Still Learning: Lessons from a Lifetime in the Classroom, Eyes on the Prize

Children in classroom

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A few years ago, I received a brochure advertising a meeting for Early Childhood educators that carried this lovely thought:

"Childhood should be a procession, not a race."

As far as I'm concerned, that should become the motto of all our elementary school systems. It should be tattooed somewhere on the body of every member of the School Board, and engraved on the door of every classroom. At the very least, it could be made into a bumper sticker that the hospital hands out to the parents of every new baby.

We all laugh at stories of parents who spend their child's kindergarten parent/teacher conference discussing what the child must study to ensure Harvard admission, but we shouldn't be laughing. The image is too close to the truth.

I once had the father of a 5-year-old ask me: "On a scale of 1-10, how would you rate my daughter?" When I protested that I wasn't in the business of rating kindergarten children, he persisted: "But if you were? Where would you put her?"
"As compared to what or whom?" I asked. "As compared to her academic potential? Her social skills? Her satisfactoriness as a daughter? Her athletic ability?"

"You know what I mean," he said. "Compared to the rest of your class, 1-10, where does she stand?"

There seemed to be no point in giving a serious answer to something like that, and I gave him what he wanted to hear.

"She's a 10, of course," I said cheerfully. And mentally I added: "And you, sir, are a minus 3."

I wonder why it is that people are so obsessed with competition that they forget what education is supposed to do. Perhaps my vision is faulty, but it seems to me that the purpose of education is to guide immature minds into ways to think clearly and creatively, using skills common to our society (like reading, writing and basic mathematics) and to develop social skills that come with growing maturity. That accomplished, it is hoped that the individual will be able to pursue happiness, and contribute in some meaningful way to the society in which he or she lives.

All the other supposed purposes of education, such as the ability to make more money, or to gain respect and social position, seem to me to be byproducts, not goals.

Somehow in our rush to make good lives for our children, we have forgotten that faster is not necessarily better. We tend to measure success by how far we can push our children to outstrip their peers, rather than by how hard a child can push his or her self to improve his or her own performance. Often we hear educators talking about helping students to reach their "full potential." That sounds like a dead end to me, as if once one achieves the full potential, one might as well lie down and die since there’s no room for improvement. I prefer to think of an individual’s striving to become a more productive and resonant human being, no matter at what age or with what experience.

We operate as if there were time constraints on learning, when in fact the process continues for a lifetime. Education doesn't stop when you leave school. But our society marches children through some preconceived framework that dictates the age by which a child should walk, talk, learn to read, etc. Deviations from the norm become cause for alarm, unless those deviations are on the side of early, as in early reader or early walker, in which instance they are suddenly brag-worthy.

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Still Learning: Lessons from a Lifetime in the Classroom, Eyes on the Prize

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