American society prides itself in proclaiming to the world that our ‘children come first’. However, do our actions really speak to this statement or do we merely give lip service to these proclamations?
In Japan, when a young child is crying in a restaurant, everyone from the owner to patrons comes to her aide. Children are revered in Japanese culture. In American restaurants, when children are crying, the patrons are miffed, the waitress stays away and the parents are humiliated into pacifying (by placing some plastic object in its mouth) or removing the child completely. Do our children really come first?
We have taken great strides in science. We are learning everyday how the mind operates in the learning process through neurosciences, psychology and other cognitive sciences. We know that the most important years of a child’s life are prebirth- in uterus- and the first six years of life. This is the time when the child mind is developing and forming dendrites that build intelligence matrixes for the future. Yet, our birthing practices are in direct opposition to these findings. Our children are wisked away from mom immediately after birth, at times, forced birthed, and the entire ordeal separates the bonds between mother and child forming psychological maladies later in life. Could children feel welcome, safe and nurtured in the experiences after birth?
As if we have not done enough to sever the relationship bond of mother and child, we encourage and force mothers to work right after birth placing children in daycares. At the most critical time of a child’s life, when they are learning about the world, they have no foundation, no grounding. To make matters worse, the caretakers are workers who make minimum wages. The quality of the care leaves much to be desired. Our children are introduced to over stimulation at too early, too much information and not the right kind that would stimulate dendrite formation. Because the emotional health of our young children is at risk at these early ages, the mental acuity must be in a defensive mode. Literally studies show that children are in a flight-fright modality at earlier ages- two, three. This situation is comparable to having your foot on the accelerator and brake at the same time. Where is the car going?
Yet, information about learning, psychology, neurology, regarding the emotional, mental and physical health of our children is nearly 50 years old has not filtered into the educational system. We still think in the Cartesian/ Newtonian mindset where a child is seen as a machine that must be measured, tested, controlled, predicted and fragmented to function. Our schools are still sterile machines with all of the components broken down into their elementary behaviors and parts. The mind and body, the spirit and matter of children are separated from daily reality. Education teaches children from the neck up and separates them from the rest of their beings.
Science has uncovered that learning is an open system in need of dynamic intervention and activity to increases complexity for later intelligence. That complexity of the learning process through relationships and interrelationships, order and symmetry, through non-linear modalities enhances learning. The human mind responds to this world as an integrated whole in holons learning to characterize by coherence and organization of form and function. Our greatest attribute is the self-organizing nature of these holons; their unpredictability, interconnectedness, openness and dis-equilibrium with an underlying energy that unites it all. Yet, our educational system with its 300 year old infrastructure, continues to treat children as if somehow in some magical way, the dissected parts will become relevant one day.
We can no longer define educational process as divided but rather as undivided wholes, interconnected to function, influence and environment. Children must be actively involved in the process because we now understand that the participant or the ‘observer’ influences reality. The observer’s influence creates an unpredictability of events and every truth is challenged. Events are not things but acts integrating from within and never complete in themselves while the brain is converting action into experiences. Integration and interdependency must be the foundation of curriculum rather than separation. Content is therefore not isolated facts but relationship of fact to experience, condition and meaning; relationship of student and child, parent and child, child and child, child to environment, child and nature, child to self. Our heretofore supposition of concepts as static and inert is questioned because we now know that reality is non-linear. The learner is integral to the experience of learning.
We have gratitude to the cognitive sciences and artificial intelligence for our understanding of the brain-mind. Like the ‘Turing Machine’, which computes algorithmically solving problems through a finite series of step and rules, the child mind grapples the unknown through relationship and meaning. Like the computer, testing, a computational process, cannot measure inherent understanding and the meaning of an event. If a box of Japanese symbols were given you along with a manual to match one object with the other, conceivably, you could learn to match one set of symbols with another (unknowing to you, the questions with the answers) without every speaking, writing or understanding Japanese. Behavior, therefore, is not tied to mental states or intelligence. The relationship of the child mind and behavior is critical to learning. Testing itself and rote learning that proliferate in schools today are purely syntactical or formal symbol manipulation that does not measure for the content of meaning.
Over the last twenty-five years, we have discovered that the human mind operates as a holograph or through holomovement learning to operate in waves of energy and interpreted through interference patterns. All seeming parts of perception and learning are in fact wholes frozen in the perception of time/space with continuous interaction. There is implicate order, a flowing movement forward and backward of ordered events as ink in solution rotated clockwise and counterclockwise demonstrates. Stimulus response is no longer a valid claim for behavior. Mind results from the interaction of the environment and reflects the basic organism of the universe. Brain remembers in entire constructs including entire contexts of situations. Memory is not limited to static, context free facts but rather on going life events.
Lawmakers and legislators are, however, more concerned as career politicians and getting elected than in the volumes of unfunded legislative mandates that deluge schools. Accountability and testing are more important than learning and self-realization or happiness. To the career politician, accountability, measured test scores are the only real tools for student success. Whether or not understanding and meaning of subject matter are evident is irrelevant. Finding the best and most thorough measurement tool is first and foremost. In the meantime, to justify their existence, more laws are perpetuated for special interest groups that infringe upon the rights of the majority.
It is most interesting that each time the Department of Education reduces funding to schools, children and local municipalities, for example, in order to maintain the level of funding from the within the government, its creates additional departments. Last year, funding was decreased on a national level directly to schools and Department of Education magically materialized the Department for Crime Prevention (which is already housed in other governmental agencies). Billions of dollars are ear marked for projects that defy reality. And in most cases, funding for new research at the Department of Education has already been granted in previous years by other governmental departments who have successfully published the results. The Department of Education has become a dinosaur where the right and left hand are mysteriously hiding from each other.
With the institutional machine in operation from the level of the Federal government down to school boards and administrators, maintaining the status quo, putting out fires and job security are more imperative than the desire, will and passion of educators to continuously learn the research and findings of science and technology. Our educational institutions propagate apathy, lethargy and mediocrity. It is time for a change. Infusion must come from many levels- top down and bottom up- and all at once. There IS no time when the life, minds and spirits of our children are at stake.