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On Schools – A Whole Human Being Requires a Whole Curriculum

A whole Human being requires a whole curriculum. Education once was many things in a village. Today education is a narrow thing that stresses mathematics and grammar but in fact fails at even that. So we do not know really what education’s real purpose is. It seems to be a confused and lost institution.

To create a whole Human being, to bring in wave after wave of new young citizens we must think differently. What we require is a new curriculum, new targets and new measures.

New stresses would include emotion, psychology, self identity, morality, creativity, critical thinking, true analytic thinking, language and communication. Math, grammar and writing will continue as important themes but the approach is failing and must be rethought.

The new strategy would be to reduce memorization but improve memorization technique. Related to this would be sending courses to specialization in college, replacing them with general summaries. Very importantly is stress upon skills and not memorization, details, and specializations. Also, there is the teaching of a kind of “supercharged logic”, that is the acquisition of thought methods in a straightforward, self conscious way – teaching students to actually think, instead of repeating someone else’s analytic logic.

We tend to shy away from a child’s ability to abstract, it is a natural skill that educators tend to creep up upon but never seem to penetrate or employ. Abstraction leads to language, mathematics and logic. But in school systems the tactile and graphic is substituted for the abstract, slowing down intellectual development.

Creativity must become a priority in any modern curriculum; the days of rigid “left brain” thinking must come to an end. Further, technology and software should be used to assist students, and we should not try to reduce the Human brain to a calculating device or a sort of vast hard drive for storing data. Counseling and mentors will be important in new schooling because psychology will be a very big part of the curriculum now, because we will be dealing with the whole Human being.

The new school prepares the student for the new world. The present school leaves the student disarmed and ignorant. She and he are not creative, not analytic, not critical thinkers. This contributes to our failure to solve pressing problems, some at crisis proportions in modern culture.

Further, the student is without self identity, without emotional knowledge. And this allows consumerism, media, marketing and entertainment to easily manipulate and exploit citizens. In sum, we are preparing our young to fail and thus whole nations. One would think that the school system is actually designed to create dysfunctional individuals, who would serve the needs of social powers that have a separate agenda, who benefit from lack of thinking and creativity, and an inner ignorance.

All of this raises an interesting problem. If the reigning culture wants the school system to underperform and remain in an old and obsolete kind of factory mode, how does one create a new system? It must begin at the bottom, at the local level it seems.

Experimental schools are needed to develop the practices; vanguard schools are needed to inspire and lead other teachers, students and parents.

The Maori of New Zealand created a concept called “Total Immersion”. A total immersion school pulls the student out of the over-culture and submerges him or her in a complete environment where traditional values, mythology, art and language are exclusively taught.

We can learn from this idea in the developed world, for we also need “total immersion” for a new school strategy to succeed. The school must be the embryo of the new culture, the new citizen is being created, a person with new behaviors, attitudes and skills. This school must be sheltered from the outer world to succeed. It must be a kind of sanctuary and sanctum where children are protected from the untoward ways of the world. There is no other way to do this.

So Total Immersion demands a total immersion in the new rising culture. The difference with the Maori is that they have a pre-existing culture to draw upon, but we in the modern world do not – we must create our alternative culture at the same time as we are teaching it.

Cage Innoye

Axxiad News