I no longer have a passion to teach. What I have is a passion for education.
While most people would equate the two, I have discovered a difference. Teaching is about me, my expertise, my skills in delivery, techniques to engage, simplification of complex ideas and so on, and as a former teacher, I worked hard to develop myself into a better speaker, better explainer and a more engaging presenter.
Education, however, is about the learner. What do they want? What are they interested in? And how can I support them? We often equate supporting learning with teaching (as if that is the only way to support it) but what I have realized in my years of study and research of self-directed education that supporting learning sometimes means not teaching and letting the learner find their own path, to pursue their own passions without forcing it to bend to anyone’s agenda or curriculum but their own.
In a way though, you could still say I am passionate about teaching — not kids — but adults. I want to teach parents, teachers, school “experts” to stop being obsessed about whether or not kids are learning enough material, whether to add more hours, days, years of teaching, whether they ought to take more tests or do more homework or more projects.
I am not saying these are unimportant. But the first step is to respect the child’s choice whether that is a path they want to pursue — to recognize that the children are people with as much right to their life choices as we adults have. Whatever gave us the idea that we have the right to command a child who wants to read a book or draw or play, to put those things aside and listen to teacher explain the difference between igneous, sedimentary and metamorphic rocks? What makes that so much more important?
Would you tell 8-year old Mozart to not spend so much time on his piano and music sheets? Ah, but not everyone is a Mozart, you might argue. And I would say, how many young Mozarts have we unwittingly suppressed because we did not allow them time to pursue their passions? As A.S. Neill, founder of Summerhill School, wrote, “heaven only knows how many geniuses have been destroyed by stupid coercion.”
Kids already have more than enough material — in fact, so much more than they will ever have a practical use for in their lives. We only need to look back at all material we supposedly “learned” before but hardly ever use today.
Education is not about force-feeding the kids, having them regurgitate material back to me, to my satisfaction so I can give them a grade. It is not about us teachers. It was never about us.
Education is about them, their passions, their interests, their future. We till soil, enrich it, and make sure it is a suitable environment for growth. But it is they who do the growing for themselves. You cannot pull on seedlings to make them grow faster. You only end up damaging them. They grow at their own pace and direction, and in their own time. We have to recognize and respect that, and be grateful for the amazing privilege of witnessing their journey.
That is what I am passionate about.
Email me at andy@freethinking.me. View previous articles at www.freethinking.me.
I was an adult IT instructor for a long time, ‘professional analogy maker’, and people pay alot of money to take a one-week class to learn – either to begin to be oriented into a new technology, or to master the hidden complexities of a technology they’ve been working with. These are adults, who have chosen what they are interested in, that choice tempered, as it often is in the business world, by the decisions of the company or industry they work in, as well as the overall marketplace, on what technologies to use.
My parents used to tell me to choose anything in the world I was interested in, but later in life I looked back on that and wished they had told me to check the new york times’ “help wanted” section and see what the world was looking for at the time, and what direction it was moving in, because that choice on my part can’t effectively be made in a vacuum.
As an IT engineer, once I do decide I need to learn a technology, I have the choice of learning it by reading articles and manuals, or to pay for a class. Usually if it’s completely new to me, I take a short intro class for orientation, and then read the manuals. Others pay for a week or several weeks of classes to be led through all the material.
I was the first born of four kids and my mom was a public-school teacher when I was born. I sat in the back of her sixth-grade class before I was in first grade, and instead of the toy store we went to the ‘teacher’s convention’; my toys weren’t video games, or regular toys from the 60’s, they were boxes of reading comprehension cards, where I read a short paragraph and answer four questions on the back and gradually advance through the different colored ‘levels’ in the box. So by the time I got into high school, I was disappearing into the research libraries of new york city, able to efficiently appropriate any field of interest, much like the vision of choosing your own path that you promote.
But my young nieces and nephews and their friends and peers today, in elementary and middle school, didn’t get raised the same weird way that I was, their parents weren’t teachers and they didn’t accelerate their kids’ ability in math and reading comprehension as a hobby or to reflect better on themselves; the culture has shifted, the pendulum has swung very much in the direction that you describe, even if the kids do still go to school to study the ‘core curriculum’ designed by committee, and on that topic I’d wholly agree, the core curriculum mandated across the country for the wide variety of different kids is inappropriate and must be somewhat harmful to many.
Now we’ve had an interesting experiment, Covid shut the schools for a year, across all grade levels. Though some effort was made at providing ‘distant learning’ for elementary school kids on laptops that were handed out, my observation has been that it is a joke- a bored kid is told by his parents to go in his room with his laptop, he says ‘hi’ in an online meeting, might even scribble out a couple of words, but with all accountability on the part of the kid effectively removed, these bored and undermotivated kids have ‘chosen their own path’. My nephew chooses to watch youtube videos of people doing stunts, jumping bicycles or exploding water containers; my niece chooses watching videos of teenagers and dating. These choices are understandable, but they aren’t what the new york times’ “help wanted” is calling for these days. And kids aren’t born with the ability to read, or spell, and some of the boys look like they’re going through torture when they’re being forced to try. But without that tortuous path, their options will be at least somewhat limited. Siri and the other AI systems will only tell you so much; I’ve always noticed there’s a huge gap between the common information system and the depth and breadth of the research libraries. And when it is time to choose a path in business and go for one of those one-week classes, they wouldn’t be familiar with the protocol of standard learning, without having gone through it earlier in life.
Some academics study communism, and think ‘wouldn’t this be great, everybody sharing everything’, then they see the history of its implementation and realize it only works for ideal people who have a conscientious vision of leadership in a community, and for a vast majority of others, it doesn’t work, and you end up with a less-than-ideal situation. Your articles on the idealism of kids choosing their own path seems similarly idealistic to me. Maybe you know some conscientious kids who would choose a path that makes sense in the modern world, but I’ve seen a vast majority of kids that wouldn’t, and didn’t, and they seem to be on the natural path kids take, so to me letting the kids decide on their own, in a vacuum, what to do with their life looks like a ‘lord of the files’ scenario. In the polarized political climate of the US these days, I like to say I’m anarcho-syndicalist, that no one person or administration or ideology can appropriately lead an entire school district, much less a city, state, or country, without making big mistakes for some portion of the constituents. I suspect your vision would work great – for Mozart. And maybe for a few others. I doubt it’s the best plan for my nieces and nephews or their peers of modern day coddled and spoiled america.
When the school systems effectively collapsed this year, I was hopeful about the whole thing being re-thought, the core curriculum being disposed of, rote memorization dropped when all the kids know they have an iPhone in their pockets and they can just ask ‘siri’ or ‘alexa’, and use spellcheck.
But I also think the happiest, most well-adjusted kids, are the ones whose parents and other mentors spend the most time with them, and the least happy least well-adjusted are those left alone in their mansions by their rich parents feeling ignored. As an uncle, I walk with them to school and go hiking with them so that we can talk about life, and i listen, and i can tell the stories of my life and the world i lived in. But I’m just one uncle and i have to go to work too, so someone needs to be there to listen to them and show them, and maybe not the teaching system of today, but I’d still like to see a plan where there is plentiful leadership and mentoring available.
Right, I understand your point.
My idea (well, not mine per se but the self-directed education or SDE movement) is to create a community with the intention of supporting/mentoring/coaching as needed, but not forced upon them.
Parents and adults have lost sight of this because we been conditioned for decades that “education” is the job of the school system, instead of a joint responsibility between the family and community.
It’s not about leaving them alone in a big mansion, but about giving them space to do their own thing in their own time. Being there for them but not imposing anything upon them. And like we do to our friends, we can always suggest activities, conversation topics, but we respect them if they say no.
In many SDE centers, adult facilitators are always ready to help, converse, play, provide counsel, etc. but all at the request or with the consent of the child.
Perhaps you would understand the entire philosophy best if you look at these two links:
http://www.self-directed.org
http://www.agilelearningcenters.org
All the best,
Andy