Education

Factory or Garden?

I thought this was an interesting article about ADHD. It discusses the insights yielded by recent research on children with ADHD. Apparently, in these children the connections between the area of the brain largely responsible for focus and other regions are slower to develop.

factory-chimney-1445484-mThis suggests that it’s simply a matter of brain maturity occurring at a slower pace in these children. Time takes care of it. But I find it interesting that the emphasis in researchers’ responses is on “treatment.”

We wouldn’t normally “treat” a process occurring naturally. Treatment implies illness. But because our public education model is essentially a factory, we have to do what we can to make everyone the same — not just by mass producing a certain product, but by making sure that the raw materials are as nearly identical as possible.

I prefer a different model — one that was presented to me by my reading this morning:

Thought in a child arises naturally. The job of the teacher is to encourage and defend it from being blighted and destroyed, to strengthen it and enable it to flourish. Education is more like gardening than manufacturing. (Stratford Caldecott, Beauty in the Word: Rethinking the Foundations of Education)

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