Subject: Re: Burns, coming through the rye/teaching and learning
From: Scottie Bowman (rbowman@indigo.ie)
Date: Mon Jul 23 2001 - 04:49:59 GMT
I wholly agree with Will that the best educators establish
a two way conversation with their pupils. But a conversation
between equals is illusory. I become very cagey when the child
is encouraged to think his contribution has some peculiar value
by virtue of being a child’s. Most children, after all, are quite ill
read & largely inexperienced. The young person with the truly
fresh, uncorrupted view of the world is a great rarity. Most of us
are so eager to put on the clothes of the adult that we don’t
recognise our new attitudes are, almost invariably, the most easily
accessible, the most conventional.
Over sixty years ago I had the rare good fortune of attending
a highly ‘enlightened’, co-educational, boarding school run by
Quakers. Far in advance of their time, these people practised
democracy with their pupils. But of course, some teachers were
more democratic than others. Those whom I remember with
the greatest gratitude, though, were not the chummy, relaxed ones
who would listen with kindly & quite genuine openness to whatever
rubbish the thicker members of the audience might offer - but
the bastards & bitches who were true masters of their subjects
& unsentimentally demanded the best efforts from each of us.
In this atmosphere of mutually respectful antagonism, there was
nothing more satisfying than proving one of them wrong on a point
of fact or putting up a persuasive counter argument in a discussion
of opinion.
I can hear the same contemptuous dismissal by my own grandsons
of such of their teachers as conduct ‘child-centred’ classes, where
parrot-learning & hard-grind reading has been replaced by
the encouragement of each little soul to express his own creativity
& originality. Creativity my ass. For most of them little attempt
has ever been made to fill the pot - leaving them nothing to draw
out but fetid, empty air.
My advice, Will, is stop all this Jack’s-as-good-as-his-master stuff.
Make the little buggers sweat for it. No more cooperation between
the generations. The only way the young can ever find themselves
is through determined, unremitting insurrection.
Scottie B.
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