As I sat in Church at the weekend I recalled a recent Maxime event... The large plastic slide outside the house in Pau had been moved. Neither Sandie nor the au pair Marianne was responsible (and you can rest assured it wasn’t me!). The mystery of the moving slide was resolved when Maxime was put under some intensive questioning. He explained that the slide had been in the sun, so it had become hot, and as a result he had decided to take it upon himself to move it into the shade meaning that he could play without risk of burning his little botty. Logical really when you think about it.
When the tale was shared with (French) Anti Establishment Papy Francis he very quickly said that all children are born logical and it is the formal education system that beats the logic out of them (side note: maybe my failed attempt to understand Descartes as a troubled teenager wasn’t actually my fault then?). That got me thinking about the philosophy of school education and the intense curriculum that children are required to follow these days – a very important topic given that Maxime starts pre-school as a 2.5 year old in September.
What I remember from Oxford is that I only really genuinely started to understand things (rather than just being able to memorise a large number of facts for an exam), when I took the time to think things through from first principles. (You will no doubt note the recurring theme of slowing down to actually take the time to think, do and live). As a consequence I believe that one of the most valuable things I do at work is to think about things whilst not connected to my Blackberry (typically in aeroplanes), scribble things down on bits of yellow paper, and then let my sub conscious do the rest over the following two weeks before I create an appropriate PowerPoint slide for general consumption. It’s just a shame that the volume of work we needed to get through for A Levels just didn’t allow us that time to reflect and understand (especially if we wanted to combine that with chasing young girls and playing football four times a weekend).
What does it mean for Maxime (and his siblings) – I suppose it means that if there is any way I can get him to view mathematics and science subjects as a set of puzzles, and to view the humanities as a series of stories about individual people in different countries in different time periods when social norms were different to those today, then I’ll be happy. Either that or I’ll just start to bribe them with money to try and get as many A*’s as possible. I really hope it’s the former.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment