The Decline of Common Sense in Education

The world of early childhood teaching today is fraught with codes, rules and expectations. Many of these are developed and established for the benefit and safety of children, with the backing of research, but in some cases rules are only in place to protect the teacher or early years education service from future liability. Is there a price to pay for reputation and liability insurance? Does laying out restrictions to cover the facilitator in the case of possible future fallout in fact hinder children’s development? It is our responsibility as educators, and indeed simply as important adults in a child’s life, to foster the critical life tool of common sense, but could it be that we are failing the next generation by not recognising this? As a kindergarten teacher accountable to a Department of Education, a great many other organisations, regulations, legislations and basically every kind of ‘ation’ you can think of, I see signs of a withering society of independent problem-solvers day by day making way for a non-thinking machine, fuelled by a plethora of anaesthetised minds.

Let’s paint the picture. Janie is five. She can ride a bike without training wheels, she can blow out the candles on her birthday cake in one breath, and she crosses the road when she needs to, holding her mummy’s hand. At kindergarten Janie and her peers are all exploring the outdoors at their own pace. While others run up and down the grassy slope, kick footballs, or swing on swings, Janie makes for the bottom of the slide. Janie is urged on by instinct, to further her physical skills, strengthen her muscles, and perhaps learn a little about friction and gravity along the way. There is no other child nearby. A teacher calls out, “No Janie, you mustn’t go up the slide. It’s only for going down!”

This happened. But I was not said teacher. Nor will I ever be, if given the autonomy to make this teaching decision for myself. In fact, I was the teacher supervising close by, sidling over to discuss the matter with a colleague from another group, who was telling my child what not to do. I started with an apology. “Oh, are they not allowed to go up the slide? Sorry, I’ve actually been allowing them to, as no one ever mentioned this rule to me before. What’s the reasoning?” The reply was that it was a safety matter, because another child might try to come down the slide at the same time, and a collision could ensue. I apologised again, adding that the other teacher might have to repeat this instruction many times that day to different children in my group, because I’d been permitting the practice all year. I was discontent, however.

If you have no experience with raising or teaching children, or indeed even if you do, you may be wondering why this bothered me so. Let’s examine the facts again. What we know about Janie: she is five, she can ride a bike without training wheels, she can blow out the candles on her birthday cake in one breath, and she crosses the road when she needs to, holding her mummy’s hand. If Janie is five, and capable of riding a bike without training wheels, she has developed some significant gross motor competence. If she can blow out the candles on her birthday cake, then she has learned how to be up close to an open flame without catching her hair and clothes on fire. If she crosses the road when she needs to, holding her mummy’s hand, then she has been educated in road safety.

Crossing roads is a part of life

The Australian early childhood curriculum recognises children as “capable and competent” and expects teachers to treat children as such. Janie has good physical skills, and confidence in these. She has been equipped with strategies for identifying danger, such as looking and listening before acting, and she has been trusted by the important adults in her life to be up close to potential hazards and utilise these strategies to keep herself safe. If Janie has these capabilities, and this experience under her belt, why is it that in a kindergarten setting, she isn’t permitted or trusted to climb up the slide in a safe manner? In order to treat Janie as capable and competent, teachers should be cautioning her of the possible dangers, such as collision with children coming down the slide, and instructing her on ways to avoid or reduce the probability of these dangers eventuating, such as checking if there are children at the top before attempting to climb. Having given these life lessons (which, let’s face it, is what teachers are paid to do), we should be putting trust in Janie to apply them in a practical setting, so she can develop experience with the subtle discrepancies to which our given guidelines may be subject.

Taking calculated risks is how children put common sense into practice

If it is accepted that Janie needs first-hand experience with applying safety guidelines, it must be accepted that, once in a blue moon, an accident may happen. Within the parameters of a kindergarten setting, with adult supervision enacted, the worst that may happen as a result of misjudgement in this particular circumstance does not compare with the worst that may happen when a child misjudges crossing the road, yet Janie has previously been trusted to cross the road. The worst does not compare with the worst that may happen when Janie leans in too close to blow out the candles, yet she’s previously been trusted to blow out the candles. Why then, do teachers put no trust in Janie to climb the slide safely by first checking that the coast is clear? Because if anything does go wrong, they may be found negligent, or at the very least subject to scrutiny, by the Department of Education or other even higher organisation. As a consequence, Janie is deprived of exercise and further gross motor development, deprived of lessons in physics and, most critically, deprived of lessons in common sense. What does she learn instead? That pre-dictated rules, not logic, determine sensible practice in life, and that no risk should ever be taken. If this is the lesson all children of Janie’s age are learning today, what kind of society will we have on our hands in 20 years’ time? No innovation, that’s for sure. No courage. And no capacity to think and act independently.

When did society’s infrastructure become so regimented that professional discretion could no longer play a part in decision-making? Who is this benefitting? My ventured guess would be no one. Perpetuating, consolidating and intensifying a culture of blanket-ruling in every profession is not conducive to fostering a generation of critical and independent thinkers, at any age level. I’ll give a non-teaching-related example. My father-in-law is recently retired, having worked hard successfully managing a veterinary clinic for several decades. His work ethic and income were such that he and my mother-in-law are now set to enjoy the fruits of their labour. One project they undertook a few months post-retirement was to purchase a lakeside property to ‘do up’. Think of a time a few decades ago, before housing market and financial crises were cropping up in nation after nation all over the world. If a hard-working, trustworthy, recently retired man with substantial cash assets were to apply for a home loan smaller than the amount he had in his bank account, the bank manager would grant the loan without much question. After all, the mortgage could be paid by the retiree in one swipe if needed. Common sense would indicate this was a safe bet for the bank.

Jump forward 40 or 50 years to today’s global economic climate. Were my in-laws to be granted the mortgage? Nope. Why might this be? Because, they were told, since the time of my father-in-law’s retirement, their outgoings were higher than their ‘ingoings’ on that bank account (well, duh!) which meant that according to the bank’s formula, they could not be relied upon to pay back the mortgage. This in spite of the fact that they had accumulated more than enough money in the account to buy the property outright in cash. The point I make by this example is that common sense is no longer applied as part of the formula in today’s system of governance, or in general existence for that matter. And here I am trying to do my part to foster the development of common sense in the next generation, with little affordance to do so, and pitiful modelling of common sense in the current generations, across other professional sectors. If those of us best placed to support children in learning to think for themselves are being forced to act without discretion, what hope is there for the next generation to apply any common sense whatsoever?

If you ever meet Janie, I implore you to let her climb up the slide. If we don’t, the future for humankind is looking grim indeed.

Let Janie climb, so she may see for herself