ABOUT SCHOOL
I asked the kids in our Kibera art workshop some questions about school. I asked which subjects they love most, which are the most useful for them, and which they struggle to understand.
I asked them what the school is useful for.
The answers are very varied, there are those who love mathematics and science and those who prefer social sciences, some do not understand the usefulness of studying their local language.
In general it seems to me that everyone is very convinced about the usefulness of school and some think that all subjects are important.
According to them, school is important for learning new things, for creating job opportunities, for understanding how the world works, but also for keeping children busy and for giving teachers a salary.
And then I asked them to ask me questions.
In this post I try to answer the questions that this experiment generated.
First of all I answer Jesska's first curiosity.
- Why did I ask you these questions?
I wish I could ask you questions every week and give you the same chance. This is to get to know each other better, stimulate curiosity and have the opportunity to talk about something that would be more complicated for me to address orally.
- Why exactly these questions?
School is one of the activities that most engages your life at the moment, until about a century ago it was not at all obvious to attend school, not even here in Europe. School as we know it now, is a fairly recent innovation.
Last year I did homework help with kids of a similar age to yours, for many of them it wasn't very clear what school was for, and above all what some subjects would be used for in their future lives.
The feeling of many Italian students is that they spend too much time at school and that this huge commitment will not be truly useful in their lives. Some of them experience school as a parking lot, or a sort of prison that forces them to make a commitment that could be better spent.
In Italy school is compulsory and free up to the age of 16, despite this many children abandon it for various reasons. In Italy and around the world there is a lot of discussion about how to make school more effective, interesting and useful.
Nicolò Govoni, who founded Still I Rise, and is working to bring quality education to all the children of the world, is one of those kids who had a bad school experience. From Still I Rise a major research is starting, to make the school better.
For these reasons I am very curious to know your idea.
The kids asked me to answer my own questions, and here are my answers:
The subjects I liked most at your age were:
Mathematics and in particular geometry, science, and technical and artistic drawing.
I struggle to make choices on the subjects that I consider most useful. For me, science subjects are very important because they help us understand how life works, but other subjects are also very useful if they are done well.
Perhaps I struggle to understand the usefulness of grammar and geography as we did it. And I also struggled to understand Italian and history.
Now, however, I think that history can be really very useful, but it depends a lot on what you study. More than individual kings or heads of state, or more than individual conflicts between nations, I find it important to understand how we came to have our culture and our knowledge.
School is useful for many things, and many are those you have highlighted.
It is useful for learning things we didn't know, it is useful for learning things that will be useful to us in life and for our work, it is useful for keeping children busy while parents work, and it is also useful for giving teachers a salary.
I think it is also very useful for these important things:
- It can help you meet peers, exchange ideas and projects with them, and make friends
- In my opinion one of the most important things is that it helps our brain grow.
Our brain, although very different from our muscles, needs to be trained to become really good at it.
The brain is perhaps our most important and complex resource, but it needs to be used, to be tested, to be trained in all its capabilities. Otherwise we remain stupid and clumsy people. Unable to deal with even the simplest problems and unable to understand life.
The brain needs to make mistakes to understand, and it needs to try.
The brain also grows a lot through comparison with others.
However, I also believe two other things:
1) that school is not the only way to grow and become intelligent people, that school can be and will be different, and that there are a lot of other subjects that could be teached.
2) that even adults need to continue to grow and keep their brains trained, otherwise they become stupid and clumsy again. And this becomes more and more true nowadays as technology and knowledge increase at an incredible speed every year.
3) that a comparison between generations will be increasingly important, and therefore it will be increasingly important not only for children to learn from adults, but also for children to explain to adults how the world appears from their perspective.
An other question was:
Is it better loving what you do or doing what you love?
In my opinion, first of all we try to love what we are doing or what we can do. If we have big passions in life, then we will try to cultivate them and ensure that they can become an important part of our life, or even our work.
Work is necessarily something useful on a social level. Our challenge could be to make our passion useful to others, so that it can be a job.
Now I answer a question about rational choices:
How do you know if the decision you made are rational before they come to yield consequences that may hurt others or even yourself?
Choices cannot be avoided.
When we believe we don't choose, we actually choose to do nothing and continue as usual.
No path can ever give us the certainty of making the right choices and not harming others or ourselves.
As the world changes, our behaviors will have to change too, and what was right for our ancestors may not be right now.
I think that there are no certainties, we must cultivate within ourselves the ability to remain in doubt and try to get ever closer to knowledge.
Rational reasoning brings together all our knowledge about the world and ourselves, and helps us arrive at the best choice. But our reasoning will always be partially wrong. There is no perfect reasoning.
The better we become, the less we make mistakes, or we will make less serious mistakes. But nothing, and no one, will stop us from making mistakes. Unfortunately.
Morally, for me it is important to strive to make the best choices and try to make less serious mistakes. But we will make mistakes, everyone makes mistakes a lot of times in life. It would seem that this is the only real way to learn.
About the subject on which I have concentrated my studies the most is biology. And somehow scientific subjects are the ones that fascinate me the most, and that have helped me make my dreams come true.
But I think that what is really helping me live a happy life, and realize my dreams, are three other things:
- The curiosity. And therefore the ability to not take anything for granted and the desire to discover new things by deepening my passions.
- The ability I have developed to learn new things and to navigate the internet to search for useful information
- The desire to shar
e these passions with others and make them useful in some way.
Comments
Post a Comment