Chicago businesswoman Marva Collins brought logic to learning when she rocked the Windy City years ago with her radically rational approach to education, as Susan Crawford, RN, recently reminded readers on her Rational Parenting List (RPL). Like the basketball coach in one of my favorite sports-themed movies, Coach Carter, Ms. Collins confronted the reality of government-run education in the ghetto with reason, optimism, and determination, not determinism.
Teaching that one should examine ideas before accepting them, she started teaching troubled students in her own home, opened her own school, wrote a book, Marva Collins’ Way, and became the subject of a television movie starring Cicely Tyson (read my review here). Today, she insists that “there is a brilliant child locked inside every student.”
Explaining her program on her Web site, Ms. Collins writes: “The child is taught to refer to what has been learned previously to support an opinion. References come from many different sources, from poetry, newspaper editorials, magazines, great speeches, novels, or any other written material. Everything everywhere provides potentially excellent material for developing reasoning skills…Textbook word-for-word, lock-step methods never make good critical thinkers. There is a difference between word reading and word understanding. And, there is a difference between knowing how to read, and loving to read.”
Learn more about Marva Collins’ philosophy here.
[Postscript Summer 2015: Marva Collins died on June 24, 2015. Read my review of The Marva Collins Story here].