The traditional school model is a conventional education system divided into grades (primary and secondary) where students and teachers interact face-to-face.
The traditional education system can potentially transfer massive amounts of knowledge in a limited time.
In modern times, the educational system is not only for learning from mentors but also for incorporating modern technologies into the academic atmosphere.
Traditional conventional education requires illustrative revision for future generations. The article highlights why we should not remove such traditional schooling and what negative aspects require an update.
Table of Contents
Pros of Traditional School
Though it needs changes, the traditional school is not entirely without value. Here are the advantages of the traditional school system:
1. Frontal training
The teacher has the opportunity to use the limited educational material with a sufficiently large number of pupils, up to fifty students.
The pedagogical resource is saved – a small number of teachers can teach many children at once.
At the same time, the teacher usually can pay attention to each student to identify his level of knowledge and evaluate.
2. Pre-planned and Organized
The traditional education system is a well-organized institution with adequate classrooms, buildings, and faculties.
Everything that educators teach is pre-planned, not only regular and extracurricular activities.
Each school department is responsible for managing schools in an organized way. Everything is pre-planned, whether it’s your daily routine or your uniforms.
3. Regulation and Punctuality
In a traditional school system, classes start and end at a definite time. Students attend and drop out of school at the same time.
It makes teachers and students punctual in their daily tasks, pre-planned by the school management team.
It also makes them disciplined, repeatedly following the same rules every day during school hours and before and after school.
4. Increase in student performance
Even for students with a self-taught profile, it is undeniable that the organization in the routine brings numerous benefits to increase performance in general.
That’s because, with pre-determined schedules and the presence of educators in real-time, there are no excuses to procrastinate.
It is possible to notice the advances in studies and the general performance of students in several areas.
In addition to traditional subjects, they start to dedicate themselves to sports and extracurricular activities that integrate education and leisure.
This mix of options will also help them awaken their talents and discover possible professional aptitudes.
After all, time at school allows them to explore more of their potential in a productive way and measure results.
5. Minimum teacher preparation for the lesson
The teacher has the opportunity to write a training program for a year. Next year, after making minimal adjustments, the teacher will teach the next class according to it.
It saves the time and effort of the teacher and makes it possible to be more involved in communicating with children.
6. Minimum materials
For a traditional lesson, often, you do not need anything but a competent teacher.
He can transfer knowledge without modern interactive devices, boards, computers, and other gadgets.
At most, he can explain the material with illustrations or demonstrations.
7. Clear organization of the lesson
It has the structure: introductory part, homework check, explanation of new material, and final part.
Each lesson is similar; the children know what to prepare for, and the teacher does not have to think over the lesson’s structure every time.
8. Systematic learning
In traditional learning, the learning of the material proceeds linearly and sequentially.
It isn’t easy to understand the next without studying the previous material, so students are interested in attending lessons and completing the necessary tasks.
9. Equality
Equality is the positive and most important benefit of the traditional education system.
It doesn’t matter what caste, religion, race, and class you belong to. You are treated without discrimination whether you belong to an upper or lower-class family.
Every student is treated equally to get the best out of each other. After all, educational institutions should provide a sense of proper education through equality and fairly.
10. Interactive
Students and teachers in a classroom can hold daily debates and lectures on specific topics. It makes them feel more indulged as they can share their knowledge.
They may have different opinions and ideas about different topics, becoming solid ideas that can change the world.
It can be referred to as face-to-face learning, which creates a friendly relationship between students and peers to make the most of this vital relationship.
This type of relationship and interaction between peers and students also develops moral and social values in students.
11. Helps create identity and autonomy
One of the immediate consequences of managing time with more demands is gaining autonomy. Even because, without responsibility, the student cannot keep up with a fast pace of activities.
In this case, competencies are favored, including skills and attitudes that contribute daily to the lifestyle.
The formation of identity itself receives influences from the period spent at school. At this stage of formation, the environment and people with whom children and young people live will dictate their perception of the world and personal motivations.
Therefore, spending more time studying and living in a friendly space with colleagues and qualified teachers is also a potent tool for self-knowledge and personal evolution.
12. Ranking and Competitiveness System
The grading system is practiced throughout the world in traditional schools. It helps the student be attentive and alert throughout the educational terms and helps overcome procrastination.
The traditional education system drives and gives a platform to compete against each other to get the best out of them.
13. Diploma
Obtaining a diploma from a traditional educational system is valuable as all institutes worldwide recognize it.
A degree means being able and fully qualified to attend a desirable job.
The fact that you learned through traditional schools gives you more value to your education than any other form of education system anywhere else in the world.
The diploma you receive from the school proves that you have learned enough and provides a showcase for your knowledge.
Cons of Traditional School
The Traditional School system is a teacher-centric system rather than a student-centric because of which students become passive recipients of knowledge.
Here are the disadvantages of the traditional school system:
1. Problem of Uniformity
Traditional teaching has as its pedagogical basis the uniformity of students. Most traditional schools preach that they want to form thinking citizens, but this is not what you see in their classrooms.
The intention is to have a good positioning in the school rankings. And traditional schools can only achieve this if all students have the same high performance.
For students to achieve high performance, they are viewed equally by the teacher. In other words, everyone’s skills and competencies need to be the same.
Individual interests are not taken into account. This system has an excess of content that must be learned, divided into numerous subjects.
From the conservative methods used by these schools, what can be seen is the formation of like-minded people. There is no room for criticism to form an independent and socially-centered thought. All are equal, uniform, and dependent on the teacher.
2. Health Risk
Traditional schools are the ones that cause the most stress and emotional illness in students.
After all, the pressure is absurd in some institutions. There are cases of adolescents with depression, anxiety, and insomnia crises due to school, family, and social demands that this type of teaching approach applies. Failure is always the student’s fault.
3. Lack of emphasis on critical thinking
Traditional classroom education does not encourage critical thinking or the ability to apply information gained through experience and reasoning actively.
Instead, it emphasizes the role of teachers as providers of knowledge and students as receivers.
This learning style does not allow students to develop the deeper levels of understanding necessary for complex concepts and lifelong learning.
4. Generalized Education
Students have their interests to pursue in life. Someone wants to become a doctor, engineer, or lawyer, while others want to become writers, teachers, or singers.
Thus the traditional education system hardly fulfills the real purpose of educating people.
The curriculum includes subjects that are unnecessary for someone but might be helpful for other students.
Everyone should follow the same course manual, whether it interests the student. This type of curriculum helps one become a monkey of all crafts but a master of none.
5. Not much Involvement of Technology
Technology is much needed in today’s era because we no longer live in an age of comprehensive knowledge, in which all information is thought of in terms of right and wrong.
With the ubiquity of the internet, every subject is viewed under different prisms, with each student now able to co-author their learning.
And since it is no exaggeration to say that there is no more learning without the internet, it turned out that the blackboard lost much of its function.
Devices that access the network management to replace the blackboard and notebooks quickly.
Schools that do not accept this new way of being of students (all regular users of smartphones, tablets, and other similar devices) will probably not be able to establish an effective dialogue with them.
It is, therefore, necessary to build a computerized space in the institution, incorporating technological tools in the daily life of the classroom.
6. Increase in costs
Although obvious, it is always worth remembering that the increased workload, including the payment of teachers’ class hours, materials, and resources such as water and electricity, leads to a proportional increase in the financial investment involved.
The load is not only on school management or students but on the parents who have to endure this load, aligning them with this framework, ideologically and economically.
7. Monotony
The risk of dull students spending most of their day in the same environment need not be a reality but a point of attention.
After all, within the teaching model for most children, the school is still seen as a source of obligations.
In other words, traditional education can make them tired and bored, even more so if the school overloads them with tasks that do not stimulate their interests and creativity.
8. Lack of learning-oriented processes
Traditional education emphasizes passing tests, whether students pass or fail. The teaching and learning process is thus devalued, and students are encouraged to memorize rather than understand the methods, techniques, and skills needed to find the answers.
9. Lack of emphasis on broader concepts or structures
Traditional education focuses on basic skills and gradually builds a whole rather than on wider and broader concepts and considers the student’s context in learning. While this simplifies learning, it provides little context, alienating learners.
10. Problem in Attention
It is difficult for a teacher to control each student’s knowledge level. Despite the efforts of the teacher to pay attention to each student, it is impossible to control all the children.
If 30-40 people are in the class, and the lesson lasts only 45 minutes, it is almost impossible to interview each student.
Yes, it is possible to test knowledge in writing, but verbal reasoning also plays a significant role in traditional learning.
11. Lack of independence
There is practically no place for independence in the traditional learning model, one’s opinions and decisions.
Here, each child performs only the task given by the teacher and only in a way that is considered correct.
Consequently, the child does not learn to independently assess their capabilities, choose their decision path, and learn from their mistakes.
12. Tight Schedule
It is a fact that there will not be much free time left for children and young people to develop other things outside the educational context on weekdays.
Depending on every family, it can become challenging to fulfill other schedules, whether making appointments or even playing more freely with friends.
13. Lack of Definite Career Direction
Focusing on numerous subjects simultaneously within the four walls of the classroom can distract students, affecting their future career growth.
Students will spend more time, energy, and effort learning something that will not help them later in their lives and future careers.
14. Passive Students
You can only get information and knowledge from your books and teachers in traditional schools.
You learn from your teacher’s knowledge and experience, which can also be wrong. Students do not make any effort to learn new ideas on their own.
A student is limited by four school walls, while online education has no boundaries in study material and research work.
15. Rating system
The assessment system is not the best because it tests your memorizing power, not your ability and knowledge.
You are evaluated by what you learn in class and all other students, not by what you have achieved through the information and knowledge you have accumulated throughout your life.
Conclusion
So, traditional education is a system that has served the education of schoolchildren and students for many years. Many aspects of traditional schooling were ideal for a successful lifestyle, while some limited the forms and extent of education they could have achieved. Therefore, it concludes that if we could emphasize students and their needs more, it would be the ideal education system for all students who want to achieve something remarkable and specific in their lives.
Quick Summary (Pros and Cons of Traditional School)
| Pros | Cons |
| Massive information in a comparatively short time | The problem with motivation and students’ receptiveness |
| Communication of opinions | Teachers’ point of view holds much importance students have fewer opportunities to form their own opinions. |
| A competent educator makes the lessons interesting through witticisms or apparent differences in mood. | Children can sometimes be overwhelmed by too much information |
| Less preparation and fewer materials to aid education | Emphasis on theoretical content; neglect of practical knowledge |
| Easier for the teacher to keep control over all the students | Social forms hardly play a role (communication between the students is severely restricted) |
(Last Updated on August 31, 2022)
