What is "the Kino philosophy" ?

An important, maybe the most important, idea underlying Kino's approach to education is the self-evident one that each child is a unique individual, with his or her own history, strengths, and needs.

You can’t run a school based on a prearranged set of uniform policies and, at the same time, say that children are unique. I believe a school philosophy is limited and open-ended. It doesn’t cover everything; it doesn’t mandate everything; it doesn’t ban everything. It is a coherent set of basic beliefs that acts as a compass that guides our daily practice. It is a starting point.

Educational philosophy should be open to new insights and understandings about how people learn, how the brain works, how society works, how the particular child works. This makes philosophy a work in progress, an evolving living body of thought, one that requires more effort and more communication.

No, really, what is "the Kino philosophy'" ?

Another important idea -- maybe this one is the most important -- is that teaching should be based on what is best for the child.

Doesn't that go without saying?

Look, though, at the decisions made about schools and children by districts, states, and national agencies, decisions based on financial considerations, political trends, “economic competitiveness,” accountability, and bureaucratic empires, not on what is best for the child. This starting point warrants being said. If we ask what is best for a particular child, we may not know the answer, but at least we are guided by the right question.

Just as doctors have a precept to do no harm, teachers should have as a fundamental principle – a kind of Hippocratic oath for teachers-- that they try to do the right thing for that kid – that specific, real person they are teaching at that moment. Teachers should not base their teaching on a need to provide accountability, or to meet standards, or to satisfy some composite, hypothesized child, whether he or she represents a norm or an ideal.

But I still feel like you haven't explained the Kino philosophy.

Maybe the first question should be "What are the aims of education?"

What are the aims of education?

Since the Industrial Revolution, one aim of our universal education system has been to provide workers who can serve the economic needs of the nation. Today we call this working for “economic competitiveness.” That is still valid. From the standpoint of the individual, having the skills to get a job is a positive thing. Society and the individual have a stake in an education that will allow a person to get a job.

Another aim of education from society’s viewpoint is babysitting. Shocking, but true (I heard it from an education professor, so it must be true). What do we do with our kids when we are at work? They have to be somewhere. This may, or may not, be satisfactory from the individual’s standpoint.

These aims are legitimate, if uninspiring. Society has loftier aims for education, though. We want to pass down the culture, hopes, dreams, skills, understandings, values to our children. In this sense, schools are the most conservative institutions in society; they are there to conserve the culture. (Whose culture we conserve in a country as diverse as the U.S. is another question altogether.)

“An official educational enterprise presumably cultivates beliefs, skills, and feeling in order to transmit and explicate its sponsoring culture’s ways of interpreting the natural and social worlds.” Jerome Bruner, The Culture of Education.

This can be good for the individual, or not, depending on one’s role in the society; but being initiated into the culture ought to be a good thing.

What about the individual? Shouldn’t the individual kid expect more than the aims we have mentioned? Of course.

Individual students should expect as aims of education to be stimulated, to learn to use the knowledge they gain, to think creatively and critically, just to think! They should learn what they are good at, what they love to do, and what they find fascinating. They should begin to see not only how and where they fit in, but that they fit in to a larger community and that it needs them. They should expect to become active citizens in a democracy.

They should learn that, “There is only one subject matter for education, and that is Life in all its manifestations.” Alfred North Whitehead.