In making decision about what we should teach, we need to remember that today’s children are tomorrow’s adults and tomorrow’s adults will have different needs from our own. We need to think about what makes some people able to cope with change and explore the implication of this for initial schooling.
Tomorrow’s adults will frequently need to learn afresh and their ability to study will be important even though their study is likely to be supported in ways that can not yet envisage. We need to help them become independent learners able to use a variety of different modes of learning.
They need problem solving skills and much work that we now do in school could be orientated to provide for this. They will need good communication skills and the ability to communicate appropriately in different ways for different purposes. Each child will also need to develop his own value system and use it to guide his own behaviour. Perhaps above all, tomorrow’s adults will need to have sympathy and sensitivity and ability to work with others to agreed ends.
Recent legislation has required each school to make a public statement about aspects of its work including a statement of its aims. This has potential value for teachers as well as parents and governors and needs discussion by the staff as a whole who need to consider how the work being done matches the aims stated.
There is currently no shortage of statements of aims for the work of schools. The Secretaries of state published a statement in the paper The School Curriculum. The School Council in their paper The Practical Curriculum gave a separate set of aims for the primary stages of education. These are both given in an appendix, together with further statement on areas of curriculum from HMI paper Curriculum 11-16. Statements from two well known writers on curriculum have also been included , Phenix, who writes of realms of meaning and Hirst who writes of nature of knowledge. You may find it useful to look at some of these alongside the statements made by your own school and your own objectives for the children you teach.
Whatever statements of aims you choose, the education offered to children might be expected to include elements designed to achieve the following at some level for each child:
- Self knowledge
- Ability to live and work with others
- Skill in communication
- Learning skills including the ability to reason and analyse, generate ideas and carry them through, solve problems, set goals and work towards them, evaluate, deal with evidence, make and test hypotheses
- A framework of understanding in the major areas of human knowledge
- Ability to cope with adult life as parents, workers and citizen
- A framework of meaning for life and a value system
- self knowledge
this broad aim might be broken down into a number of further aims:
· Each child needs to develop a positive self image.
a. Throughout the years of schooling each child is developing a view of himself which is made up from the reactions to him and to his behaviour on the part of those around him.
Initially his parents are very influential in forming his early self image, but teachers also are very powerful at the primary stage and the peer group plays an increasing part as the child grows and develops. It is very important for the teacher to recognize that this is happening and that her recognition of progress and success counts. It is also essential that she sees that there are opportunities for every child to succeed in some way and for every child to learn to take responsibility and contribute to the class community.
b. Knowledge of personal strengths and limitations
A child needs to know and come to term with his own strengths and limitations. He needs a range of opportunities, encouragement to try new things and help and support in overcoming difficulties. It may be helpful to recognize and discuss a difficulty frankly and make a plan to overcome it so that you can genuinely praise each step he takes.
c. The development of self confidence
This is closely related to the development of the self image. Each child needs to be confident in himself as person, in his ability to learn and tackle tasks successfully and in his relationships with others.
You need to help all children to develop a confident attitude to at least some part of their activity. The secret of this is to match tasks to the level at which a child can succeed if he tries. This is not easy, but it is more important for some children than others and you can very quickly see those who lack confidence and need success. In the first days with a new group it is worth concentrating rather more attention on these children so that they achieve fairly early and gain the confidence in you and in to their ideas and contributions will also at the early stages.
Children are not only influenced by the example, teaching and behaviour of teachers but also by their peer group. We tend to forget the learning which goes on between child and child. Parents often have this in mind when they choose to send a child to one school necessarily because they want their child to be with children from similar families rather than learning a way of life from other children which they see as alien.
- Ability to live and work with others
This involves the following:
- developing social competence
social education embraces many areas of learning. We want all children to be socially competent, knowing what to do in different situations. There is also a case for seeing that all children learn the conventions of normal social behaviour, such as greeting people, making and responding to introductions, thanking someone, making a complaint politely, making an enquiry and so on. The teacher’s example is important here but there will also be a need for some teaching and discussion and plenty of opportunities to practice.
- working with others to achieve an agreed end
we want children to be able to get or with other people and to live and work with them to achieve group goals, sometimes leading and sometimes following. There are skills involved in doing this which will be discussed in chapter 5. working with others is an important skill for adult life and most schools need to give more consideration to it.
- sensitivity to others
sensitivity to others is closely linked with the ability to see through the eyes of another. A teacher needs to find ways of extending children’s understanding of how things look from other points of view. Stories are often a help and it is worth trying to make a collection of stories which develop such understanding. Drama or role play game in which each child has to study the part he is playing and see things from the point of view of particular character may contribute.
Discussion about this is also important and it is often possible to use the occasion when a particular child’s behaviour has hurt someone else to get him and others to think trough how it looked from other view points. Very young children find this almost impossible to do, but development likely to come through encouragement to view things in this way.
It would seem particularly valuable at the present time to help children to become tolerant and appreciative of other ways of living and other groups of people, recognizing that Britain
In some ways such learning is needed even more in schools where the children come from a homogeneous cultural background than in schools where races and cultures are mixed.
- ability to think through moral questions and make decisions about moral choices.
Social education must include moral education. Moral behaviour is sometimes confused with obedience to particular set of rules. While we need some rules to regulate the way we do things because life is very difficult without them, more obedience to them is not really enough, however good the rules may be, because they can never cover all the possible eventualities.
A person who is acting morally needs to be able to weigh up the facts in a moral situation, look at it from different points of view as well as his own, generate or refer to principle and see if they fit in the present case and then act with intention.
At the primary stage of education teachers can do a great deal to help this development. At the beginning of primary education, children need to be bound by the rules of the adults in their world, whether parents or teachers, because they are not yet ready to generate their own. By the time they leave the primary stage some are already examining the principles offered by adults and thinking deeply about how to deal with the moral situations in their own lives.
- knowledge of our society an culture
we want children to know something of our history and that of other nations and to become acquainted with our cultural background. We also want them to know something of how people behave in groups and individualy and something also about the way society function, including its institutions and practices, the way we are governed, the need to generate wealth and the way present day life differs from the past and so on.
- Communication skills
A child should be able to communicate and receive communication using movement, language, mathematics and graphics adequately and appropriably for different people, situation, purposes and topics. The development of communication skills is highly relevant when one looks at organisation since language which is the major communication skill is an essential part of the way in which teacher and children set about their work. All aspects of living and learning involve communication skills and the teacher who is clear about what she hopes the children will learn will find opportunities it all times of the day for using the ordinary work of the classroom to foster learning in this area.
The word ‘communication’ tends to be somewhat narrowly used in schools, normally in relation to the language skills. It can be looked at very much more widely, however. All the higher forms of animal life have sophisticated forms of communication, using the senses and movement and man is no exception. We differ from other animals, however in the primacy accorded to language, particularly