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.
I think children love reading, and they will make time for it if we put the right books into their hands. And I hope I get the chance to keep being one of the people that writes them.
All too often, technology is treated as a silver bullet for perceived problems in education. This sometimes leads to knee-jerk investments, using scarce resources to invest in software or hardware without a clear notion of how either might actually empower learning.
You learn from a conglomeration of the incredible past - whatever experience gotten in any way whatsoever.
You may speak but a word to a child, and in that child there may be slumbering a noble heart which shall stir the Christian Church in years to come.
A book is always an emergence above everyday life. A book is expressed life and thus is an addition to life.
The only condition a library asks its users to honor is to do justice to their own imagination, their own curiosity and their own thirst for knowledge, and in the process, to achieve their own independence of mind and spirit.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.