Status Quo

Status Quo - something to think about.

There’s talk again about fostering a new learning culture within education. That’s what education does – fosters learning. The problem is in the word fostering. You can’t foster with a status quo that remains in neutral.

People make changes in education when they divorce the status quo and begin exciting projects on their own. Innovators receive no help from the status quo, of course, but it’s worth doing because children benefit.

One new idea is to remove the early childhood experience from day care and the public school and give it its own place to be. Early childhood learning begins about age three with a child’s desire to see and do, and finishes about age eight with reading for meaning, or intellectual independence.

Children learn more during these years than any time in their lives. So why does the status quo say “moratorium on learning” until the magic kindergarten cut off date? Is this 2-3 year absence of curriculum a control issue? Is it a failure to understand just how productive the early childhood years really are? Is someone asleep at the switch?

Because children three through eight learn through play rapidly, easily, and with little prompting and little repetition, the early childhood school should be an environment made for play with space that is adaptable to many variables, where education breaks are comfortable and become learning adventures and should unfold like all great stories.

Desks isolate children and retard play while common tables encourage secondary learning: from one another by doing things together.

Workbooks are classroom crutches for teachers with no imagination or integrity. If it can’t be worked out by hand with manipulatives and acting out, it’s a waste of time. What children learn from workbooks is how to do workbooks, and who cares?

All early childhood learning should be hands on and story telling because very young children need to make intellectual connections that they make through their five senses. Children need to do many things in a single day: acting out, building and creating, listening and perceiving, talking and sharing, seeing and doing – moving, in an unfixed, self generated working experience that teaches from many perspectives or intelligences.

It takes group discipline and organization to support the root of the learning tree. Discipline is much easier to accomplish when children are busy and engaged, go outside a good portion of the day, and receive a nutritious plentiful meal system. The unnatural demand for constant silence, chronic indoor play, and meager food only incites the worst behavior in the smartest very young children.

All this takes a tremendous amount of work on the part of a teacher. That’s where partnerships in teaching come in. Teachers working together can accomplish a whole world of learning. Segregated teaching only produces the status quo. No one can do it all by themselves for long. When mine-yours becomes ours, any project fosters learning – even among adults.

No way you say? Not a chance? Not in my lifetime? Well, it is happening. It’s happening right now with innovators and innovations that are defying the status quo. And the children are having the time of their lives learning, retaining and mastering little worlds.