Under the foundation of a rich and solid curriculum, beyond the point of prolific and passionate teachers, beyond the bond that unites playful and lively students, learning will only become the experience of all when we learn what we should have learned. thirty years ago. Thirty years! That’s how long it’s been since Howard Gardner shared his Moods with us: Just because one kid plays the piano while the other can’t even hum a tune doesn’t make the latter any less intelligent. We haven’t learned that, have we? But why the hell do we have a Ministry of Teaching instead of a Ministry of Education?
When a town can afford to party more than a tenth instead of demanding a legitimate third of the national budget, its graduates can rejoice in the rottenness of having gone to school to learn to read and write. If yesterday’s child had a school to learn, today’s adult would have a house to vote. That is a tall order as our schools still admit based on Numeracy and Literacy scores, but lack the courage to reveal the content of our disrespect for the child who is a naturalist. Why we don’t bother to check for existential intelligence at the entry point of our facilities is a question parents never dare ask. We don’t even have a curriculum that covers them. Our teachers gave us notes to copy. We’ve spent the last three decades reinventing the wheel.
Isn’t it possible that the child who wears our labels appreciates the Fibonacci sequence much better than we understand the subject in which we graduated? But it seems that we are quicker to generate the standard stigma for the student who can learn the way we cannot teach, than to transform our classrooms into the learning fields they were meant to be. Simply put, we don’t know the boy. Did the world in the classroom really know George Washington and George Patton? Did the school system know Whoopi Goldberg or Steven Spielberg? Was there a palette for Leonardo da Vinci or a brush for Pablo Picasso on his first day of school? The business ideas that were bubbling in Richard Branson’s brain were not aired in class. Neither did those industrial sparks that flickered at Henry Ford’s. If teachers were endowed with the gift of dyslexia, school life would have been better for Tom Cruise and Thomas Edison.
For each of these geniuses, there is evidence that the apprentice can learn without the master, or at least that the fields of learning exist because of the apprentices. Socrates was right: “You can’t teach a man anything.” So if all we do is rote and perennialism, maybe we can learn that there is a student who needs more pictures. There’s another one who needs a song. There is another one who needs to jump or dance or play with things. And each lesson can reflect all this to the extent that the student should be encouraged to find his own level within the group. Thus, a master must transmute his mental knowledge into a spongy scene for each different apprentice with the creativity of a master sculptor entrusted with the blade of a knife and the block of a piece of mahogany. As such, a reconstruction of the setting to accommodate the learner learning in his own way is accepted as crucial to a school of learning.
However, there is a problem: the evaluation. Can today’s student, whose learning environment has finally adapted to her learning style, be fairly judged to have learned anything under exam conditions? However, evaluated, it has to be. Therefore, our evaluation strategy should also improve. If a child can record what she learns in her own way, she must reserve the right to reproduce it in any way she chooses.
We have delayed the apprentice for thirty years. The sooner we change our state of mind, the better for the world. Teaching as a professional practice becomes easier when students learn in their own way.
