Our Measuring Stick is too Small

Whether our children are in the school system or educated at home, we are all guilty of one blaring, tragic mistake: we measure whole, limitless, unique, creative children with a tiny, severely limited measuring stick and they know if they don’t measure up. And I believe this one mistake is crippling their potential, costing us and them.

We live in a society that has come to measure intelligence by some standardized academic questions on a test with the assumption that all children are standard. (They are not.) We measure to see if a child is a “good student.” We measure for things like sitting still and listening for long hours and performance in a given subject matter.

Our small measure might include a tiny part of what it means to be educated, but it neglects two major points:

1. It does not encompass the whole of an education (not even close).

2. It most certainly doesn’t factor the many faces of intelligence.

“Everyone is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid.” -Albert Einstein

What is an education?

The sum of our academic performance in 5 subject areas? Our tests can’t measure problem solving skills, passion, creativity, integrity, ideas, compassion, insight, empathy, and a million other things that makes one wholly educated in the truest sense.

Some children are naturally academically inclined. Some aren’t as much, but still have the ability to dig down and do what is required of them, even if they don’t understand the reason. (More here on the idea that school and education aren’t even really the same thing–that’s a whole blog post or three.)

But some children are wildly gifted in other areas, and not academics. But we have elevated the one over another, and discredited gifts and strengths that are not academic in nature. I think this is a travesty.

Give Them the Freedom to Thrive

I love stories of those who have flourished in their gifts and passions despite the crippling message they were given in school. These went on to follow what they were good at, discovered success did not depend on their ACT scores, and capitalized on their strengths. We need to give our children freedom to do that.

Even down to small things like reading, we categorize (and panic) when one of our children doesn’t read well or enjoy reading. I’m a huge fan of reading and I encourage my children to read a lot, and I read a lot to them. BUT, if we treat our reading child like the good student and our child who isn’t bent as much that way like he’s handicapped, we are short-changing his capacity. His interests and gifts lie elsewhere and we must find where they are and praise those, still encouraging him to read, but not treating it as a disability if he doesn’t. (Fun fact: A good friend of mine who is a brilliant oral surgeon and quite successful in many ways, told me he hated to read until he was in his late 20’s.)

We have to lengthen our measuring stick for intelligence and education! One child is so different from the other. And that is exactly what we must remember: different isn’t bad, just different.

What if Everything We Think About School is Wrong

As a homeschooler, what I believe about real education contradicted by the pressure of doing what most people think school should look like, haunts me day and night.

There are a few, desperately pleading education reformers out there saying the most logical things human ears have heard, but are largely ignored because, “the status quo.” We must do what others are doing, no matter what logic we are confronted with. Because if we don’t, we must face our greatest bully: FEAR.

School vs. Education

Schooling isn’t really education. Why do we force children to learn things that will have little to no bearing in their adult years, that will rob them of learning more valuable skills, that robs them of pursuing passions and interests leading to meaningful careers and accomplishments?

Let’s consider the idea that yes, people can and do learn what they need to when they need to. And really, that’s the only time any of us ever really learn anything.

What Determines Success

Can we talk about how the really important things that determine one’s success in life (the universal definition of success is really “peace”) are never taught in school or in a curriculum, and what a tragic disservice that is to our children? That experience is the real classroom and even Albert Einstein said, “The only source of knowledge is experience.”

Can we talk about the sorely lacking life skills among our young adults which costs them money which means their salaries are reduced by being forced to hire other people to solve their problems?

There are so many more things…

Free From Fear

This is how I feel and what I long to be able to embrace, free from fear, in our home one day soon.

The following are all thoughts from artificial intelligence theorist, cognitive psychologist, learning scientist, educational reformer, and entrepreneur, Roger Schank, who says it better than I:

“High schools have failed. They are all about college prep but they shouldn’t be. It is not the role of the high school system to make admissions decisions easier for colleges. Now, colleges dictate the high school curriculum by “suggesting” that students take certain subjects before they apply. The colleges need to be encouraged to ask for examples of thinking ability, communication ability, and being able to get along with others. Then, the colleges themselves can teach whatever they think their new admits need to know….

The very idea of academic subjects in high school needs to be replaced. Most high school students do not go on to become academics. Students need to be helped to learn to think and should learn skills by actually doing them. The skills they learn should relate to actual things adults need to do. For example, why are there no child raising courses, or courses on how to speak well, or courses on how to get a job, or courses on how to deal with personal finance? Everyday skills matter.”

“Math teachers think I am an idiot, which is usual despite the fact that there exists no evidence whatsoever that learning algebra helps you learn to think. Working at anything that required careful reasoning would teach you to think. Math should be taught in context as needed. Build a bridge and you will learn to think. You may need to learn some math as well. Why do we jam this stuff down kids heads despite their interests? It never stays there. No one remembers algebra who fails to use it regularly and very few of us use it at all.”

“We can’t afford to have the vast majority of the population incapable of engaging in anything more that   superficial thought. A population that has learned to hate school is one that is full of people who would rather watch TV than think. We don’t even bother to teach people how to raise children or how to have reasonable human relationships. Why don’t we expose students to child rearing, or getting along with others, or how to work, or how to start a business, or how to manage you own finances? Because we must expose them to Cervantes, or Dante, or to Moliere. Pick your country and you will get the intellectuals “must expose” argument. But all this exposure is not working very well. We are not producing the kinds of citizens who can engage in rational arguments and make good decisions about their own lives.”

“What should you study in high school, or more importantly, because there are more choices, in college? Let’s start with what you shouldn’t study. Study no academic subject. Do not study English, History, Math, Physics, Biology, or any of the other standard subjects that one always starts with in high school. Whoa! Did I really say that? Heresy. So, why not then?…

So what should you go to school for? This is really an easy question to answer. First ask yourself what you really like to do in life, what you think about on a regular basis, whom you admire, and whom you wish to be? Only you can answer those questions. When you come up with answers, ask if there are jobs in that area. Be creative. Make up a job if you don’t think one exists. Ask what you need to learn to do in order to become a person who thinks about or does all day whatever it is you like to think about and do all day. Extrapolate up. If you like working on your car, maybe you would like working on airplanes or ships for example. If you like hanging out and talking, ask yourself who gets paid to do that (salesmen?). Find out where those who do what seems to be fun learned to do it. Often the answer is “on the job.” If that is the answer ask yourself how you can get a low level job in that area and work your way up. People learn by doing. Ask how you can start doing.

If you do need training to start doing what you want, find a community college that offers that kind of training. Most of all do not go to school if you have no inkling at all about what you think you would like to learn to do. Work for a while and start finding out more about the world, then ask the above questions again.”

“How do we choose who studies the elite subjects? We don’t.

Offer choices. Stop making lists of what one must know and start putting students into situations where they can learn from experience while attempting to accomplish goals that they set out for themselves, just as people did before there were schools. Education has always been the same: learning from experience with the help from wiser mentors. School has screwed that all up and it is time to go back to basics.”

As a relaxed homeschooler increasingly persuaded of the power of a child’s natural ability to learn, I’m always reading the thoughts of educational reformers who have tapped into this forgotten phenomenon.

The Everyday Genius: Restoring Children’s Natural Joy of Learning, is the incredibly fascinating book I’m reading now, and so far, I love his ideas on how children learn so much differently from the way schools teach. (He’s not a homeschooling advocate, per se, but where school teachers benefit from his research, homeschooling moms so much more.)

And quite by accident, I had the chance to see one of his learning examples played out this week. In one way it’s simple, in another, quite profound. He tells the story of a method by which a group of miners were taught to read. They were asked to tell about themselves, while the woman teaching them recorded their words. She then typed them out and the next day, handed them their own words to read.

Once the words were recognized as their own, both familiarity and intrigue/interest in seeing their words typed out, caused them to much more easily learn the words they were reading, which encouraged them, gave them more confidence, and facilitated their desire to read more.

Coincidentally, the day after I read this, our sweet neighbor friend who is an artist and a book-binder, took my younger girls to her studio where she taught them to bind their own books (with hand-painted covers). They left them blank to fill in later.

Of course the girls came home excited and were eager to write their stories. For one, her reading/writing is a little slower, so she dictated and I wrote the words.

But afterwards, I asked her to read the story. What Kline described in his book was exactly my experience with her. She read much more fluently, even the harder words, and was excited to read it several times, to different people.

The difference? It was her book, something that interested her (as opposed to just being handed a random Dick and Jane book), and the whole process was meaningful.

The secret ingredient to real learning, then, is that students learn and remember what is interesting and meaningful to them. Our job is to present information in such a way that it becomes interesting and/or allow them to pursue learning the things that already interest them.

If you think about your own learning, you know that what you really learned well and what has stuck, are those things that you need or in which you are interested. That, opposed to “force-fed” learning, is far superior and way more fun.

Ever since I taught in a high school classroom, I have felt that something was inherently wrong with the way we teach. But I still came home, fourteen years ago to homeschool, and tried to recreate all I knew–all any of us know–the only way to “do school.”

But what if a method, so ingrained that the suggestion of something different sounds like heresy, is a bad way? That is, I feel, precisely the case with our modern education.

But as I have studied, prayed and researched about education lately, I am so grateful to come upon the readings of authorities like Roger Schank. He confirmed everything.

We guard our sacred institution with all that is in us, disregarding the fact that the same subjects we teach today, and the way we teach them, were decided upon by a group of professors at Harvard in 1892, interested in educating the next group of professors (mainstream society didn’t attend college at that time), not necessarily concerned with equipping people for real life.

There is so much I want to say on this topic that I’m literally not able to write the post I want because I am bubbling over. This is the third post I’ve started, and still, I’m going to leave you with some of Schank’s own observations about “why everything you think about school is wrong.”

We are slowly gaining the confidence to do what we have believed and observed all along about education, discipleship, and real learning.

Which is why I wrote the book, Think Outside the Classroom, a great start for a practical overview of what I call “relaxed homeschooling”, a more natural approach to learning. (You can grab it here.)

“Nothing gave me more confidence as a homeschool mom than this book. Thank you a thousand times!” -Rosa M.

I would love, love, love your input in the comment section after reading the articles below!

“It is not easy to question something that everyone takes for granted. It is especially not easy when the very source of all our concerns in education can be easily traced to this one decision: to organize school around academic subjects. How else might school be organized? There is an easy answer to this: organize school around thought processes. In 1892, when the American high school was designed, we didn’t know much about thought processes. Now we do. It is time to re-think school.”Roger Schank, What Cognitive Science Tells Us About What We Really Need to Learn

“No change in education will ever happen in the US until the testing mentality is done away with. No average high functioning adult could pass them so why make kids do it? This makes no sense. What also makes no sense is the idea that math and science are important subjects. You can live a happy life without ever having taken a physics course or knowing what a logarithm is.

On the other hand, being able to reason on the basis of evidence actually is important. Thinking rationally and logically is important. Knowing how to function in a world that includes new technology and all kinds of health issues is important. Knowing how things work and being able to fix them and perhaps design them is important.

Let’s get serious. We don’t need more math and science. We need more people who can think. We need to teach job skills, people skills, and reasoning skills. And we need to make education exciting and interesting. We need performance tests not competence tests.” Wrong Problem, Wrong Solution

“Stop making lists of what one must know and start putting students into situations where they can learn from experience while attempting to accomplish goals that they set out for themselves, just as people did before there were schools. Education has always been the same: learning from experience with the help from wiser mentors. School has screwed that all up and it is time to go back to basics.” Why Do We Still Have Schools

Part 2: Rethinking Education: School Kills Creativity

Part 3: Rethinking Education: The Overrated College Degree

Part 4: Rethinking Education: “School” vs. “Education”–How to Kindle a Love of Learning

Part 5: Rethinking Education: How to Kindle a Love of Learning, The Practical How-Tos