Critiques of Books on Education

Sylvia Ashton-Warner began by trying to teach her children with conventional methods. However, once these methods failed, she was willing to experiment in order to teach her children. She did not resort to racism or devaluing the children. Instead, she found the methods inadequate to the population, and experimented until she found the methods that were congruent for the culture.

That culture was organized around story-telling, myths, and an organic relationship to the world. As a consequence, Ashton-Warner determined that the method of teaching that would work with them also needed to be organic, developing out of their own relationship to the world and their own needs within it. Ashton-Warner defended her method by noting that organic reading is not new, that Egyptian hieroglyphics were one-word sentences and that UNESCO begins with its populations using words that are directly relevant to their lives (Ashton-Warner, 1963, p. 27).

Herbert Kohl, too, refused to resort to racism and give up on his students. Instead, he saw that teachers were afraid of the students and hid from them in various ways. His method was based more on developing a trust-filled environment than Ashton-Warner's, but it could also be considered as organic. The students were allowed to express their reality in Kohl's classroom and use that reality in order to interpret the curriculum. Interestingly enough, he also allowed them into his life, and his home, feel

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involved writing. It is not doing research simply to fulfill academic requirements, but doing research because the subject matters and we, as individuals, care enough to pursue the subject in greater depth. This' idea is the crux of each of these books, and it is a valuable one. While one could criticize Herbert Kohl for not emphasizing good grammar and proper English in teaching his students - thereby making it more difficult for them to continue their schooling or obtain jobs - this is not the point of life. Calkins, Kohl, and Ashton-Warner recognized that the point of life is to live it in the best way possible within one's cultural context. It is to live life fully, embracing it, exploring it, and using the educational system in order to support that endeavor. Another significant principle that I think applies to each of these books, and requires further examination, is the principle that children do have an inexorable desire to learn and an inexorable creativeness. According to Ashton-Warner, her intent was to get into the flow of that creativity, turning it toward peaceful purposes. For her, the suppression of creativity leads to destructiveness, or destructiveness is the outcome of the unlived life (Ashton-Warner,

Category: Psychology - C