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| Photo: Getty Images |
Have you visited your grade school as an adult?
If not, the experience will surprise you. The building feels eerily smaller. The teachers seem more human.
I visited my grade school when I returned to Philadelphia for graduate school after college in New York City. I saw my fifth grade teacher. We were surprised and happy to recognize each other...
I didn't love to argue, but I don't like bull, and even as a child I could tell when people were feeding it to me.
Reading evolutionary biologist Peter Gray's book, Free to Learn: Why Unleashing the Instinct to Play Will Make Our Children Happier, More Self-Reliant, and Better Students for Life, and his column at Psychology Today, reconciled all the memories.
The content and subjects they teach pales in importance to the behavior school coerces into us.
Humans learn more through behavior we see and do than words we hear. School teaches us to sit in rows, do what we're told, follow rules, and so on.
We consider such coercion necessary to gain compliance to teach...
After Free to Learn, you may see the greatest testament
to children's resilience that our educational system doesn't break us
completely. Sadly, it keeps us from our potential and we're doubling
down on the system's failure by increasing testing, increasing work
hours, increasing homework, decreasing recess, decreasing play,
decreasing activity, increasing drugs, increasing protection, decreasing
responsibility, and more.
If you have a child who hates school, loves school, or anywhere in between, or if you live in a society where children will grow up to become adults who run society--that is, anyone and everyone--you will never look at our educational system again after reading Free to Learn.
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| Free to Learn: Why Unleashing the Instinct to Play Will Make Our Children Happier, More Self-Reliant, and Better Students for Life |
