Tag: free school

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Learning Democracy (Part 1)

Part 1 | Part 2

We love the idea of democracy, of being free to choose our own path and forge our own destiny. We enshrine the ideals of liberty and celebrate as heroes those who fight and lay down their lives for its survival. Yet, a lot of people do not know how to handle their freedom. They think that freedom is license to do whatever they want, even if what they do already curtails or restricts another person’s freedom. They do not understand that the price of sustaining a free society is for individuals to think and act responsibly, to create a space of mutual respect, only then can people in that society be truly free.

I have recently been watching videos of traffic apprehensions by the Metro Manila Development Authority (MMDA) and it is both funny and sad how people caught violating the rules seem to think that they have a special privilege for breaking the rules. They do all sorts of things to escape the consequences — they try to run, they try to reason, they threaten, they appeal to the “unfairness” of the law, and so on. Expand this to different facets of our political and economic lives and you see the same thing — people try to cheat on paying taxes, they try to evade import tariffs, they aim for special exemptions from the rule because they have connections in this or that office.

We love the idea of democracy but don’t know how to live in one.

I believe one of the fundamental reasons why is that we were never taught how to live in a democracy. In fact, our school system, which is supposed to “educate” us and prepare us for life, is one of the most autocratic institutions around — and we spend our formative years there. We spend our teenage years, and even our early adult years there. And then when we’re done and get thrown out into the “real” world, we are expected to know how to handle democracy?

What do children really learn in school? Why do I say it is an autocratic institution? Let’s count them off:

  1. Children learn from early on that their choices don’t matter. Little Johnny wants to play with dolls. “No, Johnny, dolls are for girls,” says the teacher.  “You can’t play with them.” Little Annie wants to spend all day drawing. “You can’t do that, Annie,” says the teacher, “You have to learn your Arithmetic first, and then Reading, and then some Science.”
    “But I want to learn how to make cartoons,” says Annie.
    “No,” says the teacher. “You have to learn the more important things first.”
  2. Children learn that a lot of power resides with the authorities. If you want to control that power, you either have to challenge the authorities, or you have to suck up to them. So kids learn never to express their true opinions about a matter, but to say what the teacher wants to hear. They learn that they can sometimes circumvent rules by sweet-talking a teacher, or by using intimidation tactics like, “You can’t touch me. Do you know my uncle is the head of the school board?”
  3. Children learn that their lives are mostly controlled by other people, whether it’s the teacher, the principal, or their parents pressuring them to get high grades. They learn to shut down their dreams, to not care, to go through the motions of “learning” just enough to pass the tests and move on to the next level.

By the time they’re done, we wonder why so many young graduates are unfocused and don’t know what to do with their lives. Look again at how they were “educated” and you need not wonder any more.

Originally published in Sunstar Davao.

Email me at andy@freethinking.me. View previous articles at www.freethinking.me.

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Education and Reality

Photo Credit: World Bank Photo Collection Flickr via Compfight cc

If education was meant to prepare one for “real” life, then why is it so unlike reality?

Where else do you see people grouped together by age, then forced to listen and work on 5 to 6 different topics a day (on which they have little or no choice on the matter), and at which they are evaluated and labeled at the end of the year as either smart or stupid (though the latter is rarely said out loud nowadays — instead people say “needs improvement”)?

In a world where people are increasingly becoming aware of the power of free choice and personal responsibility, schools seem to be denying the number one freedom of children — the freedom to pursue their own interests. Instead, they are being told to sit through lectures that adults have deemed as important and basic (and yes, you do really need to know how to factor quadratic square trinomials, and you need to memorize the periodic table of elements, as well as the entire character list of Noli Me Tangere even if all you dream about is to become a world class gymnast).

Of course, one might argue that in the real world, you also often need to do things that you don’t like in order to achieve what you like. A good basketball player needs to put in a lot of work on his body, going to the gym, building up his muscles, stretching, exercising, having a proper diet, putting in hours of practice, and a lot these things may not necessarily be things he wants to do, but he has to do them anyway.

Well, yes, but it was the person’s choice to be that kind of player.

Did we ever ask if our child’s dream was to be class valedictorian at the end of their elementary or high school education? Or did we just sort of push them along that path? As parents, do we respect our children’s choices and ambitions or are they the vehicle to satisfying our own ambitions (or frustrations)?

I believe that if a person really wants to pursue something, he will simply see obstacles as challenges and will find ways to hurdle them by himself. If a person is forced to do something however, even a little hardship will be seen as a mountain too bothersome to climb.

The word education comes from the latin educere meaning to draw out. Ironically, education today is not so much concerned about drawing out but about stuffing in and cramming as much material as it can into our kids’ uninterested brains.

Good educators, however, are people who can draw out a child’s innate potential, who can assist and nurture them as they pursue their own interests. They know when and how to push, and they also know when and how to leave things be and let learning occur at the students’ pace. They understand that they cannot keep watering a plant the whole day in the hopes of making it grow faster. They would only succeed in drowning it. They need to leave it alone most of the time and just watch it grow. Sometimes the plant may need a little pruning here and there, but for the most part, there is nothing you can really do to make it grow faster.

Originally published in Sunstar Davao.

Email me at andy@freethinking.me. View previous articles at www.freethinking.me.

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Summerhill Too

Photo Credit: oiZox Flickr via Compfight cc

After writing last week’s short piece on Summerhill, I reflected on the state of education and employment in our country and could only begin to wonder what it would be like if we had more Summerhill-type schools. Career and college education mismatch is a problem, not just here but also in the United States (not that it should surprise us as our educational system is patterned after theirs — and so its problems will predictably be ours as well) and the numerous studies concerning this proves that there is indeed an issue.

Several educators have noted that schools have a factory-like, cookie-cutter, one-size-fits-all approach. The school bell, for example, is similar to the factory bell, used as a way of signalling breaks and changes in shifts. Students are grouped into “batches.” Schools talk about “producing” graduates of different majors — business, accounting, chemistry, engineering — as if they were specialized parts designed to fit the societal machine.

Of course, there are those who object to this comparison saying it is a misleading comparison of the history of the educational system — as there are no hard references to schools being modeled after factories or of producing graduates primarily for the purpose of being employed in these factories. Valerie Strauss of the Washington Post contends that even if there are indeed factory-like conditions in schools, removing these will not solve the main problems of education, which she asserts are disengagement and shallow learning.

In her view, “Young people would rather be socializing than learning, and though some learning can happen through play, much of it can’t. Young people, like adults, would also like to avoid exhausting and effortful work; but thinking is hard, and much of learning involves thinking. Finally, young people aren’t naturally interested in many of the things we want them to learn in school; yet as long as school is designed to serve the needs of society and not just the desires of the individual, much of education will involve steering students away from what they are naturally interested in and towards something else.”

So the solution, she says, is “great teaching” which involves “cultivation of environments of trust and care. It means finding adequate space for play and for hard work. It means nudging and cajoling students, pestering and praising them. It means uncovering puzzles and conjuring mysteries. It means drawing connections to student interests, engaging with the real world, and cracking the occasional joke. Masterful teachers know this. And their classrooms are places of wonder. No observer would ever liken them to factories.”

While I would agree with her assessment that we need masterful teachers who can transcend the limits of the classroom’s four walls, those teachers are few precisely because they have been molded in an educational system that doesn’t look too kindly at those seeking to test its borders. It is unrealistic to expect a lot of out-of-the-box thinkers from a system that trains people to be in the box.

What attracted me to democratic schools like Summerhill is that students are really free to pursue their interests, and the teacher’s role is not to say, “Oh, that’s not very useful for society. What you need to do is study so you can become a lawyer, banker, doctor or engineer,” but rather to help the child process and maybe think through their desires and even helping them along with what they want.

I remember reading the account of one of the teachers of such a school. He had a 14-year old student who said that he wanted to be a mortician someday. Instead of steering the kid away from that path, what the teacher did was to contact the local funeral parlor in town and then asked the manager if he would be willing to take on a young apprentice. The teacher had to drive the student to the funeral parlor and then pick him up every week. That student eventually opened his own funeral parlor when he became an adult.

Now, try doing that in a traditional school.

Originally published in Sunstar Davao.

Email me at andy@freethinking.me. View previous articles at www.freethinking.me.