Jun 16, 2016 05:57 AM
(This post was last modified: Jun 16, 2016 05:57 AM by C C.)
https://aeon.co/essays/schooling-comes-n...ous-people
EXCERPT: [...] The expression of dissatisfaction with imposed imperialist education has a long history. In the early 20th century, Rabindranath Tagore set up Santiniketan in Bengal, to protest at British colonialist schooling. Classes were held outdoors; the natural world was honoured as a teacher. Stories, music and art were integral to learning. Exams were not. Nor was the world of business. Generating art in everything, Tagore’s aim was to regenerate the moment with noticed beauty to turn the meanly quotidian into a daily ceremony.
His ideas of schooling are echoed in Forest Schools, the Reggio Emilia system, and the multitude of fledgling radical schools that emphasise nature and art, and value moral, meaningful learning as much as academic work. Meanwhile, Jiddu Krishnamurti’s educational philosophy began with a revulsion at the ways in which the typical education of his time served nationalism and economics, when he taught ethics: the goodness of the human being.
Radical education has often focused on similar themes: from Devon to the Sierra Nevada, from Bengal to Veracruz, people speak a common sense of mind and body learning in each other’s service.
Take a human being. Lean it gently on the earth and let it listen awhile in the darkness. Ask it then what are the good words, and true. Ask what is the core curriculum for the human heart, the coeur values which children should learn. And, like a fundamental law of metaphysics, the answers seem to come back the same all over the world. Nature. Story. Ethics. Respect. Balance. Creativity. Spirit. Insight. Gift. The art of being human.
It is not just the overtly colonised indigenous cultures that know this; not just the nations that have suffered imperialism or slavery, but any human being who has felt the stress, cruelty, insufficiency or marginalisation of education. Anyone who deplores seeing education manacled to corporations. All who resent seeing children as colonised subjects in the empire of the school, or decry the kind of education that meanly markets children as earners, consumers and debtors-to-be. This cri de coeur can be heard wherever people, in exasperation, anger and bewilderment want to snatch their children away from a toxic ideology that damages nature, and human nature. The Dominant Society, say the Arhuaco people of Colombia, with real bitterness, knows little of the natural world but much about how to destroy it. At the core of Arhuaco education is the sacred duty of maintaining the balance of life: the protection of nature.
If this is the cherished end of the camino of pedagogy, how might those steps be taken in relation to individual children? It is a matter of one’s gift, say Totonac people: the seed that needs to be discovered and nurtured from childhood. In effect, they say, like some of the more gifted educators of the Dominant Society: do not ask if this child is gifted, ask how is this child gifted....
EXCERPT: [...] The expression of dissatisfaction with imposed imperialist education has a long history. In the early 20th century, Rabindranath Tagore set up Santiniketan in Bengal, to protest at British colonialist schooling. Classes were held outdoors; the natural world was honoured as a teacher. Stories, music and art were integral to learning. Exams were not. Nor was the world of business. Generating art in everything, Tagore’s aim was to regenerate the moment with noticed beauty to turn the meanly quotidian into a daily ceremony.
His ideas of schooling are echoed in Forest Schools, the Reggio Emilia system, and the multitude of fledgling radical schools that emphasise nature and art, and value moral, meaningful learning as much as academic work. Meanwhile, Jiddu Krishnamurti’s educational philosophy began with a revulsion at the ways in which the typical education of his time served nationalism and economics, when he taught ethics: the goodness of the human being.
Radical education has often focused on similar themes: from Devon to the Sierra Nevada, from Bengal to Veracruz, people speak a common sense of mind and body learning in each other’s service.
Take a human being. Lean it gently on the earth and let it listen awhile in the darkness. Ask it then what are the good words, and true. Ask what is the core curriculum for the human heart, the coeur values which children should learn. And, like a fundamental law of metaphysics, the answers seem to come back the same all over the world. Nature. Story. Ethics. Respect. Balance. Creativity. Spirit. Insight. Gift. The art of being human.
It is not just the overtly colonised indigenous cultures that know this; not just the nations that have suffered imperialism or slavery, but any human being who has felt the stress, cruelty, insufficiency or marginalisation of education. Anyone who deplores seeing education manacled to corporations. All who resent seeing children as colonised subjects in the empire of the school, or decry the kind of education that meanly markets children as earners, consumers and debtors-to-be. This cri de coeur can be heard wherever people, in exasperation, anger and bewilderment want to snatch their children away from a toxic ideology that damages nature, and human nature. The Dominant Society, say the Arhuaco people of Colombia, with real bitterness, knows little of the natural world but much about how to destroy it. At the core of Arhuaco education is the sacred duty of maintaining the balance of life: the protection of nature.
If this is the cherished end of the camino of pedagogy, how might those steps be taken in relation to individual children? It is a matter of one’s gift, say Totonac people: the seed that needs to be discovered and nurtured from childhood. In effect, they say, like some of the more gifted educators of the Dominant Society: do not ask if this child is gifted, ask how is this child gifted....