Learner-centred education

Maybe its the life-coach training, but as I look towards my training as a teacher this coming Autumn, I find myself increasingly aware that I really do think that learner-centred education is important and mor concerned that the current educational regimes are not really set up to enable it or even interested in it. In effect they are interested in learners either conforming or dropping out. And since the latter is politically unacceptable, blaming the teachers.

We must choose to adopt appropriate technologies that will ensure the classroom will fit the child, and buck the growing trend for technologies - including drugs - to be used to make the 21st-century child fit the classroom. The educational needs of the individual are changing, and the very nature of the classroom needs to change, too.

Is this a Christian issue? By raising the question you know that I'm going to say I think it is.
Here's why.
It seemes to me, reflecting [as recently] on Genesis 2, that Adam's God-initiated naming of the animals says that the freedom to organise experience into knowledge is one of the fundamental things that God wants for humanity. Forcing learners into contortions in order to learn, or [more likely] in effect to put them off formal/organised learning, is a betrayal of God's desire for the creativity and contemplative discovery that, at its best, learning is about. Factory-farm learning merely empowers one group who can more easily access a privilged learning-style at the expense of others. In turn this promotes a covert meritocracy which is really about wealth and genetic heritage and handing on privilege to relatives and others 'like us'. The more I hear stories of people who have managed to key into learning later in life, the more I realise how much we fail the God-given human potential of so many in the interests of maintaining social status quos.

At this rate, I could end up a bit of a stirrer for my future teachers and colleagues ...

EducationGuardian.co.uk | E-learning | 'We are at risk of losing our imagination':
Filed in: learner-centred, education, technology, drugs