Education and Child Development (ePub)

My experience as a schoolgirl and teenager in the underprivileged neighborhoods of argenteuil made me deeply indignant: i saw our education system stifle the light and the unique talents of many comrades every year. Many then found themselves in great difficulty at school. I felt already an unacceptable number of children in this situation, but i was still far from imagining the figure given by the 2007 report of the high council for education: "each year, four school children out of ten, that is approximately 300 000 pupils leave cm2 with serious shortcomings: nearly 200,000 of them have weak and insufficient skills in reading, writing and arithmetic; more than 100,000 lack basic skills in these areas. […] their shortcomings will prevent these students from pursuing a normal schooling in college. This proportion was confirmed in the 2012 report. Thus, each year, 40% of our children enter college with very great fragilities.

This surprising figure mainly denounces, in my opinion, the fact that our educational system does not take into account the natural mechanisms of human learning. Our school is essentially based on traditions, intuitions or values, but not - or very little - on knowledge of the laws of learning. It also ignores the main principles of fulfillment. This is quite understandable since cognitive psychology and neuroscience, which study how human beings learn and develop, are relatively recent. And, due to a lack of information, we made many mistakes: the school environment and the demands we addressed to children are most of the time unsuited to their way of functioning, and although wired to learn effortlessly, they struggle in class and lose confidence in themselves. Their teachers, determined to help them, are also exhausted.

As long as we impose on our children a system of learning that does not consider the natural levers of their mind, we will place them in situations that generate great suffering. Teachers will also continue to work in extremely difficult conditions: they will have to constantly push demotivated children and end their days exhausted. Imagine driving a car in fifth gear with the handbrake on. The car does not move forward, emits strange noises; you try in vain to have it repaired at different garages, but you have to face the facts, the machine is malfunctioning, it clearly lacks power. Remove the handbrake, and you'll be amazed at the power of the motor and the quality of the trip. In the same way, we are constantly holding back our children's powerful learning ability with inappropriate methods. They learn with difficulty; we think they need outside help, and we take them to specialists, themselves overwhelmed by the increasing number of children they have to take care of. Provide them with a suitable classroom environment, and the vast majority of them will surprise you with how quickly, easily and joyfully they will suddenly be able to learn.