Thoughts on Education

Having a young daughter has rekindled my interest in education. Margie and I both agree that a five year old child has no business being in school for a full day, or being subjected to testing based on arbitrary norms. We’re fortunate to have found and been accepted into a public Montessori charter school that allows Dagmawit to go home at lunchtime and Margie to stay at the school to reinforce our work on building attachment to us. It really seems to be a school that puts the children first, instead of seeing them as magnets to draw federal funding despite its dependence upon it as a public, charter school.

So my thoughts around education revolve around how do we create an environment for learning that allows each child to unfold fully according to her essence? I have no fixed conclusions, although much of what’s below feels intuitively right. I’m only trying to create a cognitive milieu in which these ideas can swim. Part of it has to do with what the goal of education should be. As a nation we’ve seem to have decided that education’s primary goal is to produce workers/consumers for the economy. The impulse to work is innately good and necessary, but an individual needs to be conscious of what he does, why he does it and for whom. To cultivate that sort of self-understanding education should expose students not only to technical skills, but to an examination of what it means to be human, or more specifically what does it mean to be “me”? Not in the narcissistic sense, but in the deep sense of expressing our essential individuality.

“To educate a child to memorize rather than understand, to accept rather than question, to be passive rather than to be active may be fulfilling a quota, but it is not teaching.” –Elizabeth Napp

The following is a list of possible aims of education, incomplete and in no particular order. Notice however how interrelated they are:


Critical thinking
Problem solving
Cultivating a sense of community
Practical skills relating to trades, professions and/or calling
Fostering an esthetic sensibility
Stripping away what we think we know
Self understanding and the art of reflection
Silence
One-pointedness of mind or attention
An ability to observe
Empathy and compassion
Autonomy
Negotiating with peers
Fostering curiosity
Seeing connections
Valuing questions over answers (our answers are shaped by the questions we ask)
Respect for hard earned wisdom vs. obedience to authority
Appreciation of the natural world
An awareness of the body and heightened sensuality
A joy of movement
A sense of awe and wonder
Purpose


There are also ideas and practices about childhood learning that I’ve found interesting from my reading about Waldorf and Montessori education, the early education philosophies of the Reggio Emilia schools in Italy and Summerhill school in England, and the writings of Paulo Freire, Howard Gardner, Ivan Illich, G.I. Gurdjieff, Jiddu Krisnamurti, and others.

Architecture and design of the physical structure and inhabitable spaces: I’ve believed for a long time that the building which houses a school should be part of the learning process. The building should reflect a unity and harmony within itself, as well as with its surroundings that suggests a centered, expansive awareness open to learning and exploration so that even very young children can sense unconsciously the esthetic built into their environment. The interior spaces should create a flow that enhances the movement from activity to stillness and back with communal space and space where a child can work, create, read, or just sit in solitude before rejoining his peers for group activities. Fill the space with art, natural light, plants.

Create a culture of allowing mistakes and viewing them as feedback, not as being wrong: We learn from doing and part of the process is examining the feedback we get. If something doesn’t work we’ve learned something. How can we take what we’ve learned and try again in a different way? Sometimes the feedback we get gives us a result that’s better than the one we were aiming for. Unfortunately, from a very young age children pick up the message that making a mistake is wrong, and stop taking risks. In school they focus on grades instead of learning.

Confusion as a contributor to learning: This idea comes from Reggio Emilia a town in Italy known for its progressive early childhood education program. Promote problem solving abilities by provoking problems for children to solve using the resources and tools available to them.

“To think for oneself is to not know the answer in advance. “ - Jacob Needleman

Kids love to work: Children are often very enthusiastic about engaging in work projects with their parents. An almost certain way to bring Dagmawit into balance is to give her some meaningful work to do, chopping vegetables, washing windows, washing dishes while standing on a stool. If this inclination is encouraged and supported, it will carry into the middle childhood years onward. In the short run it’s easier to do something yourself, or to do things for children that they can do for themselves. Long term creates passivity in children, and an expectation that someone else will take care of it. It also deprives them of a sense of competence.

“When you do something, do it with all your being.” - G.I. Gurdjieff

Parental - teacher – child collaboration: This is should be evident. Parents are the most important people a child’s education. But ideally their involvement with the school will extend beyond just staying informed. A better scenario is parents and teachers working together to determine policy, curriculum, evaluation methods. It’s more inclusive and democratic, and therefore messier, but ultimately everyone’s invested which is optimum for the children. Teachers and parents to a degree should follow a child’s leanings and interests when designing curricula and activities. Kids learn best when they’re interested. As children become older they can become consciously self-directed.

Project learning: This allows for integrating fields of knowledge and learning in an environment that is contextual and therefore meaningful, as opposed to teaching subjects separately, devoid of context. It’s the way the world actually works. Nothing exists except within relationships. Allowing the children to have a voice in the project and its direction adds to the relevance and meaning. Assist by offering ideas, but not something already formed.

“The highest function of education is to bring about an integrated individual who is capable of dealing with life as a whole.” – J. Krishnamurti

Indirect teaching: Control the environment not the child. Set up the learning space so the child learns from discovery and doing as opposed to being told. When it comes to awakening certain qualities such honesty, generosity, persistence, etc., lecturing directly to the child is the least effective thing we can do (but easy to fall into). An indirect strategy is to speak to another person about something you want to convey to the child when the child’s within earshot. Another is to use stories and analogy. With Dagmawit we’ve created the serial story of “Dazzle” a little girl whose experiences strangely parallel those of Daggy in substance if not in detail. It works! Once when she had declared she wasn’t going to share anything with a young friend who had been generous with her, Dazzle had experience that led her to see the benefits of generosity. A little later, Daggy came into the kitchen with some little item and said “Me going to give this to Natalia”.

"Liberating education consists in acts of cognition, not transferrals of information" - Paulo Freire

Teacher-students: A true teacher is also a student who learns from her students. Rather than leaning on manuals and guides, she allows her curriculum to evolve in response to her observation of her students.

Those are my musings. I’d enjoy hearing from my readers about their thoughts on this subject.

“Education in the true sense is helping the individual to be mature and free, to flower greatly in love and goodness. “ - J. Krishnamurti