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School Philosophy | Page 1 |
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Tempo School's Fundamental Principles
Teaching and Learning
the basic principle of the school which
derives its name - TEMPO - from the initials of the Latin expression
of this principle Education of children is primarily the right, responsibility, and duty of parents. No system of education for a free people will ever be successful until parents reassume their age-old role as educators of their own children. Parents have given up this function and have abandoned most of their responsibilities to the school and teacher. More and more, schools and teachers have accepted this state of affairs until they themselves are actually helping to remove from parents all remaining responsibility for educating their children. Tempo School does not acquiesce in this reversal of function. Parents of children attending the school must play their part in actually teaching their children. The school does not merely ask parents to assist the school in supervising homework. On the contrary, it is not the parents who are to help the school but the school which is to help the parents. The school can instruct the children and guide parents in method
and curriculum - but the parents must themselves be active and
responsible. the second fundamental principle of this
school Education is a word with a vast connotation. Truly, it includes mental, moral, physical and aesthetic development of the person. School, on the other hand, is a word with a much narrower definition covering only one aspect of the total process of education. Traditionally it is limited to the formal learning aspect. But, in the process of abdicating responsibility, parents today have allowed and invited the school to widen its scope until it is now being expected to educate the child completely - mentally, morally, physically and aesthetically. But the school is only one agency in the whole process of learning. It exists - or should exist - only to assist parents in one aspect of education - to teach the child how to learn. A free society has many facets - government, societies, social and service organizations, clubs of all sorts. Each one of these should play its part in assisting parents to educate children. Moral, physical, and aesthetic education are all extremely important in the whole business of learning but they are not primarily the school's responsibility. Certainly they are involved in schooling - but they are not primary objectives. The modern school has failed largely because it has attempted to take on the job of educating the "whole child" - spreading itself too thin in the process. To educate the whole child is the parents' job. Parents must call upon many agencies for assistance. The school is one of these - but only one. And its task is, first of all, an intellectual one. Not to teach children to be bookworms but to teach them to learn for themselves. Why do parents not teach their own children? Modern parents seem generally unable to give their children formal instruction in intellectual fields. Why? Two reasons may be advanced: Subject matter unfamiliar or too advanced - for example, advanced mathematics; Pressure of other duties - the mother with a large family, the father away most of the day or the "working mother".
There is no good reason why literate parents cannot teach their children to read, write, spell and figure. The difficulties of teaching reading, for example, have been highly exaggerated. As a matter of fact, they are due mostly to the illogical nature of the methods now in use in most schools. Pressure of other duties? If it really required five hours or more to teach children the three R's, then of course few parents could find the time to teach their children. But suppose the school could organize instruction so that much less than five hours a day is needed for formal instruction in the three R's. Suppose it could guide parents as to methods of supervising further learning and organized study? Then it could well be that most parents could reassume many of the tasks now being undertaken by the school. This is the aim of Tempo school.
All aspects of education are important. Art and aesthetics, for example, are indispensable for a full life. But it is utterly unrealistic to suppose that one school should instruct in all these fields. It is even more unrealistic to expect teachers to double as artists. Craft, vocational arts, and home economics are all important facets of education. Many parents are perfectly competent to deal with them at home. For those who feel they are not, facilities should be made available for their children. They should be first-class facilities with sufficient time under competent instructors and not watered-down tag ends of a school curriculum.
This is the intellectual aim of the school and the one which modern education has neglected. It does not mean to teach a child a mass of distinct subjects nor to make him a bookworm. It does mean to help him to learn how to use his intelligence. But we must not fall into a trap. Modern educators have made much of "teaching the child to think critically." If this means to learn to use his intelligence logically and accurately and to learn how to learn for himself, then of course it is the proper aim of schooling. But in order to do this an extensive body of knowledge on which the intelligence can operate is absolutely indispensable. "Critical thinking" too often seems to have become a vague sort of "attitude" to be instilled into a student without any solid body of knowledge - nothing to think critically about! In this case the term not only degenerates into a mere catchword but it represents a habit and attitude which is actually inimical to learning. top...
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