By Lily Radwan, Year 12
Should our school system be put into question? Is the way we’re taught outdated? Stephen Preece, a former art teacher at our school shares his philosophical thoughts about our school system.
The man behind the thoughts :
Stephen Preece “wrote off the first sixteen years of [his] life.” He learnt to read when he was nine and read his first book when he was sixteen. Later in his life he realised that he most probably was dyslexic, and never diagnosed. However he realized that “that was not the issue.” The issue was the lack of a a caring and nurturing environment.
Preece has a studio outside of school called Espace Cinq. Before and since leaving LGB, he has worked hard on making Espace Cinq a nurturing working environment. Within this studio, he helps students put together portfolios to get into the top art schools.
A quote to remember: “ I pretty much wasted my childhood, but you learn stuff from negative experiences. You can look at things and call them mistakes, or you can look at them as learning opportunities. “ Preece stated that he was not a happy child nor had a happy childhood.
A bit about Espace Cinq :
Stephen Preece used his lessons from his experiences in life in order to help him to create this studio. He has learnt that “people don’t function well when they’re under pressure, they freeze”. This is precisely what he did as a child. He has worked on creating an atmosphere in this studio that allows students to learn in a way he himself was never presented with. This is an atmosphere that does not allow students to freeze as he did in his early years.
The difference between school and the studio work :
According to Preece, with the studio, he can chose the people he works with. “It’s really quiet cool having an environment where the people you’re working with are people that you admire in some way or you think they have skill sets that you can learn from”. He adds “people have to earn admiration”.
“The problem with schools is that you’re doing too many things at once. It’s kind of confusing. You’re doubling your body size in a few years, undergoing chemical change… and right in the middle of that we’re sticking the IBs at you, the hardest exams of your life”.
He proceeds by saying “We should be looking for ways, I think, of going beyond that.” He says that we must train ourselves “to step back” from the big picture. By giving ourselves “some space, then invariably [we] can correct the mistake.” According to him, waking up early in the morning and working until late at night stunts our performance levels and that performing so highly during primary or secondary school may not be so necessary.
The problem with the system :
Stephen Preece states that sometimes the individual gets lost in the subject. Everyone is focusing on the good grades. School should be about “finding that compromise”. He compares school to “driving a Fiat 500 in Milan at rush hour but the wrong way up the street”. Life is not accelerate and break, it’s all about clutch control. Those are the skill sets that should be mentored.”
He says that reading, writing and arithmetic was “designed for an industrial world that no longer exists in the west”. Many new industries are being invented and according Preece we need to be looking at what is going on in between the subject areas. “The knowledge that is being used is not being confined to a specific subject area of an industry, it’s spilling out and morphing in lots of different ways.” So maybe our school subjects as we know them are outdated.
