The remote school of life
Parables and Illustrations for Values Education |
They lay the old school and instead erected a very modern and beautiful school. Built with rich materials, the luxury and the elegance sparkled everywhere. Not anything was missing: laboratories, library, counselling centres... However, students were languishing of boredom and felt strange, as in a golden cage.
The director could not hide his bewilderment because he was convinced that the old apathy of students was due to the poor condition of old school and thought that everything would change in the new.
A day visited the school a wise teacher who, after hearing the complaint of the director, took him to a station that had all of the technological advances and was an architectural masterpiece, but had a unique and very serious problem: had built away from the roads. There not passing any train.
-All very nice and modern - said the director, but he does away from the train station?
- And what is your new and luxurious school if it continues away from life?
I think that I read in one of the works of Tony de Mello the history of that paratrooper who fell in the top of a tree without having the least idea where he was. Before he could break out of the branches of the tree, went through there a Walker and parachutist asked:
-Can you, please, tell me where I am?
-You are in a tree.
-Is you teacher? - And how has noticed it?
-Because what he says is true, but me is useless.
Also relevant is the history of that really skilled boy who was always inventing, repairing things, taking the guts to devices returning to assemble, sowing seeds, collecting nests, manufactured carts... and he used to say: "Now I have to leave learning for a long time because I have to go to school".
One of the older current school fatalities is away of life. The school world has made an artificial world within the real world and most of the things that are required and are learned in school only served to stay or continue in the same school, to continue rising in obstacle courses that, too often, does not lead to nowhere. School tour and tour in a surreal and inconsequential, world of dead knowledge, where knowledge, rather than ability to live more fully, is conceived as an accumulation of unrelated data, dates, concepts, formulas, numbers, recital of a ritual without meaning.
We only educaremos for life if the school, programs, contents are immersed in reality and in the everyday life of the student, family, neighborhood, the hamlet, town, country. Authentic planning part of the experience, knowledge, feelings and needs of students, so that you submerge the school practice in the everyday social practice of their lives.
Open the doors and windows of the schools life. Let that reality invades programs. Let's not forget that it is only possible to prepare for life in the same life. We do not complain of apathy of students if the ideal of our schools seems to be the silence and peace of the graveyards.