Chapter 4: My Child Is Doing Fine
1. Traditional
education is set up to reward the students it deems smart while systematically
weeding out the undesirable less intelligent, “stupid” students. It is not a
system set up to educate all the people that come in to it. It is set up to
look for the smartest and to educate them. That’s why there are tests, grades,
gifted programs, remedial programs and labels. It is a system of classifying,
discriminating and segregating.
2. Children
don’t fail. It is the system that fails because it requires that a certain
percentage of children must do poorly every year, year-in and year-out,
starting the moment they enter kindergarten.
3. In
our current system of education, we are teaching children that the weak become
the pawns and victims of the powerful. Built into our system is a belief that
if I am to succeed there must be some sacrificial lambs. Others must fail for
me to make it.
4. For
those parents that their children are doing well under such education system,
they believe that their children are doing fine, without considering the situations
of those poor performing students in the school.
5. However
the reality is that each of us is smart in some ways and less smart in others.
6. Because
this system is based on fear, students learn to prey upon each other. Instead of
the strong standing up for the weak, we teach our student to turn their backs
on those who do not do well.
7. The
current system teaches us that the goal of education is getting good grades or
high scores on a test. Within this system that goal becomes more important than
love, friendship, loyalty, trust or even personal dignity.
8. You
may have noticed that oftentimes the very best of academia are social
introverts, brilliant within the academic system but socially lacking. They
stick to themselves or with others of their kind. They are the ideal smart
people that school praise. Students like these conform well and abide by the
rules. They learn early that to love and help your classmate is not allowed;
it’s called cheating. They avoid forming close relationships where helping a
friend could mean losing their own position as the ‘smartest’ in the class.
9. I
am convinced that the most profound solutions will come through changing the
way we educate our children. It is possible to create learning environment where
people are excited about learning and where everyone is a winner.
10. Each
person has a unique gift. The purpose of education is to inspire and nurture
that gift until it blooms. These human gifts do not bloom in environments where
creativity is crushed and where memorizing facts, figures and formulas that
adults deem necessary takes priority.
11. The
belief that “my child is doing fine,”” accompanied by a disregard for those
children who aren’t, is costly. If we do not realize soon that we are in a
closed system, and that the plight of the poor, the uneducated, the criminal,
the unhappy, the lonely and the unfulfilled is only there because we humans
created and are perpetuating the system that results in such inequities, then
we all will have lost some of our humanity. What will it take for us to learn
that if one fails on school, we all fail in some way?
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