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, in addition to gain basic and specialised skills, we have to learn how to use our cognitive acquisitions and how to deal with unexpected and completely new challenging contexts that require an out-of-the-box mindset.
It is well known that many people experience symptoms of a new mental disease, called “information overload”. This new stage of developemnt presents new tasks in education and questions on what’s the best way to equip our children to a world that evolves at a very high speed.
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rather than filling them with an overload of notions that often become are completely insignificant or unnecessary or outdated even before they finish their school path.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 (however basic or specialised those notions may be), 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 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of children and young people at odds with the traditional contents and method of teaching is also a symptom of such an outdated and limited approach to education.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 the school system and indirectly confirm the validity of a creative approach, that is the ground of the AEL project and larger educational networks such as Waldorf schools, Democratic schools and some local realities.
Even in some official teacher training courses, it is nowadays possible to detect a certain shift that takes into account not only teaching contents and curricula but also the living actors of education: the children and their emotional and mental needs.
When this trend will become widespread and dominant, we will see a strong reduction -or even a disappearance- of mental health issues in children and teenagers as well as a decrease of the home schooling current tendency.
