What Does It Mean To Educate The Whole Child?

::NOTES::

- Public schools show growth and excellence through test scores. They do not provide all students with an efficient education when they do this. Some children learn differently than memorization facts.
- What are the proper aims of education? How do public schools serve a democratic society?
- We should demand more from our schools than to educate people to be proficient in reading and mathematics. Too many highly proficient people commit fraud, pursue paths to success marked by greed and care little about how their actions affect the lives of others.
- We should charge other institutions with the task of pursuing the physical, moral, social, emotional, spiritual, and aesthetic aims that we associate with the whole child.
- Making the classroom a generally happy place.
- Students are whole persons, not mere collections of attribute, some to be addressed in one place, and others to be addressed elsewhere.
- From current policy debates about public education, one would think that U.S. society simply needs competent workers who will keep the nation competitive in the world market. But both history and common sense tells us that a democratic society needs much more; It wants graduates who exhibit sound character, have a social conscience, think critically and are willing to make commitments, and are aware of global problems.
o It needs citizens who are competent enough to distinguish better from worse.
- What kinds of peer interactions might help students develop a social conscience?
- What topics and issues will foster critical thinking?
- Wealthier students are enjoying a rich and varied cirriculum and many opportunities to engage in the arts, whereas many of our less wealthy students spend their school days bent over worksheets to boost standardized test scores.
- It may actually undermine our democracy, to concentrate on producing people who do well on standardized test scores and who define success as getting a well-paid job.
- In the pursuit of efficiency, we have remade ourselves into a collection of attributes and qualifications.




::REFLECTION::


You must eliminate the power and hierarchy of teacher over student. You must eliminate the methods used to conform children’s minds, and to make them behave certain ways. The process of grading, being compared and contrasted to your peers, as who is smarter or better at this or that subject, is not a fair and efficient way to get the child to learn. You judge your own self worth on how you are compared to others. Tests scores place you in a rank. They turn you into a number. When you are ranked against your peers, you try and rise above them as an individual instead of learning to work and cooperate with each other to learn. Ranking students, percentages, placing children in different levels based on tests not experience; it isolates the students from one another. It leaves no room for dialogue between them. They cannot learn from each other or discuss experiences they had with the subject, or how they feel about certain issues. Testing, ranking and filing, prepares the student for our world of greed and self-profit. It sets the child’s mind to fend for itself, for it’s own rank. To not worry about how his peers are feeling. Not to care about cooperation and helping his peers. Just to worry about how well he will do in the subject.

There should be more learning processes where the children help each other learn; where they cooperated with one another in the classroom. One would be more conscious of how their actions affect the lives of others.

I went to an alternative high school my junior and senior year. It took a new approach to learning, where there were no tests, no textbooks, no hierarchies in the classroom. You called the teachers by their first name, the duration of the class was spent having dialogue about previous readings or experiences, or questions the teacher would introduce. All projects you did for homework allowed room for creativity, and you could research what interested you in the subject. We gathered our learning from actual experience rather than books. For example, in my sociology class, we opened the textbook only a few times. We never learned statistics, or famous sociologist who composed this theory. Instead, we would do things, like take a trip to a center for abused woman and children (there were very small classes), and discuss our experience there. That specific experience prompted me to volunteer to teach an art class at the daycare in the shelter. This experience taught me more than a chapter on violence in our society. I could make my own decision on what I think about that issue rather than have someone else tell me what to think. Experiences like this introduce critical thinking to a student, and are much more memorable than memorizing statistics or theories.

To develop the whole child, I believe there needs to be more hands on interaction in the classroom. Children need to learn for themselves and with each other. Experiencing situations is key for learning. Room for creativity needs to exist in every subject. Students need to feel as if they are friends with their teachers, rather than the teacher is just a person who will judge their progress and proficiency.