Learning Is A Journey, Not A Destination

Education reformers reveal their lack of classroom experience when they champion policies, programs, and standards more focused on comparing students and measuring student outcomes rather than engaging students and nurturing a love of learning.

Learning is a lifelong process, it is a self-directed and self-paced journey of discovery…not a forced march and “race” to a learning standard or data point.

What we want is to see the child in pursuit of knowledge,

and not knowledge in pursuit of the child.

~ George Bernard Shaw

If students are going to unleash their talents and fully explore their interests, they must spend more time looking up and learning beyond the classroom and much less time looking down at standardized tests. Children learn by testing their limits, not taking tests. 

A standardized test cannot determine and predict who will be successful in college, career, and life just as a driver’s test can’t tell who will speed, text and drive, or get a DWI as an adult.

As long as we are alive, most people are continually learning, and the “journey” never ends. Education should be more focused on preparing students for lifelong learning, rather than high stakes testing.

School programs should be broadly focused and developed with the academic, social, and emotional needs of each child in mind. Non-routine and content-rich classroom activities should be passion driven and student-centered rather than data driven and test-centered.

Learning unfolds in a vibrant and vigorous environment where student growth is cultivated and regularly nurtured not standardized and repeatedly measured.

What does education do?

It makes a straight-cut ditch out of a free, meandering brook.

~ Henry D. Thoreau

It is just as important that students learn how to master their thoughts, feelings, and emotions as learning to master complex informational text. Education programs should challenge students to learn about themselves and others as much as they are challenged to learn about specific content and subject matter.

Today many schools are eliminating vigorous extracurricular experiences that help students discover the ways they are “smart”, so they can devote more time to preparing students for rigorous standardized tests so the state can measure and compare how “smart” they are.

For too many students, school has become a dreary and lifeless place to learn about the standardized skills they don't have at the expense of lively activities and unusual opportunities to uncover the specialized skills they do have.

Do not let what you cannot do interfere with what you can do.

~ John Wooden

Students should be “free to learn” as they pursue their passions, rather than simply following a curriculum map and data driven route to each Common Core learning standard.

Learning occurs when students engage in meaningful and purposeful activities that respect the individual interests and needs of students rather than simply serve the common "needs" of the standards and the tests.

Education programs should provide countless opportunities for students to discover their unique gifts and expertise, instead of being an obligation and competition to be “ready” for college and careers.

Focus on the journey, not the destination.

Joy is found not in finishing an activity but in doing it.

~ Greg Anderson

Rather than rating and sorting students according to a common and narrow set of testable academic skills we should be honoring and cultivating uncommon abilities in our classrooms.

As Arnold Dodge explains, schools should be more focused on celebrating the process of learning and much less concerned on measuring the outcomes...

"When a student does well on a reading test, the results tell us nothing about how well she will use reading as a tool to learn larger topics, nor does it tell us that she will be interested in reading at all. What it tells us is that she is good at taking a reading test…

With the battle cry “College and Career Ready,” the champions of standardization are determined to drum out every last bit of creativity, unpredictability, humor, improvisation and genuine emotion from the education process in the name of useful “outcomes.”..

But there is another way. If we believe that children are imaginative creatures by nature with vast amounts of talent waiting to be mined, and if we believe that opening children’s minds and hearts to the thrill of learning — without competition and ranking — is a healthy approach to child development, then we are off to a good start…

William Glasser, M.D., studied schools for over 30 years and in his seminal work, The Quality School, he outlines five basic needs that all human beings are born with: survival, love, power, fun and freedom...

Think of the characters that would emerge from such an environment. Comedians, orators, raconteurs, revolutionaries, magicians, clowns, young people with agency and drive, having fun, not afraid to take risks or make mistakes. Not afraid to be children…

The BLOG: Needed in School: 140 Characters ~ Arnold Dodge

Fulfillment and joy in life comes from finding your purpose; not from mastering a set of standardized skills.

Education should be about students falling in love with the lifelong process of learning instead of being focused on test scores which are the artificial, contrived, unreliable, and too often forced product of academic training rather than authentic learning.

In 2013, Google VP Laszlo Bock discussed the "value" of this manufactured and synthetic data…

“One of the things we’ve seen from all our data crunching is that G.P.A.’s are worthless as a criteria for hiring, and test scores are worthless — no correlation at all except for brand-new college grads, where there’s a slight correlation…

What’s interesting is the proportion of people without any college education at Google has increased over time as well. So we have teams where you have 14 percent of the team made up of people who’ve never gone to college…

After two or three years, your ability to perform at Google is completely unrelated to how you performed when you were in school, because the skills you required in college are very different. You’re also fundamentally a different person. You learn and grow, you think about things differently.

Another reason is that I think academic environments are artificial environments. People who succeed there are sort of finely trained, they’re conditioned to succeed in that environment…”

In Head-Hunting Big Data May Not be Such A Big Deal NY Times, 6/19/13

It is foolish to continue training our students in a standardized data-driven “box” and then expect them to be engaged and creative learners who can think outside of it.

Students should be free to learn in an "open" environment where they are able to blaze their own trails on a quest for learning that provides meaning and purpose to their lives.

“All [my] songs are encouraging me; I guess I write them for me,” Waters explains during a new documentary, Pink Floyd: The Story Of Wish You Were Here. “It’s to encourage myself not to accept a lead role in a cage, but to go on demanding of myself that I keep auditioning for the walk-on part in the war, ‘cause that’s where I want to be. I wanna be in the trenches. I don’t want to be at headquarters; I don’t wanna be sitting in a hotel somewhere. I wanna be engaged.”

~ Andrew Leahey, “Behind the Song: Pink Floyd’s Wish You Were Here” 8/30/12

Did they get you to trade your heroes for ghosts?

Hot ashes for trees?

Hot air for a cool breeze?

Cold comfort for change?

Did you exchange a walk on part in the war

For a lead role in a cage?