‘All children carry the seed of genius’, says educator

For Mexican educator Elisa Guerra, the planet is not only going through a pandemic of coronavirus, but also through a situation of “educational emergency” – and that is why she, co-author of a recent report by UNESCO (United Nations Educational Organization, Science and Culture), has been committed to imagining the schools of the future.

“We are in a world crisis of learning disabilities according to the World Bank, UNESCO and Unicef ​​(United Nations Children’s Fund). If this isn’t an educational emergency, I don’t know what is”, Guerra tells the BBC. News Mundo (BBC Spanish service).

“All children, including those with special educational needs or some learning condition, all carry the seed of genius and have enormous potential. Their first right is to have an ideal environment for this seed to develop.”

A teacher and school founder, Guerra has already been awarded the Best Educator in Latin America and the Caribbean by the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) in 2015 and was a two-time finalist for the international Global Teacher Prize.

The UNESCO report of which she is a co-author, entitled “Reimagining our futures together: a new social contract for education”, projects “an education that redresses injustices” and that is based “on human rights and the principles of non-discrimination”. .

Check out excerpts from Elisa Guerra’s interview with BBC News Mundo.

The starting point of the report (from Unesco) is the alert for a future of uncertainties, wars, migratory crises and climate change. How to convey this to students without leaving them discouraged or indignant? I hope they feel a touch of hope. We didn’t want the document to be alarmist, fatalistic, but to create awareness while inspiring action. It is to say that we have problems, but also solutions. Global citizenship is about having the knowledge, the skills and the doing — here comes the active part, the activism. It is no longer enough to know, we have to do something about it.

How is the school of the future planned? There is a school model, organization, architecture and school grammar that are at least 150 years old and out of date.

When we talk about the need for a transformation, it is not a complete metamorphosis, but goes beyond a reform.

I like to tell teachers to imagine that we arrive at our empty schools and have to reinvent them. We’ve done this before, because our model comes from the Industrial Revolution, when many families migrated to cities to work, and schools responded to the needs of that society.

We would have to start from scratch, as if we were in the post-war period, arriving at the ruins and asking ourselves: did we rebuild the building exactly the same? Or are we going to reuse cement but make something more adapted to our reality?

To this day, students are sitting in a closed classroom, one after the other, looking at a blackboard. What would this new design look like? There is no perfect, one-size-fits-all model. The report talks about building our futures together, in the plural, because there is no single future, nor a single path.

We would have to think about what we need. For example, greater collaboration between teachers. That’s not possible if we’re stuck in a concrete cube all day and only see each other for a few minutes in the staff room between classes.

Generally speaking, I think we need the walls of the school to be much more permeable — to go out more to the community and let the community in, and also to have more flexibility within schools.

Could you give an example of this flexibility? We have a week a year where kids from all classes mingle and choose to do a workshop.

A group creates a restaurant: prepares the menu, learns how to cook, how to price the dishes. Others go into the production of a television show. Others choose medicine, learn first aid, visit hospitals, talk to doctors. Students want more projects like this.

But we teachers sometimes run into obstacles: these innovations are not viable, they are not on the agenda, they are not supported by science.

When the first coronavirus vaccines were developed, they were given emergency authorization to be used until the studies were completed. We are in a world crisis of learning disabilities according to the World Bank, Unesco and Unicef. If this isn’t an educational emergency, I don’t know what is.

At no time in history have schools been so threatened, suffered and under so much setback. One crisis on top of another. If we have ideas and want to apply them, can’t we give an emergency authorization?

During the pandemic, the room was transformed into a virtual class. The report you participated in warns of the risks of education having links with profitable companies, which use our data, and proposes a digital public system for education. What is your opinion on this? I don’t disagree with the use of platforms, which in our case helped us a lot. We have to stop looking at them with determinism: if we like them, that’s great, if not, we’re not going to use them.

We can think of ways to be inclusive without violating our rights.

Technological solutionism, the idea that digital will eliminate all problems, is also criticized. Technology has to be at the service of pedagogy, not the other way around.

How to captivate children today? We underestimate our children’s cognitive ability and potential, even though we have made progress in applying neuroscience findings to the classroom.

Children have tremendous linguistic potential that has not been translated into reading. We teach them to read at age six because it suits us better as a system: they can sit in a room, be quiet longer, stay away from their parents without crying, and pay attention in large groups under the care of a single teacher.

But children can learn to read earlier. Not in the way we taught at six, it’s just that we’re so used to a pattern that we continue to do it, even if it’s no longer ideal.

Homework is a controversial topic. One complaint is about the time required: after some seven hours at school, which is roughly equivalent to a day’s work, the kids still have homework. What is your view on this? If the goal is to create the habit of studying in the afternoon, it shouldn’t take more than an hour.

Often these tasks are not used to strengthen knowledge, but to cover what was not achieved in the classroom, which is neither the student’s nor the teacher’s fault. It can be the school organization, the curricular overload.

And the penalties? First, let’s change the name, perhaps to “consequences”. Let’s focus on repairing the damage.

In each community there must be rules of coexistence, but also some flexibility to consider the unique situations of each student.

The consequences cannot be doing more homework, reading longer, or not having recess. This is counterproductive, because studying or reading becomes a punishment, something horrible that you only do when you are asked to do so.

And how do we give the opportunity to face the consequences and repair the damage? When someone is speeding and a traffic officer stops them, a ticket is issued and they have to be paid. End of situation. The guard doesn’t start yelling at us, but we often do with the kids. If they are already emotionally upset and we overreact, we are adding to the problem. It is necessary to investigate what is happening with the child and provide support.

What should be the rights of children by 2050, in this future that we try to visualize? All of them, including those with special educational needs or some learning condition, all children carry the seed of genius and have enormous potential. Your first right is to have an ideal environment for this seed to develop.

This potential is different for everyone, but our responsibility as educators and parents is to create an environment that nurtures them and that also allows us, as adults, to develop.

We cannot think of education as a period of life that ends when you leave school with a degree. It is something that lasts for a lifetime.

Another right of children is that both their parents and their teachers continue to learn, that they become better at guiding and supporting them. There is also the right of access to school, to technologies that favor learning, the right to find both at home and at school an environment free of violence – a welcoming environment.

This text was originally published here