The Whole Child
My mother is a reading teacher and my father is a chaplain. Questions about education and what its focus should be have been dinner table conversations for as far back as I can remember. Recently some friends and I were talking about how we, the United States, can get back our footing on the world stage and again be a positive force in the world instead of the Land of Hungry Ghosts as described by Thich Nhat Hanh.[i] The creatures in the Land of Hungry Ghosts have huge bodies and pinhole sized mouths; they want and want, but are never satisfied.
Raising children well is the best way to influence our, this planet’s, future. My parents sent me to public schools, not private, religious or otherwise. I could’ve been home schooled with the educations my parents have combined. They could put a lot of initials after their names, if you know what I mean. There was a course of study at school, but there was also a course of study at home; we graduated to greater and greater responsibilities. In our home there was a ‘spiritual’ component and behavior modeling. In the school there was academic learning and athletics. I believe in public schools and their mission to provide the best education for our next generation. Raising children well I believe involves combing these principals of a ‘spiritual’ and ‘academic’ education. I call it “Whole Child”.
The Whole Child program would have its genesis in pre-kindergarten classes and develop more advanced curriculum to graduation from high school.
Curriculum in early education should address questions students have about their place in the world. Children have questions about the environment they live in and what is required of them in social and academic settings. Perhaps most important is a child’s quest for the answer to “Who am I?” Can this be taught in schools? I believe that it IS taught in schools and we’re giving our children very mixed messages. Faculty and parents unwittingly teach bias to their children. Our media exploit our misunderstanding and bias for profit. Schools are being called on to perform more and more duties in the raising our children. This is because our schools do not raise children; schools as we know them prepare children to become workers and consumers. This does nothing to change the inequities we see in our education, much less improve our futures. I think an ongoing focus on the whole child is the key to maximizing education’s goals of gender parity and truly educating human beings to live and create a sustainable future.
The curriculum would move from the immediate to more abstract ideas and concepts as the child advanced. In addition to learning colors and numbers and names for objects in a child’s environment there would be discussion of emotion and behavior as they relate to action and activity. We have a codified way of teaching arithmetic and language, but seem to be unwilling to teach our own personal experience in an honest and meaningful way. The Whole Child would focus on living as human being on planet Earth. Jean Jacques Rousseau stated in his theory of education: “The object of education is to make a man, not a soldier, priest etc; improvement of inner self as worth as an end to itself.”[ii] If we are to make a man, or woman for that matter, we must start with a human being. Beginning students would understand what a society was and how they shaped it with their choices. As a child advanced it would integrate ideas of mutuality and self knowledge. The goal of the curriculum would be to turn out children with an understanding of their environment and who they were and the world they would like to create.
First year students might get units with titles like: What is a body and what is it for? Who is talking in my head? or Why do I laugh? Further into the curriculum may have titles like: I choose my own behavior, Empathy or Critical Self Evaluation. Even further on would be classes with units that addressed: Meditation, Love or Judgment. Finally would come: Creation, World Building, and Spirit. Each child learns and develops in unique ways. Schooling children in the ways in which they are human would do a great deal toward lessening the gender gap in scientific achievement for girls as well as alleviating the anger and isolation of boys.
Our education system has changed and developed continually and will continue to do so. The early educational ideas of the Swiss such as Jean Jacques Rousseau in the early 1700s to his successor Johann Pestalozzi in the latter half of the 1700s are very similar. The ideas I am putting forward are nothing new. Rousseau wanted children to be educated to be great members of society. Pestalozzi added the idea that the setting for this would need to be more home like and re-emphasized its naturalistic elements. Furthering in this line we run to Frobel. In the early 1800s of Germany Friedrich Frobel popularized the notion that we learn best when we are having fun. He brought into education a radical new idea: all that is knowable is connected to each part of the knowable. [iii] We credit him with the invention of Kindergarten as well. Maria Montessori is next to see the child as a person attempting to become human instead of our current method of creating consumers and task driven adults. The Italian born Montessori brought to fore an idea that children will explore and learn at their own pace if given the necessary stimuli to advance in their interests. [iv] Do we want to finally educate children for the lives they will lead or do we want to see education as a stuffing of facts in a child in way that it will spit them out on command? When children understand who they are and what they are being educated FOR they can make decisions about their interests and desires in safety and support. The violence in our schools would be greatly curtailed in my point of view. I also believe that children know best what they need to learn next. In a school setting this class would support the learning that is already going on in schools but place it in the container of what school is intended to deliver.
I would like to see The Whole Child implemented across grades. It would have to start somewhere so as the Kindergarten children advanced into full time school, the curriculum would advance with them. In thirteen years we will have learned a lot and changed the very nature of what we go to school to learn and why it’s public and why every child must attend. I could not state the problem or the solution more effective than Jiddu Krishnamurti who devoted his life to education: “To understand life is to understand ourselves, and that is both the beginning and the end of education.”[v] Along with Krishnamurti, I think we can do better. Rousseau, Pestalozzi, Frobel and Montessori long ago pointed to a better way. The Whole Child is that way.
This is what my friends and I got excited about. Why are we bailing out banks and cutting funding for education and teachers? Because we care more about money and securing some amorphous future security than we care about truly securing the planet’s future by producing well educated children in every since of the word.
[ii] Brubacher, John S. Modem Philosophies of Education Mc Graw Hill Book Co 1962, pp 114
[iii] http://education.stateuniversity.com/pages/1999/Froebel-Friedrich-1782-1852.html
[iv] http://www.casadimir.org/montessoriphilosophy.htm
[v] (Krishnamurti 1953c) (Chapter 1) Foundation India, Varanasi 221001, India
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