Hey, teacher, leave them kids alone!

We use a lot of words in education without really understanding what they mean. Take the word 'education' for example. Education is often associated with schooling, but to assume that the two are one and the same would be a serious error. When Pink Floyd sang 'we don't need no education' what they really should have said was 'we don't need no schooling' (although it wouldn't have fit into the tune quite as well). Education, if experienced in its pure form, is liberating, mind-expanding, essential. Often, schooling fails to do that for children. School for many is about uniformity, standardisation and synchronisation of behaviour. Schooling is the industrial process children are put through by the state to ensure they become compliant to authority, inculcated into the skills of reading, writing and numeracy, and systematically instructed (and then tested) about the world about them. They are batch processed by age, their behaviour is managed, their performance is scrutinised, and there is little time for self expression. One size has to fit all.

This is not education. It's indoctrination. A closer examination of the origins of the word 'education' will reveal that it comes from the Latin word educere, which means to draw out or to lead from within. What does this mean? If you are a teacher, you will know that you can either instruct from the front, or you can take a backseat and create opportunities for your students to learn for themselves. It's a choice each teacher makes, and over a period of time, it has consequences. Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget once declared:

"Each time one prematurely teaches a child something he could have discovered for himself, that child is kept from inventing it and consequently from understanding it completely." (1)

To draw out a child from within themselves, we must first accept that the child has something within them to give. Every child has something unique to offer. Each has skills, abilities, knowledge, hopes, aspirations and individual personalities that can be nurtured, allowed to blossom, encouraged. Teachers who ignore this will not only fail to 'draw out' those individual attributes, they will also deprive children from a wonderful spectrum of opportunities to learn for themselves.

Whether children learn for themselves, or are instructed, depends on each teacher's personal philosophy on education. Does education for them mean schooling, or 'drawing out from within'? Most teachers probably take the middle ground and oscillate between instruction and facilitation of learning. Yet if they are honest, most teachers will admit they default to the instructional mode when they need to control behaviour, or 'get through' the content of the lesson.

Here's the bottom line: In its purest form, education is about drawing out the learner from within themselves, giving them space to express themselves, explore and play, ask the 'what if?' questions and learn in their own style and at their own pace. State funded schooling cannot and will not provide the flexibility for this kind of education to be realised. Friedrich Nietzsche once said: 'In large states education will always be mediocre, for the same reason that in large kitchens the cooking is usually bad.' The best we can hope for within the present industrial school system is that each teacher will be agile enough to interpret the curriculum that is imposed upon them in ways that offer children enough latitude to learn for themselves.  A question all educators need to ask is: Are we keeping them inside themselves, or are we drawing them out from within?

Next post: The meaning of Pedagogy

Reference
(1) Jean Piaget, quoted in the Early Years Development Framework for Child Care Centres, Ministry of Community Development, Youth & Sports, Republic of Singapore, 2011, p 9.

Photo from Wikimedia Commons


Hey, teacher, leave those kids alone by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.