Teachers Are Made
(or parent) “to discover and provide the conditions for this growth.” So far as the curriculum goes, this posited that rather than it being imposed by history and convention it be “progressively discovered” as dictated by the laws of growth. This way of thinking offered a safe beginning for me as a teacher be cause the authority of the teacher was in proper relation to the activity of learning — it perceived the teacher as a co-participant and learner in life with the students and with other teachers, not as a god-in-authority who has the right to directly compel or trick students (however pleasantly) into doing what he decides they should do just because he is the teacher or just because society demands it. But it was not sufficient to provide me as a teacher with 1) the precise understanding of the powers of my students and 2) the specific techniques based upon this understanding which I needed in order to allow my students to pursue their intellectual growth as rapidly as they were capable of doing. It was children of two to five years of age who were my first real teachers about teaching. I soon noticed them bored by what was offered by the conventional nursery school “cotton-batting” environment. Yet they were enthusiastic about anything in biological science or social science which I could learn to involve them in, in such a way that they could link with it. And often this led to quite long verbal interchanges between them and between them and me — using what I now recognize as being a highly intellectual tool, the speech that they had already mastered and brought with them. Sometimes our projects lasted for a week or even a month. They and their parents — who often participated at school and observed feedback at home — felt their time spent each day at school to be eminently worthwhile. To outsiders what they were able to do seemed remarkable because no one in the educational field at this time had yet revealed (or even believed in) the tremendous things these children were actually capable of doing intellectually if they extended their speech into reading and writing and if they worked on mathematics. With what I have now learned I know that I seriously shortchanged them because my understanding of who they were as intellectual persons was insufficient, even though I did have some real sense of their capacity as social and compassionate beings.
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