Teaching: Putting Life into Learning

• Share

In Spinster, her vivid novel pub lished in 1959, Sylvia Ashton-Warner told of a loving, slightly balmy school teacher who taught Maori children in back-country New Zealand. Herself a teacher for 17 years in Maori schools (but a grandmother rather than a spinster), Novelist Ashton-Warner endowed her heroine with an extraordinary gift for handling young Maori minds in conflict with civilization. Dropping the fictional cloak, she has now expounded her singular methods in Teacher. Published this week (Simon & Schuster; $5), it may well be the year's best book on education.

A Force of Energy. New Zealand's brown Maori children, descendants of proud warriors and seafarers, live by the rules of "take, break, fight and be first," writes Teacher Ashton-Warner.

As a "force of energy" that swings from love to hate in seconds, they drive teachers batty. Most teachers aim to tame them by putting "your foot on their neck," and by spooning out futilely alien education from pap-filled primers that extol civilized white virtues. As a result, Maori kids tend to hate reading, fall behind in school, and wind up being labeled "stupid." It is just such frustration (or repression), argues Teacher, that leads some Maoris to become neurotics, brawlers, defeatists and alcoholics.

Since all this parallels the problems of teaching U.S. slum children, the book's solution may be applicable far beyond the backlands of New Zealand. The author argues for what she calls "organic teaching"—a way to spur nonlearners to read and write by bringing their inner feelings into the tasks.

Fear & Sex. "I see the mind of a five-year-old as a volcano with two vents, destructiveness and creativeness," writes Author Ashton-Warner. "To the extent that we widen the creative channel, we atrophy the destructive one." To achieve that requires an unconventional kind of teaching—not imposing education from the outside, thereby fostering frustration and aggressiveness, but inducing the child to reach out from inside himself.

The idea is to make children hunger for learning, to want to possess it. Teacher Ashton-Warner discarded orthodox books, charts and lesson plans in favor of "the moving currents of children's interests," whatever they might be, in "the hot prison of the moment." In the formal sense, she says, "I teach style, and only style."

To teach reading, she sought to find out what words held the most intense meaning for her pupils. "Pleasant words won't do. Respectable words won't do."

What worked were words that touched upon wellsprings of inner life, especially fear and sex. To build a "key vocabulary," Teacher Ashton-Warner daily asked her tots, "What word do you want?" Among the words children chose: love, kiss, darling, ghost, bomb, alligator, police. Each child took home "his" word, printed on a big card, learned it without effort. Using these "one-word captions of the inner world," the kids went on to write a daily autobiographical story. Sample: "Mummie got a hiding off Daddy. He was drunk, she was crying." Or: "My Father got drunk, and He drank all The beer by He self, and we had a party."