Читать книгу Can I Go and Play Now? - Greg Bottrill - Страница 10

I want to change, not just through this book but through my life, my example, through my dialogues with parents and colleagues. Some may see me as a bald-headed beardy man in his mid-40s on some crusade, but if my voice is joined by your voice and your voice is joined by another, and so on and on, can we not begin to orchestrate change that we want to see and truly become the teachers that we want to be? And maybe that’s a dilly-daydream, but wouldn’t it be better to die trying than just roll over and accept a system and structure that deep down in our hearts we know to be broken and no longer fit for purpose?

I Am the Cosmos, I Am the Wind – Chris Bell, Big Star

Increasingly, or so it would seem, mainstream education is fast becoming something that is done to a child – an act of imposition: we teach, children learn. The adult imparts their wisdom, their light, their understanding so that the child can receive and fill themselves up from top to toe. It’s as though children are empty pots on a factory floor advancing along a chain at various stages being topped up along the way. And this is how a modern-day education system would want you to think – to buy into a system that enables grading and measuring, that produces data that in turn allows it to grade a school, which in turn enables it to grade itself. It’s like the brainchild of an Orwellian dystopia which, left unchallenged, will continue to use education as a self-serving entity. It puts the individual child out of the frame at the expense of focusing on itself.

Shamefully, perhaps, this data-led measured-based approach is bleeding into Early Years and not only creating a system that seems to look past the child-as-the-child, but ultimately misses the very obvious point that when we work with young children we are dealing with people not numbers, with development not progress, and with what should be joy not mechanical learning by rote. Our leaders appear to be fixated with the ‘success’ of Far East education systems that enable measurability to the nth degree, ignoring our children’s need for energy, their true creativity, their real sense of who they are.

Now, this book isn’t going to be a call to arms or a rallying cry to rush the Houses of Parliament, a baying crowd with pitchforks waving, flags fluttering in the breeze. It is, however, going to show you that there is a way to work within the system that will give you the outcomes that, as an adult, you are expected to achieve, while at the same time giving your children wonderful and enriching experiences that will both enable them and nurture their own ‘soulness’. And if you discover the success of this approach, why not then tell someone else, who will tell someone else, and so on? Lo and behold, we have our revelation and a revolution.