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For eons, man has been involved in the quest for formal education, and in all of mankind’s exertions, he has been inclined to ascertain his highest intellectual capability or potential. A school environment surpasses the classroom, and is any milieu or social system that conditions the education process and improves the cognitive domain.
As obviated by the topic of this essay, it is not the school that discovers the student’s potential, but the school environment that aims to embellish those inherent capabilities and values that the student already possesses. In order to ensure that the developed quality is ones true potential, the student himself has to ascertain his potential, and focus his energies towards its enhancement. With this initiative as a framework, the role of the school environment comes into action.
Times have evolved, but little has changed on the education scene, in that the primary focus is largely academic with little care for anything else. The only school that can truly enhance ones highest potential is one that takes the holistic approach, and nurtures the entire man. A person’s optimum potential is as unique as his fingerprint or DNA. Therefore different methods must be employed to satisfy the varying educational needs of students.
Firstly, there must be a wide, personalized curriculum, that is systematized, and flexible, transcending stiff formality, allowing students to be appropriately stimulated. We must convert our classroom from its former pedagogic nature to comfortable environment that makes the students secure. Also the use of technology in class could increase student interest, thereby exposing his potential for enhancement.
Sociologist Erick Erickson agrees that students should be exposed to the “Five Intelligences”, if they are to be intellectually and socially balanced. The curriculum should therefore encompass:
• Bodily kinetics; that improves the physical, and create opportunity for the athletically inclined to shine. Their highest potential would have been enhanced.
• Intrapersonal and interpersonal relations, which fosters the growth of healthy relationships with ones self as well as with others. This ensures a sturdy communication basis on which the learning process can thrive.
• Linguistics, which formulate the vocal fabric of those individuals involved and to an extent the wider society. This actually propels the learning process, as most of it is done through spoken word.
Spatial and visual arts that unveil the artistic inclination in individuals that are so gifted.
Situational responses and the social graces, that carves mannerism patterns of individuals to the specifications of social acceptability.
Unwaveringly, I propound that such a method of instruction can enhance the development of ones highest potential. The method of lesson delivery should be pleasurably and moral enhancing, allowing the student to conceptualize logical elite entities. Besides, the techno-facilities available ensure that the student’s specific problem is diagnosed and cared for. This transforms the school environment to an arena of sheer learning and interrelation. Then, the learning process is no longer an encounter, but an experience. The school is expected to give simple applicable skills that are universal in scope and application, as the immense appetite for more ‘rounded’ individuals increase daily in the working world. This raises society’s expectations of the school environment.
For any process to be successful there has to be a balance of energy flow. The whole universe functions in this principle. There needs to be an appreciation for the teacher’s efforts, thus fuelling his urge to nurture minds. This reciprocity improves teacher student relations and makes the school environment more conducive to potential enhancement.
In aiming to enhance potential, individuality should be encouraged, at the same time; an altruistic perspective should be the esprit de corps of the environment, caring for the interest of the group, instead of sole self-aggrandizement. This is where my perspective conflicts with the present education system in Jamaica where there is one stiff curriculum that all students must conform to irrespective of their educational capabilities. This aims to achieve the impossible goal of ensuring that all the students are equally exposed. The irony is that not all students should be stimulated in a similar manner. Therefore, if the school seeks to make the curriculum more flexible and educates the entire person, the optimum potential of its students can be realized.
On graduating or completing a term of learning, not only form a formal institution, the student should be socially polished and ready to contend with the accelerated pace of modern living, not being formally trained automations, but sociable individuals who are intellectually balanced, being as the good book says; “ ...Thoroughly furnished to every good work.”
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Jamaican Crusader
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