When Will We Ever Learn?
Ten great educators and their legacy.
Alan Maley
Why bother with the past?
• Perspective on the present
• Humility and recognition
• A reminder of what we may have forgotten
• Courage and comfort – we are not alone
• Inspiration for the future
John Dewey 1859-1952
Dewey’s ideas
• Importance of education as agent of social change and
reform.
“education is a regulation of the process of coming to share
in the social consciousness; and that the adjustment of
individual activity on the basis of this social consciousness is
the only sure method of social reconstruction".
The need to help students realise their full potential
“…to prepare him for the future life means to give him
command of himself; it means so to train him that he will
have the full and ready use of all his capacities" (My
pedagogic creed, Dewey, 1897)
The superficiality of institutional education
“Rather than preparing students to be reflective, autonomous
and ethical beings capable of arriving at social truths through
critical and intersubjective discourse, schools prepare
students for docile compliance with authoritarian work and
political structures, discourage the pursuit of individual and
communal inquiry, and perceive higher learning as a
monopoly of the institution of education.” (Dewey, 1976;
1980).
Rudolf Steiner 1861-1925
Steiner’s ideas
• The individual child is the centre of education
• There should be a balance of artistic, practical and
intellectual activity. Physical development is vital
(Eurythmy)
• There are 3 developmental stages:
Stage 1 up to 7 years – focus on creative play, practical
activities Stage 2, 7-14 years. – emphasis on artistic activity
and imagination . T as role model very important.
Stage 3, over 14. – intellectual development based on
personal judgement and effort
• Prefers individual assessment to testing.
Steiner quotes
• Our highest endeavour must be to develop free human
beings who are able of themselves to impart purpose and
direction to their lives. The need for imagination, a sense of
truth, and a feeling of responsibility—these three forces are
the very nerve of education.
• The time has come to realize that supersensible knowledge
has now to arise from the materialistic grave.
More Steiner quotes
• You will not be good teachers if you focus only on what you
do and not upon who you are.
• You have no idea how unimportant is all that the teacher
says or does not say on the surface, and how important what
he himself is as teacher.
• Where is the book in which the teacher can read about what
teaching is? The children themselves are this book. We
should not learn to teach out of any book other than the one
lying open before us and consisting of the children
themselves. Rhythms of Learning
Maria Montessori 1870-1952
Montessori’s ideas
• each child is born with a unique potential to be revealed,
rather than as a "blank slate" waiting to be written upon.
• need to prepare the most natural and life-supporting
environments for the child
• to observe the child living freely in this environment
• continually to adapt the environment so that the child may
fulfill his or her greatest potential, physically, mentally,
emotionally, spiritually.
Montessori quotes
…education is not what the teacher gives; education is a
natural process spontaneously carried out by the human
individual, and is acquired not by listening to words but by
experiences upon the environment. The task of the teacher
becomes that of preparing a series of motives of cultural
activity, spread over a specially prepared environment, and
then refraining from obtrusive interference.
• Never help a child with a task at which he feels he can
succeed.
• We teachers can only help the work going on , as servants
wait upon a master.
• To be…helpful it is necessary to avoid the arrest of
spontaneous movements and avoid the imposition of
arbitrary tasks.
• …education is not something which the teacher does, but
…a natural process which develops spontaneously in human
beings.
• Establishing lasting peace is the work of education: all
politics can do is keep us out of war.
A S Neill 1883-1973
Neill’s ideas
•A belief in the basic goodness of the child
•Setting the happiness of the child as the goal of his education
•Responding to the emotional needs of the child, not just his
intellectual ones
•Taking into account what the child wants, not just what others
want for him
•Limiting discipline to a minimum
•Allowing freedom, not license, and respecting the rights of others
•Making sure teachers are honest and sincere toward their pupils
•Cutting the child's ties to his parents. Making the school his home
•Avoiding giving the child guilt feelings
•Not teaching religion
Neill quotes from Summerhill (1970)
• A child is innately wise and realistic. If left to himself
without adult suggestion of any kind, he will develop as far
as he is capable of developing.
• Hate breeds hate, and love breeds love.
• You cannot make children learn music or anything else
without to some degree converting them into will-less adults.
You fashion them into accepters of the status quo – a good
thing for a society that needs obedient sitters at dreary desks,
standers in shops, mechanical catchers of the 8:30 suburban
train – a society, in short, that is carried on the shabby
shoulders of the scared little man – the scared-to-death
conformist.
Sylvia Ashton-Warner 1908-1984
Ashton-Warner’s ideas
• Start from where the child is and what she knows.
• No need to plan lessons – need to trust in the organic
process with the kids.
• Real education is always creative and organic.
• Discipline looks after itself when they are in ‘flow’.
• ‘Tone’ (ie. the right atmosphere) is key to learning.
Some Townsend-Warner Quotes from ‘Teacher’ (1963)
• …and how good is any child’s book anyway, compared with
the ones they write themselves?
• I see the mind of a five-year-old as a volcano with two vents;
destructiveness and creativeness.
• First words must have intense meaning for a child. They
must be part of his being.
• …it is to the extent that the activity in an infant room is
creative that the growth of mind is good.
• You neither praise nor blame; you observe. You let
everything come out uncensored; otherwise, why do it at all?
More quotes from ‘Teacher’
• …There are two kinds of order, and which is the one we
wish for? Is it the conscious order that ends up as
respectability? Or is it the unconscious order that looks like
chaos on top?
• But it’s the inner, instinctive discipline that obliterates the
external, the imposed kind.
• Does a teacher wish to anticipate the purposes of each new
day?
• I’m just a nitwit somehow let loose among children.
• I like unpredictability and variation; I like drama and I like
gaiety; I like peace in the world and I like interesting people,
and all this means that I like life in its organic shape and
that’s just what you get in an infant room where the creative
vent widens. For this is where style is born in both writing
and art, for art is the way you do a thing and an education
based on art at once flashes out style.
• ‘Mrs Henderson, I’m sick of writing.’
‘Well go and write, “I’m sick of writing.”’
Paulo Freire 1921-1997
Freire’s ideas
• Society is profoundly unjust
• Traditional education serves the oppressors: it is never neutral
• It can be changed. Everyone has the capacity to transform their
world
• The ‘banking’ conception of education is deeply flawed.
• We need ‘problem-posing’ education based on dialogue
• This dialogue should be based on ‘generative themes’ identified by
the learners themselves, starting with their own reality.(i.e.respect)
• Literacy is power
Some Freire quotes
• The greatest humanistic and historical task of the oppressed: to
liberate themselves.
• What the educator does in teaching is to make it possible for the
students to become themselves.
• I cannot think for others – or without others, nor can others think for
me.
• Our advanced technological society is rapidly making objects of most
of us and subtly programming us into conformity to the logic of its
system.
• …each man wins back his right to say his own word, to name the
world.
More Freire quotes
• ...’pedagogy of the oppressed’…which must be forged with not for,
the oppressed.
• …not even the best-intentioned leadership can bestow independence
as a gift.
• Education thus becomes an act of depositing, in which the students
are the depositaries and the teacher is the depositor. Instead of
communicating, the teacher issues communiques, and ‘makes
deposits’ which the students patiently receive, memorize and repeat.
This is the ‘banking’ concept of education
• ...this concept is well-suited to the purposes of the oppressors, whose
tranquillity rests on how well men fit the world the oppressors have
created, and how little they question it.
David Horsburgh 1925-1984
Horsburgh’s ideas
• Traditional education does nothing to help the poor (and not much
for anyone else)
• Education should focus on helping kids to learn, not teaching them.
• It has to start from where they are – rooted in local context.
• It has to include practical skills and artistic expression as well as
literacy and numeracy.
• Vertical age-groupings focussed on projects and themes preferred to
horizontal age-groupings focussed on ‘subjects’.
• Competition, rewards and tests are all negative factors.
Horsburgh – some quotes.
• …trying to form minds that will question and destroy, and
rebuild.
• To have a school where everyone is successful.
• …to get children to learn and not to teach them.
• I wanted a school without punishments.
• Once you teach a child to read, once you teach him how to
learn, your job is done, really; and the third thing is to
motivate him to want to learn more. That's it.
More on Horsburgh…
• www.alternativeeducationindia.net/articles/david-horsburghinterviewed
(interview with Rosalind Wilson)
• www.thehindu.com/mag/2004/11/stories/2004011100190700.htm
( Amukta Mahapatra. Where the Mind is Without Fear.)
John Caldwell Holt 1923-1985
Holt’s ideas
• Left to themselves learners are already motivated to learn. They are
creative and know how to learn.
• What gets in the way of motivated learning is teaching, schools,
curricula, published materials, testing … and rewards.
• Schools are full of fear, confusion and boredom.
Holt quotes from ‘How Children Fail’
It is as true now as it was then that no matter what tests show,
very little of what is taught in school is learned, very little of
what is learned is remembered, and very little of what is
remembered is used. The things we learn, remember, and use
are the things we seek out or meet in the daily, serious, nonschool parts of our lives.
The true test of intelligence is not how much you know how to
do but how we behave when we don’t know what to do.
More Holt quotes
• ... the human animal is a learning animal; we like to learn;
we are good at it; we don't need to be shown how or made to
do it. What kills the processes are the people interfering with
it or trying to regulate it or control it.
• We can best help children learn, not by deciding what we
think they should learn and thinking of ingenious ways to
teach it to them, but by making the world, as far as we can,
accessible to them, paying serious attention to what they do,
answering their questions -- if they have any -- and helping
them explore the things they are most interested in.
More Holt quotes
• To a very great degree, school is a place where children
learn to be stupid.
• It is hard not to feel that there must be something very
wrong with much of what we do in school, if we feel the
need to worry so much about what many people call
'motivation'. A child has no stronger desire than to make
sense of the world, to move freely in it, to do the things that
he sees bigger people doing
Dorothy Heathcote 1926-2011
Heathcote’s ideas
• Drama should be at the heart of education.
• Not drama ‘in’ education but drama ‘as’ education.
• Need to start from where the kids are.
• Must trust kids to make the decisions, trust ourselves to be
able to handle it, trust that the outcome will be good … we
must take risks.
• Need to listen ‘with our pores as well as with our ears’.
• The ‘mantle of the expert’ conferring status on students.
Some Heathcote quotes from Wagner 1979
• …she does her best teaching when she and the students both are
moving into the unknown.
• Too often, we educators take a lesson-plan approach to teaching,
not recognising the energising effect of improvising with a class.
• She resists the teacher’s continual temptation: to tell all she
knows.
• Heathcote uses drama to help children understand human
experience from the inside out. (‘the left hand of learning.’)
• You use whatever information the children have – no matter
how inaccurate of anachronistic – as the grist to get into what
the event feels like to the people who live through it.
More Heathcote quotes
• Linear thinking takes the world apart and outlines it. Left-handed
thinking takes it all in and makes of it a synthesis…
• Heathcote’s instinct is to keep the forgotten language of image and
dream alive and powerful as she sets it next to scientific facts…
• She’s headed for a truth where mere facts are not what matter, for
the deep knowing that makes information come alive…
• She is not after a play that looks right to an audience but an
experience that feels right to the participants
Ken Robinson 1950-
Robinson’s ideas
• Education should foster diversity –offering a broad
curriculum and individualisation of the learning process.
• It should foster curiosity through creative teaching.
• It should put less emphasis on standardised testing –
trusting teachers to define and assess what is learned.
Some Robinson quotes from ‘The Element’
• Education is the system that’s supposed to develop our
natural abilities and enable us to make our way in the
world,. Instead, it is stifling the individual talents and
abilities of too many students and killing their motivation to
learn.
• How intelligent are you? Wrong question. How are you
intelligent? Right question.
• The highest form of intelligence is thinking creatively.
• Creative thinking goes beyond linear and logical thought to
involve all areas of our minds and bodies.
More from ‘The Element’
• Public education puts relentless pressure on its students to
conform. Public schools were not only created in the
interests of industrialism – they were created in the image of
industrialism.
…education doesn’t need to be reformed – it needs to be
transformed.
• The future for education is not in standardising but in
customising, not on promoting groupthink and
‘deindividuation’ but in cultivating the real depth and
dynamism of human abilities of every sort.
A must-see. Robinson’s TED talk
www.ted.com/talks/ken_robinson_says_schools_kill_creativity?
language=en
See also full video of British Council event:
http://www.britishcouncil.org/education/schools/support-forlanguages/think-differently/video
So what are schools for?
• Custodial care (Keeping them off the streets)
• Social conformity (Making sure they don’t rock the boat)
• Sorting kids into categories (Who passed? Who failed?)
• Education (Teaching them? Helping them learn?)
How do these ideas match up with the current ethos?
Great educators
Freedom
Diversity/creativity
Bottom-up
Children first
Synthesis
Facilitation
Inquiry / asking
Evolving curriculum
Public education
Control
Conformity/mediocrity
Top-down
System first
Analysis
Compulsion
Facts /telling
Prescribed curriculum
Some conclusions
• The views of great educators are at variance with those of
most educational authorities.
• To continue in this way is to condemn future generations to
failure.
• We need to create a groundswell of opinion which will
favour change – not just more of the same.
Thank you
for
your attention
Alan Maley
yelamoo@yahoo.co.uk
http://thecreativitygroup.weebly.com/