NSW LearnScope Blog & Podcast

Love has the quality of informing almost everything - even one’s work

In 1982 I moved from Canberra to Melville Island to live and teach. Thankfully in my final year of my Education degree I had the privilege of working with an inspirational teacher at an independent school, and I was blessed by exposure to the work of Sylvia Ashton-Warner . Sylvia was largely ignored in New Zealand, but had become widely recognised throughout the world for her revolutionary ideas on teaching. The year I began teaching she was 74 years old and was awarded the MBE in recognition of her services to education and literature.

She has been an inspiration ever since. I keep her books close by. Something drew me to her pages this morning….

‘What a dangerous activity reading is; teaching is. All this plastering on of foreign stuff. Why plaster on at all when there’s so much inside already? So much locked in? If only I could get it out and use it as working material. And not draw it out either. If I had a light enough touch it would just come out under its own volcanic power. And psychic power, I read in bed this morning, is greater than any other power in the world. What an exciting and frightening business it would be; even that which squeezes through now is amazing enough. In the safety of the world behind my eyes, where the inspector shade cannot see, I picture the infant room as one widening crater, loud with the sound of erupting creativity. Every subject somehow in a creative vent. What wonderful design of movement and mood! What lovely behaviour of silksack clouds! ……. An organic design. A growing living changing design. The normal and healthful design. Unsentimental and merciless and shockingly beautiful.’ (Spinster 1958)

She worked primary education but the message is relevant regardless.

Truly inspirational education happens behind closed doors, inside the most restrictive systems, despite the most conservative policy, without million dollar resource budgets. It is the consequence of people who have passion and creativity; who focus on the learners and on the development of life-wide life-long capability. People who find a way; who carry on regardless…..

You know who you are. You are the ones who make it make it worthwhile. You are the ones who will make a difference.

[book cover: Teacher by Sylvia Ashton-Warner]