A few months ago I remember visiting my 8 year old cousin and his house and we were having lots of fun playing but near the afternoon I had to leave because his mom wanted him to do his homework and study. I understood the situation and thought it was fine, but later he told me how he was not allowed to watch tv nor play any type of video games during the week because he had to keep studying, and this I did feel it was a bit restricting and extreme.
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It was all clear at the beginning, not of the book, but of my life. I remember when I was in the second grade that I never used to do my homework or pay attention in class because I either got bored or was too busy thinking on what I was going to do with my friends that afternoon. Not surprisingly, my grades started to go down until one day the teacher spoke to me and told me that if I got good grades, then I would be able to go to a good university and then get a good job. It took me a while, but then I realised that if I followed this simple sequence of events, then I would become successful. Although this wasn't entirely incorrect, it was much later that I realised that this sequence had some errors.
Getting good grades is not bad, in fact, I still strive to get good grades in school, but the problem comes when you are either forced to get good grades by your parents, for example, or when you force yourself into extremes to get good grades (even though you may not like the course) because the essence of learning is lost. When you do it all for the grade, then grades stop being a way to measure your learning and instead they become a way of measuring your supposed "future success". And here is where the next problem appears because once you lose importance in your actual learning, then you also lose a sense of inquiry, which is what makes us have a passion for learning and intrigue in our personal preferences, which is why you see so many people graduate from school without knowing what to do with their lives. As Peter Gray states it: "In the eyes of many parents and educators today, childhood is not so much a time for learning as a time for résumé building."(Peter Gray- Free to Learn). I didn't come to this realisation entirely by myself, I also used some sources to guide me and, most importantly, to show me a potential solution to this problem. I'v even quoted him previously and it is indeed the book Free to Learn by Peter Gray. In the first five chapters he talks a lot about free play and self education and how through those means kids learn the core values of life, how to be autonomous, how to socialise, negotiate and share by themselves. It is when you are free to make your own choices, that you find what you most like to do because, think about it, if you are free to do whatever you want, you won't choose to do something you don't like, no, you would do something you do like and therefore you would enquire about it, find sources to teach you about it and finally learn about it. That is exactly how children in hunter- gatherer villages develop and that is why those small communities work so well. So, what should be done? Well, I think that children should be given several hours of free play as well as some hours to reinforce some general knowledge because I still think that it is important to have basic math skills for example. Later, children should become more autonomous with their learning and teachers, apart from guiding their learning, they should become sources of information to which the students can go to for information. The school should then offer a wider variety of courses (of which they can drop out quickly if they don't like) and not restrain the students to only a few because there might be something students like but they haven't tried yet. Peter Gray calls this the 7th sin of schools and he states it as the "Reduction in diversity of skills and knowledge". This way, if you keep a student intrigued for learning since the beginning, they will see grades as a measurement of their learning and have a clear vision of their likes and dislikes in school. |
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