Philosophy of Education
"Grown-ups never understand anything for themselves, and it is tiresome for children to be always and forever explaining things to them." - Antoine Saint-Exupery
Any attempt at crafting a representative philosophy of education is an attempt at explaining something that only children truly have the ability to express. If we're lucky enough, we may encounter a child willing to be patient enough with us and who is not too tired to share what they know. However, they will not do so with prepared statements and adjective laced vocabulary...but in simple ways: in actions, in relationships, in feelings and in opening themselves up to the care and influence of another. Children know far more about learning than grown ups do; but, if we are very quiet listeners and if we put away our grown-up ways long enough to be shaped by children, than we too can learn.
Any attempt at crafting a representative philosophy of education is an attempt at explaining something that only children truly have the ability to express. If we're lucky enough, we may encounter a child willing to be patient enough with us and who is not too tired to share what they know. However, they will not do so with prepared statements and adjective laced vocabulary...but in simple ways: in actions, in relationships, in feelings and in opening themselves up to the care and influence of another. Children know far more about learning than grown ups do; but, if we are very quiet listeners and if we put away our grown-up ways long enough to be shaped by children, than we too can learn.
Children know learning is about creative potential. These are not their words...they're mine. They would say, "I can do it!" without giving a second thought to "How can I do it?" Children trust in their creative potential to learn new ideas and use new concepts before they really have had a chance to play and live with them. They instinctively know that their potential is only limited by their ability to think creatively...and luckily, children are brilliantly creative. For a child, a stick is not just a stick. It is a baton, a standard, a rifle or a violin bow. This is not a hat...it's an elephant swallowed by a snake. They see things grown-ups are no longer able to see.
I am a grown-up that is willing to exchange tired eyes for young eyes that can actually see. As an educator, I want to know what children know about creative potential.
I am a grown-up that is willing to exchange tired eyes for young eyes that can actually see. As an educator, I want to know what children know about creative potential.
Children know about talking. Not the big word talking that occurs around dinner parties at the adult table while sipping wine and nibbling hors d'oeuvres ...but real talking. Talking that gets down on hands and knees and sits eye to eye across a puzzle or a lego pile. Talking that is willing to travel miles and miles of imaginative ground knowing that this journey has been made infinitely better because it is shared. Grown-ups rarely talk like that. I am a grown-up that knows the good stuff of learning happens where the talking of two or more people meet.
I am a grown-up that is willing to be "bound up in relation" with children and one who will is not "making a business out of them, but is taking part in his life, accepting him before desiring to change him." As an educator, I want to know what children know about talking. |
Children know about wonder. They know the diligence of prying up rocks from a creek bed just to see what lives underneath; to gaze inquisitively at an approaching cloud and wonder where the water droplets came from to make the cloud so full. The curiousity of children has no fear of asking “Why?", and when the response to their questions are the audible sighs of exasperated parents they inquire further about how come their dad's breathing sounds so funny. Education is best in its "evocation of curiousity, of judgment, of the power of mastering a complicated tangle of circumstances...".
I am a grown-up that is willing to not only welcome curiousity from children but will join them in the imaginative space of wonder and awe that connects our affective selfs to understanding of the world. As an educator, I want to know what children know about wonder. |
Children know about risk. Grown-ups have forgotten about how big the world looks to children. They have forgotten that around the next corner there will most probably be something waiting for them that they've never encountered. Each day children risk that monsters may be under their bed, that their parents may forget to pick them up from school, that a school bully may catch them before making it safely to their classroom or that they may be called upon in class to share an idea they are unfamiliar with. Children know that on any given day their sidewalk could end and yet, despite their fears, they continue to risk. They persevere and find courage that most grown-ups have long since given up on.
I am a grown-up that is willing to go with a child right to the sidewalk's edge and peer over it with them. Children need company to co-create and encourage this "attitude of willingness... [that] is central to carry students into the full risks of learning". As an educator, I want to know what children know about risk.
I am a grown-up that is willing to go with a child right to the sidewalk's edge and peer over it with them. Children need company to co-create and encourage this "attitude of willingness... [that] is central to carry students into the full risks of learning". As an educator, I want to know what children know about risk.
Children know about friendship. When children are young, before adults exhausted them with our "way of doing things", they knew that it was better to be together than to be apart and to share rather than keep to ourselves. Children do not value having a large garage to keep a car warm in the winter, they value a flat piece of pavement for a neighbourhood street hockey game and garage door that can take the beating of missed slap shots. Children have no need to learn about how having money allows some people to do extravagant things when they appreciate a simple contentedness of being with family and friends...no matter how diverse they are. Friendship for children is being together and creating something amazing - a snow fort, a variety show for their families, a community mural - rather than isolating themselves away in privacy.
I am a grown-up that is willing to live, act, and learn in public and support those places of learning that work to create public friendships within our communities. Every single child deserves to belong to a place of learning that seeks the best for them, while offering the same for every other child in the community. Grown-ups forget that public schools have the most difficult and the most valuable job: to create a well-educated citizen. As an educator, I want to know what children know about friendship. |
Children know about beauty. In the blurry lines of a watercolour rainbow to the complex variety of a bag of marbles, children find and appreciate beauty in ways that grown ups cannot. Grown- ups too often see beauty through the lens of monetary value or social esteem. Children know that beauty is about feeling and believing that what they are experiencing is important for them to know.
I am a grown-up that knows educative imagination grows from considering the world with a child's sense of aesthetic beauty. The beauty found in fine arts "will help open the situations that require interpretation, will help disrupt the wall that obscure the spaces, the sphere of freedom to which educators might someday attend". Experiencing beauty defamiliarizes the world that grown ups take for granted but that children are naturally inclined to learn from. As an educator, I want to know what children know about beauty. |
Children know about self. In basements and playrooms across the world there are children playing dress up and make believe in an attempt to discover their true selves. Children know how to play with identity and are not afraid to try on new hats and take control of these new personas they are trying out. Grown-ups lose this explorative self-confidence somewhere along the way of fitting into our grown-up cultures and grown-up clubs. Children will easily adapt who they are and who they want to be as many times as imagination will allow.
I am a grown-up that knows a child's ability to explore who they are with confidence and conviction is a value that is desperately needed in our world. Children are not just learning about facts and ideas when they come to schools: they are learning about who they are in relation to others, to themselves and to knowledge itself. While the playful imaginings of dress up time help children build confidence in experimentation of self, the "web of communal relationships" in a "community of truth" is integral for each individual community member to "develop his or her authentic self". Learning communities must be environments that enrich the development of critical thinking, autonomous learning and self empowerment in children and in grown-ups. As an educator, I want to know what children know about self.
I am a grown-up that knows a child's ability to explore who they are with confidence and conviction is a value that is desperately needed in our world. Children are not just learning about facts and ideas when they come to schools: they are learning about who they are in relation to others, to themselves and to knowledge itself. While the playful imaginings of dress up time help children build confidence in experimentation of self, the "web of communal relationships" in a "community of truth" is integral for each individual community member to "develop his or her authentic self". Learning communities must be environments that enrich the development of critical thinking, autonomous learning and self empowerment in children and in grown-ups. As an educator, I want to know what children know about self.
“All grown-ups were once children... but only few of them remember it."
Antoine Saint-Exupery
Antoine Saint-Exupery