Child-Centered, Peer-Centered & Teacher-Centered Education: Why I Think Peer-Centered Is the Best Choice by Lark Sontag

I formerly was a great believer in child-centered education. I thought the center of the classroom should be children and each child should individually be centered. To me the idea of teacher-centered education was problematic. No educator wants to normalize a dictatorship where people bark orders at small children. But society is not a vacuum.

I believe in universal education, universal housing and universal healthcare. The center of a person’s existence should not only be themselves, but as we are a binary society I had to pick a side. I chose child-centered.

After 10 years in the classroom I began to suspect child-centered was self-centered. It is physically impossible and unhealthful to attempt to create an individual experience for each child.

Life is not your favorite TV show on repeat. Life is a shared experience. This is why I began to embrace the idea of the peer-centered classrooms. A classroom where children have to think about how their actions impact others, cooperate with other students and learn that everything can’t be tailored specifically for them, because for the benefit of all sometimes you can’t have everything 100 percent your way.

What do you think?