The Call Of The Wild And Free
Reclaiming wonder in your child's education
part 1
The traditional model of education isn't working.
Our school system doesn't treat children as what they are - children. Anyone who has a child knows that they're naturally prone to moving around and exploring, yet schools insist on bending their bodies to the shape of a chair as if already preparing them for office life.
They make them do paperwork, they make them stick to schedules, and they make them sit quietly and listen to presentations - sound familiar? We treat our children like adults and it's causing them stress. In one telling study conducted by the American Psychological Association, children re- ported feeling higher levels of stress on average across the school year than adults. Couple this with research that shows that children don't learn as well under stressful conditions, and this system starts to seem absurd.
One of the biggest contributors to our children's stress is the preponderance of testing and grading as a measure of a child's ability. Grades have be- come so important to a child's future success that schools now focus more on training children to pass exams and get good grades than on helping them to truly understand the course material. This focus on exams and grades has been to the detriment of genuine learning because it promotes a very diminished conception of what learning is. While exams are great at testing how much one can remember under a time-limit, they are terrible indicators of the true breadth of a child's intelligence. They're simply not equipped to measure non-academic forms of intelligence - like emotional and creative intelligence.
When we measure our children against the same narrow standard and apply a grade to them, we disparage children who develop slower and children who excel in non-academic areas. These children are often treated as abnormal, or as developmentally deficient.
This is a system that does not treat children as unique individuals, with different capacities. It is a system that values the curriculum above the child. All in all, what we have is assembly-line education. It is a form of education that feeds every child the same curriculum and expects them to develop at the same speed. It ignores our children's individuality from the beginning and it produces standardized products by the end.
In the next part, well see how the home-school model of education can liberate children from the assembly-line model of education.