GOOD
NEWS FOR "BAD" STUDENTS
As
the June sun makes kids yearn to escape the classroom, a U.S. expert
argues that the urge to break free is exactly what they'll need
to succeed.
It's a phenomenon
parents and schoolchildren everywhere have learned to dread - the
excruciating final four weeks of school, when the rawness of spring
has vanished and the promise of summer freedom has arrived.
While homework
is a nasty business in all the months of the school year, come June
- when every self-respecting kid would rather be shooting hoops
or practising ollies or devouring futuristic novels - it becomes
repugnant.
Now, at last,
comfort is nigh. And rather than from an expert in education, it
comes from the other end of the process, from an international career
coach and manager of change who helps people figure out how to get
out of the careers they dislike and into the ones they wish they
had.
Adele Scheele,
director of the Career Center at California State University, Northridge,
has found that success in life depends on seriously questioning
the model of "the good student," rather than embracing
it.
They may not
mean you shouldlet the little blighters go off to Shrek 2 three
nights next week. But it does at least reveal a bright side to their
longing to ditch the science project.
Dr. Scheele
explained her ideas in the 'Good' Student Trap, a book first published
in 1997 that lately has gathered a robust following. It has been
republished as Jumpstart Your Career in College, excerpts this month
in the Washington Post and in Online Education Publications directed
at June-loathing teachers and parents, and a new edition from Praeger
Publication is due this summer.
Her reasoning
goes like this: School puts children in unnatural groups of a single
age an then teaches them to be obedient. It tends to reward students
who give teachers precisely what they ask for. Frequently, assignments
are so specific that if a student gives more than what's asked for,
the teacher takes marks off.
Many teachers
even spell out exactly how to get bonus marks, Dr. Scheele noted.
Student never have to do things over or make them better. And at
the end, they are automatically promoted tto the next grade. It
kills creativity and the child's ability to figure out a true calling
later on.
"What they
are really learning is a kind of system dependence," Dr. Scheele
said in an interview this week from her office in California. In
her book, she adds: "[The lessons] boiled down to this hard-and-fast
rule: if we do our work well enough, they fall into a holding pattern
instead of taking an idea, running with it and being successful.
And how do they
shake it off? By doing the things outside school that they truly
want to do. That may be writing poetry for fun or composing songs
or networking with friends or playing soccer. The point is, they
can find out what they really want to do only by doing it.
In extensive
research with people who were educated and successful, Dr. Scheele
found that in every case, they had been involved in extracurricular
things they had loved at some point in their schooling. Such experience
helped them discover interest and skills that, often, they eventually
gravitated to in later life, and even their own brand of personal
courage.
By contrast,
the current educational focus on standards, testing and targets
-- common throughout much of the English-speaking world -- just
makes "system dependece" worse, Dr. Scheele said.
"Learning
for a test, we know, is not a good thing, because students dont
remember later," she said. "What people remember years
later is the projects they did, the experiences they had. We remember
only what we do."
And those hours
and hours of homework that little kids are set every evening? Parents
either hold the child's hand throughout or end up doing it outright.
"It becomes a true chore," she said. "Life is not
supposed to be that."
A report put
out this week in Ontario by the lobby group People for Education
catalogues a sharp decline in the number of music teachers and school
librarians among schools in Ontario. It's a trend that seems to
hold across the country. Dr. Scheele said stripping that kinda of
intellectual and artistic learning out of an educational system
is a key problem.
Rather than
teaching them how to be "good" student, meaning passive
and obedient, she said schools need to teach children exactly what
arts, music and literature provide -- adaptive, creative and critial
thought.
Her recipe for
the true good student? Lots of hands-on projects, whether on baseball
or on bumblebees. Loads of critical thinking, even if it involves
mutiny among staff reluctant to teach it. The wit and self-confidence
to debate.
Do student still
need to get high marks in shcool? Yes, no matter how flaw that system
is. But do schools need to leaven the homework of June with the
joy of smelling ths lilacs? Absolutely. Let kids do that as much
as they can, then stifle your sign, and rein them in again to sit
down to the final month of math.
Alanna Mitchell
is a senior feature writer for The Globe and Mail.
© 2004
Bell Globemedia Publishing Inc. All Rights Reserved.
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