Education/Parenting - preparation for the real world

One of the concerns that parents and educators have with a ' working with ' approach which supports kids  autonomy is that in the real world you have to learn to take the consequences of your actions, be accountable and adaptive to the demands of the society. The home and school should be preparing kids for the real competitive, unsafe and not empathic world , by giving them coping skills, and not trying to see the world through the eyes of their kids but focusing on compliance so that they will be able to comply with the demands of a future boss. Etc

Schools thus justify competition, -the world outside is a competitive one-, give grades, awards, honor rolls, rank students, standardized testing, and  rewards, punishments, consequences  to get compliance.  The home should have clear rules and when rules are broken and infractions committed, there should be immediate consequences that fit the crime.  Privileges and love should be earned. There is a reciprocity, you need to give in order to get. In this way we are preparing kids for the real world.

John Dewey said that education is not a preparation for life , but life itself. Becoming a LLL – a life long learner with a growth mindset promises one a different quality of life. So we should focus on what it means to be well-educated.

Which kids are more well equipped to cope with the outside world -  those who know how to be compliant and follow instructions or those whose needs for autonomy, competence and relatedness are being met and they have good communication and collaborative problem skills.

 The world today is less 'control and compliance ' orientated than it was in the past. But even if kids end up in a controlling environment, it is those with collaborative problem solving skills who will cope better than a person who is just compliant. Competitiveness is no longer considered an asset in the business world. It is those people who can 'work with' and collaborate with others , learning and gaining from others while making a contribution, end up achieving the most in business.  It is those people who support the autonomy, competence and relatedness of others who are able to lead and inspire.

Traditional schools don't foster collaboration and cooperation skills. As Alfie Kohn says they teach kids to stand alone in a crowd, instead of learning how to work with and benefit from others. 

Docility, compliance , following instructions is valued.

 Responsibility is taught by allowing kids to make decisions , not by following instructions. Traditional schools ignore the whole child and instead of integrating learning into a multi-disciplinary framework , everything is compartmentalized into separate subjects.

 In real life we spend very little time with people of our own ages , progressive schools encourage interactions with kids of different ages. Progressive schools learn not only through discussion but also by doing and constructing modern knowledge. Students take responsibility for their learning and are intrinsically motivated rather than driven by grades and credentials. In their personal interactions and certainly in the work place they will be business leaders and managers who support the autonomy, competence and relatedness of their employees.

In any case the work, home and school environments are different and serve a different purpose. The home should be a safe haven of unconditional love and acceptance and relationships should not be ' contractual or reciprocal ' like those in a work environment. The learning environment focuses on the process , the work environment focuses on results and achievement.

If we see school and the home as place where kids are being prepared for their economic role , educational policies that put emphasis on test scores and a narrow curriculum, those espoused by politicians and business people ,will be the order of the day.  The truth is that education that promotes autonomy, competence and relatedness will not only foster LLLs, life long learners and responsible and caring people, but also creative and cooperative people in the work environment.

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(Im) Proving Competence

In a recent blog post teacher Joe Bower talks about a new research finding that kids who not only focused on ' proving ' their competence but on' improving their competence 'did better at school.




http://www.joebower.org/2010/08/learning-oriented-learners.html


Competence is one of the 3 needs - autonomy = directing one's life from one's inner core , relatedness –in the context of good relationships , and competence that a person needs

to be intrinsically motivated , self determined and experience life at the highest level of reflection, and endorsement - Self Determined theory



From the blog we see that there are 2 ways of experiencing ' competence' - Proving or improving competence. When a student is improving competence, competence is a process , his learning is a process . When a student is focused on proving competence , the focus is on achievement , on grades and award - objects , something external , so the self becomes an object.



There is a lot of confusion between achievement and excellence. Achievement is about 'proving ' your competence , being competitive while excellence is experiencing competence , often collaborating and learning from each other. Schools focus on achievement which is often to the detriment of student learning especially when kids are younger. ' When teachers are told to improve performance, they talk more, they judge more and they control more' and this message is passed on to kids.



The truth is that students can actually 'prove' their competence to others in a way that 'improves' competence. Instead of testing and giving students grades , teachers can use a different kind of assessment.



Joe Bower says ' There is no substitute for what a teacher can see with their own eyes when observing and interacting with their students while they are learning .'

Instead of tests students can share their learning with teachers, fellow students and their parents. They can make presentations , share projects , 'construct modern knowledge' and create portfolios of their learning that they can share in student led parent-teacher meetings . Students get the opportunity to share and teach what they learn. One learns the most when one teaches , talks about and shares one's learning. The interaction leads to more learning , the process does not stop. When we focus on traditional ways of proving learning , not only does the process stops , but kids forget everything they have learned except that one got an A for that subject. Proving competence ends up as undermining competence.

There are many of us who are very appreciative of Joe's creativity and leadership in assessing students in ways that improves their competence and helping teachers put into practice the ideas of Alfie Kohn , Deborah Meier and others.

See Joe's blog on ideas on ' Abolishing grades ' so kids focus more on improving competence and enjoying learning on their way to become lifelong learners.

Allan

Education:What children really need ?

Here is my response to a paper written by Dr Hannah David , an Israeli educationist.

She claims based on the writings of Charles Murray that a large proportion of kids don't have the innate capacity to graduate high school with a diploma. She suggests that graduation which will enable kids to receive higher education should be reserved for those that have ability.

The question that should be asked is whether kids are getting an education at all and are they becoming life- long learners and not how many get a piece of paper at the end of 12 years study. At least 90% of kids will never look at maths again after leaving school and that's includes those going to university.

Instead of quoting Charles Murray we should be reading Deborah Meier and Alfie Kohn. All kids deserve an education that gives them life skills, how to communicate , acquire critical and design thinking , and the values of responsible and caring people .

It is not about how much you know , but how you think and how much you care.

Below are quotes from Deborah Meier in a response to Charles Murray , and a quoe from Alfie Kohn 's article -' what it means to be well educated' .

Alfie Kohn has 2 books on education translated into hebrew.

Having read Deborah Meier and Alfie Kohn the question is not whether we should try and make all kids succeed in a school system and curriculum which does not teach thinking and values , at most kids learn some facts and skills, or should we be examining what kids really need ?

Deborah Meier

'What all kids need is an engaging, stimulating curriculum on one hand and engaged, stimulating adults on the other. Kids need to be keeping company with a lot of adults who have qualities kids of all races and classes admire and imagine they, too, could emulate. Interesting people with power. Keeping company with interesting peers and adults is half the battle, especially across lines of class, race, generation, status, and expertise. Then comes the hard part. Having unconditional respect for each other (as we learn to decide how much to trust each other). We need enough of the latter—trust—to feel that we are amongst people whose intent is probably trustworthy. What we can offer each other in the way of expertise is what time alone only can reveal.'

Charles Murray says that Educational romanticism consists of the belief that just about all children who are not doing well in school have the potential to do much better. Correlatively, educational romantics believe that the academic achievement of children is determined mainly by the opportunities they receive; that innate intellectual limits (if they exist at all) play a minor role; and that the current K-12 schools have huge room for improvement.


Deborah Meier
' Behind our claimed commitment to democracy is a leap of faith. It rests on a imagining a level of mutuality that we are unaccustomed to articulate much less practice, an acknowledgement of each other’s worthiness that we don’t often even pretend to. It asks of schools something we haven’t seriously considered. Hoover Institute’s Charles Murray calls it romanticism. But it’s a romance that has led us to hold dear to an equally fragile idea—democracy; it’s an idea sometimes hard to defend until one considers the alternatives. It’s the “romanticism” that led Rose to go back home to interview members of his family about their working lives, and Sennett to re-examine the place of craftsmanship in the ideal of democracy itself. '


From Alfie Kohn's article - http://www.alfiekohn.org/teaching/welleducated.htm


'The assessments in progressive schools are based on meaningful standards of excellence, standards that may collectively offer the best answer to our original question simply because to meet those criteria is as good a way as any to show that one is well-educated. The Met School focuses on social reasoning, empirical reasoning, quantitative reasoning, communication, and personal qualities (such as responsibility, capacity for leadership, and self-awareness). Meier has emphasized the importance of developing five “habits of mind”: the value of raising questions about evidence (“How do we know what we know?”), point of view (“Whose perspective does this represent?”), connections (“How is this related to that?”), supposition (“How might things have been otherwise?”), and relevance (“Why is this important?”). It’s not only the ability to raise and answer those questions that matters, though, but also the disposition to do so. For that matter, any set of intellectual objectives, any description of what it means to think deeply and critically, should be accompanied by a reference to one’s interest or intrinsic motivation to do such thinking. Dewey reminded us that the goal of education is more education. To be well-educated, then, is to have the desire as well as the means to make sure that learning never ends. '
Allan