Beyond the Clock: Cutting Through Time's Hold on Schooling

"Somehow you strayed and lost your way, and now there'll be no time to play, no time for joy, no time for friends – not even time to make amends." (Cheshire Cat, Alice in Wonderland, 1865)

Let’s talk about time.

Not every time. Certainly. Bureaucratic time. It sets our clocks and drives our schedules.  At some time, we gave this time great power.

It has risen above all other time, demanding we move through its linear orchestration of being in time.

To be out of time, is to be out of step, in danger of timing out of the success this time has configured. Phases and stages, outcomes and pre-requisites.

Attempting to counter this just wastes time. Better to stay on time and on track.

As an educator I am struck by the deep assumption of this time’s ascendancy. We are so enthralled, that we subjugate our children’s human-time to the rigid hand of that time. A child’s biological blueprint determines their arc of growth and development, their physical, cognitive, emotional and imaginative manifestations of human-time. We know this. We honour this in the family and in early learning contexts. And then we call time on the natural cycle of growth.

The child is now compelled to develop according to a pre-ordained time we call ‘schooling’. Human milestones are organised by year and unit and outcome. This bureaucratic organisation of time super imposes itself upon the child’s own time. If a child persists in school they will exchange an estimated 15,000 hours of their bio-social time to a time that sorts, segments and funnels. We find this logical, scalable, and quantifiable.

We have made a hero out of a thief.

For this time is incapable of cherishing a child, of dignifying many pathways towards multiple futures. It schools children in an archetype of categorisation that constrains their agency. Now, the natural rhythms of a child’s life are subdued so that timetables and programs can be measured against clocks and calendars. The pace is ceaseless. For this time is an abstraction of power, a bureaucratic concept that needs no rest.

School time, made visible through bells, schedules, and pre-set periods and sequences, has created a resilient norm of how children experience time. All other ways of time have been colonised and eschewed for a time that predictably measures and filters, ensuring children are in the right place, at the right time, for the right duration of time. Through schooling, bureaucratic time is culturally transmitted, absorbed and assumed to be the legitimate organising structure for learning.

We have reinforced a stubborn cognitive bias for a model of time that we conceived, and then turned upon ourselves.

So routine is this experience it lies below the surface of much of the vast repository of scholarly and regulatory analysis of the way we educate children. Until we are truly prepared to countenance that schooling could be premised on forms of time that are not governed by clocks, that is not uni-directional, that is not always animated by what is finite and quantifiable, we will remain bound to this paradigm where structure not human agency defines the limits of potential and creative human permutations.

It's time.

References

Adam, B. (1995). Timewatch: The Social Analysis of Time. Polity Press.

Bear, L. (2014). Doubt, conflict, mediation: The anthropology of modern time. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Journal, 20(S1), 3-30.

Bronfenbrenner, U. (1997). Toward an experimental ecology of human development. American Psychologist, 32(7), 513-535.

Brown, B., Alonso-Yanez, G., Friesen, S., & Jacobsen, M. (2020). High school redesign: Carnegie unit as a catalyst for change. Canadian Journal of Educational Administration and Policy, 193, 97-114.

Fortunato, V. J., & Furey, J. T. (2011). The theory of MindTime: The relationships between future, past, and present thinking and psychological wellbeing and distress. Personality and Individual Differences, 50(1), 20-24.

Hodges, M. (2008). Rethinking time's arrow: Bergson, Deleuze and the anthropology of time. Anthropological Theory, 8(4), 399-429.

 McElheran, J. J. (2012). Time perspective, wellbeing, and hope. Thesis, University of Alberta.

Odell, J. (2023). Saving Time: Discovering a Life Beyond the Clock. Penguin, Random House, UK.