Abstract

RIBEIRO, Sidarta; MOTA, Natalia  and  COPELLI, Mauro. Rumo ao cultivo ecológico da mente. Propuesta educativa (Online) [online]. 2016, n.46, pp.42-49. ISSN 1995-7785.

In students of low socio-economic level, school learning is directly impaired by the important physiological limitations that typically go with poverty, as well as by the poor quality of evaluation of individual learning process. Lack of resources and overcrowded dwellings are the cause of deficit in nutrition, sleep, and physical exercise, that impair learning by means of physiological mechanisms, well-known but very little considered in school environments. Overcrowded classrooms, on the other hand, impair reliable and frequent enough evaluation of individual learning, that can lead to specific interventions focused on the difficulties of each student. Automatized tests for learning, by means of a mathematical analysis of discourse and computational games constitute low cost alternatives, fast and scalable, to personalize and qualify academic assessment. The essential goals of a new education, capable of effectively reduce the gap between rich and poor, must include an optimization of school schedules through a reduction of classroom time in favor of optimized schemes of naps, physical exercises and food, as well as frequent automatized evaluations of individual performance, that motivate specific interventions based on deficits measured not by the average learning curves among various students, sporadically calculated, but by individual learning curves updated daily. These strategies can be combined in order to reinforce positively, minutes after their detection, the cognitive changes detected in specific students. As well as ecological agriculture promotes the intelligent rotation of cultures and inputs, it is necessary to build a new model of ‘ecological education’ in which students move through different stages of acquisition and consolidation of memory, by reducing overcrowded classrooms without additional costs and potentially contributing to the leveling of educational gradients all over the planet.

Keywords : Learning at school; Poverty; Physiological limitations for learning; School evaluation; Ecological education.