Trying to get back into the swing of things here, I started with the word for today which was
acclamation and it somehow falls into a week's worth of words about elections. The word
election is a death sentence to my interest and enthusiasm. You can tell I haven't even been keeping up with my word a day, much less the writing.
Well I got sidetracked at the end of the AWAD e-mail by a quote from Victor Hugo:
He who opens a school door, closes a prison. -Victor Hugo, poet, novelist, and dramatist (1802-1885)
I truly understand the value of education. I understand that perhaps without the reforms in child labor and compulsory school attendance, that our society could have languished in an era where some of the learned took unfair advantage of the ignorant. Still, the day that mankind started to believe the myth that true education could only take place in schools and at the feet of teachers was a dark one. That happened long before compulsory education came on the scene.
There are too many children who, when the school door is opened to them, enter a prison. They enter a prison where the powers that be determine what learning is, how it is measured, when it should take place, what constitutes success or failure. On top of that, learning must be administered in such a way as to foster an atmosphere of competition like what is out there in the "real world," part and parcel of the "American dream."
I was an excellent student. I am hardwired to be a book learner. And I was taught from an early age how to please people. Actually I was eager to do so. There's nothing wrong with making people happy until it comes at your own expense. Tangent! Tangent! Back to my box.
There are other ways to learn. In fact there are a lot of children who
need to learn in other ways. They are the movers and the dreamers, the kids who learn by touching and doing and asking questions. The ones who ask why, and demand an answer. The kind that get told to sit down and be quiet. Who are told to be still. Edison was one. Either of my sons could have been another. What about the kids who are talented with their hands but not with a pencil and paper? What about those who can see in detailed 3-D, but who bog down when they're asked to memorize things? There are kids out there who if they were left free to explore, instead of being caged to a desk in an institution, would learn to do wonderful things with their hands and their minds. Instead they are labeled as failures. Or they are diagnosed with "learning disabilities" and even force-fed medication to remain among their "normal" peers.
In my perfect school, there would be no grade levels. There would be mastery levels. When a child reached a mastery level in a subject, s/he would move on to the next level. Each subject would have it's own course and the children would move through them at their own pace--"first grade" math could be taught right alongside "fifth grade" reading in that the child would not be tied to grade level work at any time.
It wouldn't matter if s/he spent two weeks or two years at a level; there would be no labels attached to learning quickly or learning slowly. Because I guarantee you--every child in there would be slow at something and quick to pick up another. The learning would be individualized and not competitive. No grading curves, no failure.
"Oh, that's not how the real world is! There is failure. There are people who fail." Okay, if I give you that, then can you give me that if the failures of the world truly had to opportunity to learn to maximize their potential--without being told that they were stupid or incapable--perhaps they would learn to do something other than fail?
Or here's another one. "In the business world, you only get one chance. You have to be able to do it right or you lose your job." Sorry. I'm not convinced. I worked in the business world. My job didn't teeter on the brink every time I misspelled a word or miscalculated a spread sheet. There was time to do it over; there was time to correct mistakes. In fact, my boss made mistakes. Big ones. And you know what--he was good at what he did. People could deal with his humanity because he was good at what he loved to do.
So if that boy who hates reading when he's seven was allowed to go outside and study the earthworms he loves so much--what might he be able to do in his lifetime with what he loves? You think earthworms aren't important? Think again. Think that you can learn all there is to know about earthworms in just a matter of months and what more is there to do? Think again. You think this child would never learn to read or write or do math if he were allowed to play with earthworms? Hogwash. Sooner or later he'd need new information. Or he would need to know how big to build the worm beds or how much he needs to fill them. He'll learn biology, ecology, chemistry--as and when he needs to and then he'll use it and it will become his. Not until he takes a test, but forever. Passing tests is not real-world!!!
There is so much more to learning than books and dry-erase boards, and mandated testing. There are children out there who think they are failures when they are anything but. It is not fair that the door that closes the prison for some closes others in the prison.
And so in my perfect school children would leave ready to pursue their dreams. It wouldn't matter how long it took them to get the tools they needed to do it. They wouldn't be forced to take the same history course three different times as they went through their school careers. They wouldn't be forced to fail higher math courses that they didn't need to use.
Of course for a perfect school to work, you'd have to have a perfect world to send these perfect students into, and we all know that's not going to happen. At least not at the hands of mankind. You can't get perfection from imperfection.
But we really should stop putting children in prison and calling it school. Don't you think so Victor?
