by Steven David Horwich
(The following is excerpted from Connect The Thoughts first Parent/Teacher Training Course, The Goals of Education.)
Teaching is a dynamic and active thing. The teacher who believes that his students are tractable is kidding himself, or has students who are taking drugs or who are being abused in some way to make them tractable. Students are not innately tractable. People are not innately tractable, and a student is simply a young person. Human beings are innately voluble. The teacher has to contend with at least two dynamic relationships while teaching. The first is the dynamic relationship between the teacher and student. The second is the dynamic relationship between the student and what he is learning. What the student is learning will daily change his views and his life.
One can see that a teacher must have certain qualities to succeed, and indeed, survive being a teacher. Here is a brief idea of some of the requisite qualities, a few of which may surprise you:
- Awareness.
As the student will be reacting to his studies and the world around him, clearly, the student will be changing from day to day. We all do. The teacher must be sufficiently aware of the student to have some idea of what’s happening inside and to the student, so that the teacher can figure out what to do for the student.
An example:
A student who loves history all of a sudden is doing poorly at it, or is resistant to studying it. As a teacher, one would hope that you would be sufficiently aware of your student to see this change, one requiring action on your part. There may be numerous reasons that such a change might occur, and we will discuss those in future courses, as well as potential solutions. But the first thing that must happen for you to assist the student is that you, the teacher, must be able to see clearly how your student is doing. This requires awareness.
- Flexibility.
As mentioned, your relationship with a student is going to be a dynamic one. The student will have good and bad days, and so will you. You, however, have a specific job to do, and so does your student. The student’s job is to truly learn as much as possible about the world, and about specific subjects (they they are hopefully interested in), in preparation for their playing a role in life that they will find pleasing and which will be of use to the world at large.
Your job is to do whatever is needed to help them do their job. Your job is not, contrary to current methods and ideals, one of “leadership”, or of “role model”, or of “lecturer and chief testing and administration of punishments officer”. Your job is one of facilitator to the student’s education. The needs of that education will change daily sometimes, as will the student’s general attitude, and perhaps even his physical well-being.
- Knowledge of the Tools and Methods available to the teacher.
We have been educating our children for thousands of years. The methods and tools of education, indeed, the entire approach, has changed many times over the centuries. So have the goals of education.
Today, there is a culture-wide failure in our ability to successfully educate. We are doing a poorer job at this than some generations passed.
Education has a very long history. That history teaches us that there are significantly more ways to approach education than are currently in use, and given that the current tools are now used systemically and have led modern education to a very dark place indeed, we’d best be looking at other approaches.
-An understanding of the goals of education.
Goals determine process. Function can determine form. The specific goal or goals that we establish in education will determine the methods we use, the subject that we teach, and even the mode of evaluation of progress that we employ.
Today, the goals established by teachers often have little or nothing to do with the individual student. They are either based in national standards derived from some very big and faceless numbers, or they are motivated by likely employment opportunities. The goals that are rarely considered in education are those of the end user of that education – the student. This particular course that you’re doing now will help you develop methods to determine your student’s goals, and then ways and means of assisting the student in investigating and pursuing those goals through education.
- An understanding of each individual student, their needs and goals.
Your student’s each have their own unique needs. They have interests that may or may not align with anyone else’s educational goals for them. And please note that I said interests, and not aptitudes. We have all kinds of poorly designed tests issued to school children (and have had them for decades) that supposedly measure aptitude in various areas. No test can properly assess aptitude. No test can truly evaluate what creativity is, or “how much” of it a person has. No test will tell you what a child driven by interest might accomplish, despite a “lack of aptitude”.
Your student is not “the national average”. His goals are his own. So are his needs. It is unlikely that any two students share the same needs so far as their education is concerned. This is one of the facts about educating children that makes it difficult to do. In spite of our desire to have some sort of base and easily executed guidelines, it is a myth that you can place children together and have them all study the same materials in the same way, and secure anything resembling an acceptable or universal result.
In discovering each student as the individual that he or she is, we immediately improve the chance for success in education. In allowing the student to advise us as to his interests, we allow ourselves to stop guessing about which subjects they are attracted to and willing to work hard on. We know, because they told us. And yes, it is true that their interests are very liable to change as they grow and experience more of life. Hence, the need to remain aware and flexible as teachers. A life is a fluid and oft-changing force. We want to unleash each student, as a force, at their greatest power upon the world. To do so, a teacher can’t work against the tide of disinterest in the student. That route – the route taken by public and private education the vast, vast majority of the time – is the long, hard road to ruined lives and the systemic failure of education.
Steven Horwich is an Emmy and Dramalogue award-winning writer/director, who has split his life between the arts and education. A teacher with over 35 years and over 20,000 hours of experience from elementary school through university-level teaching, he started homeschooling his own children in 2002. This led him to author over 300 courses since 2002, a complete curricula (excluding math) for ages 5-adult, called Connect The Thoughts. Over 20,000 people have used CTT since making it available via the Internet in 2007. His curricula is presented at www.connectthethoughts.com. There is over 5 hours of film explaining his courses and approach. He has authored a book about education today, Poor Cheated Little Johnny, and a teacher training program to go with it. He currently presents a free webinar about education and homeschooling every third Tuesday.
(The following is excerpted from Connect The Thoughts first Parent/Teacher Training Course, The Goals of Education.)
Teaching is a dynamic and active thing. The teacher who believes that his students are tractable is kidding himself, or has students who are taking drugs or who are being abused in some way to make them tractable. Students are not innately tractable. People are not innately tractable, and a student is simply a young person. Human beings are innately voluble. The teacher has to contend with at least two dynamic relationships while teaching. The first is the dynamic relationship between the teacher and student. The second is the dynamic relationship between the student and what he is learning. What the student is learning will daily change his views and his life.
One can see that a teacher must have certain qualities to succeed, and indeed, survive being a teacher. Here is a brief idea of some of the requisite qualities, a few of which may surprise you:
- Awareness.
As the student will be reacting to his studies and the world around him, clearly, the student will be changing from day to day. We all do. The teacher must be sufficiently aware of the student to have some idea of what’s happening inside and to the student, so that the teacher can figure out what to do for the student.
An example:
A student who loves history all of a sudden is doing poorly at it, or is resistant to studying it. As a teacher, one would hope that you would be sufficiently aware of your student to see this change, one requiring action on your part. There may be numerous reasons that such a change might occur, and we will discuss those in future courses, as well as potential solutions. But the first thing that must happen for you to assist the student is that you, the teacher, must be able to see clearly how your student is doing. This requires awareness.
- Flexibility.
As mentioned, your relationship with a student is going to be a dynamic one. The student will have good and bad days, and so will you. You, however, have a specific job to do, and so does your student. The student’s job is to truly learn as much as possible about the world, and about specific subjects (they they are hopefully interested in), in preparation for their playing a role in life that they will find pleasing and which will be of use to the world at large.
Your job is to do whatever is needed to help them do their job. Your job is not, contrary to current methods and ideals, one of “leadership”, or of “role model”, or of “lecturer and chief testing and administration of punishments officer”. Your job is one of facilitator to the student’s education. The needs of that education will change daily sometimes, as will the student’s general attitude, and perhaps even his physical well-being.
- Knowledge of the Tools and Methods available to the teacher.
We have been educating our children for thousands of years. The methods and tools of education, indeed, the entire approach, has changed many times over the centuries. So have the goals of education.
Today, there is a culture-wide failure in our ability to successfully educate. We are doing a poorer job at this than some generations passed.
Education has a very long history. That history teaches us that there are significantly more ways to approach education than are currently in use, and given that the current tools are now used systemically and have led modern education to a very dark place indeed, we’d best be looking at other approaches.
-An understanding of the goals of education.
Goals determine process. Function can determine form. The specific goal or goals that we establish in education will determine the methods we use, the subject that we teach, and even the mode of evaluation of progress that we employ.
Today, the goals established by teachers often have little or nothing to do with the individual student. They are either based in national standards derived from some very big and faceless numbers, or they are motivated by likely employment opportunities. The goals that are rarely considered in education are those of the end user of that education – the student. This particular course that you’re doing now will help you develop methods to determine your student’s goals, and then ways and means of assisting the student in investigating and pursuing those goals through education.
- An understanding of each individual student, their needs and goals.
Your student’s each have their own unique needs. They have interests that may or may not align with anyone else’s educational goals for them. And please note that I said interests, and not aptitudes. We have all kinds of poorly designed tests issued to school children (and have had them for decades) that supposedly measure aptitude in various areas. No test can properly assess aptitude. No test can truly evaluate what creativity is, or “how much” of it a person has. No test will tell you what a child driven by interest might accomplish, despite a “lack of aptitude”.
Your student is not “the national average”. His goals are his own. So are his needs. It is unlikely that any two students share the same needs so far as their education is concerned. This is one of the facts about educating children that makes it difficult to do. In spite of our desire to have some sort of base and easily executed guidelines, it is a myth that you can place children together and have them all study the same materials in the same way, and secure anything resembling an acceptable or universal result.
In discovering each student as the individual that he or she is, we immediately improve the chance for success in education. In allowing the student to advise us as to his interests, we allow ourselves to stop guessing about which subjects they are attracted to and willing to work hard on. We know, because they told us. And yes, it is true that their interests are very liable to change as they grow and experience more of life. Hence, the need to remain aware and flexible as teachers. A life is a fluid and oft-changing force. We want to unleash each student, as a force, at their greatest power upon the world. To do so, a teacher can’t work against the tide of disinterest in the student. That route – the route taken by public and private education the vast, vast majority of the time – is the long, hard road to ruined lives and the systemic failure of education.
Steven Horwich is an Emmy and Dramalogue award-winning writer/director, who has split his life between the arts and education. A teacher with over 35 years and over 20,000 hours of experience from elementary school through university-level teaching, he started homeschooling his own children in 2002. This led him to author over 300 courses since 2002, a complete curricula (excluding math) for ages 5-adult, called Connect The Thoughts. Over 20,000 people have used CTT since making it available via the Internet in 2007. His curricula is presented at www.connectthethoughts.com. There is over 5 hours of film explaining his courses and approach. He has authored a book about education today, Poor Cheated Little Johnny, and a teacher training program to go with it. He currently presents a free webinar about education and homeschooling every third Tuesday.
