I mentioned when I first started this blog that one of my big bugbears is the failure of our educational system to teach children to think. I believe in philosophy lessons for children. And I do mean philosophy and not Philosophy. I mean that every child should be equipped with the ability to take raw data and question, organise and analyse it abstractly in order to arrive at conclusions. To anyone who says that it's an elitist idea, I say "You're an appalling snob." To suggest that only some children are capable of philosophical thinking is elitism.
If education is only about stuffing children's heads with unconnected and unrelated facts and figures, then give them a whacking great almanac at the age of five and test them on the contents at sixteen. The very word education comes from the Latin "e duco" - I bring out. Education is, or should be, about finding the gems in a child's brain, and developing them so that the child, and society itself, benefits from the raw talents which he or she possesses.
Don't think for a moment that I'm going down the "Every child is special" line, because by definition, if every chid is special then no one is. (As was so beautifully and succinctly put in "The Incredibles") What I am saying is that just because Jane is brilliant at Maths, and John, sitting next to her is rubbish at it, but John constructs the most amazing lego models while Jane can't stack two blocks on top of each other, don't think that Jane is, ergo, the more academic of the two. Teach Jane to work out what her maths tells her about the world, and teach John to derive the same lessons through his lego.
And hallelujah, this morning a shake-up of educational policy is announced. Philosophy, they say, should be taught to young primary age children. Hear, hear! say I. The first intelligent educational suggestion I've heard for a long time. And we're to go back to cookery lessons, as opposed to the appallingly sterile and disconnected "food technology"! Let's hear it for the government. And I don't often say that.
Now let's tell parents what THEY should be teaching. Don't let's be frightened to say yes, schools are responsible for a lot of what happens in a child's development, but so are families. If we need to use sticks and carrots to herd feckless parents into actually parenting their kids, let's do it.
4 comments:
If I had kids I'd prefer that the educational philosophy be that of Summerhill School; aiming for happy and confident children.
Which, imo, isn't really the same as mainstream school teaching, with or without philosophy lessons.
I think that's a given, Andrew, and I don't think Summerhill is the only institution to aim for that. Anecdotal evidence suggests that Summerhill didn't always deliver it either, from memory. On the whole, though, I think you learn happiness and confidence at home first. A school experience can wreck it, but I would suggest it can't often give it.
You've set me thinking, Andrew. Summerhill and AS Neill's views are akmost logical extensions of the Steiner philosophy, which I wrote a study on as part of my PGCE. The school I teach at takes a lot of chuildren from the local Steiner school. But the reason that children go to Summerhill, or Steiner schools, or come to us, is because their parents have recognised what they think will make those children happy and confident. Schools have imo less power than people credit them with. We're looking at secondary schools for our kids at ther moment, and naturally the driving force is where they will be happiest.
Logical extensions.., no, doesn't seem to be...
http://www.spinninglobe.net/dreadfulneill.htm
Which more or less is the same as my feeling that Steiner was and is much more about, for example, children finding themselves through being educated via a specific very defined philosophy.. Whereas Neills approach was/is to allow children the space and freedom to make their own decisions, and to discover who they really are that way. Not at all a deliverable, imo, which presumably is the basic reason why Summerhill had such a hard time from Ofsted some years ago.
All the best with your decisions.
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