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Teaching, Learning and Schooling
By
Anne Carpenter
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Changing the way we currently teach only to the good, quiet, well-behaved
child and teach to all children we will be more successful as a society in
educating our youth. Children seem to learn best with individualized learning,
teaching and schooling.
Children learn best with individualized learning :“It is a loss and a crime
when creativity, alternative learning skills, and an individualized education take a
back seat to rote memorizations, standardized testing, and the misconceptions
that all people learn the same way” (Mooney & Cole, 2000, p.20) This was true
during Plato’s time and it is still true now. Individuals learn in their own way.
Mooney and Cole figured out how they learned best. “Our skills are alternative
learning skills. In every section, we explore multiple entry point to information,
integrating color, verbal processing, pragmatic learning, and project based
learning (Mooney & Cole, 2000, p.83). However, learning using an alternative
method goes in direct opposition to current systems. Independent communities
place values upon and reinforce specific information regardless of academic
achievement. Rogoff stated each community may have different end goals in
educating their children:”… learn to attend to the nuances of weather patterns or
of social cues of people around them, to use words cleverly to joust, or to
understand the relation between human and supernatural events” (2003,p. 22).
To make all children learn the same information is a disservice to the child and
waste of valuable resources.
Using the Socratic method of teaching Socrates questions Meno’s
knowledge of virtue, and rather than answering Meno’s question Socrates
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allowed Meno to discover for himself what he knew or did not know. In other
words, by debating with Meno, Socrates provided individualized teaching to
Meno even though Socrates declared that he does not teach. “I shall only ask
him, and not teach him, and he shall share the enquiry with me: and do you
watch and see if you find me telling or explaining anything to him, instead of
eliciting his opinion” (Plato, trans. Jowett, 1995). We have let money and
bureaucracy get in the way of teaching our children. Unfortunately, our children
are the ones that are being hurt by using assessment based punitive labeling to
pigeonhole kids. However, by not educating all children individually we have
according to Milliken:
America's three and a half million dropouts ages 16 to 25 are truly
have-nots: They do not have a high school diploma, and as a result they
have little hope for a decent future. They are far more likely than their
peers to be unemployed, live in poverty, experience chronic poor health,
depend upon social services, and go to jail. Four out of every 10 young
adult dropouts receive some type of government assistance. A dropout is
more than eight times as likely to be in jail or prison as a person with at
least a high school diploma. Half of all prison inmates are high school
dropouts. In fact, on any given day, more young male dropouts are in
prison than at a job.
The dire consequences for these young people are mirrored in the
costs to American society - to you, your children, and the future of our
country. Dropouts are costing us billions of dollars in lost wages and
increased social supports
In reality, we are costing ourselves as society more money by not educating
everyone than it would cost us to educate him or her.
We define schooling as an inclusive institution made up of buildings,
bureaucracy, social thoughts and cultural values. Rogoff stated “industrial
society’s developing priorities and practices, specifically the goal of efficient
management of schools and other institutions, modeled on the newly developed
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factory system, with its division of labor and assembly lines” (2003, p. 156). To
accommodate all participants equitably current modalities must evolve. The
thoughts and values of current society must progress and accommodate all
styles of schooling. Granted, it will take time to change and become more open
to teaching all children individually, however we must begin somewhere and we
can initiate the change.
Individualizing learning teaching and schooling brings out the best in all
children. Success as a society in educating our youth will occur when we change
the way we currently teach and accommodate the individual.