Running on Empty:More Idle Thought.
March 11th 2007 04:04
Signature Tune
The origins of this articled are revealed in its heading. Philip Waring has posted these thoughts on teaching and learning, of interest to parents, teachers, educators, he makes some valid points; what is your opinion of all this?
March 10, 2007
More Idle Thoughts in Paris
Imagine a society where the men were hunters and trappers, and the women were home and child care givers. What would school be like in that society? Would there be a school? Probably not. Boys would learn by doing (a method that John Dewey reinvented in 1900). The boys would learn directly from their fathers and from the other men of the village, the girls from their mothers.
Some children would learn faster than others, perhaps creating achievement gaps, but they all would learn enough to very early on take on useful roles in the life of the village. As the adults retired from hunting, trapping, gathering, and cooking there would be no lack of well taught youngsters to replace them.
In this society teachers would teach what they know. And there would be no attempt as now to continually reinvent the curriculum. For the curriculum would be what the adults did, would be what their lives were all about. Only if the adults took on new roles, only if they did something else, such as wage war, would they need to expand the curriculum to include the now necessary new skills.
What has happened that our young people, in spite of spending 12 or more years in school, are not ready to assume useful roles in society? Why is it that it seems to be so hard to give our children the knowledge and skills they will ultimately need? Is it that adult occupations are now too many and too complex, no longer easily transferable to the young? Or is it that real learning cannot go on in school, separated as school is from the activities and occupations that embody that learning?
It’s not surprising that professional schools are all closely allied with the institutions that house the activities of the profession, medicine with hospitals, law with courts, music with concert halls, athletics with playing fields. Probably there is nothing that is best learned from a book. Certainly not languages, nor history, nor science. Yet that’s what our schools are mostly about, book learning. For the teachers are not for the most part native speakers of the language taught, historians, mathematicians, or scientists. And their knowledge of all these subjects is mostly secondhand or book knowledge.
Teach a man to hunt without being a hunter yourself. It’s possible, but not very likely that it will happen. So what might we do to take ourselves back to an earlier time when young people learned by doing, and best of all by being apprenticed to those who knew how?
I see only one way out of what I call our present school impasse, when too many children, especially minority and poor children in our inner cities, attend school for many years and do not learn and therefore do not reach a springboard onto something else and something better, but too often find themselves at a deadend with something worse. I say take school away from the school people and close them down as presently structured.
Open them again, but this time allow anyone to teach, and anything to be taught. And allow parents and their children freedom to choose from what’s offered their kind of school and how and what they want to learn. And if it’s not offered stay home until it is.
In this way once again those who knew something would be the teachers, and those going to school would be going there to get what that person knew. No longer how to trap a bear or catch a fish, but now such things as how to program a computer, write a musical composition, speak Mandarin Chinese, or write an essay.
Posted by Philip Waring | Permalink
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