JOHN EDWARDS
THE THINGS WE STEAL
FROM CHILDREN
IDEC 2006
Edwards Explorations
Post Office Box 1934
Brisbane 4001
AUSTRALIA
The Things We Steal From Children
- Sandra Russell and John Edwards
If I am always the one to think of where to go
next.
If where we go is always the decision of the
curriculum or my curiosity and not theirs.
If motivation is mine.
If I always decide on the topic to be studied, the
title of the story, the problem to be worked on.
If I am always the one who has reviewed their
work and decided what they need.
HOW WILL THEY EVER KNOW HOW TO
BEGIN?
If I am the one who is always monitoring
progress.
If I always look ahead, foresee problems and
endeavour to eliminate them.
If I swoop in and save them from cognitive
conflict.
If I never allow them to feel and use the energy
from confusion and frustration.
If bells and I are always in control of the pace
and flow of work
HOW WILL THEY LEARN TO CONTINUE
THEIR OWN WORK?
If all the marking and editing is done by me.
If the selection of which work is to be published or
evaluated is made by me.
If what is valued and valuable is always decided by
external sources or by me.
If there is no forum to discuss what delights them in
their task, what is working, what is not working, what
they plan to do about it.
If they do not have a language of self-assessment.
HOW WILL THEY FIND OWNERSHIP, DIRECTION
AND DELIGHT IN WHAT THEY DO?
If I speak of individuals but present learning as if they
are all the same.
If I am never seen to reflect and reflection time is
never provided.
If we never develop language to discuss thinking and
reflection.
If I signify that there are always right and wrong
answers.
If I never let them persevere with the difficult and
complex.
If there is no time to explore.
HOW WILL THEY GET TO KNOW THEMSELVES
AS A THINKER?
If they never get to help anyone else.
If we force them to always work and play with
children of the same age.
If I do not teach them the skills of working cooperatively.
If collaboration can be seen as cheating.
If all classroom activities are based in
competitiveness.
If everything is seen to be for marks.
HOW WILL THEY LEARN TO WORK WITH
OTHERS?
For if they:
-have had all of their creative thoughts explained away.
-have never followed something they are passionate
about to a satisfying conclusion.
-have not clarified the way they sabotage their own
learning.
-are afraid to seek help and do not know who or how to
ask.
-have never got bogged down.
-have never failed.
-have always played it safe.
HOW WILL THEY EVER KNOW WHO THEY ARE?
“75% of all tasks across the curriculum
allowed students no choice in any aspect of
the task. A total of 1% of tasks allowed
students choice in purpose, audience or
form”
(WRAP Final Report, volume 1, 1992, page 35)
WRAP findings appear to support Lankshear
(1989) in his contention that schools promote
a naïve (superficial or simplistic) literacy
which is at variance with social reality and the
expectations regarding literacy requirements
beyond school.
The WRAP survey revealed that aspects of
literacy deemed to be important by curriculum
guidelines and policies were absent from
much of the school curriculum.
WRAP Study, Final Report, Vol.1, p.211
TIZZARD AND HUGHES
“… we became increasingly aware of how rich this
environment (the home) was for all the children. The
conversations between the children and their mothers
ranged freely over a variety of topics. The idea that
children’s interests were restricted to play and TV was
clearly untenable. At home the children discussed topics
like work, the family, birth, growing up, and death; …
they puzzled over such diverse topics as the shape of
roofs and chairs, the nature of Father Christmas, and
whether the Queen wears curlers in bed ... A large
number of the more fruitful conversations simply
cropped up...”
“... The children were certainly happy at school ...
However, their conversations with their teachers made a
sharp contrast to those with their mothers. The richness,
depth and variety which characterised the home
conversations was sadly missing. So too was the sense
of intellectual struggle, and of the real attempts to
communicate being made by both sides. The
questioning, puzzling child which we were so taken with
at home was gone: in her place was a child who ...
seemed subdued, mainly restricted to answering
questions rather than asking …”
ALICE MILLER
“In analysis the small and lonely child that is hidden
behind his achievements wakes up: ‘What would have
happened if I had appeared before you, bad, ugly, angry,
jealous, lazy, dirty, smelly? Where would your love have
been then? Does this mean that it was not really me you
loved, but only what I pretended to be? The wellbehaved, reliable, understanding, empathic, and
convenient child, who in fact was never a child at all?
What became of my childhood? I can never return to it.
From the beginning I have been a little adult. My abilities
– were they misused?” (Miller)
“For the majority of sensitive people, the true self
remains deeply and thoroughly hidden. But how can
you love something you do not know, something
that has never been loved? So it is that many a
gifted person lives without any notion of his or her
true self. Such people are enamoured of an
idealized, conforming, false self. They will shun their
hidden and lost true self….”
(Miller, “Drama of the Gifted Child” p.14)
“Probably everybody has a more or less
concealed inner chamber that he hides
even from himself and in which the props
of his childhood drama are to be found.
These props may be his secret delusion, a
secret perversion, or quite simply the
unmastered aspects of his childhood
suffering, the only ones who will certainly
gain entrance to this hidden chamber are
his children. With them new life comes into
it, and the drama is continued.”
“..what do exist are children like this:
intelligent, alert, attentive, extremely
sensitive, and (because they are completely
attuned to her well-being) entirely at
mother’s disposal and ready for her use.
Above all, they are transparent, clear,
reliable and easy to manipulate… sometimes
until puberty or until they came to analysis,
and very often until they have become
parents themselves.”
(Miller,” Drama of the Gifted Child’ p.45)
D.H.LAWRENCE
“Our business, at the present, is to prevent
the young mind from shooting. The ideal
mind, the brain, has become the vampire of
modern life, sucking up the blood and the life.
There is hardly an original thought or original
utterance possible to us. All is sickly
repetition of stale, stale ideas.
Let all schools be closed at once. Keep only a
few technical training establishments, nothing
more. Let humanity lie fallow, for two
generations at least.”
“We talk about education – leading forth the
natural intelligence of a child. But ours is just the
opposite of leading forth. It is a ramming of brain
facts through the head, and a consequent
distortion, suffocation, and starvation of the
primary centres of consciousness. A nice day of
reckoning we’ve got in front of us.
Let us lead forth by all means. But let us not
have mental knowledge before us as the goal of
the leading.
“By the age of twenty-one our young people are
helpless, selfless, floundering mental entities, because
they have been starved from the roots systematically,
and fed through the head. They have had all their
mental excitements, sex and everything, all through the
head, and when it comes to the actual thing, why,
there’s nothing in it. Blasé.
Before the age of fourteen, children should be taught
only to move, to act, to do. Adults do not know childish
intelligence. Adults always interfere.They force the
adult mental mode.” (Lawrence)
“The final aim is not to know but to be.
There never was a more risky motto than
that: Know thyself. You’ve got to know
yourself as far as possible. But not for the
sake of knowing. You’ve got to know
yourself so that you can at least be yourself.
“be yourself” is the last motto.”
D.H.Lawrence, “Fantasia of the Unconscious” (p.64)
BUTLER MODEL
OUTSIDE SELF
INSIDE SELF
PERSONAL
PRACTICAL
KNOWLEDGE
PUBLIC
INFORMATION
REFLECTION &
GENERATION
CURRENT
PRACTICE
MENTAL
MODELS
PERSONAL PRACTICAL
KNOWLEDGE
❚ The knowledge from which you drive
performance
❚ Comes from your actions and your
reflections
❚ Must switch on reflection
❚ Unique to you
❚ Has a character recognisably different
from knowing “about” things
GEMMA SIM
“We all have the
mindset that we are
dependent on people
who are above us.”
TRANSMISSION MODEL
The single greatest determiner
of what a person is able to
learn is my ability to skilfully
craft the message, transmit it,
and lodge it in the learner.
MENTAL MODEL CONSTRUCTIVISM
MENTAL
MODELS
M
F
I
L
T
E
R
M’
MEANING
MAKER
M”
WHAT I
ALREADY
KNOW
VYGOTSKY
SOCIAL CONSTRUCTIVISM
SOCIAL
PERSONAL
r
R
ACTION LEARNING
ACT
ACT
DESIGN
REFLECT
ACT
GATHER
DATA
GATHER
DATA
DESIGN
REFLECT
TRANSFORMATIONAL LEARNING
L+
clear
understood
flows
time
confusion
frustration
angst
L-
THE PIT
BUTLER MODEL
OUTSIDE SELF
INSIDE SELF
PERSONAL
PRACTICAL
KNOWLEDGE
PUBLIC
INFORMATION
REFLECTION &
GENERATION
CURRENT
PRACTICE
MENTAL
MODELS
JOHN EDWARDS
EVERY CHILD HAS A RIGHT TO
LEAVE SCHOOL WITH A RICH,
CONSCIOUS REPERTOIRE OF
REFLECTION AND GENERATION
STRATEGIES, AND THE
DISPOSITIONS TO USE THEM
SKILFULLY.
MENTAL MODELS
❚
❚
❚
❚
❚
MENTAL MODELS ARE MADE UP OF OUR
BELIEFS, VALUES AND ASSUMPTIONS.
THEY DRIVE OUR PERFORMANCE.
THEY ARE VERY RESISTANT TO CHANGE.
WE CANNOT SEE THEM CLEARLY BY
OURSELVES.
WE NEED RICH, SKILFUL, DAILY FEEDBACK TO
HELP US REFLECT ON OUR MENTAL MODELS.
WHAT FEEDBACK ARE YOU GETTING?
DREYFUS MODEL
Rule
Governed
Behaviour
PPK
Basis
For
Action
Read
the
Context
Novice
Beginner
Competent
Proficient
Expert
KRISHNAMURTI
I think you should put these questions to yourself, not
occasionally, but every day. Find out. Listen to everything, to
the birds, to that cow calling. Learn about everything in
yourself, because if you learn from yourself about yourself,
then you will not be a second-hand human being.
So you should, if I may suggest, from now on, find out how to
live entirely differently and that is going to be difficult, for I am
afraid most of us like to find an easier way of living. We like to
repeat and follow what other people say, what other people
do, because it is the easiest way to live - to conform to the old
pattern or to a new pattern.
KRISHNAMURTI
We have to find out what it means never to conform and
what it means to live without fear. This is your life, and
nobody is going to teach you, no book, no guru. You have
to learn from yourself, not from books.
There is a great deal to learn about yourself. It is an
endless thing, it is a fascinating thing, and when you learn
about yourself from yourself, out of that learning wisdom
comes. Then you can live a most extraordinary, happy,
beautiful life.