Archaeological Expedition
“I do not help students become better thinkers when I make it easier for them to glean anything. Education is the process of gleaning. Everything else is information. “What they need to know” is precisely what they should be there to discover. Education is not supposed to be a “greatest hits” album of what people need to know. It should be a process of exploration and discovery…an adventure of trial-and-error…an archaeological expedition, unearthing thought that came before and deciding what to toss, what to keep, and how to use it.
“If our elementary and our secondary educational system didn’t function this way, our college students would not expect this four-year “packet of information.” If our children grew up viewing learning as play, viewing education as an adventure, with the freedom to decide what to read and what to think about – and what not to think about – then I firmly believe that the students in my classroom would be engaged. They would be interested. They would read what I assign, or they would say, “I don’t want to read that. I would much rather read *this* instead, which is also relevant to the course.”
“How I would love it if a student said that to me. In the meantime, I’m still working on finding that magic solution.”
Read this full awesome post by An Unschooling Professor, here.
