Learning is Fundamental

Almost everyone opines on the proper role of schools and how to best educate our children. During legislative deliberations these debates reach jet-engine level decibels of cacophonous discord because of infinite divergent views. Most education plans begin with simple ideas that become complicated and potentially self-defeating once the general idea is reduced to a written plan.

If you believe that policy makers are crazy and stupid because of the plans that result, I urge you to draft the language of a policy initiative. It is harder than you believe and quickly can get out of control. You will find that the impossibility of any program increases proportionally to the size of the population the plan will serve. Any plan that is administered and designed for a single classroom will be more effectively implemented than one that tries to serve an entire district or especially a nation.

The inability to recognize that they cannot make a program to leave no one behind and ensure the success of all is the real folly of policy makers. Their search for a core curriculum is a quest that would cause Don Quixote to blush and shake his head in disbelief. The repeated proposals that some new technological intervention or software program, if only placed in the hands of all of these students, will miraculously solve the problem and lead to a trained and competent workforce keeps the focus on the leaves of the trees while the forest disappears in obfuscation.

If actions speak louder than words the message that I see and hear is that policy makers do not trust teachers. Our communities do not trust teachers or schools. Everyone wants to micromanage their behavior. So what happens, the programs that arrive in the guise of education become obstacles for teachers in the classroom and effectively inhibit their ability to educate. The constraints are so tight that more and more students have more instruction but yield less learning.

Should policy makers strive to improve our schools? Yes; so should we all. But let’s abandon our quest for a single curriculum that will bless and solve the problems for all. Let us create policies that demonstrate trust in teachers that have earned the trust and let us implement systems that permit teachers the chance to earn that trust. Let us allow the great marketplace of ideas, a marketplace that is even more easily accessible because of advances in technology, to compete and to grow. May we find in a tomorrow, that arrives sooner rather than later, an atmosphere where the goal is not knowledge but learning.

How will we know which teachers to trust? The measure is simple and easily observable.

When we love something we share it.

When we learn to love learning we learn and then share.

We can trust teachers who teach students to learn how to learn and to love learning. Thus, every student who can teach what has been taught, and often a little more, we can trust that teacher.