Teaching, as the thinker Anatole France said, is a subversive act. It must not only inform and remind but also must excite, agitate, and ignite the fire within. It must create troubled minds and leave students with more questions and some answers. It is not a funneling process; it is not a banking concept. It is a romantic act of flowering and transforming. It is a cybernetic act of creating beautiful patterns of thinking in each and every curious mind that we are entrusted to help liberate.
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"Abuse of schooling"
We must embrace the idea of teaching for understanding, much popularised by Howard Gardner. There is so much failure in our schools as a result of teaching strategies that do not meet the needs of curious young minds. Teachers are not equipped to meet the mental demand of the ‘multi-tasking multidimensional, multimediated child’ who lives in a millennium that is different from the past.
We fail these children if they cannot achieve anything but regurgitate the facts we want them to memorise. We get angry when they get bored. We punish them for not wanting to learn. We then call in the police if we feel threatened by the worst of the worst of the failures. The Malaysian minister of education will now need metal detectors in all of our urban schools. He will need to have the Malaysian police permanently stationed in the low-performing ones.
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Teaching is a verb and not a noun. It is an active process in which the teacher, as Socrates would preach, is a ‘midwife’ whose role is to help the child deliver the best that his/her potential has to offer. This dialogue must be continued so that we, as teachers, become closer to becoming a ‘verb’ than continue to exist as ‘nouns’ unaware of what ‘adjectives’ are used to describe us or how we use them to describe ourselves. There is so much to do in the area of 'thinking skills' that we could have better achieved.
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"Learn from Pink Floyd"
But there is hope, as the great Brazilian educator Paulo Freire would advise us educators. It requires a systematic radicalisation of the enterprise of teaching itself. We need to create teachers who are radical enough to go in each and every classroom, armed with a powerful philosophy of teaching and human liberation, and challenge our children even at as an early age as pre- kindergarten. What we see now in our universities is a culture of one-dimensionality, homogenisation and a more sophisticated ‘spoon-feeding-ism’ that is a necessary pre-condition for state-sponsored totalitarianism.
We can change all these - through a radical programme of graduate teacher education at the level of graduate schools of education.
- What is our curriculum for teacher education like?
- How politicised is it?
- How do we infuse at every level, critical thinking strategies so that we will produce a nation of questioning individuals that pay allegiance not to any government of the day but to ethics and intellectual pursuit without fear or favor?
- What is the culture of our classrooms like these days?
- Are we busy disciplining children, correcting behavior or developing their intellectual capabilities so that the genius in each and every one of them will be fully realised?
- When do we truly educate if we still spend time upholding the virtues of a police state?
Teachers, you are most honoured if you can play your role well - one who inspires revolutions.
But first, as Nietzsche would say,
teachers must be taught how to think.
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(http://azlyrahman-illuminations.blogspot.com/)
Fikrah:-
1) It just brilliant!
2) It is only for those who wants to think.
3) First, they have to read!
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