Education is a living thing
"Education is not the filling of a pail,
but the lighting of a fire."
- W. B. Yeats
If you have read through this edition of CreekNews, you will have seen that the majority of the pages have to do with school news. And while there is always news throughout the area, the schools grabbed much of the CreekNews' collective attention during the course of the week.
This is not an apology, for we try to cover active events and the schools and education demonstrate a perpetual activity. We can be thankful that, even though some will try as they might to make it otherwise, education is a very dynamic process.
Many wax nostalgic about the "Three R's" - reading, (w)riting and (a)rithmetic - evidently not realizing their education wasn't adequate enough to teach them that there is only one R in that aural alliteration.
In fact, education has never striven for just the Three R's. Educational models from England and Germany always sought more for their students. In the middle of the 19th Century Margarithe Schurz championed the idea of Kindergarten, with the first such in the US located in Watertown, Wisconsin. Starting in the first half of the 20th Century country schools in Wisconsin were linked by WHA radio. The public radio "School of the Air" included elementary and high school level classes ranging from nature studies to music. It was the first distance learning system using the audio visual technology of the day.
There was never a time when good educators would put the Three R's over an opportunity for students to better understand the world around them. Nor was there a time when teachers would prevent students from excelling in an area of interest in order to stick to R-R-R.
Accounts of 19th century teachers convey delight when the board of a one room school district could afford for the school to have a globe to reinforce geography classes. Other teachers of the time often wrote of the wish that classes would allow for them to give more individualized instruction to each student - a dream that teachers often hope for to this day.
It is unfortunate that many people think of school as a place, when it should first be considered a verb. While the hours of the institution have a beginning and an end during the day, learning should never stop. It doesn't stop with graduation from high school or college either - a concept that may be as important to learn as any skillset acquired in school.
So often schools are judged by the apparent order and decorum observed by former students. But that order is no proof that learning is happening.
Schools that encourage learning in a variety of ways are inherently alive. There is joy in the hallways, creative clutter in the classroom and there are teachers who listen as much as they lecture. In dynamic schools, desks are not always in rows, and often the greatest amount of learning happens when the classroom is empty and the Socratic tradition is maintained by refusing the limitations of four walls.
CreekNews looks forward to its coverage of the school experience, and invites readers to continue or return to learning first by celebrating the many ways that learning is manifested by the local school system.
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