1) The children of today are born digitally oriented and they require an education that has to do with the real (and virtual) world in which they live. The traditional approach to education does not prepare them for the knowledge and mass information society in which we live.
However, the new digital technologies represent a magnificent tool to find information and to elucidate its meaning, but above all, to create.
To optimize this creative potential, children should be organized and taught according to their capacities and talents, not necessarily by ages.
At HUMANITREE, we will promote the development of each child starting from where he or she is already at, from what they already know, and of what comes naturally to them.
Attention is very personalized through small groups. This is the only way that teachers can detect and understand each child’s needs, providing him or her with the required follow-up attention.
But to free up their potential, children need appropriate guidance.
(2) Under this model, teachers need a completely different educational approach. Teachers should stop giving the traditional “taking notes” approach and they should become advisors and guides that channel the children’s natural curiosities.
Under this new pedagogical approach, teachers ask good questions so that students can find the answers and discover that knowing, investigating, and studying can be fun-filled activities.
These guides also offer the student the context of what is occurring in the world, while they assure the necessary precision and thoroughness so that the answers are correct.
The current system leads children to reject learning because it is considered boring, since teachers talk instead of listening; they impose but don’t stimulate; they transmit instead of teaching their pupils to think and to discern; unfortunately, they do not allow the children to discover for themselves.
The teachers of HUMANITREE will not evaluate a child through a rigid methodology in which few can emerge outstanding, but instead they will take into account each student's evolution based on the assumption that he or she is in the process of developing.
(3) Our role as parents is that of the mythical archer in Gibran’s poem.
Only today children are not arrows. They’re closer to rockets, which go very far with movement that cannot be totally controlled, but rather can be pointed in the right direction and configured from the beginning.
This is what the education in which we should participate actively as parents is about.