Subject Incidental

Reading the newspaper this morning (alas, my dirty secret in the TechEd program; I pick up a dead tree before anything with a screen) I was particularly struck by an article entitled “Unschooled children are their own teachers”.While I’ll resist venturing here into a debate of curriculum-centric vs. student-directed learning (worthwhile though it may be), I was alarmed at the language used in describing the public school system. Some select quotes,

“Being bored makes school miserable for a lot of kids, plus there is the element of compulsion, which completely changes any activity.”

“Holt...argued that mainstream schools stymie the learning process by fostering fear and forcing children to study things they have no interest in.”

“He called progressive schools soft jails and public schools hard jails.”

In contrast, “unschooling”, which is obviously presented favourably in the context of this article, means “looking at life ‘as a creative adventure,’ a co-operative lifestyle involving the entire family.”

So here we are presented with an obvious dichotomy, one in which children are forcibly compelled to study a subject regardless of their personal interest, and the other a vaguely utopian learning democracy.

Fortunately, I’ve still got enough historian in me to consider “dichotomy” a dirty word.

There’s a saying in fiction that there are no bad characters, simply bad writers. I feel we can safely extend this logic to school subjects. Yes, children in public schools are compelled to study certain subjects at certain times, this is inescapable in the current system. Yet assuming for a one moment that this is developmentally destructive for a child, the alternative manifests its positive changes by establishing a creative, co-operative learning environment. However, I fail to see how these qualities cannot be integrated into a public school class, providing it is being run by a teacher open to some creative technological experimentation. With new advances, the way information is conveyed, absorbed and redistributed among classmates is subject to some crucial revisions. Class-controlled social media, easy access to limitless online knowledge, clickers, and a willingness to accept multi/mixed media projects far outside the standard pencil and paper definitions all contribute to a student’s sense of creative inclusion in a class. In turn, it is the teacher’s responsibility to foster and join this co-operation, learning from the technical knowledge of students (and I assume we’ll always be playing catch-up in that regard). With a basis of mutual learning and respect, the specific subject becomes almost incidental, just part of the larger creative adventure. And hardly boring.

So while the aforementioned unschooling article is correct in marveling at the avenues for self-teaching that online technology might afford, I am bewildered at the suggestion that a traditional classroom must be discarded in order to make use of these tools. Self-teaching is a fantastic use of new technology, but how much stronger might it be within a collective of self-teachers, sharing their mutual advances. At the head of such a class is a teacher aiming to be taught.