Teaching and learning are timeless. Many rites of passage impart lessons and wisdom in synchronicity with the phases of a person’s development. Schools can be designed to do the same. Trust, respect, and integrity are the pillars of any institution. Education itself can learn to become less fearful and prescriptive, and much more inviting and inspiring. By continuing to apply age-old traditions of sharing wisdom, like storytelling, into standards for lesson-plans, schools can help maintain connections of cultural significance. By encouraging students to infuse their passions into learning, schools can create stronger bonds between students and teachers.
There will never be a one-size-fits-all model for education that works for everyone. As such, the more that education can increasingly reflect the different learning styles and interests of its students and teachers, the more effective the experience of education will become. Educational approaches that foster solidarity between students and teachers can help shape the future of continuous learning.
Depart: Subchapter III.
Innovating Education
Pedagogies to Support the Whole Student
The methods of teaching are often organized around core values shared by communities. How can those values help children navigate the unprecedented pace of change under which they are being raised?
“We want to show not what is individual, what is singular, what is truly experienced as human, but a kind of glittering surface on top of large formal systems, and thought must now reconstruct those formal systems on which float from time to time the foam and image of human existence.” — Michel Foucault
Education has been conceptualized and implemented in a variety of ways over the last century. The small, modest, one-room schoolhouse has morphed into large school complexes filled with overpopulated classrooms. Where is the moderate class size? Where is the unwavering support for educators, administrators, and specialists? Where are the schools that help the children most susceptible to posing fatal risks to themselves and others? Why is there not an absolute premium being placed on the education of the children who will grow up to be responsible for the state of the world?
A number of alternative models for education outside national standards exist, yet they each come with their own list of pros and cons preventing any clear consensus on the right path forward. There’s unfortunately no magic wand to wave at the issue of how best to arrange education for all. There’s only the long, slow path toward discovering and implementing more open, honest, and respectful ways of teaching.
“In education, you can only create change from the bottom—if the orders come from the top, schools will resist.” — Margret Rasfeld
In Berlin, Germany, The Evangelical School Berlin Centre (ESBC) focuses on preparing students for the world outside the classroom by fostering self-motivation. This emphasis, on generating momentum from within in their approach to new challenges, serves as a useful tool with universal applications. The private school, opened in 2007 with 16 students, now enrolls 500. ESBC is full of unusual, inventive rules for educating their student body. For example, at the school: the students decide the subjects they want to study for each lesson, grades don’t exist until age 15, and there are never any scheduled lectures.
Given the freedom to follow one’s own sense of motivation (or lack thereof), students who are not engaged during class-time are required to attend Saturday mornings in a tradition called “silentium”. The school’s headteacher, Margret Rasfeld, explains how, “The more freedom you have, the more structure you need.”22 To that effect, the school’s own four-person innovation team prepares a trove of teaching materials that other schools are in the process of adopting. Rasfeld’s school is reinventing the traditional approach of students being told what, and how, to study into a method that students have a greater role in shaping. Through this transition, not only will different learning styles gain greater opportunities, but the very notion of what a classroom looks and feels like will ultimately have more opportunity to diversify.
Germany has a rich tradition of alternative and environmentally-minded education. Rudolf Steiner, who developed biodynamic farming principles based on the ideas of closed loop systems, developed a “whole child” approach to education at the end of the first World War. In 1919, looking for a way to rethink educational standards, children of workers at the Waldorf-Astoria cigarette factory in Stuttgart, Germany became the first class of this new educational system. The approach Steiner advocated focused on learning along different phases of a child’s development. It also strongly focused on integrating strengths between the head, heart, and hands. The aim of his program was to address the physical, emotional, intellectual, cultural, and spiritual needs of each student equally.23 These values speak to the human in the child, and the child in the student, in pursuit of a holistic approach to learning. Today, Dr. Steiner’s pedagogy is widely adopted throughout the world as a great number of schools incorporate the name Waldorf in honor of where this pedagogy was first practiced.
The idea of connecting formal learning directly to the environment was proposed even earlier, in Japan, at the start of the 1900s by educator Tsunesaburō Makiguchi. In his 1903 book, titled Jinsei Chirigaku (A Geography of Human Life), Makiguchi posited that the learning of geography must account for the relationship between the individual and human industry with nature. In this way, geography becomes less abstract and more personally relevant. Informed by his practice of Nichiren Buddhism, Makiguchi went on to found the Sōka Kyōiku Gakkai (Value-Creating Education Society) in Japan in the 1920s, which paved the way for the Soka Schools of today. These schools have a goal that easily translates anywhere: the purpose of education is to allow students to achieve happiness as the means for creating value in their lives.
Alternative approaches for helping students feel more engaged in their eduction continue to gain traction through a prism of recently-opened schools. In Minnesota, the Jane Goodall Environmental Science Academy supports learning to occur “out of the classroom, into the world”. This mission statement is aimed at transforming the educational experience for students who have not felt motivated in their previous school settings. By replacing lecture-based learning with hands-on applications, the school is expanding incentives for students to design their own learning based on their distinct interests and passions. This shift has given students a space in which they can develop their own discipline and love of learning.24 Through this infusion of passion and personalization, more students gain capacity as self-motivated, independent critical thinkers, and become better prepared for problem solving throughout everyday life.
Greater opportunities for personalized learning might very well become the primary enabler toward expanding learning beyond previously standardized spaces and schedules. Learning is a common journey throughout every stage of life. Continuous learning reflects the notion that we are never finished growing as people. With more attention being given to this constant path to self-improvement, the educational system itself will become more reflective of a boundless area of exploration and discovery.