Author: V.M. Howe & T. Thomson
Source document
Studies and monographs on school life
On the occasion of the International Year of the Child, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization promoted consideration on how to meet children’s needs in those areas within its competence. In education, two complementary fields were explored: the child’s right to education, and the pupil’s right to a certain quality of life at school.
In the former connection, a work entitled The child’s right to education was published as early as October 1979. It comprised contributions from experts throughout the world on three topics: the nature of the right to education, the extent to which it is really exercised, and its promotion. It makes no claim o offer a definitive formulation but rather offers normative elements and makes recommendations which can already be considered by the Member States.
It is not the same with the second field, related to the child’s school life. Beginning with Living at school during the International Year of the Child, followed in 1981 by four monographs on the acquisition of independent learning behaviours by pupils from varying cultural contexts, consideration of school life will become richer as more and more contributions appear.
While looking into the conditions contributing to quality of life at school within the context of promoting the right to education, the combined Member States and the international scientific community should together work for the solution to this multidisciplinary problem, the relationship between the fulfilment of pupil per se and that of the physical, cognitive, affective and social development of the child.
Where Living at school aimed at identifying the principal variables in the concept of the school life on the scale of Unesco’s overall membership, each of the four monographs on acquiring the ability to learn on one’s own treats these educational attempts in their national context.
Thus the present study analyses experiences in British schools. The authors, V.M. Howe and E. Thomson (United Kingdom) describe the entrance structures for British pupils, the corresponding examination system and the increasing adoption during the last 30 years of a child-oriented approach to education.
Member States can extract from these studies some elements of comparison with their own problems relative to quality of school life. In particular they will notice the need to adapt the experiences specifically for each of pre-school, primary or secondary schools. In the case of secondary schools, it would appear that the sharing out of a pupil’s time among several teachers hampers the creation of an environment favourable to developing an overall “learning-on-one’s own” behaviour pattern. In addition, the efforts recorded are sectoral, dealing with one subject matter only, eg.g. French, the sciences, English, drama, technology drawing, etc.
The Secretariat wishes to express its thanks to V.M. Howe and E. Thomson for their contribution to “Studies and monographs on school life”.
The opinions stated in the present work are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of Unesco.
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