Enrichment Programmes in Schools: What is their Purpose?

One of the many facets of being an educator that I love is the way one is constantly presented with the true significance of so many aspects of life, or indeed, on occasion, the lack of significance. Evaluation and professional critique are invaluable professional instruments in this.

When the matter is grandly significant, some of us access not only the mind, which the aforementioned do very well, but also plumb the depths within us to source meaning that often goes beyond words, into the very fibre of our being. This occurred recently as a situation called for a consideration of enrichment in education, and from there, the factor of how enrichment could be woven into fabric of societal life itself.

Enrichment in Schools  

There is extensive discussion about what it means to enrich children in education. Current practice presents that those children who are A students often need a little more to stimulate them into greater levels of beyond - age - norms achievement. Educators agree that such students are not typically to be assigned work that extends beyond their year level, but rather that they are enriched laterally with work that calls for more complexity at their current year level.

A simple example of this is the enriching of students’ application of Maths content by presenting them with real life, multi-step problems to solve. Observing students, and our own inner workings, there is most certainly a feeling of accomplishment when a problem is successfully addressed, and one registers a sense of mastery of mathematical content in an unfamiliar context ~ rather like having the tools to build something and finally, you operate the tools successfully and witness the actual outcome of - a building.

Some have referred to this as brain gym and it certainly does stretch one’s skillset into real life application. In this context, this is the actual enrichment – taking something from the realms of learning and applying it in a manner that contributes more broadly, in a real way, to life.

Collaboration

Another key component of enrichment programmes in schools is collaboration, where students work in small teams to address 'hands on' problems. Lack of collaboration inevitably results in non-attainment of the outcome, as each situation is designed so that all need to work as a team to address the problem.  This often differs from standard classroom activities where children most often work independently to demonstrate both acquisition and mastery of foundational literacy and numeracy skills that will then be applied in all areas of life, well beyond the walls of the classroom. 

Enter Competition

There is often fierce competition to be considered for school based enrichment programmes, not only among students, but also among parents. The darker side of our humanity is often displayed, with pressure put on teachers to consider ‘my’ child, and questions from parents along the lines of How was that child successful when mine was not? Behind this can be a demand for the perceived prestige of having a ‘special’ child and even the desire to garner enough academic kudos for the child to be considered for a scholarship at a private school. At times, the students place themselves on a pedestal, comporting themselves with the arrogance of being special, based on their ostensibly higher intelligence.

This is inevitable when we consider that concepts of the validity of disproportion, of superiority and inferiority, of elitism are widespread within society itself. It is for the attending educators to address this as it arises from the discerning awareness that when the uninvited guest of competitiveness enters through the side door, all true enrichment is abandoned.

What is Enrichment?

This necessarily arises the questions of ~

What are the foundational aspects of true enrichment?

Who is to benefit and how?

Is enrichment to be a pathway to exclusively feather one’s own nest and perpetuate the culture of mental superiority, or could there be another, as yet unrevealed, purpose?

What are the foundational aspects of true enrichment?

The current model of enrichment in primary schools of polishing the brightest buttons sustains the repetition of a formulaic approach of merely offering students more complex work and the status of being a member of an accelerated group.

One aspect of enrichment, referred to above, pertains to the stretching of one’s skillsets into real life application.  Taking something from the realms of learning and applying it in a way that contributes more broadly to real life contexts assuredly holds the potential to offer something to others. 

Society is enriched by those who have introduced something innovative and useful, something that potentially serves us as a collective.

Everything from the invention of the umbrella, the aeroplane, through to the discovery of penicillin; all are genuine enrichments of us all. We have all experienced and have been the beneficiaries of these.

Does then the foundation for any enrichment programme need to be that of introducing students to a socially responsive application of their intelligence?

Does students being in the dedication of advancing everyone and everything, selflessly bringing their skillset to the table, open up the doorway to a grander intelligence?

An example ~

Many, many children are super responsive to caring for animals. One possibility for students who show a passion for this, and who display relative skills mastery in the areas of Animal Biology and Maths, is to assign these students with tasks that require real life application. One example ~ a task where students design a way to address the matter of feral animals, collecting and analysing local data, and proposing and implementing solutions that relate directly to this.

This requires an astuteness from the teachers to discern not only student skills mastery, but equally the capacity and willingness of students and the teacher to work in this manner. This means going beyond the convenient access of online Mensa Maths and other similar programmes that stimulate the students into greater mental activity merely for the self-satisfaction of getting a correct answer to a complex number problem.

If this calls for a grade of pedagogy that is outside the remit of the current educational model, it is an indictment of the model itself and a significant exposé of it.

Intelligence ~ Genius or Cleverness?

What is the nature of the intelligence that we foster and enrich when we offer enrichment programmes in schools?

Indubitably, there are children, students, who have more advanced skillsets than their peers but what is the source of these? Are they earned by the sweat of the brow, the result of effort-full labours or are they inspirations from within? If the latter, what is the nature of the ‘within’? Is the source exclusively the mental planes of life or are there realms of true genius that source more deeply? Is there a difference between genius and the mental dexterity of cleverness?

From Genius to Zeit Geist; From Muses to Amusing Oneself

Ancient societies, acknowledged for the finesse of their civilisation and quality of living, referred to the calling upon of extra-sensory qualities, often referred to as beings, as the sources of intelligence, art, music and culture.

In Ancient Greece the 9 Muses held significance as a beyond sensory source across a range of intelligences, whilst Ancient Egypt referred to the governing deities of what we refer to as key learning areas ~

Thoth was the god of writing, knowledge and wisdom

Seshat was the goddess of writing and measurement 

Hathor was the source of music and the art of dance.

Were such attributions the result of primitive, societal immaturity or were they aspects of a truth that our intelligence is not ours and thus cannot be owned in the manner that we hold so today?

What if we do not, nor can ever, own intelligence?

What if true genius, such as that displayed in the works of Leonardo da Vinci, is sourced from outside of the personality that expresses it, and we are refusing to acknowledge this in modern society? The Ancients referred to deities and muses as the inspiration for what flowed through them as a quality of intelligence that was the foundation for a societal life that far surpasses the quality of current societal life that we all endure.

The Contrived Ideology of Ownership

What is our true intelligence and its purpose if it cannot be owned?

We conceptualise intelligence as being something we work for, something that some have more than others and there is ever present an emphasis on aspiration, ascendancy and superiority.

Could such concepts be no more than changeling substitutes generated by the level of intelligence that promotes only itself? A fixed intelligence cannot describe anything other than what it is; it remains fixed within its own parameters, never sourcing anything beyond its own limitations. How are we enticed to stay within the boundaries of this type of intelligence?

Enter Rewards

We are schooled from young to aspire to the rewards of cleverness. These rewards are extensive and include the accolades from teachers and parents, peer recognition as we mature into adulthood, being a leader in the field of one’s chosen discipline and the elevated status in later life of acknowledged expertise, professorships and other socially esteemed titles within one’s field.

All are trajectories of guaranteed reward that hold us within the confines of the status quo.

A bloated cow is physically incapable of wandering beyond its own paddock fence.

What if there is truth in what the Ancients presented that there are other ‘fields’  from which to access a vaster intelligence, from sources that are of a quality that cannot be owned, sources that are activated only in service to the enrichment of all?

Can We Rebuild this ‘Bridge’?

In the current education system, is there a way that we can work with the more advanced skillsets and talents of some students,  while removing the emphasis of ownership, holding them more as a blessing and a gift, not just a talent to be used for selfish, personal gain, but a blessing, a gift that is to grace all of us?

Our pedagogy is then necessarily founded on nurturing the gift of that blessing so that it is allowed to flow unimpeded into expressions that support and advance all. Clearly this is an entirely different quality of enrichment than what we have become accustomed to.

Can we open up the current concepts of enrichment to embrace a grander intelligence that has no self constantly seeking the many rewards of recognition for itself? Rather, the enrichment itself resides in the ceaseless flow of true intelligence, direct from a source that we have long ago forsaken. Will this ever be considered by mainstream curriculum and pedagogy?

True Society, True Enrichment

True society, like those of The Ancients, calls for and generates true enrichment.  Our enrichment programmes in schools both reflect and nourish the changes in Society.

Is it the case that evolutionary change in Society depends not upon legislation and policy, but rather on our capacity to enrich and to be enriched? Where are we collectively in respect of this and what is the collective demand? Do not all our children deserve to be enriched and why have we held enrichment as the purvey of a minority?  

One possible starting point is the review of the purpose, intent and efficacy of enrichment programmes in schools that then sustain either the current feathering of one’s own nest, or offer expansive intelligence that advances all.

Consider the pyramids…