Walking in Sunshine: August 2010

My previous blog post discussed how No Child Left Behind (NCLB) is destroying American education, making the lives of teachers and students miserable. This post will discuss changes that should be made to eliminate that misery, leading to happier students and teachers, and better education outcomes.

Children are born with an eagerness to learn, an over-riding desire to attain mastery of their world. But something happens once they begin school. Learning becomes a chore. It’s now work and no longer fun. Who or what is to blame for this? Some might say it’s the teacher’s fault. Others might say it’s the parents’ fault. And certainly there are teachers who do not enjoy what they are doing; and parents who do not care.

However, as NCLB has forcefully demonstrated, it is a structural problem embedded within the way in which schools are organized and evaluated. To fix education maybe we will have to let NCLB continue on its merry way to destroying our current educational system. When every drop of creativity has been drained from the system; when every spark of excited enlightenment has been extinguished; when all that remains are the droning students and teachers slogging through the wasteland of the required, testable data bits; when we’ve completed our plunge to the bottom of the list of industrialized nations with educated, knowledgeable citizens, then perhaps changes that revitalize education will be made.

We’ve known what part of the problem is for decades; at least since the 1964 publication of John Holt’s seminal book How Children Fail (which I read in 1971 when it was still one of the hottest books in education): if we focus on weaknesses, what students are doing wrong, students become disengaged. Some teachers and schools tried to make the needed changes, but the public school system as a whole refused to change, and most public schools that had tried to change drifted back to the status quo.

The status quo may have been OK when most individuals worked in jobs that were rote and limited in scope. Teaching that was rote and limited in scope was, perhaps, adequate preparation for those jobs. But those jobs are being outsourced to computers and cheaper labor in other countries. Public schools are “preparing” students for jobs/lives that no longer exist. In the real world, both present and future, students will need to be innovative and creative thinkers who are self-motivated. Public schools are not preparing them for this world.

Since focusing on a student’s weaknesses leads to failure and disengagement, we need to focus on a student’s strengths. If we can get students engaged by facilitating their strengths, they will learn to compensate for any weakness. And it may turn out that a perceived weakness does not really exist when the student is engaged in a creative, affirming endeavor.

Encouraging creativity is also key to developing individuals who will be successful in the world outside the classroom. This cannot be accomplished if schools are focused on testing or assessing every activity.

What education should provide and what students need include:

· Focus on Strengths

· Encourage Intrinsic, not Extrinsic Motivation

· Provide an Environment where Creativity Flourishes

Check out these websites and videos for schools that are getting the elements of a 21^st century education correct:

· Purnell School

· Puget Sound Community School