Learning without Boundaries

I love home education and the curiosity it fosters in children. Oliver has discovered Ghandi and Mandela on a deeper level and he has made a connection between the two. Watching his excitement and interest in the discovery that both were lawyers and both fought oppression, one with peace and one with militancy, both were non sectarian and both were imprisoned.

The questions Oliver asks are so well thought out and indicative of curiosity to what he has just discovered. The way he has learnt to read literature and text of any form is enquiring rather than rote.

Oliver is not blinded by others opinions or ideas, he looks for the facts and knits the rest together for himself and he goes on to form his own opinions and then questions others opinions.

At 9 years old he is demonstrating a natural love of learning that I doubt he would have achieved in a school setting.

How Oliver made the link between the two characters of Mandela and Ghandi fascinates me but also fills me with joy that he is thinking beyond when he thinks about and discovers any topic. He is making links for himself between things he is learning and things he is newly discovering. 

He is learning about an interconnected world that is complex and hard for even adults to understand and decipher.

I feel like I am growing a little scholar but I hope he heeds my warning that it is about what you do with the information you learn and not how much information you learn. 

The Soup Of Life - The State Of Education

 

I am looking on in horror at the state of education in it's present form.  The old Sysan Proverb states the soup of life is salty enough without adding tears to it and I believe our Government is adding plenty of tears to the education system at this time in history.

Parents are removing their children left, right and centre to escape the draconian damaging effects of Government control over an education system that is failing, and letting down, so badly, so many children and families.

Of course Home Education is a freedom that every parent has, but not all parents are equipped to educate their children in a way that children need to thrive in a modern world. How can they when they themselves have been so badly let down by that very same system even before their children get there and inherit a system that has so badly failed so many before them.

We are all swimming against the tide. Education is not just about learning Maths, Science, etc etc, education should encompass how to learn so that this can be applied to every facet in life. This is an essential ingredient to help children get through this thick soup of life. To help the child is to help the adult.

It is not just about subject, it is also about substance and that magic substance ingredient, in my opinion the most important and essential ingredient is missing from our current education system.

In times gone past political education philosophy was about controlling the masses to work in the factories and in the fields, but that has lead to what other experts have termed 'dumbing down the masses'. That long term effect has lead to todays chaos in the classroom and ever more people leaving in droves.

The whole education system needs to be overhauled but I fear that reform is something even the so called experts in education are having difficulty in finding the answer to.

Meanwhile, we wait for someone to come up with an answer to how we stop parents taking their children out of schools to home educate, and Governments desperately trying to stop them, fearing that the children will not get the education that philosophy dictates and they have a right to receive by law, yet ironically that very substance in our education system they are trying to prevent parents leaving, itself is missing that essential ingredient. 

That essential ingredient to education that will assist a child to progress and get on in life is a right enshrined in law for a reason, those events that lead to that law being made and those that devised and developed it, understood the importance of that Law for a harmonious society and advancement of the human race. A law that will assist our children to progress and be successful in life. yet paradoxically knowing how the education system has failed the parents and contributed to the social decline that we see with ever higher suicide rates, bullying and violence and parents feeling like they have lost control. 

On the other hand we have the problem of how do we stop schools giving up and off rolling children by teachers that have had that all essential ingredient absent from their training. This lack of essential ingredient in their training is so very evident and causing chaos across the education system.

There are so many problems with the education system it is hard to see where it all starts, but one problem is leading to another and all the solutions they are coming up with are just causing more chaos.

Our education system is in a mess and unless someone comes up with that missing solution to get it back on track we can only expect things to get worse.

The education system is a mess and the more solutions that are implemented  by so called experts, the more of a mess they are making. Experts failed solutions are causing ever more issues and ever more social woes. The failure of the education system is costly to society in so many ways.

The thick soup of life just gets thicker and thicker when it comes to education, despite all good intentions, in my opinion by the laws of nature the experts have currently got it all wrong.

Policy makers really do need to start listening because if they do not, who knows where this will end with the social decline unfolding before our very eyes.

The deficit in the education system is having serious knock on effects right across all facets of life for millions of people, it is a recipe for disaster, it really is time our Government woke up and stop sleep walking us all into disaster.