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How to Make Education a Positive Part of Your Relationship With Your Child
[Week 15 of 52 Weeks to a Better Relationship With Your Child]
Asking basic questions about education
Where do you get your ideas of education from? Have you given much thought to the government dictates and cultural expectations? You need to consider just how much these ideas and approaches impact not only your relationship with your child, but also your child’s ability to think for himself or herself. (Once in a while I specify both genders, but most of the time I use the grammatically inclusive ‘he’ and ‘him’ versions.)
Here are the basics you need to be thinking about:
If you haven’t really examined these basics, then you are flying blind or letting someone else fly while you don’t even watch.
What is education?
We could probably all agree that education has something to do with learning. Synonyms of education listed in my Webster’s dictionary include instruction, schooling, teaching, training, and tutelage. While the noun school is typically thought of as a special place for learning or a group of people with a common set of beliefs, it was originally an intermission.
Both the Greek skhole and the Latin schola are specifically referring to having leisure from work to discuss. The idea of attending school, as particularly used in English, isn’t recorded until the 1300’s. Why is this good to know? Because then we can begin to separate the idea of learning from the modern day institutional, non-family settings.
Leisure for discussion is about as far removed from the modern, test-oriented school model as you can get. Leisure also implies that there is already interest, or else why spend your free time talking about it?
I expect that children were being taught things and learning, but the point is that the current way of teaching children is not based on some timeless model of learning. It will probably also occur to someone that in previous time periods (and still in a few outlying cultures today), that survival was more of an issue and children didn’t have the same opportunity for free time. Isn’t it ironic, then, that as soon as they do get some significant free time, some adults think the children need to be locked up in buildings, away from home, for most daylight hours to work on a pre-approved education?
Still, I think we could say that the definition of education is two-fold.
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By Laura Blodgett[Week 15 of 52 Weeks to a Better Relationship With Your Child]
Asking basic questions about education
Where do you get your ideas of education from? Have you given much thought to the government dictates and cultural expectations? You need to consider just how much these ideas and approaches impact not only your relationship with your child, but also your child’s ability to think for himself or herself. (Once in a while I specify both genders, but most of the time I use the grammatically inclusive ‘he’ and ‘him’ versions.)
Here are the basics you need to be thinking about:
If you haven’t really examined these basics, then you are flying blind or letting someone else fly while you don’t even watch.
What is education?
We could probably all agree that education has something to do with learning. Synonyms of education listed in my Webster’s dictionary include instruction, schooling, teaching, training, and tutelage. While the noun school is typically thought of as a special place for learning or a group of people with a common set of beliefs, it was originally an intermission.
Both the Greek skhole and the Latin schola are specifically referring to having leisure from work to discuss. The idea of attending school, as particularly used in English, isn’t recorded until the 1300’s. Why is this good to know? Because then we can begin to separate the idea of learning from the modern day institutional, non-family settings.
Leisure for discussion is about as far removed from the modern, test-oriented school model as you can get. Leisure also implies that there is already interest, or else why spend your free time talking about it?
I expect that children were being taught things and learning, but the point is that the current way of teaching children is not based on some timeless model of learning. It will probably also occur to someone that in previous time periods (and still in a few outlying cultures today), that survival was more of an issue and children didn’t have the same opportunity for free time. Isn’t it ironic, then, that as soon as they do get some significant free time, some adults think the children need to be locked up in buildings, away from home, for most daylight hours to work on a pre-approved education?
Still, I think we could say that the definition of education is two-fold.