The Swiss professor and the missing ingredient in the school room
ANYONE who has ever had to deal single-handedly with a normal two-year-old of either gender for even a few hours knows one thing.
Two-year-olds are sponges: they suck in knowledge at such a rate it is exhausting for an adult to watch. And they generally have such fun doing it. They are not put off by mistakes and, indeed, they personify the late Sir Winston Churchill’s offering on the secret of success.
“The secret of success,” wrote the British statesman, “is to be able to carry on from failure to failure with undiminished enthusiasm.”
Doesn’t that describe a two-year-old perfectly?
Fast forward ten years or so, and OMG what a difference. And it’s not all down to pre-teen puberty. How is it possible that our busy, enthusiastic, knowledge-ingesting sponge has slowly turned into a surly, disaffected non-learner, who “hates school”?
After almost 10 years of volunteering for a local NGO that operates in the rural education space and after more than two years of intensive research into the South African state education system, I think I can tell you how it’s possible.
The missing ingredient is “fun”.
The two-year-old is continuously “having fun”: the teenager not so much.
It’s not hard to see why this is important. If you have fun while learning something new you will obviously remember what you learned with added affection, whereas if you hated the whole process, you will – subconsciously at least – be keen to forget the whole thing.
I don’t often find myself in agreement with the 21st Century’s explosion of ivory-tower academics, so I was particularly pleased to find a Swiss professor whose views overlaid mine almost exactly.
“Fun (is) a cardinal pedagogical prerequisite,” said Prof Daphné Bardier, “that is often given short shrift.” Prof Bardier is a neuroscientist at the University of Geneva and she was quoted in the journal “Scientific American”.
It is really encouraging to find an academic prepared to use such street-level language as “given short shrift”, so perhaps we should pay a little more attention to the rest of her language. “Pedagogical”, of course means “to do with teaching”, but it is her choice of “cardinal” and “pre-requisite” that bears further investigation.
A “pre-requisite” is something that is required before the start of an action: in other words, Prof. Bardier is saying that if fun is missing, teaching – and therefore learning – cannot even begin. And the word “cardinal” means “that on which everything hinges”.
Think back to your schooldays: was having fun the predominant emotion you remember? Did all the teaching hinge on making sure you and your fellow students were having fun?
Thanks to Prof Bardier, we now know why two-year-old sponges turn into teenage refuseniks.