Wednesday, July 02, 2008

Today's culture stunts the inner qualities that good students need: concentration, patience, persistence. Unless schools take on character development, says GARY J. NIELS, their reform efforts are doomed. Forum: Why education 'reform' isn't working. From the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.
In order to experience academic achievement, students must possess inner qualities that enable them to perform academic work. Qualities such as concentration, attentiveness, patience, persistence, cooperation, responsibility and thoughtfulness are the foundations for academic achievement. No matter what new curriculum is composed or new educational configurations are devised, if children do not have the inner qualities that are essential for any academic success, they are doomed to fail.

Young people today are quick to feel frustrated and consequently intolerant of intellectual challenge. Their impatience makes them less willing to apply critical thinking to a difficult mathematics problem, savor the challenge of reading a complex novel, work through an intricate lab experiment or master the subtleties of grammar in English or a foreign language. Frustration curtails a young person's ability to listen, absorb, and process the details that constitute learning and knowledge.

Brain research confirms this phenomenon. Today children are raised in a culture that stunts the development of the qualities necessary for academic success. The Herculean challenge of schools is to reverse this trend.
Woodworking anyone? It develops all those skills now lacking in American education.

2 comments:

  1. Anonymous8:29 PM

    I think woodworking can be a good tool to do what you are saying for some people. The nice thing about woodworking is that there are a lot of directions that can be taken with it depending on one's interests.

    Unfortunately, if the modern classroom were to implement woodworking classes to develop skills as opposed to learning a trade, it would most likely be a one size fits all approach and that would be wrong.

    My dad had a theory that a father should figure out where a child's talents lie and then seek to develop them.

    In my case, he chose woodworking, and I owe him the world for it. Even though I haven't done much woodworking since I was a kid, it has had a profound impact on my life and prepared me for things that Dad could never have imagined fifteen or twenty years ago.

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  2. Crafts should be available all through education, and of course it could and should become self directed. The idea is far from a one size fits all kind of approach.

    I think if you were to read through some of the earlier blog posts from throughout the past three school years, you would see more easily how crafts, building on a woodworking base can be used to enrich every area of school curriculum.

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