students for kindergarten.
Then kindergarten prepares students for first grade. First grade prepares for second grade, and so forth. Eventually, high school prepares students for college and college prepares them
for grad school. When do we prepare students for life, for work, for family? The curriculum and standardized testing encourage teaching in this way and administrators have focused on the curriculum and on “teaching” in their meetings and in training their staff. There is little mention of “learning”. Administrators are required to evaluate teachers at least once a year on their “teaching.” Years ago, I heard Madeline Hunter speak at Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff, AZ. There she said that it really doesn’t matter what the teacher does if the students, as they leave the classroom, say “Boy, I sure learned a lot today.” Her point was that the focus should be on learning more than on teaching.
In my elementary school, band instruments were introduced to us in fourth grade. I chose the clarinet because the man from the music store called it a “licorice stick.” I played in the band all through my intermediate grades and through college, changing my major from physics to music education in my sophomore year. And I feel that was because in music I was “doing.” I was making music, not just learning about it, and I was making music with others at the same time. Together we were making something that made sense.
I was in the middle of the American educational model, having completed college and graduate school and perhaps not learned a lot in school, but having learned quite a lot out of school when suddenly I was immersed into a completely different culture.
Over 50 years ago I came to the Hopi Indian
Reservation in Arizona, where the culture and values are different from mainstream America. Yet I found the education system being imposed on the Hopi by both the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) and the public schools to be the same as that being used elsewhere throughout the country. That system prepared people to vote when few Hopi voted, and most were unaware of political issues outside their local environment. It also prepared them for factory or sales jobs when there were no factories and few stores hiring employees on the Hopi Reservation. It seemed the educational system on Hopi was preparing students for a life off-reservation, forcing them to move to larger towns for work that fit their training, rather than preparing them for life on the reservation.
The question that many of us at Hotevilla-Bacavi Community School (HBCS), where I worked, became “What are we doing in education that helps the Hopi people and are there other programs or ways of teaching that would be better?” We began to look at what is important to the Hopi people and how they learned naturally. A National Humanities Scholar visited the school and told us about the three learning environments that we all use. First is the formal-in-school, the classroom where the teacher leads the students and “talks at” them. The second is the formal
It seemed the educational system on Hopi was preparing students for a life off-reservation, forcing them to move to larger towns for work that fit their training, rather than preparing them for life on the reservation.
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