Wenceslaus Hiner III Student,

The New School, Delaware, U.S.A.

It is a matter of life and death.

A matter of life in that being alive causes many questions to arise for a student, but the answers require effort to learn; what am I? Why am I here? Why is anything here? What should I do?

A matter of death in that being alive and human means that death is immanent and not only the answers to the questions above but also the importance of answering them is seriously affected by death.

If education were only a matter of life, if there were no death, the questions that life raises could wait, or simply not be addressed at all. It would be a matter of preference, of taste or proclivity, to choose to investigate existence and how to respond to existence. Without death, if a student didn’t choose to think about these basic theological and philosophical questions but instead chose to focus on a narrower field of study, that would be all right practically speaking. If death were not a factor then “student centered” could mean “based on the student’s preferences;” nothing external would be necessarily or seriously pressing him.

But, because all students will die, in order to be truly focused on the student (not his feelings, but him) his curriculum must address this fact.

Imagine that a student was making a general plan for his future and so he was taking several things into account: that he would have to be out of his parents’ house when he was eighteen, that he would have to make a living, that he hated paper work, that he wanted to get married and have children, etc. But, in addition to all these things, imagine he knew that in seventy or eighty years he would be getting into a rocket and he would be shot into outer space, but he did not know whether the rocket supported human life in deep space, whether the rocket had a pilot or any controls, whether it was going to an hospitable planet, or whether it was going to any planet at all.

Now imagine that when planning his future he completely ignored his inevitable space trip; that he wasn’t going to learn anything about the rocket or plan for the trip in any way.
Wouldn’t that be, rather than planning for his future, planning in spite of his future?
In the same way, if he does not know what death is, how can he prepare for it? Should he prepare for it? Will it be beautiful? Terrible? Nothingness? Does it depend? What does it depend on?

He could not honestly claim to be concerned about himself without necessarily including these questions (and their answers) in his plan for his future; nor could his education be student-centered without addressing both these questions and what arises from their answers. You could not say you Rather, I’m concerned to ask what makes sense as over-arching principles for kids, keeping in mind that different kids are going to prefer different styles, as do different families. And I’m willing to let those chips fall where they may.
If what I have described to you, which I think is optimal, includes what you are doing, terrific. If it doesn’t, I’m not going to retreat from that because it doesn’t include you, just as I would expect that your vision might be different. And then if we say this is good, but that’s good too, then we have to be more precise about what we mean. Do we mean good for different kids? Are there some kids for which you’re saying The Mayflower doesn’t work? Is it the case that this vision works for all kids? I think we need to ask those questions very carefully.

I don’t start out with the goal of excluding anyone from this model. I do start with a deliberate and only half-mischievous intent to provoke all of us, including me, to rethink our points of departure, our axiomatic beginnings, and to ask questions not just around the edges of our techniques, but at the very core of what assumptions we’re making about our roles. And I thank you for the challenge.

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Referans: http://www.democraticeducation.com/essay-hiner3.htm