Teaching Methods We Live in

Teaching Methods We live in an era, which may be characterized as almost acutely education-conscious. Articles pertaining to different aspects of the educational process can be found in our local newspapers nearly on a daily basis. And while it seems to be widely recognized that substantial amounts of not only money, but also time and energy are being channeled into education, the outcomes are nowhere to being proportionately identifiable.

How significant a role education plays in our Canadian society can be attested to by the extent, to which governments have become involved in the educational process organizationally as well as financially. In January of last year, for instance, the British Columbia government allocated $150 million to the education system with a focus on classroom services. In 2006, the education budget rose to $200 million with priority given to areas such as class size, class composition, and special needs students.

Similarly, later this year, Finance Minister Carol Taylor announced on June 30, 2006, a five-year agreement had been reached giving B.C. teachers another incentives and a 12-percent general wage increase (Ref.). These organizational and financial strategies may be said to reflect the degree and variety of criticisms put forward by teachers, parents and school administrators. Some within the educational profession believe, for instance, that sound educational reform should address such issues as class size and the design of school buildings.

Yet others view the root of the problem in the very methods that are applied to perceived problems. For example, on the one hand, we have those who are strong advocates of free discipline for the sake of self-expression, and on the other hand, we have those who caution against bringing so-called "soft psychology" to the classroom urging us instead to adopt a stronger stance in regards to class discipline based solely on the teacher's authority and discretion.

The latter group is also likely to advocate the importance of more rigorous examinations so that to assure a proper classification of different types of children according to their intellectual capacity. There are also those who argue that we should never elevate the benchmark of education until we raise the salaries of the teachers. All of these concerns, although potentially remedial and many of them good in themselves, are all issues dealing with the organization and design of the educational process and, by and large, external to the child's needs.

One may then question whether such institutionalization of education with an intense level of governmental involvement aims for the betterment of the student or otherwise. I am doubtful that these remedies, although well-intentioned, can in themselves improve the situation. The root of the problem, as I see it, does not reside in education per se, but rather in by-now-strongly-established social relations between children and adults, pupils and teachers.

Reflecting on my own experience as a student and later on as a teacher, I realize now that adults generally fail to view a child as a unique human being gifted with reason and logic and capable of self-directed intellectual development. As Callan puts it: "One of our assumptions about children and adolescents is that authority is something we cannot entrust to them because they will not use it competently" (Bailin Portelli, p.151).

This assumption, so deeply held by parents and educators alike, is grounded in the trust in accumulated knowledge and experience. Children are considered lacking on both of these accounts and, consequently, denied the right to participate in educational decision-making. And so the question remains - should autonomy be an important goal for young children? Theorist Erick Erickson (1963) contended, for instance, that each stage of life has its own task, a developmental stage. According to Erickson, the first stage of development is trust.

The second stage, at about two years of age, autonomy, is built on trust (Mayers, p.123). As argued in this paper, to refine their sense of self, children must come to believe that faith in themselves and their environment will not be destroyed by adults who are too demanding and refuse to let them make choices for themselves. Similarly, Erickson believed that children, even at age two, must be entrusted to learn to exercise will and do things for themselves, or they will doubt their abilities (Mayers, p. 123).

When we look at Erickson's fourth stage of psychological development from around age six to puberty, right at the onset of elementary schooling, healthy development becomes a matter of competence vs. inferiority.

Hence, children learn the pleasure of applying themselves to tasks at hand or, according to Erickson, they will feel incompetent and inferior (Ref.) if one is to consider Erickson's theory of psychological development, one must conclude that we as adults, whether in the position of a parent or a teacher, must absolutely make a commitment to respect children's autonomy and help them achieve a healthy level of self-assurance. Erickson characterizes this important aspect of children's development as "I am what I can imagine to be" Erickson, p.23).

Nevertheless, we in the Western tradition tend to view human condition including the development of human mind and body as hierarchical. Within such a conceptual framework, we naturally consider it imperative that children be aided and directed as much as possible in achieving their greatest potential as quickly as possible. In fact, by doing so, we somewhat subconsciously impose on the child our own adult frame of reference.

One may perhaps go as far as to say that this unconscious and, therefore, unintentional exercise of constantly aiding and directing the child's development is a form of control seriously hindering his/her curious and creative nature. This traditional way of viewing the child, so central to contemporary educational thought, strongly influences the methods employed in our schools and diverts our attention away from values pivotal to the genuine and unique experience of the child.

To illustrate how adults' erroneous perception of the child may reflect in the educational practice, I wish to offer two examples. In the not so distanced past, a number of educational interventions was grounded on the assumption that it is beneficial and, in fact, necessary to introduce instructional format of teaching to children in very early age, preferably before the commencing of mandatory schooling.

This assumption seemed to arise from a common desire to correct their errors in speech and to remedy variety of other language deficits including accent and dialect (Wheldal, p.73). Essentially, a connection had been established between language deficit and one's capacity to learn. Under this doctrine, as long as a deficit was considered inconsistent with standard English, it was viewed as inferior and subject to correction. One may only insinuate what were the consequences of such intervention.

I have a feeling that such practice was most likely hindering children's ability not only in the assimilation of instruction but also in the acquiring of reading and writing skill later in their school years. Perhaps due to the recognition of the impact of such misleading effort based on mere assumption rather than on solid empirical evidence, a growing awareness of the coercive nature of this model has been realized and, to my best knowledge, is no longer used in our schools.

More recently, similarly troublesome measure made its way to the North American educational setting. In order to encourage the participation and co-operation of the more poorly functioning children in the traditional school setting and, perhaps for the sake of political correctness, children with variety of cognitive difficulties now share classroom with more intellectually advantaged peers. In my experience as a teacher, such inclusion, although well intended, frequently elicits labeling responses toward the child, further damaging his/her self-perception.

Assuming that such measure was intended to assimilate the child and consequently bring the child's learning potentialities closer to the rest of the class, my direct observations lead me to a finding contrary to this rationale. Particularly in group situation, the poorly functioning child, even if he/she manage partake in the activities, he/she is capable to contribute for any extended period of time to activities of far lesser complexity than the rest of the group.

This, of course, leads to boredom and disturbances on the part of the child, posing distraction to the teacher's instructional effort. Considering the circumstances, one may question the educational as well as personal value of such shared experience. Given the highly structured nature of the learning process in the traditional school coupled with the adult's insistence on continually guiding the child directly, one cannot help but wonder whether the personality of the child can unfold freely as it would under less-governed circumstances.

In short, this discord between the adult and the child is due to the erroneous view of the child's capacity as a self-guiding learner. Having said that, I do realize that our Western society has gone a tremendously long way to meet the needs of our children and to accept their rights as socially valuable entities. In part, this is most likely due to advancements in social sciences such as those found in sociology and psychology.

With the conceptual tools offered by psychology, we now can, for instance, more readily investigate the effects of mistreatment on children's development. My concern regarding the general disharmony of the relationship between adult and child stems from the awareness that we adults have the inclination to view the child as grossly inadequate. In our misguided efforts to help them, we downplay the significance of what the children themselves find applicable or attractive to their interests during their formative years.

To put it briefly, the child's natural curiosity and spontaneity is suffocated by the unnecessary, if not outright damaging, and constant interventions of adults, who have the tendency to treat the child, often unconsciously, as an inferior human being. Such attitude, of course, implies distrust in the value of the child's self-regulation in the learning process. This general attitude inevitably percolates through elementary educational structures, potentially reducing education to a mere utilitarian tool concerned primarily with societal rather than the child's needs.

The central theme of the debate then emerges to be the purpose of education. The point I wish to raise in this section of my thesis is that a learning process that sacrifices children's unique capacity and universal ability to discover and learn spontaneously violates the healthy development of the creative, competent mind. What this means in practical terms, and how we can overcome these perceived inadequacies of the educational system, is a matter I would like to turn my attention to in the following section.

CHAPTER TWO: Purpose and Role of Education Education is often conceptualized as preparation for adult life. Although this aspect of education is important, it must be taken in right perspective. Personally, I am deeply troubled by this simplistic and nearsighted view of the purpose of education. It is because it stresses only what is perceived to be useful after the children leave school and enter the real world. Essentially, this is a view that somewhat artificially perpetuates the publicly accepted status quo.

Hence teachers in traditional schools, carrying in mind this utilitarian principle, feed their students information that has no connection or real meaning to their current life experiences. As a teacher, I often felt discouraged to see children disinterested in most of the material presented. At the same time, I was quite limited in my ability to alter the compulsory curriculum presented to me. Yet, I was acutely aware that what I was preaching may very well be concrete in goals and content but seriously inadequate in methods.

This is not to suggest that educational goals and content are somewhat secondary to method being applied. Rather, as I see it, content is necessary for knowledge and experience to be effectively acquired, but not on its own sufficient condition. In my view, it is goal-directed content coupled with age-appropriate method which takes into account individual differences, interests and drives that can unravel spontaneity, creativeness, and autonomy of critical thought in children.

Under this doctrine, both the individual learner, and the school or the society, are the focal point of the educational process. There is no doubt that the school is distinctive from other societal institutions in many respects but mainly, I think, in the area of delivering information, facts and verbal concepts. It is also fair to say that it is in this area that the school can go far beyond what the family can do, considering how much time and effort teachers presently channel into this endeavour.

However, pedagogy so conceptualized fails to such matters as teaching children self-reliance and the ability to think independently. Provided that there is general agreement that the attainment of such qualities arises from direct and self-guided experience involving personal experience, it is logical to conclude that the traditional school is seriously lacking in this respect. Instead, children spend much time of the day sitting in rows, attending to teacher's instruction, scribbling notes, reading from textbooks. It would seem that schools nowadays have become almost less daring if you will.

Somewhat ironically, the question arises, whether an entire generation of children will fail the preparation for adult life test because they cannot think their way through abstract problems, work in teams, distinguish good information from bad. Particularly if one considers current economic and technological trends, I believe the present concentration on competency in reading and math is only the minimum. Likewise, scientific skills are utterly necessary but insufficient.

Today's complexity of living with its increasingly global mode of thinking demands not only an adequate level of competence in the traditional academic disciplines but also the ability to evaluate new sources of information, to think outside the box and in general terms know more about the world. They need to have an understanding of such complexity and an overall balanced approach to problem solving and information processing. The matter is to teach children even at an early age how to be discerning.