Children and the Institution of Education

In his book, What Every Parent Should Know About School, Michael Reist writes about what he feels schools should be working towards, which is the embodiment of my ideas. A school where students are free to choose what they desire to learn because you learn best when you are happy, relaxed, and free to choose something that interests you. This freedom is captured by implementing the Workshop Model. This model allows for student choice, an endless adaptive dimension, and student engagement; three crucial implementations to allow growth and development.

Reist begins his book with this quote (which I love!):

This book is dedicated to every child who hates going to school. (We're working on it.)

This book is a MUST READ for every educator whether you are in the system already, have been through the system, or are aspiring to be in the system. I cannot get enough of it. 

As Reist writes, and I completely agree with, schools should be places where students thrive and flourish and become more confident and capable people than they were before. It should expand their personalities, not confine them. However, school ends up being a place where "confidence is eroded and one is made to feel incapable, where social relationship degenerate into a competition based on social acceptance and fear of exclusion...a healthy institution is one that is capable of self-reflection, self-criticism, and self-correction," something that all schools should aspire to resemble (Reist, 2013).

The school system has became a social institution that we force students to conform to and attend in order to 'educate the future.' It is so engrained into our society, that we find it difficult to change the way our students are educated even though we all have experience the ups and downs of it in our own lives, some of us as parents as well. Even though we have experience with the institution of education, we often fail to see it as something that parents can become positively involved with.

Parents are often only invited to concerts, fundraisers, and parent-teacher conferences. I feel that it is important to include parents in the system because they "would bring a very different perspective to the table, and they would also create a greater degree of accountability" (Reist, 2013). We can all get involved to change the institution of education for the better as it significantly affects our children and they way they experience the world.

Reist often refers to the school system as a pyramid. The base is all the students entering the school system, and the tip represents those of them who were able to conform and survive the expectations.

What happened to all the kids who started out at the bottom and didn't make it to subsequent levels of the pyramid? What kinds of people did the pyramid produce - both ones the pyramid worked for as well as those it didn't?

 The pyramid could resemble something similar to The Hunger Games where only those who are able to conform enough to the expectations will make it - everyone else will be left to fend for themselves.

Yet even though the school system only works for certain people, it is still one of the most powerful an influential social institutions in our society - and occurs during one's most impressionable years. Why is it then that we promote competition rather than social interaction and cooperation?

The Workshop Model builds on the strengths of all students whether they are independent workers, enjoy collaborating with others, or need to work at a different level than their peers. This helps to create a more comfortable learning environment for all students in the system instead of creating the hierarchical pyramid previously discussed.

This freedom teaches responsibility - it allows for self-choice which makes students responsible for the outcomes. If we resort to traditional teaching from the front of the classroom all day long, we are not required to take responsibility because we are being told what to do rather than make our own choices.

Another aspect Reist discusses is that of play (2013). He notes that we have seemed to have forgotten the importance of play and all the lessons that come along with it. It allows us to make sense of the world, interact with others in an unstructured environment, and learn about ourselves and others. Unstructured play is an important part of education, yet we have students sit in their desks all day long and if they squirm and cannot focus for the entire day, we often view them as someone incapable of learning or someone having a learning exceptionality. Maybe those students need to learn concepts and information in an different way than they are being taught? I know I loose focus after sitting for a length of time and need to get up and move around in order to continue my own learning.

I challenge you to question the ways of the education system - what changes could be made to create a more interactive, encouraging learning environment?