Morning Chuckle
Monthly Archives: March 2015
Children’s Role in Human History: Implications for Schooling
On February 26, I (Clive) read Ivan Semeniuk’s interview in the Toronto Globe & Mail with anthropologist Niobe Thompson, producer of the CBC TV series The Great Human Odyssey. According to Thompson, human life has been quite tenuous over the millennia and only the ingenious have survived. “Our closest call came about 150,000 years ago when…there were fewer than 1,000 breeding adults left” due to “punishing volatility” in Africa’s climate (sounds like Canada today!).
Thompson goes on to talk about key pockets of humans that have survived through incredible ingenuity, involving their “inventing technology to solve the challenges of their world.” This has required creating a whole culture in which everyone participates, including the children. “Whenever I am living with traditional cultures I have the experience of being overwhelmed with the skills my hosts have for living in their environment.” Thompson goes on to talk about the key role of children’s learning in this:
A person cannot become a hunter or a free-diving gatherer or a reindeer nomad as an adult. This is an immense package of skills that one must begin mastering as a child.
This set me thinking. To what extent are children in schools today learning “inert ideas” and “remote matters” (John Dewey) rather than things fundamental to surviving and thriving in the real world? Dewey would agree that one cannot master (and reconstruct) the requisite “immense package of skills” as an adult. The process must occur in earnest from the first day of school (and prior to that in the home). Unfortunately, however, as Nel Noddings says in Education and Democracy in the 21st Century (2013), schooling today is going in the opposite direction.
I do not foresee dramatic changes in the basic structure of curriculum…. Indeed, if we continue in the direction we are now headed, the curriculum will become even more isolated from real life…. It is this tendency that we should resist. (p. 11)
Children do learn a lot of useful things in school: we and our societies are much better off than we would be without schooling. But at present we seem to be headed in the wrong direction. So resist we must. Even in the right direction, we have a very long way to go. Perhaps human survival is not a stake, but human well-being around the planet certainly is.
“Unschooling” education
A recent article in the Toronto Star focused on a family that is committed to “unschooling” their two boys. The two children featured in the article, aged ten and thirteen, do not attend a formal school and receive little direct instruction at home. The unschooling approach has been described as an “extreme approach to homeschooling,” it is focused on self-directed learning where children are deeply immersed in their surrounding community. The boys’ father, Ben Hewitt, discussed the approach to education he and his wife Penny have implemented with their sons. Hewitt noted that as a society “we base a lot of our assumptions about education on what children are supposed to be getting from a standardized curriculum, rather than what they are actually getting… But for me, calculus and physics are not required to be a functioning member of society.” What do you think about the “unschooling” approach?
To read more about the Hewitt family and unschooling see the Star article: http://www.thestar.com/life/parent/2015/03/01/why-one-family-practices-unschooling.html
Faking It
On her CBC radio show The Current, Anna Maria Tremonte discusses the growing phenomena of faking our way to cultural literacy. A 2013 study based in the U.K. reported that “more than 60 per cent of people living in the U.K. pretend to have read classic books they’ve never actually read.” Faking cultural literacy has become easier than ever because of the rise of social media. Picking up information on a book or movie has become very easy with apps like twitter or facebook. Alexandra Samuel, vice-president of social media at a marketing firm, attributes faking cultural literacy to our need as humans need to fit in. He says, “We have, as a species, the need to create social bonds with people who we want to be like. People try and identify with a group they see as positive and then reinforce the qualities of their own that connect them with that group.” Belshaw, educational researcher, believes that faking it has become part of being culturally literate or “a way of understanding the world,” but he warns, “we need to make sure that we are not naive about the structured interests behind the technology we use.”
To listen to the entire show, click below:
Literacy Teaching and Teacher Education 