I think everyone would agree that people across this country and most all countries of the world, enjoyed above all else being able to exercise their creativity and passion through projects of ranging size and ambition. Whether someone decides to train for a marothon, start a garden, or start a business, this drive for individuality and empowerment to push for some new connection with our deepest philosophies is incredibly healthy and powerful. Our philosophies must be allowed to be put into practice or we will feel the resulting oppression in a sincere and depressing way. Now, if you agree with this fundamental premise about human potential and spirit, then you must explain to yourself and those loved ones around you why the educational practices used day in and day out do not facilitate students' development of those same projects that invigorate and challenge our intellects. We must revise our schools to put into practice project based learning in some way in order to challenge our students to think critically about their world and what they hope to see. Such a project could with the right supervision turn into an intensive curriculum capable of teaching basic reading and math skills without the boring memorization strategies so commonplace today.
Inspiration, creativity, and empowerment must hit these young people before they will approach the classroom as though it were a tool rather than an obstacle. Through my teaching style I must be outlining and demonstrating the critical thinking skills students can build for themselves if they participate. Through a solution-creation process played out using short-session projects I can and already have fostered classrooms with respect, critical thinking, and creativity. My objective is and must continue to be to interest students in participating in critical thinking as creatively as they possibly can. Now piquing the interest of students is done through the interactive activities often infused with role playing and cooperative working groups, the participation comes from inviting students to present their work to peers, and the critical thinking arises through the evaluation and reflection on the data collected through activities they help to create.
Opposite this solution-creation process is an alternative tactic used by teachers to force information to students through memorization and work not requiring independent thought based on their own understandings of the subject matter. This tactic (known by many as the banking method of education) is an oppressive philosophy of standardization. Easy to prepare and distribute to students, this philosophy of education comes in the form of non-stop memorization, reading from alien texts created miles and miles from their homes and realities, and other lower level learning skills. The result of such a program is boredom, disengagement, and fewer positive skills acquired.
Student integration into classroom work through group dynamics conversations held with the class (to ensure optimal group work--translates to compassion, listening skills, etc.) and the prompting of student work plans would challenge them to see the classroom as a laboratory of critical thought. Showcasing problems in their communities and allowing them to design programs to solve said problem pushes students to work with real data and learn by creating.
Once suggested at a Slow Food conference in San Francisco a couple years ago, health activists should pressure school administrators to better the school lunches by forcing those same administrators to eat the food the students eat for a full year and see if they still believe school food to be permissible. Something very similar should be done with adults like what is done to students in many public school classrooms across the country. That kind of order and discipline should be enforced on adults just like the young students... oh wait we have something like that already. Prisons.
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