The Spirit
of Ma’at Vol 1, No 10
EDITORIAL
Not so long ago, when the existing
educational system began, most of us were farmers, and our children helped in
all aspects of farm work. They started the school year in the fall, when their
farming duties were finished, and stayed in school until spring planting. These
are the origins of the summer vacation.
In that
simple world, where children congregated from sparsely settled communities into
one-room schoolhouses, the three Rs - Reading, 'Riting, and 'Rithmetic - were
enough to get us by. The teaching methods were equally simple: memorize and
drill. And if children still couldn't get it, the accepted procedure was to
beat it into them with a ruler to the palm, a switch to the backside, or worse.
Today,
our world has changed beyond the wildest imagination of anyone living even 50
years ago, much less back in the times when the one-room schoolhouse was born.
The horse-and-buggy peacefully ambling along shady country roads has given way
to trains, cars, motorcycles, planes, and jumbo jets, in a vast transportation
system whose complexity is difficult to conceive even now, though we use it
every day.
The
pony express, the peddlar with his wagon of goods, the itinerant portrait
painter, the traveling minstrel show - all have gradually given way to
technologies that were not even dreamed of by our own grandparents. The
information revolution has transformed industry. Boards of directors whose
members are scattered from Australia to Hong Kong, London, Paris, and New York,
hold meetings through videoconferencing. No large corporation could operate for
even five minutes without the thousands of interconnected computers that serve
every aspect of business life, from scheduling production to enhancing
''corporate culture.'' Even the smallest retail store keeps its inventory and
accounting records on sophisticated computer systems.
There
are ''superlearning'' tapes that make it possible to absorb a new language in
30 days. And in American homes, adults have for years been taking interactive
courses in everything from gourmet food preparation to HTML coding. People talk
to each other in chat rooms and on message boards where instant translation has
rendered cross-cultural and cross-national boundaries a thing of the past.
And
yet, in the middle of this sci-fi vision come true, our nation's public schools
continue in the pattern of centralized buildings, authoritarian philosophies,
and teaching methods that are exactly the same as before: memorize, drill, and
punish.
Yes,
the one-room schoolhouse has metamorphosed into a multimillion-dollar,
factory-like complex. The old potbellied stove in the corner is now a central
heating system, and the oil lamps have given way to fluorescent lighting - even
full-spectrum lighting, for the lucky ones. And teachers are no longer allowed
to physically abuse their students.
But
punishment, although it has never worked and never will, is still considered a
viable method for enforcing both learning and discipline. Still, across the
nation, thousands of expensive schoolrooms stand vacant during the growing
season. And - despite the strides that have been made in learning technology,
despite the information revolution that has transformed every home and business
in our country, despite our new understanding that learning in its natural
state is both exciting and fun - most of our public schools continue to enforce
upon our children the weary drudgery that characterized learning methods
accepted 200 years ago.
But it
has been clear for a long time that our old ways do not work. In the words of
Dr. Maria Montessori:
Scientific
observation has established that education is not what the teacher gives;
education is a natural process spontaneously carried out by the human
individual, and is acquired not by listening to words but by experiences upon
the environment. The task of the teacher becomes that of preparing a series of
motives of cultural activity, spread over a specially prepared environment, and
then refraining from obtrusive interference. Human teachers can only help the
great work that is being done, as servants help the master. Doing so, they will
be witnesses to the unfolding of the human soul and to the rising of a New Man
who will not be a victim of events, but will have the clarity of vision to
direct and shape the future of human society.
In line
with this type of thinking and the opportunities offered by computers and the
Internet, our school system is now in the very beginnings of a transformational
process. Even those in places of governmental power have recognized that
tomorrow is too late. The changes are taking place right now, and they will continue,
not only through private schools and home schooling, as before, but through
government-funded charter schools and in the public schools themselves.
In
fact, America has recently become a veritable test tube of new learning
philosophies. As we have discovered in our research for this issue of the
Spirit of Ma'at, the old system of memorize, drill, and punish is going to be
replaced very soon by concepts that would have been undreamable even one
generation ago. These new concepts, and the hopeful new directions education is
taking, are discussed in detail in my article entitled Educational Renaissance:
It's Happening Now.
How
many children do you know who like to go to school? Not many, probably. Not
today. But tomorrow will be a different story. We invite you to learn and
perhaps even participate in this rebirth of our educational system.
In love
and service,
Drunvalo