The post What schools can learn from babies appeared first on Occasional Planet.
]]>Babies are organic learning machines. I’m seeing that more clearly now, from the perspective of a grandmother. Each Wednesday, when my granddaughter arrives at my house, I see the developmental changes that have occurred in that short, seven-day interval.
At one month old, the child-rearing books tell me, she could see objects and faces only within an 18-inch range from her face. A few weeks later, she was tracking movements with her eyes, responding to sounds by turning her head, and beginning to react to familiar faces with a hint of a smile. By six months, she was reaching for the transparent beach ball dangling over her head on her playmat. Last week, she was grasping toys and jangling them. This week, she was using her thumb and forefinger to pick at small threads on a knitted toy. I’m literally watching a human mind evolve, one week at a time.
My granddaughter is not remarkably different from anyone else’s. Anyone who has spent time observing infants knows that they develop incrementally, from newborn “blobs” into curious, exploring babies and toddlers who absorb information osmotically, using all of their senses.
Unfortunately, our schools don’t seem to view children this way. In many classrooms, children are treated as vessels, into which the all-knowing teacher must pour information according to a recipe and a timetable. Worse yet is testing—in all its incarnations and levels—which is often information-heavy but knowledge-averse and, in some cases, a child-hating activity, pitting the teacher against the student.
Here are a few basic principles that I’ve observed, that schools could learn from babies:
I’m certain that there are more. My granddaughter just isn’t old enough, yet, to have shown me what they are.
Connect the dots: Schools need to vastly reduce the ratio of kids to adults. And I’m not talking about the conventional idea of “teacher/student ratio.” We need to reinvent our idea of “teacher,” and encourage coaching, mentoring, inspiration and trust. We need to free our children from the shackles of textbooks, and teachers from endless rounds of curriculum development. We need to rediscover play, and make learning joyful again, through experience and experimentation. We also need to stop trying to measure everything, and even to allow our children to fail now and then.
How can these concepts be turned into reality? Here are a few ideas, some, admittedly, easier to accomplish than others:
As has been said, and will be said many times on Occasional Planet, these changes will not happen instantly, and the results will not be reportable on a quarterly basis. But if schools could learn from babies, we might actually get culture change and move from teacher/administrator-centric bureaucracies to organizations that celebrate children, honor their natural curiosity, nurture their creativity, and start them on a path toward real learning.
The post What schools can learn from babies appeared first on Occasional Planet.
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