Arizona just posted what I think is an awesome idea that her 12 year old son came up with shortly before being kicked out of school (more or less).
My son, at age 12, tried to reform the system through a proposed “10 minute schoolplan†whereby teachers were given 10 mins to “sell†a lesson after which kids could leave if not interested and repair to a self-directed learning centre (basically a room with library and internet access, maybe a workbench for tinkering).
Seems brilliant to me, actually. I can see why they gave him the boot! Although ten minutes is far too long, in my opinion. You could give a full lesson in that time span, and then have the kids do their own thing based on it. Or in ten minutes, you could pitch 5-10 different lesson plans, all revolving around a basic topic. Through this process, you can guage interest, and then figure out what costume to dress your lesson up in. The basic idea would be that no matter what you’d be covering the same type of material, but you’d be doing it from different perspectives. There’s a lot of excellent potential to mine in an idea like this, I think. When I taught I worked like this about half the time. Sometimes there were things that I covered with each class word-for-word the same way with every group. Others, I’d feel them out, see what they were ready for, and figure out on the fly how best to approach them. It’s much more exciting for everybody involved.
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4 Comments
The idea is that, if you’re a good teacher and can genuinely engage the class, then few kids would ever walk out on you. This was the threatening aspect for teachers. I get the feeling you would not have felt threatened yourself.
At the Sudbury Valley Schools, they have at least yearly elections for all their teachers, and their students and entire staff are invited to attend a weekly town hall type meeting where they can all cast a vote on school policy, even some financial matters. It’s amazing.
I drew up an educational philosophy for my son’s home schooling based partly on the Sudbury model but also on the ideas of A.S. Neil’s Summerhill. The “group” meetings were simply negotiations between him and me, but he had the last word. I had to take “no” for an answer, lol. The education authorities didn’t like it but were too intimidated by then to put up much of a protest.
The best general philosophical formulation on the empowerment of children is by Sarah Fitz-Claridge of Taking Children Seriously.
The best idea for education I have is: pay students to go. They’re not doing it for themselves, they’re doing it for the businesses they’ll be slave to someday, so they should be paid for their training.