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Janice Campbell
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Articles:
Learning by Reality - What is Value? I have pointed out that the labor that children engage in all the years of their schooling is thrown in the trash because it is not valued by anyone. Now certainly, there is value in the things they learn for "someday." But there is actually no present value for the child even in that learning. It is seldom something he or she is using right now to further some personal goal. What is value? Value is simply the property of anything by which it is useful or desirable to some one. And the value of anything is determined by the person who wants it for themselves. The question is how valuable is it to that person? Value in society is usually represented by money. In today's world the involvement of money is often defined as something "bad" or "tainted." But money is only a device we use to measure the value of some real thing or some amount or quality of labor. Money in and of itself is nothing, anymore than the numbers on a yardstick. Money is a measurement of value. Look at what people put in their trash. That smelly mess has no value to the people who put it there. And it has no value to almost anyone else. How is it that all of a child's work in school is destined for that filthy garbage pile? Certainly there is temporary paper work in even the most real form of learning. But in real learning, temporary paper work supports the creating of value. How can creating value work in real schooling? In project-led learning, let's say a child grows flowers for cutting and flower arrangements as a project. For several months the child arranges and places on the dining table, twice a week, a new bouquet of flowers. Everyone welcomes the cheerfulness and beauty. No one would think of immediately shredding the child's work and trashing it. In fact, let's say the child sustains this for 15 weeks or 30 bouquets. At $15 a bouquet, the child has added $450 of value to her family's life. The memory of those weeks of endless bouquets is a lifetime treasure. Meanwhile, the student is reading about flower growing, flower cutting, flower arrangements. She is creating a scrapbook of photographs of her work with descriptions. Will that piece of "school work" be thrown away immediately? I hardly think so. She is publishing it online. She is learning botany and soil science. She is learning logic through the progression of seed and growth and harvesting and arranging and displaying. The list of learning goes on. A child working in a flower garden and making lovely flower arrangements to brighten the family home is engaged in an education far superior to a child chained to a desk all day and limited to pictures in a botany text book. This is learning by reality. Along with business-based learning for highschoolers, follow the link to YGuide Academy to learn more about project-led learning for the junior high years. Help your child build his or her own business with Micro-Business for HighSchoolers, a nine month course that guides step-by-step in the creation of a real-world business, while learning a whole lot. This course could easily become a central part of your child's high school education. Check it out at http://www.YguideAcademy.com/MicroBusiness.html Copyright 2009 by YGuide Publishing. Freely use without changes, including links. http://www.yguide.org Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Daniel_Yordy
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