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What is a Student-Centered Education?
by John
Russell Wenceslaus Hiner III
Student, The New School, Delaware,
U.S.A.
It is a matter of life and death.
A matter of life in that being alive causes many
questions to arise for a student, but the
answers require effort to learn; what am I? Why
am I here? Why is anything here? What should I
do?
A matter of death in that being alive and human
means that death is immanent and not only the
answers to the questions above but also the
importance of answering them is seriously
affected by death.
If education were only a matter of life, if
there were no death, the questions that life
raises could wait, or simply not be addressed at
all. It would be a matter of preference, of
taste or proclivity, to choose to investigate
existence and how to respond to existence.
Without death, if a student didn’t choose to
think about these basic theological and
philosophical questions but instead chose to
focus on a narrower field of study, that would
be all right practically speaking. If death were
not a factor then “student centered” could mean
“based on the student’s preferences;” nothing
external would be necessarily or seriously
pressing him.
But, because all students will die, in order to
be truly focused on the student (not his
feelings, but him) his curriculum must address
this fact.
Imagine that a student was making a general plan
for his future and so he was taking several
things into account: that he would have to be
out of his parents’ house when he was eighteen,
that he would have to make a living, that he
hated paper work, that he wanted to get married
and have children, etc. But, in addition to all
these things, imagine he knew that in seventy or
eighty years he would be getting into a rocket
and he would be shot into outer space, but he
did not know whether the rocket supported human
life in deep space, whether the rocket had a
pilot or any controls, whether it was going to
an hospitable planet, or whether it was going to
any planet at all.
Now imagine that when planning his future he
completely ignored his inevitable space trip;
that he wasn’t going to learn anything about the
rocket or plan for the trip in any way.
Wouldn’t that be, rather than planning for his
future, planning in spite of his future?
In the same way, if he does not know what death
is, how can he prepare for it? Should he prepare
for it? Will it be beautiful? Terrible?
Nothingness? Does it depend? What does it depend
on?
He could not honestly claim to be concerned
about himself without necessarily including
these questions (and their answers) in his plan
for his future; nor could his education be
student-centered without addressing both these
questions and what arises from their answers.
You could not say you Rather, I’m concerned to
ask what makes sense as over-arching principles
for kids, keeping in mind that different kids
are going to prefer different styles, as do
different families. And I’m willing to let those
chips fall where they may.
If what I have described to you, which I think
is optimal, includes what you are doing,
terrific. If it doesn’t, I’m not going to
retreat from that because it doesn’t include
you, just as I would expect that your vision
might be different. And then if we say this is
good, but that’s good too, then we have to be
more precise about what we mean. Do we mean good
for different kids? Are there some kids for
which you’re saying The Mayflower doesn’t work?
Is it the case that this vision works for all
kids? I think we need to ask those questions
very carefully.
I don’t start out with the goal of excluding
anyone from this model. I do start with a
deliberate and only half-mischievous intent to
provoke all of us, including me, to rethink our
points of departure, our axiomatic beginnings,
and to ask questions not just around the edges
of our techniques, but at the very core of what
assumptions we’re making about our roles. And I
thank you for the challenge.
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