We live in a time when cognitive skills alone are less relevant than how people can manage their skills and knowledge in challenging contexts.
In fact, we are no longer in the Age of Enlightenment when the target of making knowledge available to everyone was a great progressive aim, but in a stage of civilisation when we have to deal with unexpected and completely new challenging contexts that require an out-of-the-box mindset.
Rather than acquiring more information we need to learn how to manage those information and our cognitive skills. It is well known that many people experience symptoms of a new mental disease, called “information overload”. We are well into the stage when we need to learn how to manage the available knowledge as well as our individual talents.
From my own work experiences -in software and education- I had continuously called for attention on how our children are capable to use their cognitive skills rather than filling them with an overload of notions that often become are completely insignificant or unnecessary or outdated even before they finish their school path.
One of the reasons that led me to choose to become teacher in Waldorf education was exactly this point: in modern times we don’t shape the intelligence of young people by hammering old notions into their brain, but by taking care of a balanced development across the whole spectrum of human faculties and using the various teaching contents as sparks to activate the those innate talents.
Education should be a journey of exploration into the realm of humanity, not about fixing standards or stereotypes to which every child has to conform.
The current increase of children and young people at odds with the traditional contents and method of teaching is also a symptom of such an outdated and limited approach to education.
Only fifty years ago was unthinkable to take into consideration an intelligence that was not connected with intellectual cognition. All the efforts were addressed to shape “intelligence” through a direct inoculation of academic notions.
Nowadays it seems a narrow mind not to take into consideration the existence of multiple intelligence, emotional intelligence, creative thinking and a general personal development that can be nourished through artistic and creative activities. In such a new perspective, language learning has a prominent role and can provide an organic path to a balanced human-centred education.
I feel very glad that what we have observed over the years in our small universe of AEL students, is basically detected in scientific researches that directly call for changes in school system and indirectly confirm the validity of a creative approach such as our in AEL project.
