A few suggestions
I have heard of you through ESSA, and visited your website. I tried to
contact you directly from the website, but it didn’t seem to work. I have
got your email address from the Phoenix Education Trust.
My impression is that you do not know how many allies you have around the
world - not necessarily agreeing with all your points, but agreeing with
enough to give you some encouragement.
I noticed that someone had suggested you look at the Lumiar website. That’s
just one of many you can find at www.idenetwork.org. I would particularly
recommend Sudbury Valley School’s site, as well as Summerhill and Sands
School in this country. And then I would like you to look at my own site,
www.davidgribble.co.uk, and the Lib Ed website, which publishes collections
of articles three times a year - www.libed.org.uk/articles.
David Gribble
August 17th, 2009 at 1:41 pm
Many thanks David.
I have followed your suggestions with much interest. I particularly liked the comment in your own article where you say: “The school curriculum is supposed to equip young people for life. I would suggest that the lesson that you remember most clearly from your years at school is simply the importance of doing what is expected of you, the importance of fulfilling a proper function as a cog.”
This compares with the following from ‘Wot, No School?’:
“School is an institution established for the promotion of
education. Though an institution’s objective may have
value, the institution itself has no intrinsic value. As we
have seen, the institution ‘school’ has not only become
more important than the original objective ‘education’, it
has become confused with it. The demand is that pupils
and teachers should be good at ‘school’, should be good
inmates, good servants of the institution. Originality,
thinking ‘outside the box’, thoughts and ideas which
may change the world, creativity, innovation, things
which cannot easily be measured, do not sit comfortably
in such an institution. Yet, as we look towards creating
an education fit for the twenty-first century, originality,
creativity, innovation and discovery may be precisely
what we need for the economic benefit of society and for
the enrichment of our personal lives as individual human
beings.”
And also with Prof. Charles Handy in his book ‘The Age of Unreason’ (1990):
“The man stood in front of the class. ‘Now learn this’ he
said, writing an equation on the board. We wrote it in
our books. Three months later we wrote it out again in
an examination paper. If the second time of writing was
the same as the first, we had learnt it. I exaggerate, but
only a little…Later on I came to realise that I had
learned nothing at school which I now remember except
only this – that all problems had already been solved, by
someone, and that the answer was around, in the back
of the book or the teachers’ head. Learning seemed to
mean transferring answers from them to me.”
I also enjoyed your article on Falko Peschel. I am no expert in pedagogy, but his approach to learning perhaps has relevance to the suggestions made in ‘Wot, No School?’ for the School Leaving Certificate curriculum. I would welcome comments on both the suggested curriculum and the ideas on the organisation of classes.