Dr TomaszTokarz is a social-skills trainer, digital-skills trainer, teacher, mediator, coach and academic lecturer. Our guest teaches lessons, classes and workshops at several alternative schools, including Alpha High School in Wrocław. He has also published a book of 30 essays about the Polish school system, "School Is for the Student." The book is an appeal for a different educational culture, based on recognising the student’s agency.
Tomasz Tokarz:
School has retained a form that is inadequate to today’s needs.
People are confined there against their will in order to change them and give them a uniform shape.
Unfortunately, some teachers have become officials whose job is to ensure that students follow instructions.
High school mainly prepares students for an exam that is completely disconnected from what people do in everyday life.
A person joining a company has to unlearn everything they were taught during four years of high school.
The matura should be a test in which people solve real-life problems.
The matura is disconnected from what is valued in professional life.
Teachers are very much needed, but not in the role into which they were cast in the 19th century—a role that continues even though everything around them is changing. A teacher should be a person who is developing.
I have the impression that students are taught by teachers with whom they have no bond, relationship, trust or genuine, rather than forced, respect.
Education based on coercion is abstract.
Students should choose three core subjects that matter to them and study those.
If someone does not like history, compulsion will not turn them into an expert on the Middle Ages or the Renaissance.
Not everyone has to be an expert in everything.
All of us adults believe that these 12 years must be devoted to meticulous learning and great effort, and only then will a person acquire the desired shape. Then it turns out that a student finishes their education without knowing basic facts.
Let children experiment in grades 4–8. Let them look for their own paths.
I use smartphones with my students; we strengthen our mutual relationships, solve GPS puzzles, conduct interviews, edit films and analyse statistical data.
Remote education is a fantastic solution in principle; in reality, in most cases, it means doing homework.
The minister said, “It has to be done, so we do it,” out of fear that someone will hold us accountable.
Teachers believe that they have a mission to fulfil.
Some of us try to give our lives meaning through sacrifice and suffering.
School should discover a young person’s potential, rather than try to change them.
School should accompany students in their development.
You can read about Tomasz Tokarz’s ideas on teaching on the Innovative Education blog. Below is an excerpt from the post:
"Yesterday at our school, when a teacher asked a fourth-grade primary-school student where he had his lesson, he replied, ‘Up my arse...’"
I read such a statement...
And you know what?
The vast majority of students do not give a damn about lessons.
Which does not surprise me at all.
A person in full possession of their mental faculties, conscious, with a sense of self-worth, neither manipulated nor intimidated, does not give a damn about lessons in their current form.