Our society considers that schooling, and more specifically, the educational model current in Spain, it is valid and correct. Not all voices think this way. Whatever the final conclusion we get to know these opinions and other experiences in educational matters is very revealing. In the book that I present to you "Educational Manifesto" by Íñigo Flórez de Losada, with a foreword by Mathew Appleton, former Summerhill professor and Reichian therapist, it is stated that, in the author's opinion, our education system has many negative consequences on the development of children.
The vision of this work gives much to talk about, and surely many parents and teachers disagree. However, it has helped me to ask myself if some of the routines of Early Childhood Education are positive. Marking the obligation to make chips, putting "pegative faces" as tasks are done correctly, keeping children doing chips if they want to play or the famous thinking chair are things that I think do not benefit the little ones at all .
Above all, I think it is positive to know other visions about education so that, while our children are young, choose the one that is most trustworthy.
In this work the author points out that our children are forced daily and for years to spend many hours of the day without play, sitting. They are told that they must study in a theoretical way, things that they do not want to learn at that time, enclosed in a program of knowledge that they do not choose.
To this is added the constant threat of suspense if they do not study or do their homework and to the competitiveness that the exams. Master classes and textbooks mark what they have to learn and what they are examined, in a fixed data and ideas system in which their spirit of criticism or personal research is excluded. All this has an influence on their lives and the way they face the world. What are these consequences? Are they really positive?
The prologue explains how other education systems are possible and have been developed successfully in other countries for years ... The manifesto is made up of nineteen parts, each of which is built around a key concept, which we explain in the blog of Crimentales:
1.-The system: The price that students pay for submitting to the system's veleities is the loss of their freedom, their own ability to decide and, worst of all, their own childhood ... 2.- Need and importance of the game: By not allowing children to play, we make them believe that playing is bad. That makes them believe that their natural instincts and themselves are bad. And that creates a tremendous conflict that is very difficult to detect and resolve. As they grow, we steal from the children their playtime. We call that schooling ... 3.- Fear and repression: Children are constantly and strongly threatened that, if they do not study and do not approve, they will not be anything tomorrow or they will starve to death. From very young we are implanting all kinds of fears so that they obey ... 4.- Arrogance: The Western world is presumptuous, unsupportive and vain because it is being educated in those values. These values are not taught in the subjects, they are acquired by students simply because they are imprisoned within the system. 5.- Humor: The mental health of a child is directly proportional to how well he has a good time and how much he enjoys life. Exactly the same as with the mental health of adults. 6.- Truths and lies: Traditional education, all based on supposedly scientific deceptions and lies, produces adults who lie chronically and compulsively. 7.- Energy: Children become lazy to the extent that, on an ongoing basis, we force them to inhibit and repress their energies. And this we usually do in three ways intertwined with each other: the first is not letting them play; the second is forcing them to study things they don't want to study; and the third is preventing them from learning what they want to learn. Any of them is bad, the combination of the three is fatal. 8.- Time: To overwhelm students with subjects, subjects and subjects, setting deadlines and fixed dates for their examination and learning, is the masterpiece of a madman. 9.- Confidence and participation: The more confidence we have in the child, the better we will let him educate himself. 10.- Study plans: Children naturally know what they want to learn, but they become confused and doubt themselves when adults tell them that, before paying for what they want, they have to learn what we want them to learn. That, all he does is put an insurmountable ocean that separates and separates the person from his own interests and ideals. 11.- Exams: To promote the idea of competitiveness in children is to promote the artificial idea that some are destined to win and others to lose. And as long as we continue dramatizing and staging that way of thinking we will continue to have a huge amount of losers, since the system is designed to win only a select few. 12.- Individualized teaching: Teaching does not accept the fact that students are different from each other; that is why he tries uselessly to treat them and measure them all under the same standard and under the same parameters. That demonstrates the great ignorance in which the teaching is mired. 13 .- Data: Children do not stop learning by an act of will, but because they fall dejected by the huge tangle of data, with which they are daily bombarded in the classroom. 14.- Theory and practice: For children the practice is prior to the theory. Children learn things by practicing with them. They learn a language, or two at a time, based on listening and speaking, without needing to study any theory. They learn to ride a bicycle or play the piano in the same way. They do not need theories to learn. 15.- Results: In a repressive and / or competitive education like ours, the most submissive student usually ends up becoming the most repressive. The model student is simply a servant of the system. 16.- School failure: Education classifies students as good, bad, and heap. This classifying mania has two relevant aspects to highlight: One is the compulsive activity of having to classify students into categories, and the other are the parameters so random and disastrous that they are used to carry out such classifications. 17.- Control and manipulation: Human beings are born sincere and honest. It is the education we receive that is responsible for becoming manipulators. 18.- A better world: The first requirement that is needed to change something is the will to do it. The rest is rolled.
