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A Key to Your Child's Success
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16831 |
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Section : |
LIFE
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| Issue
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9 / 1989 |
2,081 Words |
| Author
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Steve Kaplan
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Parents concerned about building their children's creative potential and sense of self-esteem should not look to schools to achieve this. Most American schools try to fit the many-shaped pegs (the students) into the square holes of a rigid mathematical-linguistic curriculum. Standardized tests that rate how "smart" a student is inevitably emphasize math and language skills, ignoring an entire range of other talents. American schools, by and large, test and prepare children for an extremely narrow range of abilities and interests.
It is impossible to guess how many future geniuses are being discouraged by today's school system and how much future creating is being stifled. Edison, Mozart, Picasso, Olivier, Lucille Ball, and Baryshnikov would probably be considered failures if they entered our school system today, because their particular talents lie outside the mathematical-linguistic scale. Albert Einstein, who failed classes in school, once wrote, "It is nothing short of a miracle that modern methods of instruction have not yet entirely strangled the holy curiosity of inquiry." There is a growing recognition, though, of the damage done to children by squeezing them all through the same educational mold. Across the country, experimental schools are looking for new and better ways to teach children so as to maintain their natural curiosity and creativity.
What is perhaps the nation's most ambitious and exciting educational experiment is taking place in an undistinguished schoolhouse located in a lower-middle-class neighborhood in central Indianapolis. Eight teachers banded together in 1986 to form Key Elementary School, founded on the proposition that children are multidimensional beings whose interests and talents extend beyond learning multiplication tables and verb conjugations. In fact, say Key School teachers, those skills represent only two of seven very distinct "intelligences" inherent in every human being.
The seven intelligences theory originated with Harvard psychologist Howard Gardner, who postulates that individuals draw on different innate abilities to process information and solve problems. Linguistic abilities and logical-mathematical talents are only two kinds of intelligence. Others include musical, interpersonal, intrapersonal, spatial, and bodily kinesthetic intelligences. It is the combination of these abilities that makes the person, says Gardner.
Key School attempts to encourage children in all their intelligences, thus helping them find their areas of greatest competence and build their self-respect. To facilitate this the school has designed a class schedule that gives equal emphasis to each intelligence and encourages cross-subject synthesis.
"This is not like a school from the sixties, where everyone gets to do whatever they want," says Pat Bolonos, Key School principal. "We have a very disciplined schedule for our kindergarten through sixth-grade children."
The school day is divided into thirteen periods, most of which last forty minutes. Each day begins with stretching exercises, followed by physical education class and music lessons. All Key students study the violin until fourth grade, after which they're allowed to select another instrument, if they want. All students study Spanish for twenty minutes a day. Among the other classes on the schedule are relatively
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