Unmaking Sense

The importance of judiciously-chosen and designed experiences that encourage the acquisition of the ability to do, understand, explain and coach. Good educational experiences lead to more learning than any conceivable amount of teaching could supply.

Human societies reflect the underlying predispositions that shaped them so evidence gleaned from them tells us about those influences, not about some primordial thing we imagine to constitute Human Nature. Implications for educational reform and political structures.

National curriculums, school comparisons through league tables, and the centralised, global systems needed to support them deny schools the freedom to devise and implement educational strategies suited to local needs.

A predetermined national curriculum devised abstractly by a Ministry of Education or a politician constrains the freedom of each school, head and teacher to devise a locally-appropriate curriculum by negotiating it with pupils in order to engage them and get their “buy in”. Without that freedom and the delegated trust it relies upon, schools are condemned to failure, their teachers disempowered from the outset, and their children not served properly by the system intended to benefit them.

Have we really left Hegel’s barbaric educational philosophy behind, or do we still tacitly implement programmes that coerce young people into becoming some kind of predetermined, socially-acceptable and “useful” citizens that arise at the expense of terrible personal conflicts and tensions? What we could do instead.

Education needs to be more proactive in facilitating the generation of persons who take responsibility for their own learning by enabling them to experiment with available resources and set their own standards and criteria for progress in ways that reflect who they want to become.

Why, if we fail to learn how to extract the full meaning from the present, we lose all motivation to learn and to hope for the future.

As we grow older we either play less or we take play more seriously. We need to rediscover play and experiment as imaginative rebelliousness, the kinds of things that create newness and help us break out of suffocating systems defined by the past.

All human systems of thought are ultimately circular, and adopt strategies that immunise them from attack. How then do we break out of them, how do we escape the self-authenticating power of systems that entrap us? By experimentation, through play, and by taking risks.

Something akin to Hegel’s view was adopted enthusiastically to supply the industrial revolution with a literate, numerate workforce. Knowing mattered more than being; it mattered so much to inculcate knowledge and skills that it did not matter much if the body and spirit were broken in the process.