Human-Centred Education

A practical handbook and guide

Scherto Gill, Garrett Thomson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781315454191
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Human-Centred Education (HCE) radically rethinks the aims of education, the nature of learning, and the relationship between individuals in schools. This accessible guide presents a HCE approach to schooling and includes a variety of rich pedagogical examples. It provides practical suggestions as to how the approach might be adopted as a whole-school initiative, or else woven into particular aspects of existing school life, including the curriculum, classroom culture and feedback for learning. This handbook also illustrates how holistic educational practices, found in some alternative schools, can be introduced fruitfully into the state educational system with step-by-step guidance on how to integrate HCE into teacher training and school governance.

HCE is more than a set of inflexible pedagogical prescriptions or a recipe of lesson plans. It originates from the fundamental values of care, positive relationships and well-being. National education policies tend to ignore deeper educational processes, such as the cultivation of qualities that are central to living meaningfully and well, because they focus on measured, high-stakes academic performance. HCE is an effective antidote to this, and brings to the fore a more human-centred approach without sacrificing academic standards.

Current secondary teachers, members of school management and leadership teams, as well as those currently undertaking teacher training will all benefit from reading this important book.

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Chapter 1

Introduction to human-centred education

Overview

In this chapter, we will explain briefly the core principles of human-centred education (HCE). We will preview

• the main ideas of human-centred education;

• the nature of a human-centred learning community;

• the human-centred approach to curriculum;

• human-centred pedagogy;

• learning feedback and review (instead of assessment);

• implementing human-centred education in schools.

These headings are used to organise the handbook so that school leaders, teachers, parents and students can understand the vision and ethos of HCE and acquire the know-how to apply such principles in their day-to-day practices within a school. Each of these distinct elements is elaborated in further practical detail in its own part of the handbook. For the moment in this first chapter, the aim is simply to present the ideas. Finally, towards the end of this chapter, we will discuss in general terms how schools might put these ideas into practice and give an overview of the implementation processes.

Some teachers will be familiar with the ideas advocated in this chapter and will be already putting into practice some of the practical proposals advanced later in the book. The idea that schools should serve the development of young persons is not new, and teachers have been helping students bloom for many years. This book, however, lays out a compelling new vision for the secondary schooling system based on principles for which we argue. In other words, we aim to articulate a well-reasoned, systemic alternative to the standard approach, which will weave together some old ideas into new patterns. For readers who are interested in the argumentation for the claims made in this introductory chapter, please see part I of Rethinking Secondary Education (Gill and Thomson, 2012). In this chapter, we simply explain the main conclusions concerning a human-centred approach. We won’t discuss them academically. This work is a manual and not a tract.

Human-centred education: the main ideas

The idea of HCE has four main strands. The first concerns the aims of education; the second, the character of educational processes; the third, the nature of learning; and the fourth, the needs of students.

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Aims

Educational activities have three general kinds of aim. Education should be geared at the following:

1 various kinds of social ends (such as economic growth);

2 academic ends (such as understanding how cells multiply);

3 the development of the individual.

The fundamental aim of education should be the development of the person as a human being understood in terms of her well-being and flourishing. This aim is paramount over two other general educational aims: academic and social ends. Human flourishing takes priority over the needs of socio-economic institutions and of academic standards, ultimately because such institutions and standards exist to serve human life. People have primary value amongst all other things of value, such as novels, factories, companies, cars and toys. This means that the living of life has primary intrinsic value. Other values are derivative. However, this doesn’t mean that the development of the individual always precedes other educational aims in all circumstances. Nevertheless, it does mean that, whenever conflicts exist between the aims, the development of the person will take the lead in shaping the standards defined by other objectives.

Secondary education ought to be directed towards the development of the individual as a whole. Such holistic development typically points in two directions at once: outwardly towards caring for people, causes and things of value beyond oneself, and reflexively towards greater self-awareness and self-direction. Thus, it involves both greater engagement with the world and greater care and responsibility for oneself. ‘Holistic development’ includes a person’s emotions and motivation and is not simply a way to perform better academically. It also means that the person’s cognitive development will be contextualised as being integral to their overall growth rather than simply as a way to attain academic goals, which may make little sense to a young person.

Processes

The second strand to HCE is based on the principle that human life has primary intrinsic value and shouldn’t be instrumentalised. We instrumentalise when we treat something that has intrinsic value as if it merely had instrumental value.

This is a profound mistake inherent in everyday conceptions of rationality. Normally, we think that only the goals of our activities have intrinsic value and that the means to those goals are merely instrumentally valuable. This way of thinking identifies intrinsic value with goals, and means with instrumental value. We can call this way of thinking ‘instrumental rationality’ or ‘means–ends thinking’, according to which we should always be efficient in achieving our goals by minimising the means.

This conception has a disastrous implication. It implies that we should treat all our goal-directed actions as merely instrumentally valuable in relation to our goals. Essentially, it means that all our activities are costs. Because efficiency requires that we should always reduce those costs, this implies disastrously that we should minimise our activities. Think about what this signifies for learning. According to instrumental rationality, the activity of learning is a cost that we bear for the sake of certain goals and which, as such, should be reduced to a minimum. Clearly, such a way of thinking cannot acknowledge that learning is an activity valuable for its own sake even though it has goals. It cannot recognise the value of learning for its own sake.

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Through such reflections, we reach the important conclusion that this instrumental way of thinking cannot recognise the intrinsic value of learning as an activity. This conclusion can be generalised to all activities: instrumental rationality cannot recognise the intrinsic value of any goal-directed activity. This is because it mistakenly treats the goal as the sole source of value. It misunderstands the value relationship between lived processes and goals.

Unfortunately, instrumental rationality is rife in contemporary society. In education, it implies that the activity of learning only has value because of its goals. In sharp contrast, HCE rejects the claim that all values should be conceived in terms of instrumental rationality. Such a claim would instrumentalise all lived activities and processes. HCE rejects the instrumentalisation of human life. This has several implications.

First, it means that time at school is a lived human experience and is an important part of a young person’s current life. As such, it is valuable as an end in itself. Adolescence is not merely a preparation for adult life. Therefore, respecting the young person as a human being implies not treating adolescence mainly as a time to prepare for joining a nation’s workforce and contributing to the economy. It involves taking the lived experience of adolescents more seriously, and designing educational institutions that provide a culture and space for young people to enjoy this special time of life.

Second, it means avoiding seeing young people simply as empty vessels to be filled with knowledge in order to attain grades. Furthermore, the culture of a human-centred school will transcend interactions that are defined solely by roles. Roles are goal-defined functions. We are more than such functions and the culture of a human-centred school would recognise this. In this way, such a school would constitute a learning community, which we will explain in Chapter 2. In short, a human-centred educational culture would not be dominated by roles and ratings.

Third, human-centred educative processes will encourage the young people to take ownership of the learning or development they undertake. Such processes cannot be forced because they involve a person’s sense of self, but they do need to be guided. All of this requires that the curriculum allocate sufficient time and the proper kind of space in order that young people can develop such ownership.

Thus, the HCE vision calls for an explicit shift from schools as controlled spaces for receiving instruction to schools as humanising learning communities. This vision will guide the planning, design and nurturing of learning communities, and place quality-based processes of personal development at the core of the curriculum. It transforms the nature of pedagogy and of learning feedback.

The nature of learning

A human-centred approach challenges the standard dictionary definition of learning as the acquisition of knowledge and skills. This view needs (at least) to be supplemented with the idea of learning to be; that is, to have qualities or non-moral virtues. These include character traits, such as the capacity to care for others and integrity, as well as qualities related to understanding such as curiosity, persistence and patience. These virtues or qualities are more than knowledge and skills; they involve caring about the right things in the right way.

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We argue that knowledge and skills are only meaningful for a person’s life insofar as they pertain to relevant non-moral virtues or qualities. Without the relevant virtues, knowledge and skills mean little. Consider what it is to be a historian or a biologist, a carpenter or a systems designer. In each case, the role is defined by caring about the right things in the right way; the skills and knowledge flow from those.

The same applies to being a person. Since the main aim of secondary education is to help young people self-develop, the qualities they need can be defined primarily in terms of living a flourishing human life. The virtues or qualities form part of the valuable features of our way of being. So they include the kinds of caring that are appropriate for the full range of our way of being. As beings who are self-aware, capable of rationality, who connect with others, who feel emotions, who have moral sentiments and aesthetic sensibilities – as such beings – to live well, we need to care in appropriate ways. In short, if education is to be centred on human flourishing and well-being, then its main aim will be the development of the person as a whole, which requires the acquisition of a host of relevant virtues or ways of caring.

As such, a human-centred approach will be directed explicitly towards the relevant qualities through processes of personal development. The idea of learning as a cultivation of qualities is already inherent in existing educational practices such as professional and vocational training. Even academic learning involves implicitly the nurturing of virtues. A scientist cares about the way experiments are designed, data is interpreted and theories are constructed. He or she cares deeply about some aspect of the natural world. Likewise, a historian will care about some period in the past and about how it should be described given documentary and other evidence. In each academic discipline, we learn to care.

The kinds of qualities or virtues that we need in academic, vocational, business and professional endeavours often overlap with those we require for everyday living. There is here, then, a huge underlying common ground and an immense synergy that characterises human-centred education. However, the fostering of qualities is often only implicit or indirect in mainstream education, and this is in part because qualities cannot easily be measured or tested. Test-driven instruction drives out mentorship.

In many educational processes in secondary schools, the nurturing of virtues is often only implicit and indirect. In the human-centred approach, we make it explicit and direct. Therefore, HCE will be designed explicitly for learning, defined (in part) as the nurturing of desirable personal qualities that are essential for a person to live a flourishing life.

Such qualities might typically include:

• being curious, inquisitive and reflective, having the motivation for inquiries and learning, and having the aptitudes and capacities to carry out investigations, to analyse and to draw meaningful conclusions from evidence. This will also include having an open mind, being able to listen to others, and to critically accept those who follow other traditions or have dissimilar lifestyles;

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• caring about connecting well with other people, to love and to commit to friendship and relationships. This involves knowing how to understand other people and how to deal with their feelings of anger, fear and sadness. It also involves being able to apply ethical considerations in one’s decision-making, and being willing and knowing how to contribute to the well-being of others, for instance, by being compassionate and forgiving;

• caring for things of value beyond oneself, such as social justice and the betterment of the world, and having strong commitment to truth, beauty and goodness;

• caring about thinking independently, creatively, critically and systematically, and being motivated to apply sound reasoning in formulating questions and developing ideas. This will also require being sensitive to the nuances and implications of language for the sake of both one’s own thinking and communication with others;

• having strong self-understanding, including of one’s own emotions, dispositions, talents and interests ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Human-Centred Education
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Boxes
• List of Tables
• Introduction
• 1 Introduction to Human-Centred Education
• 2 Nurturing Learning Communities
• 3 A Framework for a Human-Centred Curriculum
• 4 Human-Centred Pedagogy
• 5 Human-Centred Approach to Educational Evaluation
• 6 Becoming a Human-Centred Educator
• 7 Educational Governance
• 8 Integrating Human-Centred Education
• Appendices
• Bibliography
• Index