Guess I took a bit of a hiatus there. I have many papers due this week and although I spent much time not doing the things I should be doing, I somehow never found my way to personal narrative.
It's okay. Not much has happened in the mean time. I mean, Pixie ate a steak this week and my brother decided that he's leaving his toy house in September and moving to Vancouver (hmm...changes and vegans, what do these things have in common?). But you know, nothing important has happened to me. And that's what we all care about, right?
Right.
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Today I listened to a presentation from a staff member at the local Fairfield School. The school is built on Rousseau's principle of the noble savage, and in practice it means that the students play all day until they feel the need to learn something. There's greater structure than that, obviously - the students are trained to become adult citizens in a participatory democracy, so there are a lot of meetings and there are quite a few rules that the students and staff have voted into effect over the years - but the basic idea is that you shouldn't make students learn a single thing they don't want to learn.
We were absolutely stunned. These are hammerblows to the accepted orthodoxies of teaching - even the progressive, student-centred models of teaching we're moving towards as a profession. We're so used to carrot-and-stick discipline that the idea of freedom is nuts to us. Which, of course, doesn't mean that it's not the most progressive idea ever to come out of the human species. It just means that it's a complete mental 180 turn, much more so than most of the changes that are given that label.
It's a wonderful idea and I'd love to send my kids there when I have some, but there are, of course a few drawbacks. For one thing, the school's philosophy attracts a certain kind of parent and therefore the school tends to self-select out of diversity. In practice this means that the student body is always middle class/privileged and usually white. The other drawback is that although the philosophy is championed as a basic right of all students, they seem to have very little idea what to do with students who are seriously exceptional (i.e. a student with obsessive compulsive disorder who wigs out without a structure imposed from without or a student with Prader-Willi Syndrome who has an obsessive concern with food and who will "graze" all day if food is uncontrolled and unstructured).
Still, I think that the people who made this school a reality are brilliant people, and they represent a very real evolutionary advance in education. It comes to me now that I might respect my own desires if I had attended this school instead hating and fearing them as I do.
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2 years ago today: I do occasionally say the right thing.
