Sustainable development and the whole child...

In my wood shop, I am continuing my exploration of Japanese puzzle boxes, as you can see in the photos at left and below.

In the early days of the progressive education movement and among those who promoted both Kindergarten and Educational Sloyd, it was suggested that most education was "one sided " and that schooling must instead concern itself with the "whole child."

I ran across the following in a book (Educationeering) by Pai Obanya, connecting sustainable development concerns with the necessity of sustainable education.

Since the human being has to be educated to maximize his capacity to function as the motor of sustainable development, his Education should also be sustainable. The question that we will therefore have to address is: what makes Education sustainable?

To answer the question would require reversing the ills that an over-emphasis on mere schooling, bookish learning, and regurgitative examinations has wrought on education systems over the ages. Thus, sustainable education for the human being will have to obey the following four imperatives.

1. It must not be one-sided
2. It must provide for the basics
3. It must never be terminal
4. It must stress both hard and soft skills.

One-sided education is one that fails to address the individual's three H's–– the head, the hands and the heart. That is, the type of education that has not assured the beneficiary's all-round development. It is also the form of education that promotes the disintegrated approach to knowledge; on that denies the learner a broad intellectual/affective base by over-emphasizing premature specialization. –– Educationeering, 2014 Pai Obanya

The point of  course is that education should lead each child to an understanding of the interconnectedness of all things. Quite sadly, schools as they are currently contrived are not the place in which that is designed to happen.

“Most learning is not the result of instruction. It is rather the result of unhampered participation in a meaningful setting. Most people learn best by being "with it," yet school makes them identify their personal, cognitive growth with elaborate planning and manipulation.”
― Ivan Illich, Deschooling Society

Make, fix and create... Teach others to do likewise.