Today, we see more young people going into university than ever before. We also see that a degree is now required for a job that two decades ago could have been gained with a school certificate. We also see graduates doing menial jobs because they can’t get a job with the degree they have earned. We hear of professors who complain of the poor basic grammar of their students, and we witness other students leaving school who are illiterate and with too poor an understanding of the world they are about to enter. Parents find it hard to trust schools, although few complain in case their children suffer for it by vindicate teachers. Despite hordes of teachers leaving their profession as they do today, America loses some 200,000 teachers every year, governments struggle to create images that schools are successful, and employ a huge propaganda machine to convince the public of the efficiency of the educational system. What has really gone wrong?
Here is the forerunner to “The Illusion of School” it discusses similar aspects without the guidance and tips, and more focuses on the development of our technology and why education needs to redesign itself.
Teacher, Parent, Child is a game changer for education. It explains, through stories of real adults and children, why we are wrong to assume that learning capacity is dependent upon intelligence, and why the apparent ability of any student in school is only their history of understanding.
When the parent or the teacher applies enough sensitivity to restructure the child’s understanding, then dramatic improvements follow.
Mediation, we are to discuss, is where the more experienced guide the less experienced from what they know to what they do not know. Yet, it is important to realise that mediation, as any form of teaching or guidance, is only given value through a clear understanding of what “The Art of Sensitivity in Awareness” means.
More simply in this example of the zone of proximal development, it would not be to think of a particular zone but to consider a number of levels within each zone. Thus, if in each zone the teacher discusses with the student what they think they know and having improved this for them, what they expect to encounter as they further develop, they will cause them to be more sensitive in their handling of information. With this higher awareness, the student will be more able to predict what is expected of them and so be less likely to import ideas which are not relevant, which they do when they don’t understand what they are doing. It is by the constant dialogue of how the student understands their past understanding, how they see the way information is presented at this moment and how they could predict what may happen next, is the means by which the teacher would significantly develop their ability and with this the confidence that arms them to explore and self-correct as they develop this.
However, the problem is that Vygotsky’s idea, just as those of every other educationalist before and after him, seek how to improve the learning for the individual student. But students do not learn individually. They learn amongst a mass of confused personalities who strive with different interests to be in the class or try to avoid being in it, often guided by a teacher who is pressurized simply to give information, mark the responses they get and move to the next lesson, with a few moments here and there for the most problematic in the class.
It was through this understanding, I realized the importance of the attitude of the teacher and how this directs the attitude of the students, and from which I put forward a philosophy in teaching and learning encapsulated by the term ‘The Andersen Attitude Method of Teaching.”
All the above aspects we have just mentioned are ones we shall come back to in time. However, in the development of education Vygotsky’s philosophy was not known outside of Russia until the 1960s, and although there were many educationalists in the West who had similar ideas to his, they were seldom given the means to make practical use of them in the classroom.
So, in all of nearly two centuries, there has been great changes in the school experience for the child. Plastic chairs and communal tables have replaced wooden pews and benches, by which the environment became more homely, which seemingly encourages children to interact more with it. The language of education in textbooks and examinations that once clearly defined the opportunities or limitations to each child, as they were familiar to this, changed to present greater and fairer parity to all. With an ever increasing realization of the true role of the environment, information became more colorful, imaginative, and more information manageable, which did improve the opportunity of each child to do better.
However, as we have just shown, the deeper changes that would have released the child from the mechanism of a stratified future remain a controlled process, for the need of and the machinery which desired discrimination has not altered. It has merely changed its appearance to survive. The grade the child gains is still set about the conditioned average and still regarded as a mixture of their motivation and inherited quality, with the competence of the teacher and so education little brought into the equation. In all this, the teacher has long been phased into the background, and so deprived of the opportunity to interact and improve each child’s progression of their understanding; without which the child struggles to survive among 30 or so other children blinkered by their personal understanding of why, how, when, and what they should do as assessment of their competence is ever more refined.
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