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Validating yourself. Developing yourself. Yet in our offices and our classrooms we have way too much compliance and way too little engagement. The former might get you through the day, but only the latter will get you through the night. Indeed, most of the scandals and misbehavior that have seemed endemic to modern life involve shortcuts.
Hinton, a blonde woman in a colourful silk scarf, stands before a class of eight- and nine-year-old boys and girls, almost all of whom are African-American. For administration, are Creating the search of this Religion. Save completely or add Twitter Status for more failure. Now, this might not sound like it has much to do with the field of education, but if you'll bear with us then we think you might just be surprised. Tags: social justice.
When what they must do exceeds their capabilities, the result is anxiety. This is the essence of flow. They enjoyed it. The joy of the task was its own reward. Why not reach for it? The joy is in the pursuit more than the realization.
In the end, mastery attracts precisely because mastery eludes. But goals imposed by others—sales targets, quarterly returns, standardized test scores, and so on—can sometimes have dangerous side effects. And when that drive is liberated, people achieve more and live richer lives. Nothing has made a greater impact in my life then learning to apply flow psychology to my learning and work. The important thing, however, is the attitude toward these disciplines.
If one prays in order to be holy, or exercises to develop strong pectoral muscles, or learns to be knowledgeable, then a great deal of the benefit is lost. When we choose a goal and invest ourselves in it to the limits of concentration, whatever we do will be enjoyable.
And once we have tasted this joy, we will redouble our efforts to taste it again. This is the way the self grows. To achieve such autonomy, a person has to learn to provide rewards to herself.
She has to develop the ability to find enjoyment and purpose regardless of external circumstances. Optimal experience is thus something that we make happen. For a child, it could be placing with trembling fingers the last block on a tower she has built, higher than any she has built so far; for a swimmer, it could be trying to beat his own record; for a violinist, mastering an intricate musical passage. For each person there are thousands of opportunities, challenges to expand ourselves.
Quotes from Ivan Illich, author of Deschooling Society :. It is rather the result of unhampered participation in a meaningful setting.
The ecological balance cannot be re-established unless we recognize again that only persons have ends and only persons can work towards them. An individual with a schooled mind conceives of the world as a pyramid of classified packages accessible only to those who carry the proper tags. Every one of us, every group, must become the model of that which we desire to create. The future depends more upon our choice of institutions which support a life of action than on our developing new ideologies and technologies.
The most radical alternative to school would be a network or service which gave each man the same opportunity to share his current concern with others motivated by the same concern. The political process breaks down, because people cease to be able to govern themselves; they demand to be managed.
Once this lesson is learned, people loose their incentive to develop independently; they no longer find it attractive to relate to each other, and the surprises that life offers when it is not predetermined by institutional definition are closed. Teaching, it is true, may contribute to certain kinds of learning under certain circumstances. But most people acquire most of their knowledge outside school, and in school only insofar as school, in a few rich countries, has become their place of confinement during an increasing part of their lives.
The scientific research is unanimous, people that regularly unplug and spend time in nature are much healthier, happier and more creative. Nature offers healing for a child living in a destructive family or neighborhood. If we are going to save environmentalism and the environment, we must also save an endangered indicator species: the child in nature.
These are the moments when the world is made whole. Through it we learned to trust ourselves and our abilities. Nature presents the young with something so much greater than they are; it offers an environment where they can easily contemplate infinity and eternity. A teacher that is immensely old and extraordinarily wise. A teacher that can teach subjects that no human can teach. A teacher that will go at any pace. Playtime—especially unstructured, imaginative, exploratory play—is increasingly recognized as an essential component of wholesome child development.
For almost anything you want to do, you can find instructions and video on the Internet. For almost any idea you want to think about, you can find arguments and counterarguments on the Internet, and even join a discussion about it.
This is far more conducive to intellectual development than the one-right-answer approach of the standard school system. We all tiptoe around the truth because admitting it would make us seem cruel and would point a finger at well-intentioned people doing what they believe to be essential. A prison, according to the common, general definition, is any place of involuntary confinement and restriction of liberty.
In school, as in adult prisons, the inmates are told exactly what they must do and are punished for failure to comply. Actually, students in school must spend more time doing exactly what they are told than is true of adults in penal institutions. Another difference, of course, is that we put adults in prison because they have committed a crime, while we put children in school because of their age.
The children themselves become convinced of their incompetence and irresponsibility, and may act accordingly. The surest way to foster any trait in a person is to treat that person as if he or she already has it. Yet policymakers and powerful philanthropists are continuing to push us in the opposite direction — toward more schooling, more testing, more adult direction of children, and less opportunity for free play.
This is very different from superficial knowledge that is acquired solely for the purpose of passing a test and is forgotten shortly after the test is over. It also promotes anxiety, depression and feelings of helplessness that all too often reach pathological levels.
Children did not adapt well to forced schooling, and in many cases they rebelled.
This was no surprise to the adults. Brute force, long used to keep children on task in fields and factories, was transported into the classroom to make children learn. It is a very grave mistake to think that the enjoyment of seeing and searching can be promoted by means of coercion and a sense of duty. The solution, I think, is simple and glorious. Let them manage themselves. Now we have been rendered permanent children. Schools are intended to produce through the application of formulae, formulaic human beings whose behavior can be predicted and controlled.
If it could be fixed it could have been fixed by now. People need to be told what they are worth. School trains children to obey reflexively; teach your own to think critically and independently. Urge them to take on the serious material, the grown-up material, in history, literature, philosophy, music, art, economics, theology — all the stuff schoolteachers know well enough to avoid.
Challenge your kids with plenty of solitude so that they can learn to enjoy their own company, to conduct inner dialogues. Well-schooled people are conditioned to dread being alone, and they seek constant companionship through the TV, the computer, the cell phone, and through shallow friendships quickly acquired and quickly abandoned. Your children should have a more meaningful life, and they can. In simpler terms, I tried to maneuver them into positions where they would have the chance to be their own teachers and make themselves the major text of their own education.
It warned sharply that academic classes and professional credentials would count for less and less when measured against real world training. Ten qualities were offered as essential to successfully adapting to the rapidly changing world of work. See how many of those you think are regularly taught in the schools of your city or state:. Few people have done more than Sir Ken Robinson to wake people up about the short-sightedness of the current obsession with standardization and measurement.
Our model of schooling is killing the most valuable resources we have: curiosity and creativity. He argues that creativity is just as important as literacy in a knowledge-based economy. The key to this transformation is not to standardize education, but to personalize it, to build achievement on discovering the individual talents of each child, to put students in an environment where they want to learn and where they can naturally discover their true passions.
It's well worth the time. It seems that so much of the apprehension about bringing technology into schools is about fear. Fear of losing control of information, fear of harming children's attention spans, their learning brain. How do you think we can address or overcome these fears? There is no evidence of an increase in such crime, just an increase in reporting. We are also fearful about ourselves—the Internet is ruining our brain, our attention, our memory. Everything new changes our habits, makes new patterns, and there is certainly a learning curve whenever we face new challenges.