Learning Shouldn't Be Dictated by the School Calendar - washingtonpost.com

Learning Shouldn't Be Dictated by the School Calendar - washingtonpost.com

The academic calendar inspires similarly bad habits in schools. Parents and teachers conspire each spring to clean up weaknesses in the records of some children so they can be promoted to the next grade. Some urban high school teachers have told me of panic attacks every April, when only half of the senior class appears qualified to graduate. Extra-credit projects materialize. Grade book calculations are readjusted. Magically, the graduating class grows to about the same size as last year's.

Educators have been trying for more than a century to make lessons more like what students will find in real life. Philosopher John Dewey started a movement with a concept he called experiential education. His disciples have tried to introduce projects -- putting out a class newspaper has been a favorite -- so students learn by doing. You can find examples of this in many schools, but the old just-get-through- the-year mentality still reigns. It is difficult to cover all that I wanted to learn as a student, and I wanted my children to learn, in a nontraditional, project-driven format. Deborah Meier, Dennis Littky and other free-thinking educators have made headway with impoverished urban teenagers, but they are exceptions.