Saturday, October 02, 2021

180 years old and fresh as the day it was born.

https://www.froebelusa.com The kindergarten model of education launched by Froebel in the 19th century should be the model of all schooling from pre-K through university. The ideal is that we learn through play within the realm of real life.

Artificiality and contrivance are the bane of effective learning. They kill it dead. 

Students who want to be teachers should be launched into classrooms their first term at the university so that they are provided a means to test and utilize and be energized and awakened by what they are learning in class. 

Froebel offered an understanding that what was taken into the mind needed to be tested through the outcome of the hands and in real life. Student testing of what is taught is the foundation for the development of critical thinking. That our nation has devolved toward idiocy is the consequence of our failure to develop critical thinking skills. Those are derived from scaffolding developed within the child through the following pathway. Start with the interests of the child. Build from the known toward the unknown, from the easy toward the more difficult, from the simple to the complex, utilizing the concrete to form the foundation for an understanding of abstract principles.

This is not rocket science, but  is built upon observations from the 18th and 19th centuries on how children and adults learn best.

You can participate in a renewal of education by paying attention to the Kindergarten documentary film series, and by attending to the path to learning podcasts created by my friends Scott Bultman, Jay Irwin and John Pottinger. Path to learning can be found here: https://www.froebelusa.com/podcasts/the-path-to-learning-podcast

Make, fix and create...


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