Education in our times

I have just read two articles about education. One of them, written by Anna Cunningham named “Steiner schools should adopt modern reading methods” which appears on the website The Conversation verses about how, after a research, the author concludes that these schools should adopt forms of learning how to read that are used in standard schools in UK. According to her the methodology adopted in Steiner schools is bringing results that tend to be less effective in learning how to read well and even spelling. Other subject explored is about what happens when one child, one family or both do not match the philosophy of the school and the possibility of bullying when the child is not able to follow the school’s proposal.

The other article, written by Stephen Heppel in his own blog talks about an education that can be more instrumentalist. He claims that we should be worried about allowing students and teachers to be more proactive in terms of providing the world people more prepared to our challenges and that can be more useful in a modern society. In terms of his thoughts, technology and creativity develop a central role.

In my opinion and as a teacher schools should be able to provide both ways to students. In our modern world, technology can be a central part of apprenticeship if well used as we can see in the interview with Natalie See, principal of the Hilltop Road Public School in Maryland about the challenges and the results of doing so. This interview being part of the first week of Music and Education in XXI Century by University of Sydney - Coursera. Certainly children who are kept apart of this new world may find difficulties to adapt when confronted to it once probably they will have to live amongst a technological world. Maybe it is like someone who used to live in the country and is suddenly forced to live in the big city.

On the other hand, as it is justified in the interview with Virginia Moller, principal of the Kamaroi School (Australia), the creativity and social behavior provided in schools that follow Steiner’s philosophy or some pedagogy similar to is certainly another important tool in this technologic and industrialized world. We also need to foster these abilities to our students in order of preparing them to an ever-changing world with economic and social crises that overcome our capacities and bring us the need of surpassing new obstacles all the time.