when will we ever learn? ten great educators and their legacy. alan maley
TRANSCRIPT
When Will We Ever Learn?
Ten great educators and their legacy.
Alan Maley
Why bother with the past?
• Perspective on the present•Humility and recognition• A reminder of what we may have forgotten• Courage and comfort – we are not alone• Inspiration for the future
John Dewey 1859-1952
Dewey’s ideas
• Importance of education as agent of social change and reform.
“education is a regulation of the process of coming to share in the social consciousness; and that the adjustment of individual activity on the basis of this social consciousness is the only sure method of social reconstruction".
The need to help students realise their full potential
“…to prepare him for the future life means to give him command of himself; it means so to train him that he will have the full and ready use of all his capacities" (My pedagogic creed, Dewey, 1897)
The superficiality of institutional education
“Rather than preparing students to be reflective, autonomous and ethical beings capable of arriving at social truths through critical and intersubjective discourse, schools prepare students for docile compliance with authoritarian work and political structures, discourage the pursuit of individual and communal inquiry, and perceive higher learning as a monopoly of the institution of education.” (Dewey, 1976; 1980).
Rudolf Steiner 1861-1925
Steiner’s ideas
• The individual child is the centre of education• There should be a balance of artistic, practical and
intellectual activity. Physical development is vital (Eurythmy)• There are 3 developmental stages:
Stage 1 up to 7 years – focus on creative play, practical activities Stage 2, 7-14 years. – emphasis on artistic activity and imagination . T as role model very important. Stage 3, over 14. – intellectual development based on personal judgement and effort• Prefers individual assessment to testing.
Steiner quotes
•Our highest endeavour must be to develop free human beings who are able of themselves to impart purpose and direction to their lives. The need for imagination, a sense of truth, and a feeling of responsibility—these three forces are the very nerve of education.
• The time has come to realize that supersensible knowledge has now to arise from the materialistic grave.
More Steiner quotes
• You will not be good teachers if you focus only on what you do and not upon who you are. • You have no idea how unimportant is all that the teacher
says or does not say on the surface, and how important what he himself is as teacher.•Where is the book in which the teacher can read about what
teaching is? The children themselves are this book. We should not learn to teach out of any book other than the one lying open before us and consisting of the children themselves. Rhythms of Learning
Maria Montessori 1870-1952
Montessori’s ideas
• each child is born with a unique potential to be revealed, rather than as a "blank slate" waiting to be written upon.• need to prepare the most natural and life-supporting
environments for the child• to observe the child living freely in this environment• continually to adapt the environment so that the child may
fulfill his or her greatest potential, physically, mentally, emotionally, spiritually.
Montessori quotes
…education is not what the teacher gives; education is a natural process spontaneously carried out by the human individual, and is acquired not by listening to words but by experiences upon the environment. The task of the teacher becomes that of preparing a series of motives of cultural activity, spread over a specially prepared environment, and then refraining from obtrusive interference.
• Never help a child with a task at which he feels he can succeed.
•We teachers can only help the work going on , as servants wait upon a master.• To be…helpful it is necessary to avoid the arrest of
spontaneous movements and avoid the imposition of arbitrary tasks.•…education is not something which the teacher does, but …
a natural process which develops spontaneously in human beings.• Establishing lasting peace is the work of education: all
politics can do is keep us out of war.
A S Neill 1883-1973
Neill’s ideas•A belief in the basic goodness of the child •Setting the happiness of the child as the goal of his education •Responding to the emotional needs of the child, not just his intellectual ones •Taking into account what the child wants, not just what others want for him •Limiting discipline to a minimum •Allowing freedom, not license, and respecting the rights of others •Making sure teachers are honest and sincere toward their pupils •Cutting the child's ties to his parents. Making the school his home •Avoiding giving the child guilt feelings •Not teaching religion
Neill quotes from Summerhill (1970)
• A child is innately wise and realistic. If left to himself without adult suggestion of any kind, he will develop as far as he is capable of developing. •Hate breeds hate, and love breeds love. • You cannot make children learn music or anything else without
to some degree converting them into will-less adults. You fashion them into accepters of the status quo – a good thing for a society that needs obedient sitters at dreary desks, standers in shops, mechanical catchers of the 8:30 suburban train – a society, in short, that is carried on the shabby shoulders of the scared little man – the scared-to-death conformist.
Sylvia Ashton-Warner 1908-1984
Ashton-Warner’s ideas
• Start from where the child is and what she knows.•No need to plan lessons – need to trust in the organic
process with the kids.• Real education is always creative and organic.•Discipline looks after itself when they are in ‘flow’.• ‘Tone’ (ie. the right atmosphere) is key to learning.
Some Townsend-Warner Quotes from ‘Teacher’ (1963)
•…and how good is any child’s book anyway, compared with the ones they write themselves?• I see the mind of a five-year-old as a volcano with two vents;
destructiveness and creativeness.• First words must have intense meaning for a child. They
must be part of his being.•…it is to the extent that the activity in an infant room is
creative that the growth of mind is good.• You neither praise nor blame; you observe. You let
everything come out uncensored; otherwise, why do it at all?
More quotes from ‘Teacher’
•…There are two kinds of order, and which is the one we wish for? Is it the conscious order that ends up as respectability? Or is it the unconscious order that looks like chaos on top?• But it’s the inner, instinctive discipline that obliterates the
external, the imposed kind.•Does a teacher wish to anticipate the purposes of each new
day?
• I’m just a nitwit somehow let loose among children.
• I like unpredictability and variation; I like drama and I like gaiety; I like peace in the world and I like interesting people, and all this means that I like life in its organic shape and that’s just what you get in an infant room where the creative vent widens. For this is where style is born in both writing and art, for art is the way you do a thing and an education based on art at once flashes out style.
• ‘Mrs Henderson, I’m sick of writing.’ ‘Well go and write, “I’m sick of writing.”’
Paulo Freire 1921-1997
Freire’s ideas
• Society is profoundly unjust
• Traditional education serves the oppressors: it is never neutral
• It can be changed. Everyone has the capacity to transform their world
• The ‘banking’ conception of education is deeply flawed.
• We need ‘problem-posing’ education based on dialogue
• This dialogue should be based on ‘generative themes’ identified by the learners themselves, starting with their own reality.(i.e.respect)
• Literacy is power
Some Freire quotes
• The greatest humanistic and historical task of the oppressed: to liberate themselves.
• What the educator does in teaching is to make it possible for the students to become themselves.
• I cannot think for others – or without others, nor can others think for me.
• Our advanced technological society is rapidly making objects of most of us and subtly programming us into conformity to the logic of its system.
• …each man wins back his right to say his own word, to name the world.
More Freire quotes
• ...’pedagogy of the oppressed’…which must be forged with not for, the oppressed.
• …not even the best-intentioned leadership can bestow independence as a gift.
• Education thus becomes an act of depositing, in which the students are the depositaries and the teacher is the depositor. Instead of communicating, the teacher issues communiques, and ‘makes deposits’ which the students patiently receive, memorize and repeat. This is the ‘banking’ concept of education
• ...this concept is well-suited to the purposes of the oppressors, whose tranquillity rests on how well men fit the world the oppressors have created, and how little they question it.
David Horsburgh 1925-1984
Horsburgh’s ideas
• Traditional education does nothing to help the poor (and not much for anyone else)
• Education should focus on helping kids to learn, not teaching them.
• It has to start from where they are – rooted in local context.
• It has to include practical skills and artistic expression as well as literacy and numeracy.
• Vertical age-groupings focussed on projects and themes preferred to horizontal age-groupings focussed on ‘subjects’.
• Competition, rewards and tests are all negative factors.
Horsburgh – some quotes.
•…trying to form minds that will question and destroy, and rebuild.• To have a school where everyone is successful.•…to get children to learn and not to teach them.• I wanted a school without punishments.•Once you teach a child to read, once you teach him how to
learn, your job is done, really; and the third thing is to motivate him to want to learn more. That's it.
More on Horsburgh…
• www.alternativeeducationindia.net/articles/david-horsburgh-interviewed
(interview with Rosalind Wilson)
• www.thehindu.com/mag/2004/11/stories/2004011100190700.htm( Amukta Mahapatra. Where the Mind is Without Fear.)
John Caldwell Holt 1923-1985
Holt’s ideas
• Left to themselves learners are already motivated to learn. They are creative and know how to learn.
• What gets in the way of motivated learning is teaching, schools, curricula, published materials, testing … and rewards.
• Schools are full of fear, confusion and boredom.
Holt quotes from ‘How Children Fail’
It is as true now as it was then that no matter what tests show, very little of what is taught in school is learned, very little of what is learned is remembered, and very little of what is remembered is used. The things we learn, remember, and use are the things we seek out or meet in the daily, serious, non-school parts of our lives.
The true test of intelligence is not how much you know how to do but how we behave when we don’t know what to do.
More Holt quotes
• ... the human animal is a learning animal; we like to learn; we are good at it; we don't need to be shown how or made to do it. What kills the processes are the people interfering with it or trying to regulate it or control it.
•We can best help children learn, not by deciding what we think they should learn and thinking of ingenious ways to teach it to them, but by making the world, as far as we can, accessible to them, paying serious attention to what they do, answering their questions -- if they have any -- and helping them explore the things they are most interested in.
More Holt quotes
• To a very great degree, school is a place where children learn to be stupid.• It is hard not to feel that there must be something very
wrong with much of what we do in school, if we feel the need to worry so much about what many people call 'motivation'. A child has no stronger desire than to make sense of the world, to move freely in it, to do the things that he sees bigger people doing
Dorothy Heathcote 1926-2011
Heathcote’s ideas
•Drama should be at the heart of education.•Not drama ‘in’ education but drama ‘as’ education.•Need to start from where the kids are.•Must trust kids to make the decisions, trust ourselves to be
able to handle it, trust that the outcome will be good … we must take risks.•Need to listen ‘with our pores as well as with our ears’.• The ‘mantle of the expert’ conferring status on students.
Some Heathcote quotes from Wagner 1979
• …she does her best teaching when she and the students both are moving into the unknown.• Too often, we educators take a lesson-plan approach to teaching,
not recognising the energising effect of improvising with a class.• She resists the teacher’s continual temptation: to tell all she
knows.• Heathcote uses drama to help children understand human
experience from the inside out. (‘the left hand of learning.’)• You use whatever information the children have – no matter how
inaccurate of anachronistic – as the grist to get into what the event feels like to the people who live through it.
More Heathcote quotes
• Linear thinking takes the world apart and outlines it. Left-handed thinking takes it all in and makes of it a synthesis…
• Heathcote’s instinct is to keep the forgotten language of image and dream alive and powerful as she sets it next to scientific facts…
• She’s headed for a truth where mere facts are not what matter, for the deep knowing that makes information come alive…
• She is not after a play that looks right to an audience but an experience that feels right to the participants
Ken Robinson 1950-
Robinson’s ideas
• Education should foster diversity –offering a broad curriculum and individualisation of the learning process. • It should foster curiosity through creative teaching.• It should put less emphasis on standardised testing –
trusting teachers to define and assess what is learned.
Some Robinson quotes from ‘The Element’
• Education is the system that’s supposed to develop our natural abilities and enable us to make our way in the world,. Instead, it is stifling the individual talents and abilities of too many students and killing their motivation to learn.•How intelligent are you? Wrong question. How are you
intelligent? Right question.• The highest form of intelligence is thinking creatively.• Creative thinking goes beyond linear and logical thought to
involve all areas of our minds and bodies.
More from ‘The Element’
• Public education puts relentless pressure on its students to conform. Public schools were not only created in the interests of industrialism – they were created in the image of industrialism.…education doesn’t need to be reformed – it needs to be transformed.• The future for education is not in standardising but in
customising, not on promoting groupthink and ‘deindividuation’ but in cultivating the real depth and dynamism of human abilities of every sort.
A must-see. Robinson’s TED talk
www.ted.com/talks/ken_robinson_says_schools_kill_creativity?language=en
See also full video of British Council event:
http://www.britishcouncil.org/education/schools/support-for-languages/think-differently/video
So what are schools for?
• Custodial care (Keeping them off the streets)
• Social conformity (Making sure they don’t rock the boat)
• Sorting kids into categories (Who passed? Who failed?)
• Education (Teaching them? Helping them learn?)
How do these ideas match up with the current ethos?
Great educators Public education
Freedom Control
Diversity/creativity Conformity/mediocrity
Bottom-up Top-down
Children first System first
Synthesis Analysis
Facilitation Compulsion
Inquiry / asking Facts /telling
Evolving curriculum Prescribed curriculum
Some conclusions
• The views of great educators are at variance with those of most educational authorities.• To continue in this way is to condemn future generations to
failure.•We need to create a groundswell of opinion which will
favour change – not just more of the same.
Thank youfor
your attention
Alan Maley
http://thecreativitygroup.weebly.com/