“My Grandchildren Started Out Loving School”
“My grandchildren started out loving school at 4 years old, but have now grown to dislike it, as have so many children who are deprived of the arts, recess, and true learning.”
That’s one sentence from a very moving letter from someone who read last week’s post in which I reached out to Maria Montessori, John Dewey and Aristotle to get their reactions to 20+ years of ‘Education Reform’ and its impact on NAEP scores.
I wonder how many more grandparents and parents feel as she does, their hearts sinking as they see children’s vitality, their love of learning, and their curiosity diminishing or disappearing? It doesn’t have to be this way.
In last week’s post I said that rescuing public education requires a new paradigm in which educators ask, ‘How is this child intelligent?” Our current system, which is designed to sort students into ‘winners’ and ‘losers,’ uses test scores, parental status, income, residency, race, and social class to answer the wrong question, “How smart is this kid?”
While it’s easy to say, ‘Ask a different question,’ what can people who aren’t on School Boards actually do to change the direction of public education? What steps are required?
I believe that there are seven specific steps/tasks/actions that parents, other citizens, and change-oriented teachers can initiate. While my book, “Addicted to Reform,” provides a 12-step program, several entail coming to grips with the expensive failures of “School Reform.” In this post, I will briefly describe three of them: Measuring What We Care About; Expecting More from Students; and CONTINUE READING: “My Grandchildren Started Out Loving School” | The Merrow Report
