WHAT MAKES SCHOOL SO RESISTANT TO CHANGE? The Wittgensteinian approach.

1. WHAT MAKES SCHOOL SO RESISTANT TO CHANGE?The Wittgensteinian approach.

2. Learning and school are two completely separate and unrelated concepts.

3. We meet intellectual difficulties if we try to base schoolwork on learning.

4. It is of no value only to criticize the conventions of the school.

5. It is of key importance to understand why the unwanted characteristics develop in the first place.

6. The school is intended to provide circumstances which are appropriate to determine marks and degrees rather than to learn.

7. The marks and degrees guide the flow of the students to their higher education, adulthood professions, social relationships and economical status.

8. All learning at school is subordinated to this.

9. Evaluation pays attention predominantly on the adopted facts instead of enthusiasm towards learning.

10. The students lose their strive for independent thinking but become masters of foretelling how the teachers expect them to think.

11. The best performers of this ”creative thinking” will be priced with good marks.

12. Co-operation with other students easily lowers the rank of the altruistic ones.

13. This is why co-operatively intended learning so frequently transforms into completely chaotic mess.

14. Because the general level of the students has an effect on the actual length of the scale, it becomes socially intelligent not to learn too much.

15. Competition at school gets turned into reverse competition.

16. School Mark Economics: The one-dimensional quantity of learning (=marks) supersedes the multi- or even pan-dimensional quality of learning.

17. This seriously damages both the student´s and the teacher´s intrinsic motivation and replaces it with superficial learning and teaching strategies.

18. The students learn how to give an impression as if they were learning.

19. The same applies to the teachers and teaching.

20. A radically different way of thinking about learning and the identity of the school is needed.

21. Learning is a state of mind. This is not a cliché.

22. STILL: The expected difficulties in determining the marks are regularly used both to support the conventional classroom methodologies as well as to shoot down alternative approaches.

23. Neither does information and communication technology reach its influence to the way how the school understands its own identity.

24. The notorious curve of Gauss effectively demonstrates how school provides protection against alienation and social segregation.

25. What the students truly study in a constructivistic manner, proves to be the teachers.

26. The teachers´ constructivism is similarly restricted towards, for example, the matriculation exams.

27. Creativity is not learned by avoiding mistakes, except, of course, creativity in avoiding mistakes.

28. Real (high quality) learning becomes (low quality) school learning almost inevitably if the learning results later become targets of exam based scrutiny.

29. This leads to misunderstanding that to learn is the same as to remember the facts.

30. The teacher has to combine two incompatible roles of profession: the student´s coach and the controller of the school marks.

31. The student is supposed to confide to a coach, who in the student´s mind belongs to the opposing team. This carries along a self-supporting bilateral lack of trust.

32. This, in turn, gives birth to a specific form of learning where the learners learn to keep their weaknesses hidden.

33. An arms race between the student and the teacher turns hollow all the recommendations about the importance of a deep-oriented learning strategy.

34. Evaluation motivates its performers because of the feeling of power it arouses.

35. But to seriously hand over the responsibility for evaluation to the students themselves is unthinkable.

36. Learning, thanks to our recent technological development, has in an ever greater extent become independent of time, independent of place and independent of teaching.

37. This swiftly proceeding cultural transition has struck the school by a complete surprise.

38. We carry along our networks and the networks we carry are representations of ourselves.

39. What used to be cognition has transformed to co-ignition.

40. This is why convincing Internet presence belongs to the degrees that matter for the most.

41. But, information becomes knowledge only after it is processed in ways that makes it a part of the learner´s own inner self.

42. If disregarding this with the excuse of ICT, we easily bring up empty and hollow students who only by their looks resemble human beings.

43. It has proven to be difficult to think with pure brain.

44. I think with concepts. Therefore I am.

45. This is why the profession of the teacher does not essentially transform according to the media where the information originally is stored.

46. Because of its co-operational and equitable essence, ICT often makes managing the conventional ways of schoolwork even harder.

47. The assessment centric school, in contrast with ICT, encourages and requires behaviour that is selfkeeping.

48. How to unite ICT with school, still largely stays unsolved in the school systems organized around rank-orderism.

49. It easily gives birth only to a separate layer of extra work with no proper connections to the regular school life.

50. The officially justified, constant and prominent attraction to social segregation is an organic part of the school institution´s proper identity.