Page 48 - Linguistically Diverse Educational Contexts

LINGUISTICALLY DIVERSE EDUCATIONAL CONTEXTS
Quality education requires deep learning. Confusion is imposed on children by too many strange adults, each working alone without entering a deeper relationship with each other, pretending, in most cases, to have expertise they don't really have.
2. Class position
I teach students that they have to stay in the class they belong to. I don't know who decides this. Children are numbered so that they can return to the correct class when they leave it. Numbering is a big and very profitable business, although the strategy is elusive. The lesson from this is that everyone has a designated place in the pyramid and that there is no getting out of the classroom. You must stay where you are placed.
3. Indifference
I teach children not to care too much about anything, even if they want to make it seem like they do. I do this in very subtle ways, such as demanding that they are totally engaged in my lessons, jumping up and down in their seats with anticipation, vigorously competing for my attention. When they do this, it is very moving; it impresses everyone, even me. When I am at my best, I plan my lessons very carefully to produce this show of enthusiasm. But when the bell rings, I insist that they drop what we've been doing and quickly move on to the next class. They have to turn on and off like a light switch. Nothing important is ever finished in my class, or in any class I know of. Students never get the full experience.
4. Emotional dependency
With stars, points, smiley faces, rewards, and punishments, I teach children to surrender their will to follow my instructions. Rights can be given to students or taken away without appeal by the teacher, headmaster, etc., because rights in school do not exist. Freedom of speech does not exist. I discipline behaviour that threatens my control.
5. Intellectual dependency
Good students wait for a teacher to tell them what to do. This is the most important lesson of them all: we must wait for other people, better trained than ourselves, to give meaning to our lives. The expert makes all the important choices; only I, the teacher, can determine what my children must learn, or rather, only those who pay me can make those decisions, which I then enforce. This power to control what children will think allows me to separate successful students very easily from failures.
6. Provisional self-esteem
If you've ever tried to wrestle with kids whose parents have convinced them that they will be loved despite themselves, you know that it's impossible for these free spirits to adjust.
Self-esteem, a basic tenet of every major philosophical system that has ever appeared on the planet, is never considered in education. The lesson from writing report cards, grades and tests is that children should not trust themselves or their parents but should rely on the judgment of officials. People need to be told what they are worth.
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