When: Tuesday, January 13, 2015
Time: 7pm
Where: Lawrence Library, 2751 Brunswick Pike, Lawrenceville, NJ
Cost: Free and open to the public
Hosted by Princeton Learning Cooperative and Bucks Learning Cooperative.
Category: News
Op-Ed: Are Kids Naturally Lazy or Natural Learners?
It wouldn’t be so bad if the current education debate just involved different ways to achieve the same goals for children. But the reality is much more dangerous.
We are talking about two completely different paradigms: One, the traditional one that is failing, assumes that children are naturally lazy and need to be forced to learn. If you believe that then you need competition for grades, passing and failing, tons of homework, long school days, long school years, No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top.
But modern brain research doesn’t confirm that assumption. Rather, it confirms a second paradigm, that children are natural learners, that the brain is naturally inquisitive. If you operate on that paradigm, as many progressive educators and homeschoolers do, almost none of the approaches mentioned above should be used. The teacher’s role is to actively help the student find resources to explore and learn about everything they are interested in.
In fact, forcing students to be in traditional schools operating on the first assumption creates a self-fulfilling prophecy: After about six or seven years of forcing students to learn things that they aren’t interested in and are often irrelevant to their lives, they do appear to lose interest in learning. That natural ability to learn is gradually extinguished. Anyone who has ever administered standardized tests to that group can see clearly that the rate of improvement on the whole decreases to a crawl, even on those flawed standardized tests. But beyond that, you see the light go out of their eyes. They retreat to watching television and playing video games. Even worse, they retreat to drugs, or in some notorious cases, decide to try to kill people in their schools or themselves.
The latter cases may be rare, but they do reflect that culturally we simply accept as fact that children hate school. Why do we accept that? If children are natural learners and they say they hate school, something is wrong with their school. Something is wrong with many, many schools.
There are schools that children love, and love to go to. These are under the general heading of alternative and progressive. They are learner-centered in their approach. I know of one democratic school in which the children voted to ban all snow days. They didn’t want to miss anything.
Did you wonder why the government never gives statistics comparing home-educated children to publicly educated ones? In many states homeschoolers are required to take standardized tests. The answer might be because in at least one study homeschooled students scored in the 86th percentile nationally.
We need to end No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top. Education is not a race. Nobody tests you in order to allow you to leave the public library. You are assumed to be a natural learner. All people are. All children are. We need to understand the new educational paradigm before it is too late.
Originally published in June, 2010 in Education Revolution Newsletter
November 30th: Class Dismissed Movie Screening In New York City
Nov 30, 2014 11:00 AM
Be the among the first to see the Class Dismissed movie!
We'd like you to come to a special screening of this powerful documentary. If you are a parent, or want a fresh perspective on education & how people learn, you won't want to miss this one-time showing!
Not only will the filmmakers and be in attendance, but some of experts in the film will be on hand as well. After showing the 90-minute movie, they filmmakers will host a short Q&A session.
We encourage you to invite friends or family who you think will benefit from the alternative education insights this film provides. Jerry Mintz has an interview in the documentary.
Buy tickets here.
Democratic Education and Low Voter Turnout
by Jerry Mintz
After last week's record low turnout for the midterm vote there were a lot of articles reporting this and despairing the phenomenon. But the analysis of why this happens didn't ever get to the core of the situation:
As I said in one of my TEDx talks, "I think that the best way to prepare students to participate in a democratic society is to have them grow up in democratic schools. Why do we have them experience 12 years of a dictatorship and then expect them to be ready for democracy?
Why would we think that people who attended schools for twelve or more years would be prepared to vote when they didn't grow up participating in a democracy? In fact, the training in 95% of the schools seems to be how to live and survive in a dictatorship.
You would think this would be self-evident. Democratic schools are very successful and their graduates do amazing things. Most of the schools we help people start have a sliding scale tuition and are interracial and have a spectrum of students.
Related to all of this is bullying. I believe that no program will "cure" bulling in mainstream public and private schools because of their top-down, authoritarian nature. In that situation there will always be people at the "bottom" who will be bullied by those above. But in democratic and non-authoritarian learner-centered schools bullying is hardly seen. When it does happen, a democratic meeting about it can be called right away. Even in public at-risk alternatives, researcher Dr. Robert Barr discovered a starting drop in bullying statistics when he looked at alternative schools in his research.
You might wonder why research like this doesn't lead to drastic changes. I do, too. But I think that the current authoritarian system serves some economic vested interests and is also more akin to a religion. It is based on habits and rituals and not very amenable to research or discussion. So that is our challenge! We know that learner-centered and democratic schools work. How do we get this across to the mainstream so we can truly have an Education Revolution?
