Magic in the Classroom

The classroom should be a magical place- filled with wonder and surprise, leaving space for play, fantasy and the joy of discovery. That is how you create lifetime learners and critical thinkers. Filling it with fear and stress builds the expectation that life will be barren and harsh. If you impart that lesson to children who have already experienced too much of life's pain, you are lowering their expectations of a caring and benign world to dangerous levels. And encouraging them to inflict as much pain as they receive because pain is all they know. Current education policy is child abuse writ large. Like most forms of abuse, it turns its victims into agents of its continuation.