112. The schism over blocks
[From Seth Godin, Stop Stealing Dreams http://www.squidoo.com/stop-stealing-dreams]
Jean Schreiber wants kids in elementary school to spend more time playing with blocks and less time sitting at a desk and taking notes.
Is that okay with you?
Blocks for building.
Blocks for negotiating
Blocks for pretending.
Blocks for modeling the real world.
Time spent on blocks takes time away from painstakingly learning to draw a six, from memorizing the times tables, and from being able to remember the names of all fifty states.
Is that what school ought to be doing?
As a parent, you see what seven-year-olds in China are doing (trigonometry!) and you see the straight rows of silent students and rigor, and it’s easy to decide that there’s a race, and we’re losing.
We are losing, but what we’re losing is a race to produce the low-paid factory workers of tomorrow.
In New York, the Education Department just proposed a reading test for all third-graders—a test that would last more than four hours over two days. Clearly, playing with blocks is not part of this requirement.
But go back to the original premise of this manifesto—that what we need is not to create obedient servants with a large bank of memorized data, but instead to build a generation of creative and motivated leaders—and suddenly, blocks make a lot of sense.
Give me a motivated block builder with a jumbled box of Legos over a memorizing drone any day. If we can’t (or won’t, or don’t want to) win the race to the bottom, perhaps we could seriously invest in the race to the top.
Tags: stopstealingdreams
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