In the future, if you want a job, you must be as unlike a machine as possible: creative, critical and socially skilled. So why are children being taught to behave like machines? We succeed in adulthood through collaboration. (0) So why is collaboration in tests and exams called cheating? Why are curriculums and tests so narrow that they alienate any child whose mind does not work in a particular way?
There is, as Graham Brown-Martin explains in his book Learning {Re}imagined, a common reason for these discrepancies. Our schools were designed to produce the workforce required by 19th-century factories - workers who would sit silently at their benches all day, behaving identically, to produce identical products. Collaboration and critical thinking were just what the factory owners wished to discourage.
When they are allowed to apply their natural creativity and curiosity, children love learning. They learn to walk, to talk, to eat and to play spontaneously, by watching and experimenting. (19)
. We sit them down, force-feed them with useless facts and test the life out of them.
As far as relevance and utility are concerned, we might as well train children to operate a spinning jenny, the textile machine. (20)
. We make them suffer this life-defying, dehumanising system for nothing. The less relevant the system becomes, the harder the rules must be enforced, and the greater the stress.
There is no single system for teaching children well, but the best ones have this in common: they open up rich worlds that children can explore in their own ways, developing their interests with help rather than indoctrination. (21)
. They use them to create projects, share material with their teachers and each other, and can contact their teachers with questions about their homework.
There are plenty of teaching programmes designed to work with children, not against them. (22)
. Cutting across traditional subject boundaries, they manage a shipping warehouse, excavate a tomb or rescue people from a disaster. A similar one, called Quest to Learn, is based on the way children teach themselves to play games. To solve the complex tasks they’re given, they need to acquire plenty of information and skills. They do it with the excitement and enthusiasm of gamers.
The first multi-racial school in South Africa, Woodmead, developed a fully democratic method of teaching, whose rules and discipline were overseen by a student council. (23)
. By such integration of the content, learning is made authentic because it is rooted in the student’s natural surroundings and totally relevant to their everyday life.
The tragedy for many European countries is that such programmes succeed not because of their systems and governments, but despite them. (24)
. What they need is to change the system, to equip children for the likely demands of the 21st century, rather than those of the 19th. They need to engineer the children out of the factory and into the real world.
Isprobaj potpuno besplatno!
Registracijom dobivaš besplatan*
pristup dijelu lekcija za svaki predmet.
