A new page, Educational Rights/Question Words, has been added to my Educational Rights notebook for My Idea Outlet. The contents can be found below.
There are many ways in which schooling tries to control the educational process. This is especially obvious within individual classrooms. All students within each class are expected to learn the exact same things in the exact same way at the exact same time. I can actually expand on this by comparing all students in a class (the who) to the different question words.
Who: This refers to the students in a class. These are the people subjected to the educational constraints below.
What: This is what a class is expected to learn. Learning anything else can potentially interfere, so students are restricted from learning unrelated material.
Where: Most of the work normally associated with learning is expected to occur in class. Most teachers will include supplementary work to complete at home. Students are not given any opportunity to leave a class for the purpose of learning elsewhere. For example, teachers would likely consider it an unexcused absence if a student went to a zoo when expected to learn biology.
When: Classes start at a specific time and end at a specific time. There is no flexibility to adjust schedules once set. If a student wants to go to a math class during language arts, he or she does not have that option. Additionally, a student can't select the days to learn such as learning on a Saturday instead of a Wednesday or a summer day instead of a spring day.
Why: The reason that students follow through on their assignments is because their teachers demand it. At higher grade levels, there is at least some flexibility in which classes are taken, but classes do not reflect individual lessons. Even class selection can cause problems since all students have interests that the schools can't accommodate. The schools are ultimately prohibiting their students from learning for their own reasons. This results in students who lack any meaningful connection to the lessons.
How: Teachers create lesson plans for their classes, not individual students. The use the same resources, such as the same textbook, for all of their students. They provide no flexibility in how children learn. Because of this, students have no flexibility to learn in a manner that is ideal for them.
Each of these question words represents a manner in which each class controls the learning process. By dictating these things, they effectively restrict students from pursuing alternatives. In other words, the schools selecting the what, where, when, why, and how restricts the right of a student to pursue his own what, where, when, why, and how. This is what I mean when I insist that schools control and restrict the educational process.
I want to remove restrictions. Ideally, the approach I am proposing will eliminate all of the constraints listed above. Children should be able to learn what they want to learn. They should be able to learn in any location that provides the resources they desire. They should have flexible and dynamic schedules that allow them to pursue answers when they arise. They should be driven be their own reasons and interests. Most importantly, they should embrace the role of the biggest experts in their own educations. Children who do their jobs should have a good sense of how they learn, and they should have every right to pursue it.
No comments:
Post a Comment