“To trust children we must first learn to trust ourselves…and most of us were taught as children that we could not be trusted.” (John Holt)
After having reflected upon what I perceive to be the strengths and challenges of the Summerhill/Free School model of education, I must admit that I still find it appealing… I really do hope such a school can one day be founded in Montreal. I know people are already working towards this, as evidenced by an alternative education workshop I attended a couple of years ago. I think it’s paramount that parents and children have diverse educational choices! I’m still not sure if I would send my own children to a Free School, but I don’t think I would. At least not until I see one ‘in action’.
As for the issue of whether school and education is seen as synonymous, I decided to ask a third-grader what he would think of not attending school anymore, but staying home and having the freedom to do whatever he wanted all day, every day. He looked at me perplexed and said: “Well, it’s a weird question and a hard question, too. I think it would be half good and half bad. Good because I would do a lot of fun things, like play outside, play sports, watch cartoons… but bad because I wouldn’t learn anything…”
His response confirmed “common knowledge” I had been thinking about throughout the research of this project. Schools teach us useful things that aren’t fun. This constitutes “learning”. Freedom to engage in fun activities of our choice, don’t teach us anything. Our schools seem to have convinced us of this sad fact…
“Next to the right to life itself, the most fundamental of all human rights is the right to control our own minds and thoughts. That means, the right to decide for ourselves how we will explore the world around us, think about our own and other persons’ experiences, and find and make the meaning of our own lives. Whoever takes that right away from us, as the educators do, attacks the very center of our being and does us a most profound and lasting injury. He tells us, in effect, that we cannot be trusted even to think, that for all our lives we must depend on others to tell us the meaning of our world and our lives, and that any meaning we may make for ourselves, out of our own experience, has no value.” (John Holt)
Misha Gale said,
June 3, 2008 @ 12:07 pm
I’d say your anonymous third-grader is repeating what he has already been taught: that school’s have a monopoly on learning, that knowledge only counts as knowledge when it’s imparted by a qualified teacher in a classroom. I think this is the most dangerous aspect of conventional education, that it teaches children they are incapable of learning anything for themselves. This sort of attitude seems to me to be the very antithesis of education.
I hope he learns the truth about learning soon