Pause • Reflect • Sundays on Pianodao
Written by ANDREW EALES
The rather stark title of this week’s Fermata post comes from a quote found in a book written by two of the world’s leading education experts:
“We have piled onto our children stress upon stress, pressure upon pressure, standardised test upon standardised test.
There is no evidence that this has helped our children’s learning or their futures, but we keep doing it, year after year, to millions upon millions of children the world over.
We have done this helplessly, almost involuntarily, like the victims of some sort of hypnotism, like people in a dream, like lemmings heading for the sea…
This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense, for any society or for any child; it is childhood hanging on a cliff of sorrow.”
Pasi Sahlberg & William Doyle: Let the Children Play
(2019, Oxford University Press)
Assuming we respect the research, expertise and authority of Sahlberg and Doyle, as so many leading international organisations and educationalists do, then the strength of their impassioned plea will command our immediate and undivided attention.
Continue reading ‘Hanging on a Cliff of Sorrow’