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- Herausgeber: Antonio Tombolini Editore
- Kategorie: Bildung
- Sprache: Englisch
We all agree that the growth of knowledge and democratic organisation are the two pillars that must support education and they must therefore constitute the foundations of every idea of school. If we then ask ourselves what these two cornerstones have in common, it is difficult to discard the idea that the distinctive trait they share is that both are the expression of organisational methods which are not only dynamic but able to constantly challenge their own institutions and meanings, without crystallising them and removing them from the scrutiny of critical thought. This leads to a clear-cut conclusion: if the school really wants to educate young people in knowledge and democracy, it must adhere to those same guiding principles and tangibly apply them in its practice. There is only one way to do this properly: by showing a plurality and ramification of different potentialities that will indicate a true capacity for opening up to the overwhelming proliferation of theory that distinguishes our times, avoiding all forms of mundane banalisation, and by contending with the new and the unforeseen, training minds that will be able to cope with them. The idea of school presented in this book has been created and developed on this central nucleus, which gives it its hallmark.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2016
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Silvano Tagliagambe
Up Schooling
UP SCHOOLING
THE PREREQUISITES AND CORNERSTONES OF A GOOD EDUCATION
Silvano Tagliagambe
Collana “Studio Digitale”
a cura di
Roberto Maragliano e Silvano Tagliagambe
ISBN 788893370790
copyright © 2016 Antonio Tombolini Editore
digital rights reserved
Via Villa Costantina, 61,
60025 Loreto Ancona
Italy
email: [email protected]
www.antoniotombolini.com
Immagine di copertina a cura di Marta D’Asaro
Indice dei contenuti
Foreword
Preface Up
1. Space, perception and movement
2. Learning environments
3. Learning environments and technologies
4. Material support of data and knowledge
5. Data processing: deconstruction and reconstruction
6. The contribution of information technology
7. Learning environments: deconstruction and subsequent reconstruction
8. The importance of meditation and spaces put aside for concentration
9. What being a good teacher means: the ethics of responsibility
10. von Foerster’s ethical imperative
11. The tendency towards the glocal
12. Multiple intelligence: cognition and emotion
13. Didactic contents: the axis of languages
14. Analytical-compositional semantics and holistic semantics
Note
Foreword
Roberto Maragliano
This book by Silvano Tagliagambe is the first volume of Studio Digitale, a new kind of editorial project that, in addressing the school and those who work there, aspires to providing conceptions and products that match up with the logics and sensibility of the open system.
So do not expect to find linear paths proposed here and in the titles that follow, on whose intrinsic scientific goodness you will be able to rely and which will therefore be easy to put into practice to obtain positive results. If we were to equip ourselves to think and act in that way, we would still be trapped in a closed system, and would consequently run the risk of misunderstanding the meaning of a proposal like this one of Up schooling, that does not wish to be seen as a handbook of good, correct ideas to mechanically translate into didactic action but, on the contrary, intends to challenge that kind of culture and expectation. Consistent with this assumption, the text I am introducing (which acts as a programmatic document for the Up School initiative described in the Preface) aspires to being a sort of medley of ideas and suggestions, each with its own specific technological-scientific-cultural substance, by means of which the teacher or educator can take steps towards rethinking the role they are called to carry out, the context in which they work and the cultural and material instruments they use. Not so much a shielded system - a list of guaranteed formulas and authors - as an open network of references where what counts is first and foremost the quality and quantity of the connections between node and node.
The objective of this book does not, of course, neglect the need to be practical; all the considerations formulated and discussed here consequently aim to give life to a school that wants to be beautiful and pleasant, yet challenging for those who work there and those who use it, apart from being good, obviously, and therefore efficient, productive and constructive, as well as democratic and transparent. But the aspirations and elements for action that the text refers to are never detached from a constant effort to conceptualise, nor indeed could they be, given the profile of the author, a philosopher and epistemologist. Or, to express the idea better, the shift towards practice, to a different way of understanding practice, is shown and promoted here as the outlet of an itinerary of reconceptualisation. Hence, a complex pathway, as I shall soon explain. But in the meantime, I would like to justify my reasons for resorting to the term “reconceptualization”. I use it because in spite of words that recur with a certain frequency in the text and that, by showing they belong to the semantic areas of creativity, efficacy and socialisation appear to act as elements of continuity of an educational project that has given ample proof of its worth over the past decades, not only in contexts of research into the school but also in those of political and administrative action concerning the school (in Italy, but not Italy alone), in spite, then, of this feeling of familiarity that the reader might sometimes experience, before long he will notice that most of the scientific, philosophical, technological, literary and artistic references underpinning Silvano Tagliagambe’s arguments and proposals belong to repertoires that we do not usually find employed, moreover, with such generosity, wealth, relevance and flexibility, in works destined for teachers.
The thread running through the references to current scientific events - I am thinking particularly of the examples from neuroscience brought into play, but also those taken from classical culture and presented in contemporary terms, such as the extracts from Hegel, Kierkegaard or Leopardi but also the audio or visual references to Henri Matisse or Giuseppe Verdi - serves to support the need to give body and substance not so much to an idea as to the actual idea of school. Hence the meaning of “reconceptualization” of which I have spoken. I shall try to broaden the horizon within which these inspiring thoughts should be placed. The dense, full-bodied processes underway in the world need to be acknowledged. So many changes and such obvious ones have taken place in the life of societies and cultures compared with the times in which the school model still in use, albeit in its skeletal structure, was developed: approximately two centuries have passed since the founding years of some of the most important national schools of the European continent, including of course the Italian one. The separation of the inside world of the school today from what is underway in the dynamics of the outside world is also considerable: it is of little importance whether this condition is proudly claimed as an opportunity offered to the school to positively oppose the negativity of the surrounding world, or if it is fatalistically understood as a justification for the scarceness of the results achieved; the distance is still there. The system then made plenty of progress in which choices that were motivated in the past but would today prove far less legitimate, achieved the result of being experienced as unquestionable assumptions: I am thinking, just to give one example, of the hierarchical power attributed to the different languages, the written one placed at the highest, most noble levels of scholastic action, and the audio, the visual and the operational ones situated at the edges, starting already at the first school level (and increasing as we progress upwards to the higher levels). In short, so many and such great things have matured in the indoor and outdoor spaces of scholastic action, and so much and such great confusion as well as fusion has arisen on the various fronts of what was once called "the battle of ideas", that the very idea of school seems to have evaporated in people’s minds (and, one might say, in the sciences, too, namely, in the official encounters between experts and working staff). These days everyone has his own idea, partly because there is no-one who has not had a personal experience at school (not to mention those who found themselves repeating the experience as teachers and marginally as parents), but all the myriad individual ideas do not appear to have a common foundation at present. What is missing, in short, is the idea of school. So even if we ignore the underlying issue, we have become used to wanting to change this institution and possibly improve its internal functioning, but without having adequate awareness of what its foundations could or should be, in the present, and therefore its actual identity as a school. Not surprisingly, the institution’s philosophical and epistemological presuppositions are never seriously or freely discussed, similarly its educational and technological presuppositions, despite the fact that the latter date back five hundred years and the former to two hundred years ago. They are not discussed also because they have become so internalised in the common culture as to be wrongly regarded not as historical data but as natural data. Not by chance did those who tried to raise the issue in the past suffer endless censorship and curses. Yet it would be useful to bring back to mind at this moment in time the warning of de-schooling suggested nearly a half century ago by a visionary like Ivan Illich, when the claims and the very institution of school (with the myths and rituals associated with it) seem to have lost their substance and even legitimacy, at least the way they are experienced by a non-negligible share of their recipients, the students in first place. So, if we wish to tackle the issue honestly, we need to face up to the problem of contributing to the positive re-schooling of society, beginning with the need to give concreteness not to an idea of school so much as to the idea of school that best matches the world as it is constituted and being constituted: the world, so to speak, of complexity, where no simplification (and in our doing and thinking pedagogically there are so many) incorporates the guarantee of being worth more than flatus vocis (just words).
To reconceptualise the school, achieve the idea of it and convince it of the idea, is an operation that must necessarily cope with the need to put teachers and pupils, starting with children, in direct contact with the world of complexity via concrete, intelligent procedures and solutions, open to innovation and able therefore to surprise and keep alert the actors, bringing to justice the many artificial, obsolete schematisms that continue to circulate within the institution. There is, then, a need for fresh oxygen, for new ways of looking at the world of learning and teaching, if we really want to give life to a contemporary school in our modern age marked by major upheavals in the collective ways of thinking, acting and living. We can no longer allow ourselves a school (or university) cut off from the world or, worse, in sterile opposition to it. Nor can we erase from our memory and consciousness what the best developments in the field of education have been proposing throughout the last century for a future active, open school. We can do this even less now that we can count on instruments like digital and network ones which, if used properly and with intelligence, enable these noble prospects to be implemented and impetus given to them.
It is within this frame of mind, therefore, that I invite those who are curious and enthusiastic about original scenarios on which to base their educational action, to lend an ear to many of the suggestions arising in this book, and in so doing, avoid reducing them to pedagogical formulas ready for use, a trap more than ever present on the horizon of so much scholastic culture bureaucratised not only in language but also in thought.
Those who find it difficult to identify with a compositional-analytical paradigm and with that conception of encaging knowledge which, by adhering to the logic of closed systems, matches textbooks with disciplines (as well as regulating knowledge); those who refuse to think of the class as a unit with absolute pedagogical validity; those who are dissatisfied with the excessive mentalism characterising the current school syllabuses (or whatever you want to call them); those who are dissatisfied with many current teaching and assessment models that by sacrificing the requirements of the body, of being active and of affectivity, both on the part of teacher and pupil, hamper the development of courses centred on interest, curiosity and sharing; those who believe that thinking by texts risks cultural suffocation if it is not put into a constructive, dialectical relationship with thinking by action, images and sounds; those, in short, who are tired of an idea of school that has long lost its original ideal force, will find here, in Tagliagambe’s book (and in the subsequent titles of the series), a vision and ideas in which, and for which, to take heart.
Preface Up
School Team
It is no coincidence that the first title in this innovative series involves the Up School curriculum (http://www.upschool.it/ideadiscuola/), for we think it contains the generally applicable prerequisites and cornerstones from which our project originated and was developed, focusing on the child and its needs, freedom of self-expression and creativity, and the mastery of various languages and language registers designed to provide the tools to actively participate in the life of the future society.
But Up School also has a history, a past that began twenty-five years ago at the will and initiative of its Head, Enrica Corbia, and from experiments carried out with La Piccola Accademia, L’Accademia dei Piccoli, all private infant schools (0-6 years old) operating in Sardinia and a shared example of innovation. During this period, our research was not limited solely to studying quality pedagogical models but, thanks to close public-private synergies, also to partnerships and collaboration in research at an international scale, and to experiments with organisational and management forms aimed at reducing costs and leading to greater accessibility by users.
Up School fits into this course as the natural continuation of established experience tending towards verticalisation of the educational path up to primary school and beyond, and the example of these good practices are a reference base for repeatable models on the territory.
After studying business administration, Alberto Melis picked up the baton passed to him by his mother, building upon past years and continuing in the wake of a complex, comprehensive construction process to define a contemporary school. The principles are binding, clear and declared. Children need balance as they grow up. Balance between body and mind, between cognition and emotions, knowledge and competences, tradition and innovation, roots and wings, between international projection and local rooting. To form complete persons, physically fit, able to think, reason, argue and decide, but also to dream and get excited, to grow up responsible and reliable. Aware that knowledge and know-how are very closely correlated qualities that need to grow hand in hand.
Since September 2015 Up School has started up primary school education.
While following ministerial syllabuses and under the private school system, the teaching project, with the expert scientific guidance of Prof. Silvano Tagliagambe, the author of this text, adopts these principles integrating them into a new educational model that takes into account the mechanisms governing our cognitive system, the most recent discoveries in neuroscience, the contribution of the new information technology and the importance of controlling the physical and psychological well-being of the students.
This entails a reorganisation of teaching processes in time and space, starting with a flexible, multi-purpose environment where groups of students join up and disperse based on their interests and competences.
Up School is structured in learning centres, laboratories subdivided into thematic areas: knowledge, skills and competences are built up, taught and enhanced by tackling problems and developing projects, and used in interaction with the others, with resources, tools and typical artefacts of all kinds of knowledge as regards the spheres of languages, mathematics, science and technology, and the socio-historical context, without neglecting ministerial programmes, but handling them with advanced, contemporary, effective teaching models.
The use of the new technologies is being increased, as useful tools for integration into daily activities. Printers and 3D screens are available in a “baby-Fab lab” at the School, while projectors and interactive tables are reserved for the environments for teacher-centred lessons and group work. It is not a case of replacing traditional learning tools, but of combining them with the new devices we are using in our everyday life, based on controlled but spontaneous use. To favour the sharing of information and knowledge, students need to be provided with the tools that will encourage them to inquire and compare, as well as prepare them to cope with what contemporary society will require from them in their work and everyday life. A school that does not integrate these tools into its teaching courses and does not teach their proper use and potential, is a school out of touch with the dynamics of the real world and unable to keep up with the times as dictated by the needs of its own students. Many school subjects can use the enhanced reality situation to collect and exchange information, share and discuss at a distance or simulate actions that would otherwise be impossible to carry out in a traditional school setting.
Up School fosters interactive situations that lead the student not only into individual dynamics but also social ones; the possibility to generate interactions of a different nature, albeit sometimes mediated or indirect, is essential to activate the flow of understanding of what surrounds us. An innovative school is a space that facilitates interactions and the complex processes of learning, encouraging group work and discussion.
For this reason, space design was entrusted to a team of young architects - Fabrizio Pusceddu, Lino Cabras and Silvia Farris - who, in the wake of the most important, recognised pedagogical trends, built up a child-friendly environment. A reassuring place, a villa of the early 1900s, fully restored and combining a welcoming homely feeling with the most innovative technologies and respect for the environment, thanks to the use of environmentally friendly materials. No closed classrooms but flexible learning environments, ergonomic and furnished for the various activities. A large park in the centre of the city, with spaces for physical activity, and an indoor swimming pool at the service of students.
“I used to play in great earnest, and somewhere along the line they called my play art” said Maria Lai, the important local artist who died recently.
Creativity, artistic action, games, all have rules that must be taught, learnt and metabolised, so that they become an educational process tending towards the development of personal awareness of the world, opinions that will mature over time thanks to observing what others have done and to the will to express oneself by doing, creating, remaking. Managing one’s emotions, knowing how to interpret and understand them, letting them flow consciously into the creative act.
At Up School specialist teachers guide the creative and artistic efforts of the children in equipped laboratories, experimenting with different techniques and approaches based on shared themes tending towards understanding reality and towards the events of everyday life.
The psychological and physical well-being of Up School’s young pupils is the first target on which the programme for the day’s teaching is focused. The ability to think is a quality strongly linked with the sense and control of the body, and with the chance to seize the opportunities the spatial context offers us in terms of “opportunities for action”. Play, sport and, more generally, physical activity, are key factors for the functional development of the associative areas of the cerebral cortex and favour the development of the nervous system in every way. Body awareness and physical experience cooperate in procuring independence and self-confidence, as well as individual well-being. The choice of guiding these processes through water and aquatics, yoga, dance and other non-traditional activities in the school environment, is tailored on the usefulness of passing on to students the basic motor skills and coordinating elements that will subsequently develop in all their activities.
A healthy, well-balanced diet, together with outdoor activities and work on the school’s vegetable garden, are an integral part of the educational programme: this is why all meals are based on a diet designed by nutrition specialists, to protect the children's health and teach them about good dietary practices.
Up School is not just a school, but also a study centre for research and innovation, to improve teaching and educational technology models. It will soon be the first school in the world to have a sophisticated environmental control system, developed by informatics experts under the guidance of the creator and supervisor Paolo Garau, aiming both at the children’s well-being and their maximum safety.
It is a system for monitoring children’s movements that can detect the presence or absence of each student in a space inside or outside the school, so as to ensure the respective degree of security in every environment and at the same time have direct, automatic feedback on the activities being carried out.
The system also enables it to be decided which areas are to be considered more “sensitive” and therefore requiring a greater degree of attention, such as the swimming pool or the external area, automatically generating a direct alarm signal to the teachers and management in the event of any abnormality.
The technology used, already widely tested and certified at an international level, will consist of an iBeacon tag inserted in a pin supplied with the uniforms, and very low power environmental detectors (some thousands of times lower, to give an idea, than that of a common Bluetooth headset) sending information back to the central server that processes it using specific management software.
But Up School is also a partner in the “Infantes - servizi diffusi per l’infanzia in rete” (“Infantes: Internet Solutions for Children”) project, proposed by Alberto Melis, Fabrizio Pusceddu and Paolo Garau under the “Smart Cities Nazionale” programme, selected by the Ministry of Education out of over 400 proposals from across the nation and now under development.
It is in this light that we think of the contemporary school, in continuous development, with differentiated educational programmes for each age group that encapsulate the best international experiences in the learning sector. We enjoy reflecting on and imagining the school of the future: this is why we are constantly studying new methods of teaching and learning.
1. Space, perception and movement
Recent knowledge acquired in the field of neuroscience has provided us with hints towards understanding how to redirect learning processes. The first concerns the considerable change in the idea of perception, triggered by an important notion James J. Gibson introduced in 1979, namely affordance, or resource, coined to describe the mutual relationship between animal and environment, which subsequently became one of the key elements of ecological psychology. According to Gibson, the visual perception of an object entails immediate, automatic selection of its intrinsic properties that enable us, on each occasion, to interact with it. They are not abstract physical properties but embody practical opportunities that the object, so to speak, offers, to the organism perceiving it.[1]
For example, a sculptor may perceive a stone and interpret it as a figure concealed within; a builder as an element to place on top of similar ones to build a wall; a child as a plaything, to roll along the street; a collector of stones as a precious sample to place on a shelf next to other samples with different shapes and colours.
The same thing happens with artefacts. We may perceive a hammer as something we use to knock a nail into the wall, but also as a lever to prise a piece of wood from a shelf to which it is stuck; or a leveller, to flatten material that is soft but not easy to mould, such as a sheet of tin, over a harder surface; as a weapon with which to hit someone who has attacked us; or as an instrument suitable to break open a money-box, or to rid the sole of a shoe of something that has stuck to it. Briefly, its function and meaning may vary depending on the needs of the person handling it, who may therefore see it in many alternative ways.
So according to Gibson, objects, even the simplest everyday ones, contain more than one affordance, i.e. offer a variety of possible uses, and therefore of interaction. The consequences of the availability of this wide spectrum of opportunities are taken from Giacomo Rizzolatti, head of the research group at Parma University, to whom the discovery of mirror neurons is owed, together with Corrado Sinigaglia. In the case of a common cup, the visual affordances offered to our motor system concern the handle, the central part, the rim, etc. Observing it, therefore, will determine the activation of several neural populations in the superior intraparietal (SIP) area, each of which will codify a specific affordance. It is likely that these “proposals for action be sent to the F5 area, triggering authentic potential motor acts. Now, the choice of how to act will not depend just on the intrinsic properties of the object in question (shape, size and orientation) but also on what we intend to do with it, the “use” functions we recognise in it, etc. In the case of the cup, for example, we will grasp it in different ways depending on whether we want to pick it up to drink some coffee, wash it, or more simply, move it. And in the first case our grasp might be different depending on whether we are afraid of burning ourselves or not, whether there are any objects surrounding it, our habits, and our desire to respect good manners, etc.[2]
We can therefore say that we are confronted with a pair of tendencies and capacities, both effectual, i.e. present and active in time and space. The cup in our example offers the person wanting to use it, as its own resources, a whole series of possible ways of grasping that objectively exist, whether perceived or not, and that do appear to be characterised by objective tendencies. On the other hand, a subjective capacity that is just as real and effective exists on the individual’s part to extrapolate and process information on the shape, size and orientation of the handle, rim, etc., belonging to the process of selection of ways he has for grasping and activating the series of movements (beginning with those concerned with prefiguring the hand) that come into play each time in the act of grasping a coffee cup. By pairing up these two sets of objective tendencies it comes to light that the cup acts as a virtual pole of action, which by its relational nature defines, and is itself defined by, the motor pattern it has just activated.
On the other side, i.e. that of the person looking at the cup, there is sight that is not an end to itself but oriented towards guiding the hand, and which thus presents itself as also, if not above all, seeing with the hand, with respect to which the object perceived immediately appears as codified as a specific set of hypotheses of action. Perception is thus the organism’s implicit preparation to respond and act, from which, consequently, a type of understanding arises that has an eminently pragmatic nature. This does not determine in itself any “semantic” representation of the object, based on which it would be, for example, identified and recognised as a coffee cup, and not simply as something able to be grasped by the hand. F5 and AIP neurons only respond to certain features of objects (shape, size, orientation, etc.) and their selectivity is significant in that these features are interpreted as an equivalent number of systems of visual affordances and potential motor acts. In contrast, the neurons populating the lower cerebral cortex areas codify profiles, colours and textures of objects, processing the information selected into images that, once memorised, enable them to be recognised in their visual features. But is this enough to resolve the anatomic distinction between the ventral and dorsal streams in the functional contrast between vision-for-perception and vision-for-action? Rizzolatti and Sinigaglia do not think so – unless perception is reduced to an iconic representation of objects, to the portrayal of a thing, regardless of any where or how, and action reduced to an intention that discriminates between a how and perhaps a where, but has nothing to do with the thing. Unless, that is, we relegate the perceptive process to mere identification of figures (ideas, in the literal sense of the word), adjusted as regards any motor significance and raised to the rank of single possible vehicles of meaning, and split up the sense of the action into a simple succession of movements in themselves devoid of an objective correlative.
The two sets of effectual tendencies upon which we have dwelt, namely the resources of a cup and the possibilities of grasping that they allow us, on the one hand, and a person’s capacities, on the other, to evaluate all the possible ways of grasping, selecting them and activating a series of consequent movements, take on meaning and value only when they mutually interact. This fact gives precise, tangible sense to the idea that objectivising thought, founded on the claimed autonomy and self-sufficiency of “things” that populate our environment, should be replaced by an ontology of relations, by virtue of which the cup, rather than an object in itself, proves to be, as we have seen, a virtual pole of action to which a spectrum, just as virtual, of ways of grasping and respective movements responds. Only by pairing these two “virtual horizons” and from their convergence is the selection triggered, within each of them, of that project-oriented solution that will transform possibilities into reality, i.e. the hypothesis of action into a cup and the entire spectrum of ways of grasping into the actual chosen movement. What appears to us as “immediate naturalness” of the world is configured, therefore, in the light of this acquired knowledge, as the result of the intentional pragmatic relations that unite the subject, who is acting and knows, with the object towards which he is directing his attention, in a correlative relationship of reciprocal attribution of sense.
This means that movement and action of the body are essential for learning, as is clear from the discovery of mirror neurons, whose presence was originally found in the pre-motor cortex of the monkey and was then confirmed also by experiments with the human brain. The name given to these neurons is linked with the fact that they respond both when the monkey carries out a specific action (for example, grasps some food) and when it observes another individual (the researcher) carry out a similar action. Moreover, they are discharged not just when actions are carried out or observed, but also when the action may only be heard, such as the sound associated with the act of cracking a walnut or peanut; they are also discharged when the consequences of the action are not seen directly but may only be predicted. We can therefore conclude that these neurons embody a representation that is already abstract, and not purely immediate and tangible, of the action.
The first thing we need to learn from the results of the studies on “mirror neurons” is that body movement and action are essential for learning, to the point that we learn even just by observing the action of others: imitation is therefore an important way to learn. The agranular frontal cortex and the inferior parietal cortex prove to be a mosaic of areas anatomically and functionally connected with each other and form circuits destined to work on a parallel and to integrate the sensorial and motor information relating to specific effectors. The same goes for the circuits involving the areas of the prefrontal cortex and that of the cingulum, which are responsible for the formation of intentions, long-term planning and the choice by which to actually act. The brain therefore acts and understands at the same time.
Another important interaction is the one between the areas overseeing movement and visual ones; the perception and evaluation of the space in which movement takes place and the body acts are fundamental to be able to understand targeted action. Visual exploration of the environment and free movement in space are therefore essential conditions for the action and for it to be understood. The richer and more significant the experience of the external world, in relations with others and activities with things, the richer and more intense our internal life, in terms of sentiments, knowledge, relations, choices and decisions. A direct thread exists, a sort of narrow bridge, between the external environment and the internal one, between the natural landscape and the mental landscape: hence, space is at the same time around us and within us, it is a boundary and edge of the link between the internal and the external world. “The landscape is within and around us: it is the fruit of our projections and we introject it, becoming what we are, in our continuous individuation”.[3]
The dynamic between internal and external is therefore constant and fundamental, complex and fascinating. Indeed, by virtue of this dynamic “we cannot be homesick, we cannot but belong to a place, we cannot but give sense to that place”. The first and already fundamental answer to the question on how to develop education based on creativity is therefore to refer to the need to have free spaces available, contexts and environments for active, stimulating learning, full of things to discover by gestures and actions to be made. Exactly the opposite, then, of traditional classrooms, where the prescribed physical immobility approves passiveness and receptiveness, so that any non-compliant activity or behaviour, the only possibility to escape from the obedience and silence considered the exclusive, unconditional behaviour rules, is immediately stamped and sanctioned as unruliness. Dewey, an old man but still lively and topical, had perfectly clear ideas on the subject: “Let me speak first of the advantages which reside potentially in increase of outward freedom. In the first place, without its existence it is practically impossible for a teacher to gain knowledge of the individuals with whom he is concerned. Enforced quiet and acquiescence prevent pupils from disclosing their real natures. They enforce artificial uniformity. They put seeming before being. They place a premium upon preserving the outward appearance of attention, decorum and obedience”. And again, a little later: “The other important advantage of increased outward freedom is found in the very nature of the learning process. That the older methods set a premium upon passivity and receptivity has been pointed out. Physical quiescence puts a tremendous premium upon these traits. The only escape from them in the standardized school is an activity, which is irregular and perhaps disobedient. There cannot be complete quietude in a laboratory or a workshop. The non-social character of the traditional school is seen in the fact that it erected silence into one of its prime virtues”.[4][5][6]
The single fact of making free spaces that are open to many uses, exploitation and therefore a wide range of possibilities, the setting for teaching processes, makes the idea surface and grow in children that the world is a project to tackle and develop, obviously taking into account the ties imposed by the sense of reality but also the overall opportunities these ties provide for those who want to make use of them. As Dewey, once more, highlighted “this external and physical side of activity cannot be separated from the internal side of activity; from freedom of thought, desire, and purpose”. On the grounds of these presuppositions the National Trust (http://goo.gl/gjNkHd), the important English organisation dealing with safeguarding and fostering the landscape and art history heritage of Great Britain, published a study in 2012 entitled Natural Childhood, edited by Stephen Moss (http://goo.gl/AJMv4K), a voluminous, documented recognition of the need to reconnect children not just with the external environment (the gardens near home, let’s say) but with the natural environment in the wide sense.[7]
Ornella Martini, in a recent ebook entitled Dare corpo.Idee scorrette per una buona educazione, offers some particularly interesting comments on the matter: “Freedom of movement”, writes the authoress, “creates a positive atmosphere, making people well-disposed to practicing internal freedom, and helps them to accept the experience of life with others, and to learn the fundamental rules of respect for others, for food and animals. Children and young people adhere within a very short time and with little effort to community rules for living that they are normally unaware of or do not know at all, such as all eating together, sharing food and not wasting it, keeping one’s things as tidy as possible and oneself clean”.[8]
To achieve the aims indicated in the National Trust report, the external environment must be as natural as possible, and not something sterilised to the point of preventing any possible risk. This is happening in an emblematic case recalled by Martini: “Material culture tells us of the ideas that motivate it. An example: in a popular central district of Rome, Testaccio, now become a fashionable neighbourhood, and therefore a hybridised place, with new types of inhabitants, cultured and sensitive to the rights of all individual groups, such as children to begin with, the children’s area of the garden in the square-symbol of the district has been covered with artificial grass squares. In an attempt to make it safer and more hygienic (each morning before opening, someone from the local Council runs over the whole surface with a large vacuum cleaner to dust the cracks between the squares), all natural elements have been removed, like stones, earth, dust, blades of grass, leaves, perhaps insects, of course dirty and a nuisance, and sometimes dangerous but authentic and, possibly, useful for trying out the first little tests of experience and growth in environments that are not completely synthetic.
Is external hygiene the symbol of an idea of mental hygiene?
How can this child, a modern-day Peter Pan, who really can’t manage to grow up, except in the adultising images proposed by the great market of goods and the imagination, recover the shadow, sometimes dark and black, of the fears and dangers that, without needing to be knocked down by them, help him cope with the variety and wealth of the ‘possible’?”.[9]
The result of an education that lets us be conditioned and guided by a constant feeling of danger is to for [...]
