|
|
February 26, 2010
A compassionate education
Reuven Feuerstein’s methods have had an indelible impact.
EUGENE KAELLIS
In contemporary education, few things are more valued than mental prowess in mathematics and science. Students achieving in these two areas can expect, often to the detriment of their exposure to the humanities, to graduate from university to a market normally welcoming of their skills. This emphasis on technology received a major impulse in the West when Sputnik became an embarrassment to the United States.
Now, with the global diffusion of skills, the situation is not as defined. A technical problem can be e-mailed to, for example, Hyderabad and a solution sent back the next day at a much lower cost than by using homegrown engineers. Moreover, skills education to the virtual abandonment of the liberal arts bodes badly for democracies, which rely on a population at least minimally versed in the liberal arts for making intelligent political choices.
Basic contemporary education methods can be conveniently analogized to providing nourishment. One approach, the “cafeteria style,” offers students a wide variety of courses from which they can choose. Teachers become “cooks” concentrating on abundance and variety. The problem here is that some students may invariably choose desserts to the exclusion of, say, broccoli. This approach reached its apogee in the free school movement of the sixties. The other is the “fixed menu” approach, in which a series of planned subjects, each with a planned syllabus, is presented.
To carry the analogy further, in Israeli clinical, developmental and cognitive psychologist Dr. Reuven Feuerstein’s methods, each child is attended by a sympathetic “nutritionist” who provides him with ample “food” in a planned regimen within which he, nonetheless, can make choices. The teacher observes the child’s reactions and adjusts the “menus” as would any sympathetic and thoughtful parent. This approach evidently requires an often long and closely managed process that can strain the priorities of society. However, the cost of the presumed social consequences of not adopting such a supportive approach can themselves be extremely high. Unfortunately, that balance sheet is often not available or taken into account.
Feuerstein’s approach to education is considered labor intensive because it gives “poor students,” those who may have been assessed as “low intelligence,” an opportunity to expand and diversify their cognitive abilities. His work, begun in a Hadassah-supported institute in Jerusalem, is now applied widely, including within the Vancouver school system. Feuerstein, who has lectured in Vancouver and with whom the Vancouver Board of Education has established a liaison, received, among many other international awards, the local Variety Club’s International Humanitarian Award.
His methods, making minimal assumptions about how much potential intelligence people can develop, is served by his series of mental exercises based on minimal suppositions regarding “innate intelligence.” Research has shown that all intelligence tests have a cultural component, often unacknowledged by test devisers, but presenting a marked disadvantage to some children. Here are just two examples of how one’s background can influence the “correct” answer on an intelligence quotient (IQ) test.
Five crows are on a clothesline. One is shot. How many remain? Arithmetic (urban experience) answer: four. Experiential (rural) answer: none, as the others have flown away. Another: Which of the following is not a fish: salmon, shark, herring, turtle. The “correct” answer is “turtle,” but a well-informed child might choose “shark,” since taxonomically it is an elasmobranch, not a teleost. Feuerstein’s methods are as “culture-free” as possible and are used only as guides to what mental processes need remediation.
“Innate intelligence” is largely a influential 20th-century invention. IQ test scores were widely used to “stream” children, preparing “bright” children for university while preparing “dull” children for a vocation. The test’s premise is that there is a property, called “intelligence,” that is inherent in each individual and which marks the upper limit of one’s ability to learn, and that it is unrelated to culture or environment. The latter point is particularly important. It means, for example, that children from homes with no books tend to have lower scores. It also ignores the relationship between nutrition and mental abilities. Think of cretins, having an iodine deficiency, and pellagra sufferers lacking B2, both of which, historically, fed into the “rural idiocy” stereotype.
Feuerstein concedes that intelligence may be limited, but there is no reliable way to determine its limit, which is, therefore, better ignored.
To illustrate how agile are the minds of children, who can pick up grammar before being instructed, note the following. Very young children may say, “He doed it,” meaning that they have unconsciously absorbed the rule for conjugating verbs in the past tense. What, of course, these children haven’t yet realized is that “to do” is an irregular verb. Notice also how quickly children learn to use the passive voice – “The lamp was broken,” when the “breaker” evidently doesn’t want to be identified.
The mediated learning experience, which Feuerstein advocates, and the use of attendant tools that he devised, transmits “a stable yet flexible system of values, behaviors, cognitive and affective processes.”
Feuerstein himself is a testament to courage and tenacity. Romanian-born, he is a Holocaust survivor who made his way to Jerusalem and whose experiences have left him with an indelibly humanistic approach in education.
In Feuerstein’s approach, the personal factor is of paramount importance. Intellectual challenges to which pupils are exposed are accompanied by the care, respect and attention the teacher manifests toward the students. No computer can mimic expressions of creativity, versatility, encouragement and faith, characteristics only a human mediator can offer. Feuerstein has also devised an instrumental enrichment program, based on a series of exercises that are minimally culture-based, often employing universal geometric figures.
Feuerstein teaches us not to be profligate with our most basic and important resource – children.
In learning the care, patience and ingenuity required to help children who, for whatever the reason, are often left behind by a harried school system, we can benefit not only the children but ourselves, and not only in their presumed achievements, but in our own growth.
I had the privilege of interviewing Feuerstein some years ago when he was making one of his periodic visits to Vancouver to help guide school programs based on his methods, especially those directed toward the aboriginal community. He proved to be as kind, patient and resourceful as I assumed he would be.
Eugene Kaellis is the author of Face Off or Interface? (2009), a book that deals with the relationship between science and religion. It is available at lulu.com.
^TOP
|
|
