Sunday, November 18, 2012

Analogy : education and love

Advice to educators: The assumption that fancy methods, classroom management techniques, more worksheets, high technology, scientific tracking, attention-grabbing stories, rhymes, charts and toys will help you to teach an objective better to a class..

is as flawed and as short-sighted...

as the thinking that using expensive gifts, pick-up lines, mind games, flamboyance, false promises and preten
ces can get a person to fall in love with you.

In both cases they will respond only if they themselves inherently wanted to, regardless of the efforts you put in. At best you'll only get a partner pretending love for the sake of the money, or a class pretending to learn for the sake of the marks. At worst you'll only end up giving false hopes of a great future and set them up for a big disappointment.
 
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A friend asked me to elaborate upon this. I shared my recent video. Then he asked to elaborate upon it more. So I wrote him this:

Well, it's as I shared in the post. Children are human beings first. The International convention on human rights is supposed to be applied to all human beings. The magic number of 18 (and the assumption that below that, these rights don't apply) is a lie. We are not supposed to hold any human being against their will, no matter how convinced we are that it's for their own good. If any compromise on this stand is to be made for practical reasons, then only parents/family reserve this right. Outsourcing it leads to human rights violations aka the present state of pedagogy.

The 9-year-olds in my class, every last one of them, was capable of learning everything we wanted of them at their own pace. They were all capable of learning non-linearly (like mastering years worth of learning in a few weeks when they really want to - everything on this planet except the education system is non-linear!), there was no need of worrying if one of them can't master adding double-digit numbers right now.  But I held them against their will and tried forcing things on them, in whichever way. That had a net negative effect on them. I witnessed the spark of genius being extinguished in front of my eyes. It harms the natural tendency of the child to like something, pursue it and master it themselves. The outcome of this forced schooling is everything that we find wrong in the people around us today. Most of what we pass off as normal just because everyone else is doing it, is actually abnormal and unnatural, and everyone is suffering.
Adding a moral science subject or one on democracy is bullshit if we're violating their rights and practising dictatorship on them at the same time.

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