As most of you know the biggest part of Genki English is how to revolutionize education. How do we take a test centric, industrial model of “education” where the first thing kids are taught are “sit down” and “be quiet” and make it into something that releases kids’ abilities and makes them able to use their talents to improve the world? It’s the same problem whether in “developed” Japan or Europe, or in the slums of India.
Fast Company has a series of articles about some solutions this month. They also feature some, what they call, “radical ideas” .
Which ones would you like to see?
There are also some great suggestions in the comments on those pages.
e.g. have desks for parents in school where they can telecommute from and offer free lessons
Honestly, I find that the biggest problem stems from the parents of the students. Our society in general has become a society where we are overprotective of our children, to the point that the kids are picking up on these skills to do malicious deeds. I hear way too many stories about kids running the middle of the street and tying their shoes just to get an emotional high on their power over adults. So many of my students act up in class, and in general make it impossible for anyone else to learn because the teacher can’t control them without risking their job.
Kids also have the power over their parents (at least in the U.S.!). Do anything they want, parents can’t do anything since any type of punishment is consider child abuse now-a-days. Kids learn this and become chaos incarnate, quite counterproductive to any type of learning environment. Maybe I’m just jaundiced, but I firmly believe that learning is a two way street, you need both a good teacher and a good student; one without the other will fail.
OH YES, my votes on this.
I haven’t checked the sites up there, but I was thinking into a similar direction.
Yesterday I went to my sons’s JH, and though I must say, that Japanese schools are very disciplined compared to everything I’ve seen in the west, I found it interesting to see, that the kids that weren’t disciplined and tried to bother everybody around were those, who have been that way since Kindergarten. In all the grades (I know the present years pretty well)
And I know that they have had the best teachers throughout their years.
I think that education also needs to involve the whole society, no matter what age, if single or married.