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Written by Roger Prentice
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Saturday, 02 December 2006 |
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The idea that the lives we are constructing (or allowing others to construct) for our children being toxic is surely part of the wider debate on education, and therefore it is as old as debate on education. However it has been given a major boost by a recent book by Sue Palmer called Toxic Childhood and a variety of articles in the educational and general press.
Amazon's Book Description One in six children in the developed world is diagnosed as having 'developmental or behavioural problems', and the number is rising by 25% each year - this book explains why and shows what can be done about it Synopsis Children throughout the developed world are suffering: instances of obesity, dyslexia, ADHD, bad behaviour and so on are all on the rise. And it's not simply that our willingness to diagnose has increased, there are very real and growing problems. Sue Palmer, a former head teacher and literacy expert, has researched into a whole range of problem areas, from poor diet, a lack of exercise and sleep deprivation to a range of modern difficulties that are having a major effect: television, computer games, mobile phones. This combination of factors, added to the increasingly busy and stressed life of parents, means that we are developing a toxic new generation. Sue Palmer's wonderful book illustrates the latest research from around the world - in Japan, for example, use of chopsticks is declining rapidly among children - and provides answers for worried parents as to how they can protect their families from the problems of the modern world and help ensure that their children emerge as healthy, intelligent and pleasant adults. Toxic Childhood is an enormously important book that reveals the issues behind our general concerns that 'things are getting worse' and shows how you can make sure that your own children suffer as little as possible. It might be that the book has done a great deal of good in that it has started a debate that is widening even if it isn't deepening.
The reason I went back to what I considered to be the ultimate of all questions; "What is it to be human - fully and positively?" The toxicity of what we provide for children is not just physical and technological - it is spiritual as well and to de-toxify, and prevent toxicity, we need to go back to basics - not to the nonsense touted by UK Prime Minister John Major some years ago but to basics that
enable children to develop healthily and holistically. What would you include in that list? Mine would be quite a long list. Here are three chosen at random; 1) Enable children to maintain interaction with the natural world. 2) Identify those skills and attitudes that enable children to deal most effectively with toxic messages - what is the spiritual equivalent of Jamie Olivers's healthy school dinners? 3) Enable parents to support their children in 2) through identifying and communicating good practice - why is there such a dearth of good examples - they don't have to be 'monolithic', there can be a variety of views as to what constitutes good practice? There is a lot of debate re the toxicity of the childhood our children are having - just Google the term.
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Last Updated ( Wednesday, 13 December 2006 )
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Written by Roger Prentice
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Friday, 01 December 2006 |
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In correspondence with Dr Jeff White from
the US the idea came up that holistic might be defined by the
model/reality being holographic - in which each shard reflects the
whole.
I wonder whether the only way we can get to being "holographic" -
with each shard reflecting the whole - is through the consciousness
of the teacher being in muti-level dialogue with her/his class/es.
The consciouness of the teacher and the decision s/he makes, in
multi-level dialogue, is at the heart of the SunWALK model.
Of course we never embrace the Whole, that
of which we are part, but often people when talking about Holistic
Education appear to have in mind a 'bitsa' model i.e. a limited
bits-and-pieces approach. Of course if you take the 'let's
identify all of the component elements and all of their
relationships' approach you have impossible complexity.
But the genius of the human being
mind/soul (heart-mind) is such that s/he (the teacher) doesn't
have to have all of the elements and all of their relationsdhips
'up-front' for them to be playing their part - they are in the
background, below consciousness. Education needs to be within the
best possible conceptualization of what it is to be human. That
includes working with the infinite nature, and mystery, of the
teacher's soul and the souls of the students. We are far more that
we can measure with any and all of our sciences - we are more than
we can objectify. So the holographic reality lies as a possibility
in the consciousness of the teacher. But what does this mean in
practice?
I think that my chosen definition of being
a holistic practioner helps;
the holistically minded practitioner is
trying to do each particular thing, theoretical and practical, with
consciousness of connections with, and between, all pertinent
contexts - environmental context, social justice context etc. -
right up to - and most essentially - with some sense of the
Whole.
I tried in SunWALK to get as near as possible to the
'holographic' reality. I probably failed but others can go
further. In the meantime perhaps the 'proceeding with a sense of
the Whole' makes the holographic imaginable and therefore, more
usefully, closer to reality than the 'bean-counting' approach
involving measuring 'all of the elements and all of their
relationships'.
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Written by Roger Prentice
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Thursday, 30 November 2006 |
Three of my favourite quotations from the writings of Professor John M Hull:-
1) The entire value of the charitable giving of the people of the United Kingdom was exceeded in the first few hours of the Iraq war.....................
If spirituality is ambiguous, one of the contributions of education to spiritual development lies in the resolution of ambiguity. This means helping the pupils to distinguish the constructive use of money from its destructive use, and this should be done through examples relevant to the day to day life of the pupil as well as examples taken from such issues as currency speculation, debt repayment and warfare (Hull 1999a). Discussions like this should take place in business studies, economics and current affairs
(Hull 2001), and can be strengthened by links with the teachings of the great religions about money. If it is true that money represents the mutilated image of God in human society, helping young people to identify the distortions of this false transcendence may perhaps lead them to contemplate the transcendence of transcendence, the transcendence greater that which none can be conceived.
http://www.johnmhull.biz/is%20there%20a%20spirituality%20of%20money.htm
2) Religious education contributes to human spiritualisation in so far as it helps people to advance in their self knowledge and their knowledge of the world, and also advance their knowledge and understanding of the Ultimate. This divine Ultimate may be studied as expressed in one religion or several. In view of the fact that the specific goals of religious education deal with knowledge and understanding, it seems preferable to religiously educate from more than one religion. Only in this way can the learners acquire a cognitive perspective which will help them to transcend the limits of their earlier self-understanding and world-understanding.
Religious education, however, does not seek to develop, in the specifically religious sense. Schools in particular and education as a whole should encourage young people to have a trustful and optimistic faith in life and in themselves and others, and that is the wider definition of faith of which we spoke earlier. The narrow definition of faith, whether in religion as a whole or whether in specific religions, is beyond the scope of education and thus beyond the scope of religious education.
If religious education were to seek to nurture faith in any specific religion, it would no longer be religious education as we have described it, but would be better described as religious nurture. Religious nurture in the form of Christian nurture or Islamic nurture has an important part to play in human spirituality, because the religions are agents of human spirituality. Education, however, is only concerned with that humanisation and spiritualisation which flow from increased knowledge and understanding. These
represent important, indeed essential contributions towards spirituality, but they are not necessarily the only paths to spirituality and they do not necessarily take the learner to the mountain top.
It is enough for us as teachers and leaders of youth that we refuse to accept economic, social, educational and physical limits which prevent the children and young people in our care from entering upon the process of becoming more human, and thus exploring and developing their potential nature as spiritual (i.e, truly and deeply human).
http://www.johnmhull.biz/Spirituality,%20religion,%20faith.html
3) We have seen that there is a natural spirituality of disability which points to the variety of human bodies and of human experiences as making up the whole human world, and that this poses a challenge to the structures of unequivocal power which rule our world. We have also seen that to some extent the Christian faith produces and collaborates with this hegemony of power. We have also seen from the rich variety of its ambiguity that the disabilist theologian may be able to recover elements which may form the basis for a theology of disability. Such a theology will link with a spirituality of disability in the sense that it will give specific religious articulation to the natural, experienced spirituality of the various conditions of disabled people, as each learns how to transfigure and transcend the limits of his or her biology.
The position outlined in this article is not without its own ambiguity. One would not expect doctors to give up the fight against disease on the grounds that it is good to encourage a variety of human worlds, nor would we expect an ophthalmologist not to do his or her best to save someone’s sight because of his respect for the blind world. The concept of an epistemological world is not intended to avoid the varieties of human suffering, but to honour the distinctiveness of the experience of those who permanently reside in various states. Let us hope that the Christian faith which has always motivated its adherents towards the alleviation of suffering will prove equally effective in motivating Christians to recognise variety and to challenge the concentrations of exclusive power.
http://www.johnmhull.biz/A%20Spirituality%20of%20Disability1.htm
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Last Updated ( Saturday, 02 December 2006 )
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Written by Roger Prentice
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Thursday, 30 November 2006 |
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The Build a Better Model of Education site
is built using Joomla. Dan our designer was originally going to use
the Geeklog engine but we switched to Joomla because it was a bit
more suited to my needs, not least to my very modest level of
technical ability!
I'm told that Geeklog and Joomla are two of the best CSS engines
on which to build a website!
If you want to see a very fine site built using Geeklog go to;
http://technohippie.com/geeklog/public_html/
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Written by Roger Prentice
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Thursday, 30 November 2006 |
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Last Updated ( Saturday, 02 December 2006 )
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