Continuing with my proposals to change education today I want to call your attention to what is being called "Knowledge of the environment"that when I was a child they were Social and Natural.
What I mean is that, no matter how well the training resources come, The medium is medium, not a book and knowledge of the medium is learned about everything and above all, in the middle, not in a book, and more at early educational levels, as I recently heard Isabel Fernández del Castillo explain, which we soon expect to interview in Babies and more.
I understand that in a classroom you cannot have a town, a city, a highway, a garden, a forest, an orchard, a mountain, a river, a beaver, an elephant, the taiga and the savannah, the monsoon and the stream of the gulf ... but studying anything of these without the child experiencing it or asking about it after assimilating their experiences in the real environment is absurd, it is a simple memorial exercise without any application and forgettable.
The experience of the environment
The books of "Knowledge of the environment" can never replace direct experience. And when this is not possible, children should be offered the most sensory experience of the element we are talking about.
Use documentaries, movies, make an orchard, schedule excursions and visits, go to museums ... all are complements of the real learning of the natural, social and human environment.
Obviously, the school cannot now offer the real experiences, since it is a closed and artificial environment, but if it can have the objective of being able to provide them, it is what children need. And only when they wish, offer them thematic books.
Get the knowledge of the medium to be in the middle
Changing Education implies changes, it is not something passive, conformist or repetitive of previous schemes. The school must be integrated into experience and life, not build a universe parallel to it centered on what the textbooks say.
The child will learn and needs to learn knowledge of the environment in Nature and the normal development in society, observing and experiencing, asking, rather than being instructed without their own initiative. And above all, never demand a memorial learning of definitions or fixed schemes of the subjects.
Not using memory learning is essential in all areas of knowledge but in this case, knowledge of the environment is essential. We cannot know the medium without knowing and experiencing the medium. Even when we talk about lists of capes and gulfs, countries and capitals, mountain ranges and continents we can look for methods that combine several areas and that make sense of what the child has learned.
Learn from the experience
The word learned should arouse emotion, connect with a sensory and sensory experience, leave a mark. Otherwise it will soon be forgotten, as soon as it is no longer necessary and the exam is passed.
We should consider not only how children naturally learn but also the age at which certain knowledge is essential and always combine it with their own environment, which will nurture the learning of real memories that will make it meaningful and truly understood: lived.
Later, in Secondary, it is very important that the child is able to make their own logical structured exposures, draw conclusions and exercise a critical spirit about what they have learned, and this cannot be sustained in a closed and memorial study of concepts.
All this is supported by the way they will have learned as children. We cannot demand that they do what has been prevented from doing previously. Nor can we expect paper to replace real, sensory and experimental experience.
Within the limitations of the school organization and the school building, the priority of the educator, whether teacher or parent, should be to understand that the child learns globally, with his personal experience.
That is why it is important to be clear that the knowledge of the environment is not the book of "Knowledge of the environment"It is the medium itself that teaches what children, especially little ones, need to learn.
