“Let’s Stop Blaming Schools”: Ger Graus, Global Director of Education at KidZania

Ger Graus, Global Director of Education at KidZania, discusses the globalization of growing up, the need for better scholarships, and the role of parents as co-educators.

Transcript

CHILDREN’S ASPIRATIONS MATTER

Ger Graus: I think partly we know we talk a lot about education in the 21st-century and we talk a lot about the new curricular technology and all those things. I think we don’t talk enough about the individual. One of the consequences, I think of development’s education in terms of society, is that the individuals matter more. So if we take schooling as it was, actually we use the United Kingdom as an example, in the industrial revolution and beyond that, the purpose of schooling, in many ways, was to fulfill the need for the world of work. So, we need shipbuilders, we’ll train, we’ll school shipbuilders, whatever it is, we need people to work in the cotton mills, we’ll do that, too.

Now what we’re entering is fear of a kind of individualism. The mass approaches seem to be vanishing into the world of work, in society, in general, and, therefore, education too, I think. So, the question becomes what for? Why do we go to school? Because we don’t. Certainly in the UK and I suggest that in many other countries, we don’t go to school anymore for the mass production of workforces, but to enhance the chances and life chances and opportunities and well-being of the individual. So, therefore, we need to focus more on individual children’s aspirations, and I think the education system, our schooling system, particularly at secondary ages, set up so the economies at scale, with schools that are so big that we don’t get the chance to get to know the individual.

We know the children’s academic potential, we know their attendance record, we know their grades, we know if they’re, like me, naughty, we know that they’re naughty but apart from that, suddenly 80% of them, they’re still part of that mass. Therefore, to create a focus on the individual child, their aptitudes, their skills, their interests, their dreams, their aspirations, it is incredibly important and then combines with that, you’ll have that thing that every child lives on its own contextual bubble. So if I’m a girl, then I’m expected to be in certain ways. If I’m black or white then I’m expected to behave differently, if I come from a socioeconomically deprived background, then certain things don’t seem to be accessible to me. So, to get to know the children individually better and their circumstances better allows us as educational specialists to help them fulfill their own potential more, that’s it, I think.

The other thing is we need to think about, and I’ve said this at a conference, we need to stop asking children about what they want to be, we need to focus on who they want to be. This is an interesting thing as well, which exercises my mind a lot. Technology, as you and I noted, technology is speedily developed, and everybody has told you and I for years that our lives would get easier because of all the technology and we might even, at some point, work 4 days a week, but it doesn’t feel like it, right? And because what technology does to me is that e-mails arrive at one o’clock in the morning now, but I have the trust and the faith that at some point the technology will help people have more time.

One of the things we need to think about with our children is about who they want to be as if you had an extra day per week, how would you meaningfully use that? Surely not sitting behind a screen for a whole day, but you might go and volunteer or you might go and whatever, so it’s about that development that sits well with us, I think.

GLOBALIZATION OF GROWING UP

Ger Graus: KidZania is an interesting example, almost as a research garden, because essentially what it is, as you know in Mexico, it’s a city for children where children can learn about the world of work and from airplanes to operating theatres to television studios and theatres and sport grounds and chores in supermarkets, you name it. Each KidZania has about 60 jobs, Youtubers in São Paulo, and the kids can choose when they come in, and they get KidZanian money and they can spend and they can earn, and they can get interest and a bank account. It’s like a live economy in a live city, and typically a child can engage for about 4 hours, the ages range from 4 to 14, and most importantly, when the children come inside, the adults, the accompanying adults being teachers or parents, are there to be seen and not heard, there they can’t interfere.

This playground is the children’s, and this world is the children’s, and then to observe them we can learn lots of lessons, we get to know the kids better and we pass that information through analysis with Tec de Monterrey, through analysis, we pass it on to educationalists and people with like OCD or whatever. But to go to your point, there are differences, what our research shows is there are perhaps not where we might expect them, so we’ve done research on what’s children’s first choices, and then we look at who the kids are, right? And we’ve done this in Mexico, in the UK, in Turkey, in India, and we’re doing all the others, and what we’re finding is that between the nations the differences are, as the statisticians say, statistically insignificant. (OFF: The children are the same everywhere). Yes, and that’s an interesting thing. I think the answer to that is simple; I think there is something like globalization of growing up.

I had no idea in how many languages Peppa Pig exists, for example, and YouTube, of course, is a global phenomenon, and at the same time, KidZanias are in malls, in shopping malls, and sometimes, when I travel a lot, I don’t know which country I’m in because when I walk into the mall, we’ve got mall in Kuala Lumpur, we’ve got mall in Mexico City, we’ve got mall in Dubai, I see the same brands, I see the same shop layouts, right? There’s a Zara, H&M, and Adidas, whatever-it-is-shop, in all of them, and literally you have to think “where am I today?”

So, you think of the impact of that imagery, and that storytelling on children, and maybe it’s not a surprise that they’re not that different, right? But there are differences within that that are very clearly pronounced, so, and I think sometimes we, as educators or policymakers, thought we were doing better than we are, so our research shows that all stereotypes are set at the age of 4, and probably before, and actually that they are as bad, if you wish, as they could be. So you take activities for 4-year-olds, you go to the airplane, cabin, pilot, 90% girls cabin crew 90% boys pilot, and so it permeates throughout the city, and the interesting thing from me on that one is it’s at the age of 4. So this is before they go to school, this is before they’ve been taught anything, this is before they’ve been institutionalized, educationally, so where does that come from? You know, that comes from the family that comes from grandparents, but that also must come from their environment, from the Peppa Pig in whichever language, and from the shopping mall they go to, and from the image, they see because there’s still the pink and the blue.

LET’S STOP BLAMING SCHOOLS

Ger Graus: I think we must not make the schools responsible for everything. It seems to be a global phenomenon, right? Schools have now been seen politically as a solution to all of society’s ills, right? If I reflect it on the United Kingdom, sex education is the school’s job, drug education is the school’s job, knife crime? The school will deal with it. Where are the other components of society that are meant to be the role models and lead by example?

I love the schools that my wife is principal of, because it’s a school that functions against the odds, and it also shows what’s possible. I don’t mean about the academic, right? So I walk into that school, and every child will say “good morning”, and when I walk down the corridor, the children will hold the door for me, they will ask me, if I say “how are you?, good morning”, their reply will be “I’m fine, thank you, how are you?” That wasn’t taught in a classroom. That was modeled by the other adults around them, and I think one of the things that the research shows is that this is my question, particularly on the 4-year-olds before they go to school, is who is the teacher? Who is responsible for where they are? We all are, aren’t we? And the minute we realize that the minute we know that we are role models, all of us, then we should stop throwing rubbish out the car windows, yeah? It permeates through life.

We should stop sitting behind screens all the time, we should put them away and have conversations, very simple things that move those things on. It isn’t all about teaching and it is about the awareness if you, and I’m absolutely certain that at a university of your standing. If Tec de Monterrey knows that it has a number of students who originate from a socially deprived background, you know who they are, you can easily put them in touch with other students who will look after them and put together a mentoring program, because it’s what you do well. If we teach to the masses, going back to the early point, that we don’t know our individual people and we can’t do anything about it, and in the end, I think we will harvest tremendous success if we do that because it is about the individual and looking after them.

THE NEED FOR BETTER SCHOLARSHIPS

Ger Graus: I see a lot about scholarships. We were talking about it the other night, weren’t we? So what, particularly independent schools, private schools use, they give a scholarship, and what that means is they will pay the fee or they will waive the fee for the schooling. But put yourself into Charles’s shoes: they still need a uniform in many schools, they still can’t afford to go on all the trips, they can’t, they still can’t quite be like all the others. So, my suggestion (OFF: so they feel the same), yes. So my suggestion for a number of independent schools has been “give fewer scholarships but give better ones,” yes? So that Charles doesn’t feel “I can’t go skiing” or “I can’t go to the theatre.” “I can’t do this or that.” If you give one, do it for the whole chart instead of just the academic riff (OFF: so they grasp the full experience like the others.) Yes (OFF: that are in a different) otherwise they will always feel, otherwise what you buy, what you’re buying them is a ticket to feeling inferior, I don’t think that’s very fair, and I think fairness is a really important word in education and schooling.

CONTINUOUS STUDENT SUPPORT

Ger Graus: My wife is the principal of a school in England, of a number of schools, but one of the schools is in what is statistically seen as a very deprived area and the school does exceptionally well. The school gets some of those children to get scholarships to private schools, because they’ve done so well, academically they’ve done so well, and now they’ll go into university, which is not the point as a principal, where she sees the first cohort of children going into university. We talk about this a lot: those children are still from a deprived background, even when they go to university, and an education system still needs to provide additional support even when they’re 20 and they’re past the entrance test or whatever. They come from a background that is socioeconomically deprived that often has parents who are not that well educated themselves.

There’s evidence that there are very few books at home. There’s evidence that when those children start school they have a limited vocabulary, that they have limited life experiences, and in many ways, in some of those aspects, they will always be slightly behind their peers as they grow up. Then it becomes our responsibility going back to the very first void, to keep knowing our individual children students and to keep providing support where it’s needed, be that through mentors or through additional tuition, or be that additional activities. We have to keep supporting them until they come out of their cocoon and the butterfly can fly, but I think that’s much later on because I think confidence, for example, is something that takes a long time to build up in all sorts of circumstances.

PARENTS AS CO-EDUCATORS

Ger Graus: A good friend of mine, Bill McFarland, who is a television presenter in the UK, Bill wrote a book called “Drop the Pink Elephant,” and I urged everybody who works with children to buy the book and read it because it’s about language, and it’s about the language that we unknowingly confront our students and our children with. So, when you do a tour of the school, and you look at all the signs in the school, it tells you everything you can’t do: don’t talk, don’t walk on the left, don’t run, dark, negative, right? So, Bill says, “change the wording,” put “walk” and “please be silent” or whatever. Positivize the language. Ever since I read that book, every e-mail I write, I go back over and I take out the no’s and the can’ts and the don’ts, and then since that is your reflection, and know that we will never get it right, but the fact that you might have dinner over the weekend and you talk to your friends about it. It’s about empowerment, it’s about us, also schools, turning to parents and saying “you’re part of this, you may feel that we’ve excluded you from this process, but you’re part of this, we can’t, we can school your children without you but we can’t educate them without you”. Yeah?

So (OFF: so there’s a difference), so you need to take an interest when they come home and help and co-educate them at home. Ask them about the homework, ask them about what was difficult, yeah? And maybe schools are set to, some elementary schools, once a week, you should set a family homework, a homework that can only be completed if the whole family takes part, it might just be watching a David Attenborough program for half an hour or whatever, right? On plastics and the harm that it does, but I think schools are also guilty of this divide, in that they’ve gone “well, actually, we don’t like parents coming in very much, we’ll build a fence around the school or whatever it is,” right? And I think we need to open those fences because, as my wife’s motto, the motto in my wife’s school is ‘Every child is everyone’s responsibility’, and I think that that’s right. It isn’t just “that’s the school’s job” and “that’s the parents’ job”, and we need to reflect. The parent in Moscow said to me, “my children, they’re always in their room watching their telly, a television, on their phones, on their screen, they don’t communicate with me
at all”, so I said to him “who bought the television? And who put the television in the room? And do you sometimes knock on the door and say ‘can I come and watch with you’?Stop blaming the technology and other things, reflect on your own behavior and say “actually,” and I think people are busy, I get it, they’re working, they’re busy, they’re getting tired, but I think people need to spend more time with their kids meaningfully, and schools need to encourage that.

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