Blog 6

3 things I learned:

1. Kindergarten is meant to be a “garden” for children to play and learn on their own. Now I realize why we had so much free time during kindergarten and always had so many play things with shapes. However, are these play things a universal thing all the children can use to learn or will schools have to have a vast majority of play things, hoping that all children find the one they would learn the best with.
2.  I had always believed that everyone would be a realistic learner like me where I learn better by observing, but now I know that there are many types of learners and should teach in a manner that caters to all types of learners.
3. The existence of existentialism, pragmatism, perennialism, essentialism, conservatism, progressivism, and social reconstructionism. I had only known about the terms idealist and realist before, never have I heard of the other terms. It goes to show that I still much to learn when it comes to education.

2 connections:

1. According to the article, I am a realist. I learn better when I am able to see what I need to do rather than having it explained to me. I had never thought about putting in terms of idealist, realist and etc in terms of learning before but now that I have read about it, it does make sense to categorize the types of learners this way. Of course not everyone would fit the one category and not the other but for the majority I believe they would fit in one of these philosophical categories.
2. When the article talks about existentialists I made the connection to people who do not finish their high school diploma to live a successful life away from the traditional academia. “The aim is to be true to oneself despite external pressures.” In this quote external pressures is the academia and to be true to oneself would be living successful lives (eudaimonia in terms of realist).

1 question:

1. The article shows us there are many different ways of thinking and how people approach education. With the many ways someone learns, why do we only group students by age and expect them to all learn through the same method at the same pace? I cannot help but think that there must be a more efficient way to group children so that they are learning at the maximum efficiency. Would it be more efficient to separate students based on their skills at each subject (ie a student would be at a grade 4 level of math but only at a level 2 at English and so on)? How about if we separate students based on how they learn (idealists, realists, and so on)? I feel that there must be more efficient ways for children to learn other than being grouped by age and getting held back a year if their knowledge is not satisfactory according to the school system set up by the government.