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One of the first things we learn at school is that learning means being still.
At primary school it’s about sitting on your bottom and not fiddling with your pencil. Walking not running, and putting your hand up before you speak. Staying in your chair, even when you’re desperate to crawl under the table or lie on the floor.
At secondary school it carries on. Some schools insist that young people track the teacher with their eyes, and won’t allow them to reach into their bag for a water bottle without asking. Every move is choreographed and on command. They say this maximises learning.
We tell children that to learn they need to listen, and to listen they need to keep still. That’s particularly hard for children, and so a lot of their energy is spent trying to conform with that. For some, it’s much harder, and they get in trouble for bouncing and jumping. The movement bursts out of them, and we tell them they can’t learn like that.
It’s not true. If you watch children learning out of school, they move and twirl and jump. They lie on the floor whilst listening to stories and hang off the monkey bars whilst they think. They ask unexpected questions at inconvenient times. They make new connections whilst sitting on the toilet, bouncing on the trampoline or when watching TV. They run around and then come back to story. They express their feelings through their body.
Schools need to control children’s bodies to manage large numbers, but that doesn’t mean that stillness is the best way to learn. As adults, many of us must work hard to reconnect to our bodies. We’ve learnt to ignore our urge to move and we can’t understand why we feel so terrible after hours at a desk.
The things we learn at school run deep. But learning is about connection, not disconnection, and we can’t leave our bodies out of that.
Let’s reclaim our right to be active.
We need to move to learn, and that goes both for our children and ourselves. | Posted on 30/Aug/2024 04:01:02
