
NB2 - to all you individualised, psychologised ‘mindfulness without the rest of the Buddhist 8 fold path’ enthusiasts - even the Buddha (yes that guy who pretty much invented the term ‘mindfulness’) recognised the importance of being in the right environment in order to maintain and cultivate spiritual development.
What I am saying in this introductory post is that the English education system is most certainly NOT conducive to mindfulness. In fact, I am saying that it is so bad that even someone with lots of experience in Buddhism and mindfulness techniques (i.e. me) CANNOT protect themselves from the horrors of this system…. maybe someone with 10 years of Zen training could, maybe it would take 20, but I cannot.
I’ve tried, I’ve failed, and I have to leave voluntarily before this system grinds me into a mindless shadow of this self that, outside of this system, I might yet transcend. Whether I ‘return to the marketplace’ after said transcendence is another matter.
The mind map above outlines the 11 objectively existing, structural factors that make my day to day working life an anxiety filled hell. In future posts, I'm going to drill down into each of these and trace systemic imperative to life-world consequence... I'll probably split this series into a further 12 posts - 11 problems and a concluding post, so this is really '1/13' - I didn't put that in the title, as it'd just put people off!
Having waded through the critique, I might then do a more uplifting series of posts on positive educational models. But I need to do the critique first, it's cathartic.
The worrying thing for the English education system is that I’ve had it relatively easy for the last 18 years:
I love the subject I teach (sociology), and for 17/18 of those years, that is the only subject I have taught (so no ‘having to wing-it in a second subject); I teach the easiest age group (16-19s); I teach in a middle class area, so there are very economic barriers to learning, and they are generally very nice and willing to work; and the staff I work with, and even the management (!) are all perfectly lovely; and despite funding cuts (although that is an issue), we’re pretty well-resourced TBH (ipads in the classroom, a generous photocopying budge, enough for plenty of books for me to read to keep up to date with sociology).
To top all of that, because I teach A level, I effectively have half-time contact hours from May-June; I haven’t had to do any holiday work for about the last decade because since then I’ve been totally on top things, so I have had about 13 weeks genuine holiday a year; and to top it all, I’ve got it set up so I live a 35 minute walk away from work - so I have options: I can walk, cycle, train, or (since I bought a car) drive.
In short, if a system can cut through all of those perks and make someone like me feel so bad that I can't take it no more.... that is one SERIOUSLY FLAWED SYSTEM!
Next post (2/13)... On the Horrors of Performativity in the English education system: how constant surveillance induces unbearable anxiety in staff and students.