My concern regarding the general disharmony of the relationship between adult and child stems from the awareness that we adults have the inclination to view the child as grossly inadequate. In our misguided efforts to help them, we downplay the significance of what the children themselves find applicable or attractive to their interests during their formative years. To put it briefly, the child's natural curiosity and spontaneity is suffocated by the unnecessary, if not outright damaging, and constant interventions of adults, who have the tendency to treat the child, often unconsciously, as an inferior human being. Such attitude, of course, implies distrust in the value of the child's self-regulation in the learning process.
This general attitude inevitably percolates through elementary educational structures, potentially reducing education to a mere utilitarian tool concerned primarily with societal rather than the child's needs. The central theme of the debate then emerges to be the purpose of education. The point I wish to raise in this section of my thesis is that a learning process that sacrifices children's unique capacity and universal ability to discover and learn spontaneously violates the healthy development of the creative, competent mind. What this means in practical terms, and how we can overcome these perceived inadequacies of the educational system, is a matter I would like to turn my attention to in the following section.
CHAPTER TWO: Purpose and Role of Education
Education is often conceptualized as preparation for adult life. Although this aspect of education is important, it must be taken in right perspective. Personally, I am deeply troubled by this simplistic and nearsighted view of the purpose of education.
It is because it stresses only what is perceived to be useful after the children leave school and enter the real world. Essentially, this is a view that somewhat artificially perpetuates the publicly accepted status quo. Hence teachers in traditional schools, carrying in mind this utilitarian principle, feed their students information that has no connection or real meaning to their current life experiences. As a teacher, I often felt discouraged to see children disinterested in most of the material presented. At the same time, I was quite limited in my ability to alter the compulsory curriculum presented to me. Yet, I was acutely aware that what I was preaching may very well be concrete in goals and content but seriously inadequate in methods. This is not to suggest that educational goals and content are somewhat secondary to method being applied. Rather, as I see it, content is necessary for knowledge and experience to be effectively acquired, but not on its own sufficient condition. In my view, it is goal-directed content coupled with age-appropriate method which takes into account individual differences, interests and drives that can unravel spontaneity, creativeness, and autonomy of critical thought in children. Under this doctrine, both the individual learner, and the school or the society, are the focal point of the educational process.
There is no doubt that the school is distinctive from other societal institutions in many respects but mainly, I think, in the area of delivering information, facts and verbal concepts. It is also fair to say that it is in this area that the school can go far beyond what the family can do, considering how much time and effort teachers presently channel into this endeavour. However, pedagogy so conceptualized fails to such matters as teaching children self-reliance and the ability to think independently. Provided that there is general agreement that the attainment of such qualities arises from direct and self-guided experience involving personal experience, it is logical to conclude that the traditional school is seriously lacking in this respect. Instead, children spend much time of the day sitting in rows, attending to teacher's instruction, scribbling notes, reading from textbooks. It would seem that schools nowadays have become almost less daring if you will. Somewhat ironically, the question arises, whether an entire generation of children will fail the preparation for adult life test because they cannot think their way through abstract problems, work in teams, distinguish good information from bad.
Particularly if one considers current...
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