Today I finally began attacking the ever growing pile of books I want to read. While it’s been sitting in my pile for quite a bit, I finally cracked open Robert Fried‘s The Game of School. He begins by making what some may regard as a derogatory and others as the ugly truth.
People think they’re teaching and learning. Students and teachers earnestly comply with what they feel to be their duty. But nobody is really learning much beyond what it takes to pass the next exam or cover the textbook chapter. The Game begins whenever we focus on getting through the school day rather than actually learning.
Fried mentions other familiar topics such as high stakes testing. He believes this has only intensified The Game. He talks about engaging students in learning; creating learning experiences that are meaningful and important to students’ lives. In line with Sir Ken Robinson, Fried talks about an attack on students’ natural drive to learn, their learning spirit.
Our freedom of physical movement is severely restricted, our curiosity is confined, our opportunity to talk to other kids about what we are learning is curtailed…We experience pressure to do well, to be good, to be smart in school. Little by little, grade by grade, we find ourselves relating to school more and more in a way that sharply contrasts with the energy, purposefulness, and joy that young children bring to the challenge of learning how to talk, run, play games, ask, questions, and investigate the world around them. Learning becomes a chore rather than an adventure.
We often seek students’ impression of school by asking them what they learned or what they enjoyed at school that particular day. Perhaps these are the wrong questions to ask! Fried suggests we should be asking, “Did you learn anything in school today that you really want to know more about?” If they can produce an answer to this question, you know they have broached a topic that has meaning. They’ve made a connection to information they have deemed as meaningful and important; important enough to investigate in more depth in order to find out more about it. They are engaged in their own learning.
Unless our children – of all ages - are truly engaged in their learning, most of what they experience during school hours passes over them like a shadow of a cloud, or through them like an undigested seed.
