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Zen Suggestions
 | Raising Our Children, Raising Ourselves, Naomi Aldort, Book Publishers Network, 2006Superb! Fantastic book on how to raise our children with compassion, unconditionnal love and respect. |
 | Helping young children flourish, Aletha Solter, Shining Star Press, 1998 |
 | Why Love Matters: How Affection Shapes a Baby's Brain, Sue Gerhardt, Brunner-Routledge,2003 |
 | Parent Effectiveness Training: The Proven Program for Raising Responsible Children, Thomas Gordon, Three Rivers Press, 2008 |
 | Everywhere All the Time: A New Deschooling Reader, Matt Hern, AK Press, 2008 |
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| Should we accept that School puts child off subjects? |
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| Written by Richard | ||||||||
| Thursday, 29 April 2010 04:23 | ||||||||
 School is a place that you send your children to learn, be inspired, meet new people and to prepare them for their adult life. However, schools don’t always meet all those objectives. Often, they can put kids off many subjects for life.
Most schools in most countries exist to teach to the average. They organize themselves en masse to teach a mass of children. Some of that group are obviously in need of more help than others, and there are some children who are more gifted than others. The author Haruki Murakami raised the point in his excellent “What I talk about when I talk about running”:
“When I was at school I never much cared for gym class, and always hated sports day. This was because they were forced on my from above. I could never stand being forced to do something I didn’t want to do.... when I wanted to do it, and the way I wanted to do it, I’d give it everything I had.”
This is really rather true in some measure for most pupils and represents a failure in the education system. It’s a failure of the system and a failure of the responsibility to teach children and prepare them for the future.
Take a personal example of gym classes in cold, impersonal and frankly smelly sports halls or football practice in the driving rain. Neither of those experiences gave this author a taste for sport, more a distaste. These were activities that were designed for the mass of pupils who were happy to kick a football around a muddy field for 45 minutes.
Extend this to other, more critical, subjects such as Mathematics and English. What if teaching to the mass makes 20% of the class bored and disinterested? They turn off from the subject and leave school without the minimum tools they need to accomplish what they are capable of in other spheres. For some children that will also mean that they are not being taught to their maximum capability and thus we are leaving unused potential on the table.
Sir Ken Robinson, in The Element, writes that there are up to seven different types of intelligence and each individual is has different capabilities in each of these “intelligences”. Hence in an ideal approach to a subject would be able to leverage the intelligences where pupils were more capable and therefore interested.
Teaching to the mass robs our children of their full potential and our society of the benefit that happy, fulfilled people bring.
What’s the solution? There are many, and they are varied. From alternative schools, through de-schooling, through to parent choice. As a parent it’s essential to understand your children and look for schools that will enable them to flourish.
Image: http://www.flickr.com/photos/perspicacious/303144538 and http://www.flickr.com/photos/xtinamilan/3026488828 For more insight into this topic, see these articles:
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