Project Dialectic Education  "OBJECTIVE FLEXIBILITY"

Greetings

Project Aim

Background

Goal and scope intervention

Project Promotional Activities

Verifying Modalities and Instruments

References

Project Dialectic Education  "OBJECTIVE FLEXIBILITY"

Project Aim:

    The “Objective Flexibility” project is aimed at the educational development of the flexible creative personality in younger generations.  It is a means of primary prevention of social disorders relying on a newtype of family feedback particularly for the youngest children.  It is therefore addressed firstly to parents of children in kindergartens and primary schools or younger.

    This project was first launched as a ‘pilot project’ in 1995 by the Town council of Taglio di Po, Veneto region, Italy.  But, since addiction problems of various kinds are ubiquitous, for example addiction to various types of religious fundamentalism, the educative conditioning of which the Dialectic Education model opposes, we think it is worth spreading this project beyond Italy.

Background

Derm Barrett wrote [1]: 
" … the human actors in the drama of economic evolution … fell into three categories: inventors, who discovered, created, and invented new products or services; innovators, who put the new products or services into successful application, and entrepreneurs, who marshaled the money and organized the commercial enterprises that made innovation an economic success. … All the roles played by the actors in the drama of change and innovation are creative roles.  The actors have no script to follow.  They create their own play and execute their own lines.  What is clear is that economy is creativity at work.  Creativity is the propeller that drove the ship of progress.” 

    The development of children’s creative flexibility is thus well established as the main goal of modern educative research, not only in economic achievement but in art / aesthetics, science and ethics.

    The same approach has also been recommended by the Italian Health Ministry in its Blueprint 84 on 20 Oct. 1984: "Guidelines for interventions of Primary Prevention of Drugs Addiction" [2], published in the Italian Republic Official Journal n°21 on  25 Jan. 1985 and now an integral part of the Italian Law on Drugs.  In it, primary prevention of drugs addiction is identified as the formation of a mature personality in the child, making the latter able to express her own autonomous and creative capacities, aimed at self-realization and self-reliance, independence and self-fulfillment, and the ability to make responsible choices and share in the social fabric with his/her own critical and creative contributions.

    All of this calls for the attention of whomsoever may be responsible for addiction prevention in the main educational agencies where the youth’s personality is shaped: at school and in the family.

   The goal of the "Objective Flexibility" Project is the identifying and developing of a cooperation between these two educative domains, school and family, through the socially and technologically mediated empowerment of the family in terms of educative-formative opportunities.  These foresee the shared participation and positive confrontation between parents on the theme of a child’s personality development.  Parents must thus be informed about the link between the earliest learning of language and the self-fixing of a child’s personality from babyhood, starting therefore from the family at children’s zero-to-three age.  In fact the type of feed-back given to children in the family context can incline the child’s personality self-fixing towards either of two main and opposite poles: a psychologically dependent, or an autonomous, creative, “flexible” personality.

    The “Objective Flexibility” project aims to inform parents about a new communication methodology based on a more aware and rational use of a family’s feed-back tools.  This new know-how, or communication model, is presented as “Dialectical Education”  , aimed to feed-back to children the self-fixing of a more independent and flexible personality by developing and strengthening their initiatives and autonomous resources. This educative approach is most important when a child’s resources are otherwise limited by a physical or mental handicap.

   The “Dialectical Education” proposal is aligned not only with modern authorities in educative research and primary prevention of drugs addiction, but also with the prevention of any form of excessive family protectiveness towards the child; excessive protectiveness which may foster or exacerbate a condition of psycho-dependence.

    The “Objective Flexibility” project, in short, draws and encpurages parents’ attention to social and technical resources and programs, presented as “Dialectic Education” [3], which aims to bring the family to the wholeness of its primary educative-formative function.

    Notice that the “Objective Flexibility” project does not deal with the contents of educational messages, that is, what parents usually tell their children on a daily basis, but the way in which parent-educators deliver such messages to their children: any message, within the Family first, and then in other educative settings.

    For practical comparison of the assumptions upon which the “Objective Flexibility” project is based with what has traditionally been dominant in western culture, we refer to ‘Palo Alto’ School, and especially to the systemics of Paul Watzlawick [4], who pioneered the analysis of human communication.

    In contrast to almost all educative projects dealing with parenting and claiming similar goals, the new way of communication promoted by Dialectic Education is presented in a quite simple form, easy to understand and recognize and is readily accessible to any parent and in every family, offering useful assistance to the development of healthy dialogue between parents and children.

        The “Dialectic Education” communication model is based on two elementary principles:

  -    Parents waiting to speak “second” to the child, so as not to prevent, obscure or distort the child’s own demands, nor to encroach on the child’s initiative;

  -    Parents showing appreciation for critical thinking by demonstrating to the child the overt dialectical comparison of opposite opinions between themselves whenever they occur.

    These two principles appear fully in line with what is foreseen by the above-quoted blueprint of the Italian Ministry of Health, and characterise the “Dialectic Education” educative model.

    This model represents an alternative to the current model of educative feed-back prevailing in today’s families which is tacitly and pervasively accepted by parents and educators all over the world.  Under the current model, “parents speaking first” is the norm, and any critical comparison of each other’s attitudes in front of the child tends to be concealed because it is often felt to be a cause of family conflict and a child’s instability, so unintentionally depriving children of a relevant formative stimulus for critical and creative thinking.

    Today’s parents seem to be woefully lacking in awareness of the basic functions of communication and their  practical application to the formation and fixing of their children’s future personality. Once informed properly, parents will be able to more consciously consider the educational task and the choices that involve them so closely. Such information is still missing from the global scenario as it pertains to health education. Indeed, what is needed today is a positive and sustainable awareness and public promotion of the development of creative flexibility from early years onwards, beyond any moralistic rhetorics but centered upon the basic parameters of communication that are within the reach of every parent.

    It is in this as yet still crucial but largely unaddressed educational domain, that the “Objective Flexibility” Project seeks its appropriate place: locally, nationally and also internationally, addressing the Family as institution, and placing itself as a positive reference point for the formation of flexible creative personalities in coming generations.

GOAL  AND SCOPE  INTERVENTION

    The “Objective Flexibility” Project is aimed to inform parents about the nature and practicability of the educative tools at their disposal, so as to foster autonomy, creative flexibility and independence in new generations.  Some discussion topics among the project’s promoters are forecast:

• To be parents today, open to dialectical comparison, and without widening conflict;

• To meet diversity as a right and a value;

• Self-awareness and self-fulfillment within communicative relationships

• Communication and social involvement;

• Identification and removal of the causes of social discomfort and marginalisation.

PROJECT  PROMOTIONAL  ACTIVITIES

• Press conferences for the presentation of the Project;

• Involvement of School Heads to promote and sustain the proposal which is aimed at parents and teachers;

• Involvement of parents and teachers by circulating an “Informative Questionnaire” (enclosed A) with the main purpose of encouraging parents to do some thematic reflection and, secondarily, of collecting appropriate data.

• Collection and sharing of data in a purpose-built web site including a discussion forum.

VERIFYING  MODALITIES  AND  INSTRUMENTS

    The Project’s validity will be determined firstly by the approval of those participating, the number of citizens involved, the shared interest of parents; and secondly, by any perceived need to establish self-help groups of parents.