Slow Food > Slow Schools

A article tip from Nicole (of the previous post)... the Center for Ecoliteracy has some great resources as part of a project called Rethinking School Lunch. They have created a Thinking Outside of the Lunchbox essay series in support of that project. In an interesting essay titled The Nature and Purpose of Education Maurice Holt draws the analogy that perhaps there should be Slow School much in the same way there is Slow Food. As someone who had secondary teacher certification (although I ultimately did not choose public school teaching for a variety of reasons) I can tell you some of the points in this short article really strike some chords with me. An excerpt:

Pausing to ponder the nature and consequences of a burger bar in the center of Rome was how a major eating revolution began. Carlo Petrini, a prominent Italian journalist, was walking past a newly opened McDonald's franchise when he stopped and said: If this is fast food, why not have Slow Food? In much the same way, I was thinking about the standards-based school curriculum, with its emphasis on regurgitated gobbets of knowledge, when I recognized the analogy with fast food. What we have created, with our tests and targets, is the fast school, driven by standardized products. So why not devise a Slow School, driven by an emphasis on how ideas are conceptualized, just as Slow Food is driven by how the innate qualities of ingredients can be realized?

Read the whole article