Literacy, Numeracy and Creativity
"What I wanted was to create thoughtful citizens—people who believed they could live interesting lives and be productive and socially useful. So I tried to create a community of children and adults where the adults shared and respected the children’s lives."
ATTRIBUTION: Deborah Meier (b. 1931), U.S. educator. As quoted in New York magazine, p. 78 (December 21-28, 1992).
An urban educator, she co-founded the innovative Central Park East High School in the Harlem neighborhood of New York City.
Children and Being Useful
It has been my pleasure to raise two boys to young adulthood. Well, that isn't quite the story, my husband was there every step of the way.
I do like to think that our efforts were and are useful. "No learning is ever wasted", I tell our boys when they are introduced to something new. It isn't just trivia, it is knowledge. Our Rabbi likes to speak of 'ridges on the brain', and how, in their Bar Mitzvah studies she wanted to make 'deep grooves' in their brains for the knowledge they were, well, 'learning' might be a stretch, or 'being offered', was more like it.
The Rabbi contended that the more they studied, the deeper their brain ridges became and the less likely it would be that they would lose this fabulous knowledge of their direct elders, their ancestors and their people. They learned about the Hebrew language (in Hebrew), they learned about art, and historic figures and philosophy and great Jewish Art and Culture, some American, some not. They became 'men'-adults in the Jewish Community-of-the-world not just the US. And then my children were bi-lingual.
They are now both Jewish adults and have rights and responsibilities in the community. Some would call them children still, but even when they were younger than 13 and had not gone through the Bar Mitzvah process, they still had their rights and responsibilities. One of those rights was/is to creativity. Like Literacy and Numeracy, Creativity is every child's right. The right to explore, to mimic, to experiment, to internalize, to make one's own.
To learn, to impart to others, these should be the goals of every parent and every teacher of every subject. As an Administrator I oversaw the teaching of the English Language for four years. Refugees ans Immigrants of all ages came to my agency and learned to communicate in a way they had never imagined they would need just a few short years ago in their lives. Yet, they were now in New Haven, Connecticut and English was a necessity. Adults were being taught by college students young enough to be their daughters and sons. Children would not longer have to interpret for them in the doctor's office. The family was empowered to go back to the traditional roles of parent and child. Now the children could go back to being children, unburdened from the pressing-of-urgency that daily language crises bore down upon them. And then the children were bi-lingual.
There are many influences on our children. But all children learn what they are taught. One way or another, our children learn about those things that the environment brings to them. Music, Dance, Journalism, Photography- are all these things the domain of adults? No, just as my children learned of their people and their past, and my agency-children in learned in New Haven, the environment will shape how they view their futures. Please teach the Arts to our children, for it is only when they are taught will they learn.
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