Golden rule should prevail in classroom

The ethic of moral reciprocity is found in the scriptures of nearly every world religion, instilling merciful compassion, benevolent charity, tender kindness, good neighbour policies and love of peace in true believers. In this tarnished age, too many factademic institutions spit-polish dullish rusty golden rules which only prepare unoriginal robots to follow directives imitatively, memorise pointless boring drills, recycle copycat information and make calculated standardised test guesstimates. The challenge is how to open up mundane lockstep mindsets by encouraging independent outside-the-box creative and abstract thinkers to re-envision their own future options by determining what works best for them in active, practical, common sense terms rather than according to carefully taught passive, theoretical assumptions.

In decentralised community schools, collaborative classroom decision-making "with" not "for" involves learning how to formulate and evaluate shared goals which enable motivated individuals to become responsible for monitoring one another's work, to cooperate in logical problem-solving reasoning strategies, providing honest, supportive peer feedback as well as designing and applying their own curriculum, tailored to meet personal wants, needs, strengths and limitations. Entrusting our most precious natural resource, civic-minded potential leaders, to become skilled architects of their own educational blueprints will help build secure, united common-cause foundations with brick-by-brick mortar; facilitate self-esteem; and nurture prideful dignity.

George Bernard Shaw observed: "The golden rule is that there are no golden rules." Nevertheless, there are basic good neighbour tenets that we must learn to live by and practice, all requiring fair-minded judgement to take risks, admit mistakes, make others feel important, promote a vision and develop self-confidence.

Chanchai Prasertson

Bangkok