Students should not only be trained to live in a democracy when they grow up; they should have the chance to live in one today.
Interpretation
Students should experience democracy in their education, not just prepare for it in the future.
Alfie Kohn emphasizes the importance of allowing students to actively participate in democratic practices within their educational environments. This engagement not only prepares them for future citizenship, but also empowers them to experience and contribute to a democratic society in the present, fostering skills such as critical thinking, collaboration, and responsibility.
In practice
In a school assembly, a teacher could quote Kohn to advocate for student involvement in decision-making processes.
Some who support [more] coercive strategies assume that children will run wild if they are not controlled. However, the children for whom this is true typically turn out to be those accustomed to being controlled— those who are not trusted, given explanations, encouraged to think for themselves, helped to develop and internalize good values, and so on. Control breeds the need for more control, which is used to justify the use of control.
Children, after all, are not just adults-in-the-making. They are people whose current needs and rights and experiences must be taken seriously.
In some suburban schools, the curriculum is chock-full of rigorous A.P. courses and the parking lot glitters with pricey SUVs, but one doesn't have to look hard to find students who are starving themselves, cutting themselves, or medicating themselves, as well students who are taking out their frustrations on those who sit lower on the social food chain.
If a child is off-task...mayb e the problem is not the child...maybe it's the task.
How can we do our best when we are spending our energies trying to make others lose - and fearing that they will make us lose?
Each time I visit such a classroom, where the teacher is more interested in creating a democratic community than in maintaining her position of authority, I’m convinced all over again that moving away from consequences and rewards isn’t just realistic - it’s the best way to help kids grow into good learners and good people.
If someone has children, the first thing they want is for them to be happy, and then become someone in life and all that. But the educational system, I mean always, not just now, creates competitive, successful people, and does not educate them to be happy. The problem is that success gives money, not happiness. The eternal problem.
All genuine learning is active, not passive. It involves the use of the mind, not just the memory. It is a process of discovery, in which the student is the main agent, not the teacher.
My hope and wish is that one day, formal education will pay attention to what I call 'education of the heart'.
But in the new (math) approach, the important thing is to understand what you're doing, rather than to get the right answer.
The youth is the hope of our future.
The education of attention would be an education par excellence
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