"Learning by heart is useless".
... but real professionals know a lot by heart.
"Children can't concentrate for more than 15 minutes"
... and yet we see them staying focused for hours on end.
"Restless children don't learn anything".
... but we don't know many successful leaders who were able to sit quietly in their chairs for hours on end at school. Today, we calm down our potential leaders; apathetic we think they learn better. Above all, they learn the power of the system.
"We mustn't let them experience failure - it damages their self-esteem".
... this is partly true, but the pedagogical qualities of failure are also extolled. Few people have achieved anything of significance in their lives without overcoming difficulties and setbacks. So how do we develop resilience?
There are dozens of pedagogical principles, and few of them can claim to be universal.
Understand the words and concepts, link them together, go gradually, apply, practice. Teachers successfully apply these learning principles in 1,000 different ways to different contexts and individuals. It's only when we stray too far from them that failures appear, with performance demands and "objective" assessments that fail to take account of individual realities.
We have the right to criticize pedagogy, and some don't hesitate to do so. Pedagogical myths are useful, but only if you don't believe them, as Frédéric Duriez reminds us. It is possible to make pedagogy unassailable by affirming its foundations. This edition invites us to revisit our classics and look at ways of improving the way we teach, in terms of both contexts and methods.
Learning is essential to the survival of any organism. The human capacity to learn is immense, and the school can give it the opportunity to be fully exercised. There is still so much to learn and discover.
Denys Lamontagne
Illustration: Saydung89 - Pixabay
