Spongey Scholars

Coming into the world we don’t know the reason behind anything. The baby cries “my belly hurts.” The baby has no idea why their belly hurts, just that when their mom gives them that plastic looking thing they feel better. If we grew up as clueless as we started out our world would be a whole mess of people throwing rocks and running around naked! Now this is a little extravagant but it all relates back to teaching reasoning skills to our young scholars.

In Kindergarten we are taught letters and numbers, although at the time we don’t realize we are being taught reasoning skills we are. “Why are we learning these letters?” Because, we will turn them into words, and then sentences, and then essays and speeches! This valuable skill that we all take for granted is crucial for the expansion of knowledge, and is 100% required in primary school. Children’s brains are like little sponges, they want to know everything and if you’ve ever been around a child normally their favorite question is why?

This is primarily because even before elementary school mothers and fathers are teaching their children reasoning skills. Making choices for a 2nd grader is more thought out than one might perceive. They can look at a two cookies and know they want the larger one, because they want to eat more sweets. This response is the early stages. However when adolescents become teens they are faced with many more decisions that they need to be ready for. For example, choosing to take drugs, career paths, and cheating on a test. If we waited to teach our children to weigh the outcomes and see the potential consequences until teenage years we may be too late.

The teachers in our school systems today are pressured to maintain inventiveness and creativity in their lessons to constantly be challenging their students.It is not just reading, math and science anymore, it is now using these age-old studies and making them into ideas capable of learning reasoning. However, even with the best teachers and most in-depth lessons some children are influenced elsewhere, such as cognitive, psychological, social, cultural, and societal factors. We need to just break the barrier, although children may be taught something different at home than in their classroom it does not mean the teacher is right and the parent is wrong, and vice-versa. Our society is depending on these little sponges asking why. We are striving for all children to grow up and be able to weigh the outcomes of a choice they are making. Or research to know the truth behind a topic. Children are innocent and eager to know and learn, so primary school is the perfect chance we have to steer them in the right direction. With the guidance in schools as well as at home there is no way a child will grow up without the skills he needs to achieve goals and excel in life.