Grow by Learning

It is impossible to straighten a crooked tree and turn a forest covered on all sides with bushes into a fruit garden. Johann Amos Comenius

Comenius imagined people as trees in a garden. According to him, such trees should be cared for from a young age and it should be done sensibly. This is how trees can be made to thrive. The garden, in turn, can be seen as both a place where one learns and a time when one learns. For the first six years, the gardener in such a garden is the parent, who is to make an educated effort to keep the tree growing and to keep it safe. After a time, an educated gardener joins the parental care. He, too, has the best interests of the children in mind, and so he also thinks of their protection. He joins the parents in the hope that they will transplant into his garden the little tree that they helped to grow in its first years of life in an instructed, and therefore sensible, way. He assumes that he will be helping a little tree that has not grown without interest. He expects a tree that - though still small and vulnerable - bears fruit. It does not yet bear much, but it already bears tasty fruit grown in the garden. And these are tastier than the fruit of a wild tree that grows without interest and thus without protection.

Comenius thought about useful things that help children in learning. This is especially why we recognise him today as the revered discoverer of the teaching profession. However, Comenius - like many other discoverers - could not in his lifetime have explored in detail all that he really discovered. Let us take a principle that probably everyone knows: we speak differently to a five-year-old than to a young man in his teens. We talk differently and about different things. If a five-year-old addresses us informally, we are not surprised. We don't ask him about travel plans. With a fifteen-year-old we can already discuss the details of a future trip. Nothing happens if we ask about the territory or a map during the conversation. We don't expect the youngster to address us informally in the very first sentence. Both what the parent and the teacher are to talk about with the child, and the language in which they are to do so, according to Comenius, must be derived from the time the child has lived so far. Hence the principle that the gardener should respect the age of the tree he is caring for, so that he can grow together with it trees which are thus the same: equally immature and equally undeveloped.

It is not difficult to imagine two trees of approximately the same age. Even two trees of the same age and species can look fundamentally different. Even an inexperienced eye can detect the differences between them. One tree may be stretching in all directions, the other just standing with its branches drooping. The former has a dense crown, the latter a barely sparse one. The first is happy to be in the world, the second is bitterly hard to survive: one child learns easily, quickly, and gladly; the other learns indeed, but harder, more slowly, or reluctantly. One child is curious and bright; the other, though not stupid, improves only slowly, laboriously, and in the short term. From such differences one can guess how well this or that sapling has grown and where it has grown to. Perhaps these differences can be seen most clearly at two moments: when a sapling is brought from the parent garden into one common garden, and when a mature tree tries to transplant itself into the open countryside. Shouldn't the starting point for gardener's useful work, therefore, be something other than the number of years a tree has survived? Could it not, for example, be the growth of the tree over a period of time? Is it possible to study and increase the rate of such growth? Is it enough to study such growth only at the time the tree is growing in the garden? Or should it be a strategy based on a lifelong study and evaluation of this development? These are also questions that the Renaissance scholar could not have asked himself: after all, he had just discovered a remarkable territory of scientific investigation and had only begun to draw the first maps.

The adult tree is to live outside the garden. It should live on its own, it should be resilient, it should continue to grow, and it should grow without the help of a gardener. Comenius could not count on learning to continue beyond the tidy fence of the school garden. The world in his time changed only slowly; from the perspective of today, his world was rigidly slow, almost motionless. Today we hear routinely about the need to learn in adulthood. We don't even pause when someone says that we need to learn all our lives. It's just - how are we as adults supposed to nurture our perceptions and thinking when we are beset on all sides by a bush of manipulative strategies, dubious claims, escalating emotions and distracting stimuli? In this opaque thicket, how do we arrange to teach today's children to face the new threats that the 21st century brings with it? How do we proceed so that children can see that today they have stronger roots, a stronger trunk and a more branched crown than yesterday? How to teach them to perceive their learning progress and to continuously evaluate their thinking and cognitive development? How to get them to take an interest in their learning and to see the learning ability as a key attribute of theirs that they will take care of themselves from a certain point on? Finally, how should they be influenced to accept their school time as a crucial but only the first stage of a lifelong learning journey?

Trees grow even if they aren´t grown in gardens. Comenius knew this. He knew that if a tree doesn't receive proper care in its early years, it will fundamentally affect its whole life. Keeping this knowledge in mind has always been useful. It is also useful today, at a time when school gardens are surrounded by digital maps of fictitious territories and the distracting noise of information highways. To grow by learning - to grow by rational interest in something, to develop by enlightened exploration, to blossom by focused thought, and to blossom by creative discovery - all of this cannot be reserved for a period of time lived only with the help of educated gardeners. All of this is what freshly grown people should take away from gardens into the next life as precious fruits that are not born on their own. In the life beyond the garden fence, the new trees will already be left to themselves; they will grow in it according to themselves, according to how they have grown by learning and how they can continue to grow by learning.

All rights reserved EDUAWEN EUROPE, Ltd.

Karel Dvořák PhD. – DaCoSiDe expert

Sources:

KOMENSKÝ, Jan Amos. 1991. Informatórium školy materskej. Bratislava : Slovenské pedagogické nakladateľstvo. 160 p. ISBN 80-08-01568-3

KRATOCHVÍL, Viliam. 2019. Metafora stromu ako model didaktiky dejepisu. Bratislava : Dr. Josef Raabe Slovensko. 270 p. ISBN 978-80-8140-365-1