The Path to my Masters

I have been thinking about all this collaborative, constructive learning principals, and I think about what it would be like to be in a one room school house as a teacher. What would have been the norm for education in those days, is now a principal, a theory or a methodology. Yet in the day, it was how you dealt with a room of full of different level students. They had to feed off of each other. They had things they had to memorize, and not question, just as the kids of today do with multiplication, and spelling and grammar. (Although the later is a lost art with computers.) But for the most part, much of the learning was directed by the student interests and needs. There was not a lot of text books and other forms of media, so the students had to learn science by going out and walking around and questioning what they saw. They learned math so they could compute agricultural issues like acreage vs. seed. Education was developed by the resources and needs of the times.

In Socrates time, learning was by questions. Galileo asked questions and thought outside the box. (Both of them were prosecuted for their original thinking.)Education in poor countries and in other countries is done by passing on of stories with moral implications and apprenticeships. Native Americans learned from the elders and from experience. We had brilliant people like Henry Ford and Andrew Carnegie who had very little education but knew how to ask questions and who to ask.

But in many countries, education is limited by the governmental and religious sanctions. Only certain people can get educated, and others are left to fend by what they can gleam by themselves or through experience.

This thinking is making me wonder, how much is the potential of a child to exceed and do well in their educational pursuits based on the physical components of school such as the teacher, school system, and community and how much is based solely on the child’s desire to know? How much is truly just the ability for the child to ask the right questions?

I know I am not the first to seek this answer. Both Kohlberg and Piaget both were looking for understanding the development of children and how they think and learn. I am not going into a huge thing here in my blogs, as this is my reflection. I am wondering though if the information taking from those studies can apply to today’s child. I think of all the theories that still holds true is Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. If a child’s biological needs are not met, nothing else will matter. I think to some extent this hold true for all learners. I see it in my field that when the individual’s (MRDD) feel safe and trust you, they really open up to learning. This is sad because if anything, this population has the most transient group of people supporting them.

I think today’s children require instant gratification. They are used to finding information in a second through the various electronic resources. They want to find out if it snows in Africa, they can check out a web site and there it is. My question is…do they ask? Do they know how to ask? Do they care enough to ask?

My husband and I were discussing this at dinner tonight. We were talking about teaching to the test and how that robs not only the teacher, but the student. He is a Social Studies teacher and gets pumped up about how history repeats itself and it’s so important to look back and reflect on what has happened. My statement to that is, most people want to know something now like a history fact, they hit a search tool. Does it matter to me in my life about how many people who died in Antietam? Sorry, but not really. What does apply is understanding why the Civil War took place and the concept of war and revolution by the citizens of this country.

So maybe we need to really rearrange the priorities and relevance of our education system by allowing the children of today to learn to question. But let them know it is safe to ask, and let them know what is relevant to them, what they may need to know to survive and prosper. Do not let a test dictate education. Relevance is something I want to bring out in my course.