Yolanda U. Trapp
As a person concerned with public education, we shall consider in this project some of the conditions, factors and guides to promote a range of capacities and potentials, that both individually and in concert, can be put together to create a world in which a great variety people will want to live.
Traditionally, the function of our schools has been to train for the thinking aspects of living. And this obligation, more than at any other time in our history, must continue to be one of the basic responsibilities of the school. Our society has never been in greater need of citizens who can think clearly. But learning to think was, and unfortunately still is, regarded by many people as the training of a large isolated "mental muscle". By memorizing facts and acquiring certain mental skills the students is supposed to grow into a rational adult capable of dealing with all kinds of problems, including emotional and social problems. We know now that such all around competency does not grow out of an educational program aimed exclusively at training the intellect.
A few decades ago some learning educators began to question the didactic, the 'telling them", the "precept" method of teaching children what they should do, how should they act. Instead they argued, if children and youth had more direct experiences with the materials, the processes, and the products of our world-both physical and social- they would, with help, arrive at sounder knowledge and would achieve greater readiness to do, act, in an "Intelligent Way" when confronted with new experiences, both real and vicarious.
However, in this doing or action programs, it was assumed that the intelligence and feeling aspects would become mature more or less automatically. We are finding that this does not happen quiet so automatically. Every child must have help in growing. My goal is to prepare the students into an emotionally mature adulthood. After long years we are recognizing our responsibilities for helping children to learn to feel and respond cognitively in certain ways. Most teachers and most teacher training institutions say, "yes, of course, we are interested in, and feel responsible for, the whole child, for the emotional, social, and cognitive growth". But most of us are not prepared to take on these responsibilities; we have not been trained to do so. With the constant evolution in theories ways of learning, and studies of human intellectual potentials, lead us to speculate and bear factors in mind when we try to help the child to become a good human being. I will discuss the factors of readiness for experiences, dealing, and integration of the feeling, doing, and thinking aspects of living.
Contemporary psychological thought has come to stress the importance of exploring and understanding these factors. 1The basic quality of our emotional maturity, we realize, is largely the result of the most important factors; the relationship between parent and child. Another relationship of great importance to the growth of the individual - and of even greater importance to the good of society - still cries out for study but remains generally neglected. Despite the fact that millions of children and thousands of adults are daily pressed into a student - teacher relationship, we know very little about their interactions and the influences they have on each other. Of course, there is a great deal of material available on learning theory and general educational practice. But none of this tell us what actually happens when a teacher asks a child a question in the classroom.
What does the child hear when he/she is called on? What does he/she feel? What does he/she think? What are his/her fantasies and wishes? What does he/she try to do? What kind of intellectual profiles is he/she assessing? What effect does he/she have on the teacher? What does the teacher think and feel and do as she awaits the answer? Does she understand the meaning of the child's answer or see it merely as right or wrong? Does her relationship with the child have the intimacy ideally necessary for intellectual growth or is it a dull, contractual one which fosters non - learning as much as it does learning?
Not every teacher is able or even willing to accept a relationship of such intimacy. Nor, for that matter, is every student. It would be reasonable, however, to expect the teacher to make a greater effort than the student does to promote interaction between them. But how? What can we do?
We cannot legislate sensitivity into existence. We can define curriculum and theorize about motivation, but we cannot promote perception by command. Only by specific, concrete examples can we encourage teachers to learn to see their pupils, not their subject matter. It is important to see all the aspects of the child. Only by showing again what the child in the classroom is doing can we come to understand how he/she learns and how he/she fails to learn.
Failure in a success - oriented culture is hard to take, we are failing and our children are failing in our schools at an alarming rate. 2Even children who achieve enviable grades are failing to learn much of what we hope to teach them: abstraction, curiosity, and most of all, appreciation. The subject matter of a course is frequently little more than merely a vehicle for the achievement of these educational goals-yet, all too often, the subject matter becomes an end in itself.
A teacher can perceive this only if she gets inside the Mind of the pupil.
In 1847 the first graded school was invented in America. The assumptions about the course of learning upon which the school was built were straightforward: students would be grouped by age, and each age level would be assigned to a grade. Age grading in our schools became the dominant organizational structure. It was further assumed that, since students were grouped by age, the content and aims for each grade should be the same for all children in that grade. Effective teaching was defined as the ability to enable all children in a grade to achieve the goals for that grade level. Like an army marching in tandem, at the end of an eight, or a 12 year period students would exit the school having mastered the content assigned to each of the previous grade levels.
These assumptions about human learning and these features of school organizations are alive and well in American schools today. Indeed perhaps more than in the past, the specification of grade-level standards is more than a tacit embrace of age grading. If we were to take President Clinton's advice, we would take grade-level standards, so seriously that no child would be promoted without having met grade level expectations, despite research indicating that retention is not general a good remedy. 3The roots of the problem are deeper.
We have learned that human development does not proceed in a tidy manner. An eight-year old child is not an eight year old. Children differ not only in the rate of their development but also in the particular areas of work they are expected to perform. Some students have high-level aptitude in the arts; others, in the sciences. Some children are gifted in social skills; others, in the use of language. If some magic, teaching could be made optimal for every student in a class of 25, the variability of student performance in that class would increase in each subsequent grade. Optimal forms of teaching for those gifted in other areas would enable them to move farther and faster in artistic pursuits than those gifted in other areas; those gifted in mathematics would move farther and faster in quantitative areas than those not so gifted. Under optimal teaching, variability would surely increase.
