'There's a World of Education Beyond School': Rosen
“We live in a world surrounded by all the stuff that education is supposed to be about: machines, bodies, languages, cities, votes, mountains, energy, movement, plays, food, liquids, collisions, protests, stones, windows.
“But the way we've been taught often excludes all sorts of practical ways of finding out about ideas, knowledge and culture - anything from cooking to fixing loo cisterns, from dance to model making, from collecting leaves to playing 'Who am I?'. The great thing is that you really can use everything around you to learn more.”
So begins Michael Rosen’s newly-published book Good Ideas: How to be your own child’s (and you own) best teacher. Poet, broadcaster and former Children’s Laureate Rosen believes there is a world of education available to children outside the school gates and that parents can be the key facilitators in opening this world to their children.
In an interview with the UK’s ‘Independent’ newspaper Rosen said: “Parents are very nervy about the kinds of hands on activities that can give children confidence and understanding. You can sit in a bookshop and see people buying books full of mock tests and blank pages to fill in and ignoring the real books.
“Enjoying them and developing feelings and ideas at a level that is age appropriate to the children will lead them on to a very powerful way of looking at the world, yet they seem to think the best way of getting to a good result is by filling in the blanks in these questions.”
His father was a teacher and told the young Rosen recalls how it was “very hard” for an exam to test whether a pupil was “good at finding out things - it won’t tell you why one pupil has learned something and another one hasn’t”. “When people ask me about my education, I think of course about my schools and universities but part of me always wants to say ‘and the back yard, window sills and the alleyway where I lived’,” he says.
In the many interviews that he has conducted to promote the book Rosen is at pains to stress that he is not being critical of schools. It is just, he argues, that there is a world of learning beyond them.
If there is a single point that emerges from the book it’s that all knowledge is valid and that the act of discovering things (working it out, browsing through bookshelves or on the internet, reading) is itself learning. One particularly striking story is that recounted by the naturalist David Attenborough. Having found an animal bone in the garden as a boy he took it to his father, a doctor, who pretended not to recognise it. Instead, they pored over zoology and anatomy books together: “They shared the excitement of discovery.”
