Elogio de la educación lenta

Author: Joan Domènech Francesca
Translation Rights: Editorial Grao

Have you ever found yourself wondering where the time went? Have you ever complained that there isn’t enough of it? Time is subjective, look at the clock and you become its slave, but the clock keeps on ticking. ‘Every white man has a watch’, says an African proverb, ‘but he never has enough time’. We need to learn how to use time differently, says the author of In Praise of Slow Education. Do you remember how time passed more slowly when you were a child? Well, according to Domènech Francesch, modern education methods are in danger of robbing this experience from young children. It is a common complaint of educationalists that the modern obsession with testing and assessing schoolchildren is shifting the focus of education away from the needs of learners, towards the coaching of assessment-ready candidates. You’ve heard about Slow Food and Slow Sex. At last, the case has been made for Slow Education.

This book is primarily aimed at educators, but it is an essay that anyone, parents and learners alike, will gain from reading, if we accept that ‘learning’ is a lifelong process, and that pausing a while to think about how we learn can be, from time to time, an enriching experience for adults and children alike. In a nutshell, this is a motivational book which focuses attention on what the impact of modern techniques and education technologies are having on the classroom. If we’re not careful, the author explains, we are in danger of focusing too much on short term ‘outcomes’, such as ‘key skills’ in maths or language, while forgetting the bigger picture: becoming rounded individuals.

This is increasingly a common experience in education. We focus on what is most ‘urgent’ rather than what is most ‘important’, and we need to get our priorities right. The first half of this book explains how culture is becoming ‘accelerated’ and why ‘speed’ is not necessary in the classroom. ‘Speeding up’ the learning process leaves learners behind who can’t keep up. Instead, we should learn that ‘less’ can be ‘more’ and that ‘time can be saved’ if we get our learning priorities straight. The second half of the book provides detailed examples together with reflection activities for how teachers can face the challenges posed by modern curricular requirements and technologies in a way that is creative and stimulating. An excellent book which should be on every PGCE reading list.

This is a summary of the reader’s report byAlex Ibartz