For the past five years I have been working in early childhood education. One of the challenges of this age group is educating adults about how crucial that time is in a persons life. Those are the years when we learn the most and we learn the fastest. The years when we shape our view of ourselves, learn to trust the world and the people in it, and learn what the world expects of us. From the time we enter the world we are ready to learn. I watch my son now, who is 8 months old, and I am continuously amazed at how, on an almost daily basis, he has acquired a new skill and how quickly he puts those skills together to accomplish a new task. Just this week he started to crawl, clap his hands together, and suck his thumb, all while new teeth are pushing their way through. What is more amazing is that he continues to try even when he fails, he is frustrated, and sometimes is in pain or hurts himself. Now, of course every parent is excited when their child reaches these milestones, because we are proud of them and because it tells us that they are healthy. But, I think we often lose sight of the fact that our children are working very hard. Because we see these as natural and normal steps in development and think that there is no other alternative but to reach them, we often fail to associate the accomplishment with the perseverance of the child.
I go down this road because I think a lot about education and I talk a lot about changing our education system. I hear story after story of how schools are failing our children and continue to marginalize the children who do not "fit" into or meet the "standards". The number of people who have become disillusioned with the education system continues to grow. Yet, there is a lot of resistance to educational change. A few months ago I read an article by Andrew O'Hehir in Salon magazine about one families homeschooling experience entitled Confessions of a Home-schooler. It was the reader comments that really shocked me. The level of intolerance and prejudice regarding families and children that homeschool was beyond belief. (I have to share here that I was homeschooled until the time I started public school in 5th grade). The hypocrisy of someone scorning homeschoolers because they need to go to public school to learn tolerance is just part of the point. It points to a purely emotional reaction to the debate, which makes sense, since who we are as people and as a society is so entwined with our educational experience. One argument I hear over and over in favor of our present system is that children need to learn to meet challenges, they need to be pushed if they fail, they have to know that school is important and they have to work at it even if they don't like it because when they go out into the world they need to find a job, which they might not like, and they need to know that you can't just quit, they need to learn to "fit in". There are a few issues here for me...
First, it screams to me of a dysfunctional society. One where we are a mass of people all working in jobs that do not make us happy, yet we push our children to "fit in" to this same society. Rather than thinking about what ails us as a civilization and addressing it through education, we choose to continue the cycle of teaching people that they need to blend in with society and not that they can be innovators, the beginning of a healthier society. The definition of which I would like to discuss at a later time as having a goal is pertinent to establishing a means to achieve it.
Second, for anyone who has watched a baby grow and develop and gained an appreciation for the learning process they go through you will see that learning comes naturally to them. They have an innate desire to progress and they work hard at doing it. At some point most people lose this motivation or it is taken from them, but to begin with, it is there present in all of us at birth. We need to spend more time figuring out how and why it is lost in the first place and addressing that, as opposed to trying to get it back once it is gone.
Third, the problem with the education system is that it fails to take into account the whole child. Children who do not have their basic needs in life met will be at a disadvantage when you talk about academic success. This means that if they are hungry or lacking proper nutrition, they do not trust the world, they worry about shelter, they do not have a support system in friends or family, or they lack a sense of themselves, they will be less successful at meeting and less interested in the curriculum taught in school. What good is it if a child does well on a standardized exam if they enter the world with all of these other challenges? How positively can a person contribute to society if they harbor a distrust of the world around them? How do they engage the world and develop a strong community when they never felt supported by the people in their life?
We often hear these amazing stories of teachers who go above and beyond and reach a child in a way that no one else can, changing the course of their life and allowing them to see that they have an impact on the world and that they can achieve what they set their mind to. These are great stories, but it's alarming to me that this is not the norm, that we see them so rarely. The fact that we don't points to the challenges that teachers face, but the challenge is not getting them to do better on an exam, its figuring out why they stopped caring about learning in the first place and starting there. I realize that this is a monumental challenge, but it is one that the right kind of education can address.
I do not proclaim to have all of the answers, I am no expert. At least not on my own. But, I believe that we as a community of people who care for our children and who care for the direction our society moves in all have a voice and an experience to contribute that brings a "collective expertise" that we should be discussing. My goal here is to start that conversation and a re-imagining of what education can and should be.
