One of the traditional messages I took note of over Christmas Day was from Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, a man who I have a great deal of time for, he spoke about dependency and independence, there were several points that spoke to me as an educator.
‘Yet we have over the long millennia of human existence created a whole culture in which there is a basic impatience about learning – we want to get to the point where we can say, OK that’s enough, I know what I need to know – and about receiving’
As educators we are focused on successfully preparing students for their examinations, within a tight time allocation and under the pressure of performance management, we focus on the content and skills needed to successfully navigate the exam hurdle, but at what expense?
The ‘expense’ is that educators feel restrained from deviating from the content through fear of not covering what is necessary; this creates a stress that I believe is transmitted to students, approaches become less creative, as a result student motivation begins to wane, relationships become strained.
Often students begin to ask what the minimum requirement in terms of effort and knowledge are in order to be successful, utility rather than interest takes over.
A notion of life-long learning evaporates… as we provide students with a narrow set of skills needed to be successful in the short-term, we create a negative dependency.
‘And in the case of children, we shall do our level best to turn you into active little consumers and performers as soon as we can. We shall test you relentlessly in schools… we shall do all we can to make childhood a brief and rather regrettable stage on the way to the real thing – which is ‘independence’, turning you into a useful cog in the social machine that won’t need too much maintenance.’
Difficult to argue with this, students are under intense pressure to succeed, such turns students away from learning in some cases, a fixed mindset develops, where success is related to a grade or percentage, other successes and personal qualities are devalued.
Economic utility has become king, a liberal sense of exploring and engaging with knowledge for its intrinsic value has disappeared.
’Can we as a society accept and even celebrate the fact that there is a place for proper and mature dependence – that human beings need to receive and learn: not so that they can get to the point where they stop receiving and learning, but so that they can acquire the habits of receiving and learning in ever-new settings? Can we help children enjoy their dependency so that they don’t just leave it behind but get to manage it with freedom and imagination as they grow older?’
A call for a focus on life-long learning, we need to prepare students with the necessary skills to engage with learning throughout their lifetime, within a variety of contexts.
‘One is simply to reconnect ourselves to our own capacity to receive and learn with joy and excitement – to become like little children, as Somebody once said. The other is to be ready to give the nurture and security that children need – to create the safe places where they can learn, where they can make their mistakes.’
Finally, as educators we need to promote our love of learning, but at the same time reassure that failure is part of learning…
