3421. How Free Are Our Students?


Our students are free. Only so they can learn. I’ve written a lot on classroom management and discipline. Also on freedom and responsibility. 

My school head deputy once told me that classroom management was right, but ultimately the students are free to listen, behave nice and learn. 

Our students have to be free, and subsequently responsible. Otherwise, if not free, as you can infer, they will not learn. And they will not love. Love is the keystone of freedom. I’m referring above all to benevolence love: seeking what is good for the other person, for the other people. 

Thus we have to manage the classroom behavior and the students’ learning but willing they be free. 

And we will accomplish and achieve that goal if we treat them as persons, with intelligence, will and feelings. 

We manage the classroom but the students ultimately keep being free. All this – freedom and willing to do things the right way – flows from the students’ interior. The students have to be able to say “I learn because I do want to!”. And we can help them in that way. 

I’m rather a friend of freedom. Freedom and responsibility. You’re free and subsequently responsible of what you do. 

/ Photo from: teatro-romano-de-merida. More on Romans! That on the photo is Mérida Roman theater, which is so huge and impressive. There you can see as it stays now, in southern Spain. On next post I intend to post a pic with a 3D reconstruction, so as to compare them, now and 2,000 years ago… Mérida is a town near where I was born, in as-ever-peaceful Badajoz. Mérida was a Roman army-veterans-retirement city, Emerita Augusta in Roman Latin.

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