EMA: Education in a Modern Age

YOU DON'T HAVE TO READ ENTIRE BOOKS
TO UNDERSTAND THEIR COMBINED MESSAGES.

CS

In her Notes to parents and Educators, she writes,

" As parents, mentors, and educators...we urgently need to look at our curricula with a view to culling those key
competencies that will provide the platform for learning and
continuously relearning...
No teacher can afford to complacently believe that what has been sufficient until now will serve in [the] future.
When we examine what we have been delivering to our young and vulnerable consumers in the form of useful
future competencies, we find that we have been focused on teaching verbally based, orally delivered curricula.
...we leave unused, undeveloped, and undervalued the potential to learn using visual skills and
other modes of learning."
In our time, this form of human expression is considered child's play. It's place in the
curriculum recedes as the grade level increases, to the extent that no place of honor is given
on high school diplomas for excellence in art."

In reverence for child's play, she goes on to emphasize that,

"Drawing also has the important advantage of being considered fun and play. Because it has not been an
academic subject, measured and judged as have reading and math,it is free of most of the baggage related to
fear of failure and anxiety around academic success."

Finally, she makes a powerful argument for the inclusion of the visual skills in education by stating,

"Visual skills of every kind, from drawing to visioning, will need to be primed, to stand equal with all our other skills.
It makes no more sense to ignore its development than it would to tie one hand, or one foot. We need the full flow
of all our human skills to deal with a future so challenging and so complex that we can hardly imagine it."

Mona Brookes

Seeds of Greatness

The seeds of greatness are attitudes and beliefs that begin in children
as dos and don'ts as casual family chatter as bedtime stories
as locker-room gossip as off-handed,
delicately constructed,transparent ideas.
Like flimsy cobwebs at first,t hen with years of practice
become like unbreakable steel cables to shackle or strengthen our character
throughout the rest of our adult lives.
Author unknown