Teaching and learning
That the child become the vehicle for saving our world may very well be what drives idealistic young people into teaching, that the world will somehow be a better place through their efforts with the children.
Of course this sort of thing never happens. the world is not changed, Helas!, by what we do to the kids in school. Would that it were! Schools do not make kids more virtuous. Nor do they make them more democratic.
Such organizations as The Forum for Education and Democracy, working to promote education for democratic life, are at best naive, and at worst terribly wasteful of people’s time and energies.
Do you want to teach democracy? Take the kids outside of school and throw them into life, into real life situations where they have to make choices and decisions. They will quickly learn the difference between dictatorial and democratic organizing principles.
The only way that good things happen in the schools, that is, the only way that real learning takes place, has to be through the efforts made by the kids themselves. School administrators and even teachers are clearly of secondary importance in the pursuit of learning.
I think of my own grandson. “What did you do in school today?” “At recess I played soccer, I think I’m an excellent goalie.” Not a word about Spanish, math, language, science, or history classes.
I know he’s taking these classes, but somehow they don’t reach his consciousness, or if they do they don’t stay in his consciousness beyond the final classroom bell.
Most of what kids learn in a single day proceeds not from the classroom, but from their time outside of school doing things of their own choice, things that reflect their own interests.
In my grandson’s case, these things are computer dependent activities, such as adding to his store of jokes and riddles by doing Google searches, playing games and watching movies, then away from the computer, playing Othello and 52 Pick-up with me, and outside, taking long walks all the time playing practical jokes on his grandfather.
All of course only after he has done his 30 minutes of homework, which for him is kind of the dues he has to pay in order to free himself to do what he wants.
So far after two years of classroom Spanish my grandson does know a few words. But in French he’s bilingual, fluent in the language, because that’s mostly the language he hears and has to communicate in when he’s in our home.
Schools just don’t seem to get the nature of language learning, nor math, nor science…. Immersion is the only effective technique of learning anything. And yet immersion, be it in math, science, or writing an essay, is nearly absent from our classrooms and schools. So far no one knows how to hold 20 to 25 kids under water at the same time.
The educational theorists don’t make things happen, any more that the physicists by their own thinking determine the nature of matter, nor the biologists the structure of the cell nucleus. At best the theorists uncover what’s there, but what’s there determines the course of our lives.
In schools what’s there, or what’s “in the kids” determines what’s learned. The kids more than the teachers make things happen, or that’s the way it should be. In society people more than politicians make things happen, or that’s the way it should be.
The tragedy, or better comedy, in which we now live, is that educators and politicians, rather than kids and people, are the driving forces. And in most cases they’re driving us off the road.
The fact is that up until now kids have pretty much escaped all the educational systems into which we would enclose them, nor have they been much influenced by the endless series of educational reforms to which we have subjected them.
I’m reminded of this every day….
