Eerlijk gezegd dacht ik toen ik over het manifest ‘Stop stealing dreams‘ van Seth Godin hoorde, dat ik wel kon inpakken. Ik heb de stukken die voor mijn profielwerkstuk nuttig zijn doorgelezen/gescand en gelukkig is dit niet zo. Hij noemt wel een aantal punten die ik ook behandel en een aantal punten die ik in gedachten zal houden.
Is het niet geweldig dat iemand mensen oproept om het onderwijs te veranderen? Om hierover te discussiëren en je standpunten wat betreft dit onderwerp te verdedigen? Ik vind van wel.
Hieronder een aantal citaten die mij aanspraken en nuttig kunnen zijn voor mijn stuk:
“As we get ready for the ninety-third year of universal public education, here’s the question every parent and taxpayer needs to wrestle with: Are we going to applaud, push, or even permit our schools (including most of the private ones) to continue the safe but ultimately doomed strategy of churning out predictable, testable, and mediocre factory workers?”
“The mission used to be to create homogenized, obedient, satisfied workers and pliant, eager consumers.
No longer.
Changing school doesn’t involve sharpening the pencil we’ve already got. School reform cannot succeed if it focuses on getting schools to do a better job of what we previously asked them to do. We don’t need more of what schools produce when they’re working as designed. The challenge, then, is to change the very output of the school before we start spending even more time and money improving the performance of the school.”
“Dreamers in school are dangerous. Dreamers can be impatient, unwilling to become well-rounded, and most of all, hard to fit into existing systems.
One more question to ask at the school board meeting: “What are you doing to fuel my kid’s dreams?””
“What is school for?
If you’re not asking that, you’re wasting time and money.
Here’s a hint: learning is not done to you. Learning is something you choose to do.”
“We need dreams based not on what might be. We need students who can learn how to learn, who can discover how to push themselves and are generous enough to engage with the outside world to make those dreams happen.”
“Unlike just about every other institution and product line in our economy, transparency is missing from education. Students are lied to and so are parents. At some point, teenagers realize that most of school is a game, but the system need acknowledges it.”
“The good jobs of the future aren’t going to involve working for giant companies on an assembly line. They all require individuals willing to chart their own path, whether or not they work for someone else.”
“Sadly, most artists and most linchpins learn their skills and attitudes besides school, not because of it.”
(“A linchpin is the worker we can’t live without, the one we’d miss if she was gone”)
“A teacher can also serve to create a social contract or environment where people will change their posture, do their best work, and stretch in new directions.”
“What we do need is someone to persuade us that we want to learn those things, and someone to push us or encourage us or create a space where we want to learn to do them better.”
“Teaching is no longer about delivering facts that are unavailable in any other format.”
“I can’t think of anything more cynical and selfish, though, than telling kids who didn’t win the parent lottery that they’ve lost the entire game. Society has the resources and the skill (and thus the obligation) to reset cultural norms and to amplify them through schooling. I don’t think we maximize our benefit when we turn every child’s education into a first-time home-based project.
We can amplify each kid’s natural inclination to dream, we can inculcate passion in a new generation, and we can give kids the tools to learn more, and faster, in a way that’s never been seen before.
And if parents want to lead (or even to help, or merely get out of the way), that’s even better.”
“School is a factory, and the output of that factory is compliant workers who buy a lot of stuff. These students are trained to dream small dreams.”
“School is at its best when it gives students the expectation that they will not only dream big, but dreams that they can work on every day until they accomplish them-not because they were chosen by a black-box process, but because they worked hard enough to reach them.”
Het zijn misschien wat veel citaten, maar deze vond ik erg sprekend en het vermelden waar. (Niet dat dit de enigen zijn die het vermelden waard zijn: lees vooral het manifest!)